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More often, user interface (UI) designers and user experience (UX) designers are using app-prototyping tools to take their UI designs on test drives earlier in the app lifecycle. This capability can be a game-changer, in some cases removing barriers to rapid iteration and development that have frustrated teams in the past—things like late-in-the-game user testing data, last-minute tweaks, slower feedback cycles, and delayed approvals.

Prototyping applications enables UI designers to share working prototypes of screen designs so that experimentation, testing, feedback, and approvals can happen before development even begins—in some cases, as early as the sketching and wireframing phases. For teams using Design Thinking, it’s one of the best ways to can keep up with the fast pace of iteration required to keep ideas (and products) moving. Designs can be imported and interactivity added, allowing users to click through apps, scroll, toggle, and generally engage with an app exactly how they will once it’s built.

There are many different options on the market with a slew of features that may make one or the other more attractive to you or your team, whether it’s pricing, third-party integrations, or advanced features like file syncing and real-time presentation modes. In this article, we’ll look at a few reasons why design teams at companies like Paypal, Twitter, Uber, and Netflix rely on prototyping tools like InVision, Flinto, Origami Studio, and Justinmind—and why you should use one, too.

See designs in action.

Just import designs into a platform to get started. InVision, Origami, Justinmind and Flinto all allow import of PhotoShop or Sketch files (some both), whether it’s natively or via a plugin.

Any actions you want your app’s UI to have you can make happen with a prototype: gestures, animations, scrolling, transitions, effects, and other “micro-behaviors.” Dropping in screens you’ve already designed—whether they’re simply sketches or more involved designs—allows you to hit the ground running.

In Flinto, for example, interactive screens are visually linked, showing users where each action will take them within an app. InVision similarly lets you add behaviors to designs, but note that the designs have to be created separate of the tool—you can’t create layouts within it like you can with a more all-in-one platform like Justinmind, which lets you create wireframes in the app with templates, pre-loaded UI kits, and a drag-and-drop interface.

Fire up the feedback cycle.

Prototyping helps to truncate the review/change cycle by getting clients, business partners, product managers, and anyone else who needs to weigh in on the feedback loop earlier with a working, clickable prototype.

The design team at Shopify uses InVision “as a feedback mechanism to allow asynchronous feedback on a design. InVision is great when we’re moving super fast—it cuts down on the amount of meetings we must have.” InVision also enables real-time design sharing and collaboration between teams, as well as browser-based design presentation tools that make it easy to share designs with clients with a bit more polish, if you need it. During real-time design meetings, presenters can use virtual laser pointers, real-time sketches and notes, and group chats to talk through designs and incorporate feedback as you go.

Justinmind has commenting built in, too, so users can login and leave feedback you can track and organize to turn into actionable changes.

Make tweaks before development starts.

By having interactive prototypes that designers can save and share on mobile devices, teams are able to see their designs in action, then make tweaks and adjustments to the UX before those tweaks become (more expensive and difficult) changes to the code. It lets teams get their designs closer to a finished product before development kicks in.

InVision takes commenting and conversation seriously, too. In the platform, teams of designers collaborating on a prototype can leave comments on specific elements of a design (comments that get threaded and organized) and drop feedback onto visuals that can be hovered over and expanded to eliminate any confusion over who’s talking about what and where. This keeps changes moving along and minimizes duplicate feedback.

Check to see if a platform offers file syncing, which would let any changes you made to your Sketch or PhotoShop files sync into your prototypes—something that can make the design-to-development process a little smoother, too.

Prototype for any kind of app: web, mobile, tablet, or wearables.

You’ll want to ensure the platform you choose supports the platform you’re developing for, whether it’s web, iOS, or Android. Many also offer downloadable mobile apps that allow you to preview the prototype on that specific device, e.g. Origami Live, Flinto Viewer, Principle Mirror, and more.

InVision covers iOs, Android, or web, supporting files imported from different design software like PhotoShop, Sketch, etc. Similarly, Flinto supports iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad and Android devices. You can create prototypes for Nexus 7, Nexus 5, Nexus 4, they are viewable on any Android device capable of running the latest version of Chrome. Justinmind’s wireframing tools have UI widget libraries built in for newest versions of iOS and Android (Nougat) for phones, tablets and wearables.

Origami, the Facebook-owned prototyping tool that’s been used on apps like Instagram and Messenger is big with iOS because of it’s Apple Quartz Composer integration, but also supports Android prototyping.

Fit a prototyping tool into your existing workflow and tools—and keep other teams in the loop.

An app is rarely just the concern of design and development teams. Other departments like marketing and tech support can benefit from familiarizing themselves with a new app, weighing in on it, and staying in the loop on its progress. With prototyping tools, designers can drop screen designs into the prototyping app, add animations and functionality, then export and share them with anyone given access.

For teams that already rely heavily on versioning, workflow, or chat tools, certain prototyping tools have the capability to seamlessly integrate right in with that existing tool. InVision is great for teams who already use tools in their workflow like JIRA, Trello, GitHub, Basecamp, and Slack.

There are project management aspects that make life easier, too. In InVision, projects can be organized (On Hold, In Progress, Needs Review, Approved) so everyone on the team knows where the work stands. In some platforms, updates to comment threads can be sent in an email digest or updated in Slack so you know what’s happening when you’re not logged in.

Get valuable user testing data even earlier.

Gather valuable feedback that isn’t just based on how your app or site looks—it’s based on how the interactivity works. Hear what actual users think before the app has been through rounds of development and revisions and incorporate that data into your app at an earlier (and less expensive) stage.

While you can easily export prototypes and share them out through your own testing means, many platforms integrate third-party testing services. A big bonus with Invision is the unlimited, free user testing you can get via UserTesting and Lookback, with video and audio recordings of actual users navigating around your product. Justinmind integrates with analytics and testing tools like Clicktale, UserZoom, Crazy Egg and Google Analytics.

Find a pricing plan that works for you.

Whether you’re a solo designer, work on a team, or are enterprise level, most prototyping apps offer paid plans that scale up to meet your needs—and include advanced features, if you need them. Many platforms offer Enterprise versions: InVision, Justinmind, Marvel, and more.

For example, Flinto Lite is contract-free and lets you pay $20 a month, with an extra $20 per team member, while Flinto for Mac is a flat $99 from the App Store. Origami is $19 per user per month if you pay annually, but $29 if you go month-to-month.

InVision has tiered payment plans that charge by the prototype and by the team size. So, one prototype is free, but 3 runs $15/month, unlimited prototypes run $25/month. The Team plan gives you unlimited prototypes for 5 team members for $99/month, and Enterprise packs more advanced features on.

Note: If you’re already paying for Adobe Creative Cloud, Adobe XD might be worth exploring, too.

Security that’s up to your strictest standards.

Are your app designs or data sensitive, or do you require more strict compliance from vendors or tools?

For app prototyping tools like InVision and Flinto, security is a top priority. You can rest assured your data and designs are safe. InVision has a dedicated, full-time security team and has server, network, and cloud security covered. Both Flinto and InVision offer encryption via SSL and TLS connections. Flinto and Justinmind prototypes can be password-protected and shared with only authorized users so your designs aren’t being seen by the wrong users before they’re ready.

Which tool is right for you?

This is not meant to be a comprehensive review of the mentioned platforms, or inclusive of every high-quality prototyping tool out there—it’s more of an introduction to what you can do with a prototyping tool to get you thinking about how one could work for you and to get you looking out for the features that might be priorities.

Each tool offers features and benefits that are worth exploring in detail. To find the one that’s right for your app or organization, consult a UI designer, mobile developer, or front-end developer to get a gauge for which might suit your needs. Or, visit these sites to get more information, watch videos, or download free previews.

• InVision. Used by MailChimp, Netflix, Uber, SoundCloud,
• Justinmind. Used by Oracle, IRS, Sony, Adobe, Verizon.
• Origami. Created at Facebook, used on Instagram, Messenger, and Paper.
• Flinto.
• Marvel.
• AdobeXD (Experience Design).

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I’m sorry but, if you’re reading the article, chances are you’re one of those who is constantly looking for the next shortcut to more leads, more sales, and more money inside your business.

With all the latest gadgets, apps, techniques and gurus springing up on the marketing scene, it’s easy to think that the key to business success in 2017 and beyond lies in some “magical system”.

But that is far from the truth.

The real secret to business success is one of the old keys to success ever; and in a short while I will show you how you can start applying it in your business to rapidly increase your sales and profits.

The Story of Two Entrepreneurs

A few months ago, I was invited to join a private mastermind of small business owners and online entrepreneurs.

There were 2 entrepreneurs in the mastermind who were very much alike in a number of ways.

Both started their businesses about the same time.

They served similar market demographics with similar services.

Each had crossed the One million dollar mark in earnings, and each was married with two kids – the elder child from each family recently graduating from high school.

But there was a major difference between these two entrepreneurs.

One of them was super excited about his business, and the other wasn’t. Bob, the one entrepreneur was excited because he spent less time working, and more time “finding creative” ways to serve his customers. And his “creative time” was usually on one beach or another, or in a five star hotel for 4-5 days nearly every quarter

Crystal, the second entrepreneur, on the other hand, wasn’t as excited. She was complaining about how many hours she had to put in just to keep up. She complained that she had to spend so much time trying to find new customers and clients. She complained that her team wasn’t catching the vision, and as such were not performing at their best. Even worse, all of this was taking a serious toll on her family.

How Could They Be So Different?

I’m sure by now you’re wondering as to what could be responsible for the stark difference in experience for those two entrepreneurs, given that they both have the exact same circumstances.

The answer is one word. And that word is the SINGLE GUARANTEED ingredient for extraordinary success in your business especially if you’re in a crowded market.

The one word is the subject of this article, and it is…

RELATIONSHIPS

Listen, if you’ve run your business, then you’ve probably suspected that the world we live in is not really about what you know as it is about who you know.

This is true in business, nonprofits, jobs, even education. Do you think everyone who gets admitted into an Ivy League university earned it?

Whether you need a contract, a job, a grant or big donation, you better have some contacts. True, you must have the technical ability to deliver; but that MUST come with the right Relationships.

You need the right relationship with your board or shareholders, you need the right relationships with your staff and team members, but more importantly, you need the right and ongoing relationship with your customers and clients.

Do you know that repeat customers buy 30% more?

I found an article that stated existing buyers are are 50% more likely to try new products or services, compared to 5%-20% with new buyers. Existing buyers were also easier to sell to, and spend 30% more than your average customer.

This is why Bob spent more time helping his existing customers get more value from her business so they spent more with her.

When you forge the right relationships in your business, you are usually able to leverage the trust earned during the relationship building phase so you can your grow your business quickly

There are 4 elements to harnessing the power of Relationships in transforming your business fast:

• Engaging Your Customers
• Implement Growth Culture
• Attract & Engage Top Talent
• Build Leadership

So what do you do to bring each of these four elements to bear in transforming your business?

That’s where I come in.

I’ve spent the last 11 years working as an entrepreneur and business development consultant. I’ve run business in the US, Ghana and Liberia. I’ve consulting for a number of small businesses, government agencies and nonprofit organizations. I’ve gained a lot of experience during those years.

And I want to use that experience to help you. So if you have the feeling that you could significantly grow your business or organization by forging the right relationships the right way, then I invite you to schedule a one hour strategy session with me.

During the one hour, we’ll look at:

• How to identify the specific types of relationships you need to forge
• Simple steps you can take to connect with some of the most powerful people in the world. I used this to connect with over 7 multimillionaires who I’m proud to call friends.
• How to leverage your connections to grow your business or NGO in the shortest possible time.
• Specific mental shifts that get busy and powerful people to make time to talk to you ALWAYS.

Artificial intelligence is going to change everything. It's going to change business. It's going to change marketing.

The problem is that we can't skip steps and suddenly claim that all brands are AI-first (as brands like Google and Salesforce are stating). Sure, it's commonplace to want to future-proof your business, put a stake in the ground and claim that you are technologically miles ahead of the competition. Still, the marketplace does not lie. The truth is in the marketing. The reality of what consumers see, touch and do with a brand is evident - no matter what a Chief Marketing Officer says at your local industry conference from the stage during a keynote address.

If every brand is embracing artificial intelligence, where are the signs of simple (and great) personalization in the work today?

How can any brand claim to be leading (or tinkering) with artificial intelligence, when the vast majority of their marketing materials are either not personalized at all or hauntingly poor at understanding even the basic information of their customer (gender, geographic location, last item(s) purchased, intent to purchase again, etc...)? This is not a criticism of any specific brand, but an overall indictment against our industry. It is an industry that loves to toss around buzzwords, make impressive PowerPoint decks, get lots of ink in the industry trade publications and - in general - bang a loud drum. Still, where is the proof that brands have mastered personalization - let alone have the capabilities to leverage artificial intelligence to build better engines of marketing and communications? 

Great personalization is like common sense... it's not all that common.

A quick test: when a company lays claim to leveraging artificial intelligence to build better customer experiences, go ahead and do three things: 

1. Sign up to their basic e-newsletter.
2. Do some generic searches on their website. Bonus points if you add something to you shopping cart and abandon it before making a purchase.
3. Do some searches for the brand on Facebook, LinkedIn or any other social media space.

What happens next?

Over time, is that newsletter adapting to your choices, your basic information and/or your true needs? Did those general searches suddenly trigger a ton of retargeted ads that haunt you for months, constantly and consistently? Are you suddenly seeing that brand (or their competitor) showing up much more in your social media feeds? If you are, it's safe to assume that the vast majority of brands are practicing traditional advertising strategies in these hyper-powerful digital channels. They're vying for the customer's attention, because that customer - at some point in time - raised their hand. The thing is this: that hand could have been raised for a myriad of reasons. The customer could have a complaint about the brand, they may be a repeat customer, they may be doing research for a friend, and on and on. If artificial intelligence were at play, the messaging would adapt in a much more profound way to the customer's desires and interactions. If basic personalization were are play, the messaging would be more specific and would not dampen the customer's content experience.

An opportunity for marketing to be great.

That's the real point here. Digital marketing was not created as another channel to annoy consumers with messaging that they don't want. Artificial intelligence, personalization, targeting, retargeting and more is an incredible opportunity for brands to build a better (and more direct) relationship with their customers, and engage those consumers that may be interested in the brand in a more value-based and personal way. It seems like marketers are very eager to sell the idea of technology-first initiatives, but they're backing these claims up with a very traditional attention and repetition model. The scale of digital makes that traditional formula a problem for publishers and consumers alike. Too much inventory, too much blasting and the overall value of the marketplace (content and advertising as a business model) starts to erode. Yes, marketers need artificial intelligence. Yes, artificial intelligence can be a very powerful tool to not only gain marketing budget efficiency, but to make the consumer experience that much better. But, none of that is going to happen if we can't get personalization right. And, the time for proper personalization is now. Today.

Artificial intelligence is the future of marketing. Personalization is the present of marketing.

Tags: advertising agency advertising strategy ai artificial intelligence attention brand brand experience business business blog business model buzzword chief marketing officer cmo communications consumer experience content content marketing customer experience digital channel digital marketing digital marketing agency digital marketing blog direct relationship enewsletter facebook google j walter thompson jwt linkedin marketing marketing agency marketing blog marketing budget mirum mirum agency mirum agency blog mirum blog mirum canada mirum in canada mitch joel mitchjoel newsfeed newsletter personalization powerpoint publisher publishing retargeting salesforce shopping cart six pixels of separation social media social media feed wpp

Varying Perceptions of Google Tales from Business Owners and Their Customers

I’m often struck by how two clients in the same industry vertical and in the same city can have radically different perceptions about the effectiveness of Google AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising.

In order to understand these Google Tales, it’s important to look at the reasons why. Here’s a short list:

1. SEO White Hats vs. SEO Black Hats.
2. Word of Mouth Talk from Your Colleagues and Competitors―Real or BS?
3. The Power of Millions of Dollars of Television Advertising to Persuade.

SEO White Hats vs. Black Hats

R.L. Adams a respected technology writer and is quoted in Forbes.com, Nov. 29, 2016 as stating:

Most people look at SEO the wrong way. They look at ways to do the least amount of work for the greatest initial return, when in fact, it’s quite the opposite. Obviously, SEO is one of the best skills that you can possibly learn, but in order to succeed with it, you need to do the most amount of work for the least initial return. It’s a slow, steady and painful process, but that’s also the nature of the beast … today, Google knows about all your schemes, so don’t even bother with them …

A “White Hatted SEO” pro will tell you it takes several months of hard SEO work, even years in some cases, to rank on page one of Google. The more competitive a search term is, the harder it is to rank. There are no shortcuts in SEO. However, with Google’s advertising platform called AdWords, you can have your ad on page one of Google search in any geographic location and time of day and not pay unless someone reads your ad and decides it is interesting enough to click-through to your website. You set any daily budget you want.

Of course, there is no free lunch. When your daily budget runs out, your ads come down for the day. The skill is to show the right ad copy/messaging/offers to the right prospects in the right locations to get a return on your investment.

Word of Mouth Talk–Real or BS Google Tales?

The stories below are real and illustrate why what you hear from others in your business and at trade shows may simply not be real.

• One of my best AdWords clients, a large lawn care franchise owner that is currently getting over 19.30% conversion rate at a cost per lead of $23.81 told me recently “my colleague who also owns a similar franchise in a nearby city told me he’s getting over 600 leads per month doing non-digital marketing at a fraction of what I’m getting!” When we dove deeper into the numbers, it became clear this was quite possibly nothing more than BS.

• Another one of my clients, a respected dentist, was getting some of the best results Google had ever seen in his industry vertical as told to me by my agency’s Googler. As a Google Agency Partner, I’m able to get insights the general public cannot. Even with terrific results, the dentist stopped his campaign because his internal colleague and business partner in the practice, his wife, told him they needed to use the money being spent on advertising for his daughter’s upcoming wedding.

• A third prospect who sells furniture to colleges and universities asked me over a year ago to do a Pay Per Click (PPC) audit of their DIY AdWords campaign. It was immediately apparent the campaign had a number of amateur flaws that were negatively impacting the campaign’s success. Google itself continues to send this campaign’s administrator suggestions for basic improvement, but the campaign’s administrator and business partner inside the company refuses to implement them, acknowledge them, or hire a Google Certified Partner like myself to help. The last time I talked to the administrator she told me “Well … I see my ads on Google so I’m satisfied, even though I don’t know if they’re returning my investment.”

• A large nationwide insurance company shut down one of their most successful agent’s AdWords campaigns which was producing five new never before seen policies per month within a five-mile radius of his office. Why? Their corporate digital marketing coordinator didn’t know the difference between organic search (SEO) and paid search (PPC). The agent was told that even though his ads were only appearing within a five-miles of his office and were clearly from an individual agent, not the corporate office, they might cause a “domain authority” problem for corporate. The ads were directed inside the corporate URL to the agent’s page at: “xyzinsurance.com/agents/myagentsname” and did not create any problems.

I am relatively certain the man who was bragging about 600 leads per month at a fraction of the cost knew very well he was fibbing but probably continues to tell this braggadocio’s story in his own versions of Google Tales. If asked about ending her AdWords campaign, the dentist’s business partner may or may not admit the real reason was to use the money for her daughter’s wedding even though the campaign was a success. The furniture merchant simply won’t admit the problems with their flawed AdWords set-up and may tell you if asked “Oh … we put a small amount of money in Google AdWords, but it doesn’t really produce much.” And the national insurance company’s misplaced trust in their digital marketing coordinator is shocking, and company may never know it passed over an opportunity to restructure all its AdWords campaigns nationwide along “local lines” for increased successful results.

The Power of Millions of Dollars of Television Advertising

Angie’s List (PR Newswire, May 2, 2017) reported “marketing expense was $9.8 million, a decrease from $19.1 million in the year-ago quarter, due to a reduction in advertising spend as we adjusted the level and timing of such spend in the first quarter of 2017 as compared to the first quarter of 2016.”

You may or may not know that Angie’s List not only spends millions on television ads like this one you can see on YouTube, but according to SEMrush, a competitive metrics provider, is currently spending $114,000 per month on Google AdWords. In the same PRNewswire article which comes from Angie’s List’s own Investor Relations department we read,

Angie’s List and IAC announced they have entered into a definitive agreement to combine Angie’s List and IAC’s HomeAdvisor into a new, publicly traded company; a separate release announcing the transaction was issued yesterday.

Because Angie’s List and Home Advisor are merging into a new publicly traded company, many of us have also seen Home Advisor’s television commercials.

Similar to Angie’s List, Home Advisor is spending a huge $1.8 million per month on Google AdWords!

Clearly, both Angie’s List and Home Advisor are trying very hard to convince you they’re about the only place a consumer can go to find a local home service provider … and yet it is also clear they are pushing hard to convince you of this at a time when they are merging and trying to create value for themselves in the stock market. There’s nothing wrong with this as long as you realize as a consumer and a business owner the latest research from Google presented this month shows that only 15% of consumers use a ratings and review website like Angie’s List, Home Advisor, etc.

Finally, the fact that Angie’s List and Home Advisor themselves spend millions of dollars advertising with Google AdWords should be a large clue to the fact Angie’s List/Home Advisor’s are taking business owner’s money and simply aggregating it and plowing it into AdWords when you can do the same thing for yourself and direct the clicks directly to your own website.

The graphic below illustrates Google is the undisputed market share leader among all search engines with over a 77% market share. If you find you’re getting a great return on your investment with an aggregator, ratings and review website, then, by all means, continue with them. Just know that only 15% of your customers are using them and you can have your ad directly on page one of Google yourself with AdWords.

If you’ve ever sat through a presentation and thought, “Why am I here?” you are not alone. Most presentations fail to answer this most fundamental question until five, ten – even thirty minutes into the content. Presentations that do not quickly answer the question “Why?” are frustrating, confusing, and causes distraction-prone buyers to tune out. In his popular TED Talk, Start with Why, Simon Sinek proposed that people won’t fully buy into a product, service or concept until they understand the “why.” Start with why is how all great presentations begin. But…

Starting with why is, well…just the start. To really connect with today’s buyers and increase your presentation’s success, it’s important to know which “why” you are addressing in your presentation. This isn’t as daunting as it seems. The underlying “why” for most prospects typically boils down to one of the following:

Start with Why :

Why should I buy this product or service?
Why should I buy it from you?
Why should I buy it now?

Starting with the right “why” is critical for advancing the conversation and the sale. Consider the following example:

Imagine you are trying to decide whether to buy a house or continue to rent. You set a meeting with an agent and he talks for fifteen minutes about why you should choose his company’s services rather than a competitors. At the end, you are confused, annoyed, and nowhere closer to making a decision at the end. If the agent had instead addressed your central question, “Why should I buy vs. rent?” he may have very well ended up with a new client.

Addressing the wrong “why” in your sales presentation is often the result of insufficient discovery or relying on assumptions. Skip this important step at your own peril!

Once you’ve identified your prospect’s specific “why,” use the suggestions below to increase your chances of success.

3 “Start with Why” Questions:

Here are the key things to take into consideration when addressing each type of “why” question in your presentation:

1. Why should I buy this product or service?
   

   This “Why” question is common when a prospect is just entering in to the buying cycle or unaware that he has a problem that needs or can be solved.

   In a “why buy” scenario, you’ll be wasting your time if you parade out all your product features and benefits before you have prospect buy-in to solve the problem. Instead, improve your chances of success by focusing on the impact of the problem and why it needs solving. Create a compelling case for change by exploring the contrast between the prospect’s current state and a new and improved future state.

For a prospect grappling with the “why buy” question, an analogy or customer success story delivered early in your presentation can be very effective at overcoming resistance to change.

2. Why should I buy from you?
   

   In this situation your prospect agrees he has a problem and is interested in solving it, but he is still exploring different options. This could mean not just direct competitors, but indirect competitors as well. For example, let’s say your prospect is experiencing a drop in sales revenue and you sell a CRM solution. In addition to other CRM platforms, your prospect is considering other options, including hiring more sales reps, discounting, or running a marketing campaign. Either way, you are facing competition.

   When going head to head with competition it’s important to sell value to avoid falling into a pricing war or a feature vs. feature smack down. Know your competition well so you can position your competitive advantages upfront in your presentation. You can also use timing to your advantage. If possible, present before your competition so you can disarm and address any potential landmines your competition might be planting.

3. Why should I buy now?
   

   This prospect has identified a need and has indicated that you are the preferred vendor. Unfortunately, she has no sense of urgency around getting a solution into place. Until this prospect has made the decision to buy a priority, selling your company, your product, or your category will do little to move the needle.

Instead, place the focus of your presentation on the risk or cost of delay and potential opportunity costs. As you go through the body of your presentation explore each challenge your prospect is facing. Tie it back to the impact of not resolving the problem by a specific date.

Summary:
Remembering to start with why is an important first step in developing your presentation. But don’t forget to quickly narrow your focus down to the specific “why”question for your buyer. Structuring your presentation around the “right why” will dramatically improve your chances of success.

Admittedly, we’re biased toward mobile engagement, but we realize that the ideal marketing strategy makes the most of every available messaging channel. For many companies, email remains one of their most important touchpoints with customers and we’re always getting asked how marketers can use email to improve their mobile app marketing and vice versa. So, if email is a critical channel to your enterprise marketing strategy, then you’ll want to read on…

Examples

Let’s dive right in and look at a few use cases that will apply to almost every marketing strategy, regardless of size or industry:

#1: First Impressions Are Key

So you’ve built a really cool app and your rank in the app store is rapidly rising, which means people are installing and loving your app. That’s great! The next question is, how are you engaging with these new users?

In most cases, you’ll start by guiding users through their first experiences, showing them how to use your app or surfacing valuable recommendations. In mobile, this is known as onboarding, which is usually done over the course of a user’s first 3-5 sessions. One of the key objectives of onboarding is to make sure that as many users as possible opt in for push notifications, since users who have push enabled are far more active than those who don’t.

The question is, how do you keep engaging those users who get through onboarding and still haven’t enabled push? Our most sophisticated customers have found success in emailing this user group. Here’s how they used Localytics to make it happen.

Goal: Successfully engage new users that have Push disabled

Segmentation

• In Localytics, create an audience of users with 3 – 6 sessions, and push disabled
• Using Localytics’ Audience Export send this audience to your email service provider on a daily basis
• Using your email vendor, create a recurring onboarding email campaign that’s driven by the Localytics’ Audience

Performance Measurement

• Using the Localytics’ Events API, share the result (ex. Opened, Bounced, Unsubscribed) of the email campaign for each recipient
• Use Localytics’ analytics reports (specifically the Usage, Engagement, Retention, and Funnels reports) to analyze these users’ downstream behavior versus those that enabled push during onboarding

Outcome: You can now effectively engage new users that have disabled push and measure the downstream impact. You can even build variations on this example to engage users with push disabled long after they’ve finished onboarding. Send a message as a push for users who can receive it and send the same message as an email for those who have push disabled.

#2: Reward Customer Loyalty

Loyalty program members spend up to 20% more than non-members on average (source), so if you don’t have a customer loyalty program, you’re missing out. For marketers who manage a thriving loyalty program, a major part of a successful program is getting your customers to redeem their points. Here’s how marketers are using Localytics to increase loyalty redemption.

Goal: Increase loyalty reward redemption

Segmentation

• In Localytics, create an audience of users with more than 180 days worth of outstanding loyalty rewards
• Using Localytics Audience Exports send the audience to your email service provider on a weekly basis
• Using your email vendor, create a recurring redemption reminder that’s powered by the Localytics’ Audience

Performance Measurement

• Using the Localytics’ Events API, share the result (ex. Opened, Bounced, Unsubscribed) of the email campaign for each recipient
• Use Localytics’ Analytics and User Insights to analyze these users downstream behavior versus those that haven’t redeemed their rewards or non-loyalty members

Outcome: You can now increase loyalty redemption and measure its impact on mobile engagement. Additionally, you could also use this process to make loyalty-based offers and incentivize other behaviors from your best users.

Closing the Loop on Campaign Performance

In these examples, we are using Localytics to drive targeted email campaigns, so you might be wondering why I also included sending the campaign results back to Localytics. Why not just view those results in your email vendor’s dashboard?

Closing the loop with performance measurement is critical, because it enables data-driven marketers to measure the deeper impact of their efforts, not just the typical ‘click through’ surface metrics. For example, from the onboarding scenario, you could use Localytics’ Analytics to see if users who receive the onboarding email and enable push have a higher retention rate or Lifetime Value (LTV). If so, you can implement additional campaigns that strongly incentivize users to enable push, since you now have evidence that the return on investment is significantly higher.

Start Emailing Your App Users Today

So if you consider yourself a savvy marketer then it’s critical that you implement a closed loop, multi-channel approach to marketing. These are just a couple examples of how you should be using Localytics in conjunction with your email provider. For more examples and assistance integrating Localytics and your email vendor, be sure to contact your Localytics Mobile Engagement Consultant.

We’ve all heard that in order to engage and differentiate, we need to shift from a brand- and product-focused mindset, to a customer-focused mindset. This also includes altering our storytelling practices to be more educational, inspirational and even journalistic.

For many, completely rethinking our creative process, from our content messaging to our design process and campaign strategies, is easier said than done. But during the Inbounder World Tour stop in New York City, brand content consultant Melanie Deziel offered some tactical tips and best practices to help marketers think more like journalists.

Over the course of her career, Melanie has become a trailblazer in native advertising — a trend we’re seeing more and more in the B2B marketing world. She has collaborated with several native advertising divisions from top publications, including The New York Times’ T Brand Studio, HuffPost Partner Studio, and Time Inc’s portfolio of 35+ media properties. She currently writes for Inc. Magazine and, therefore, has an interesting perspective for brands that are trying to stand out, win buyer attention and even seek editorial coverage.

“When you’re in journalism you tell objective stories,” Melanie explained. “When you’re in advertising, you’re usually trying to interrupt someone trying to do something else with information they may not be looking for.”

The key to turning the traditional content marketing model upside down, is TRUTH, which stands for:

• Timely
• Reputable
• Unique
• Tension
• Human Condition

Beyond the catchy acronym, brands need to remember that in the end, the truth will always prevail. No brand wants their advertising lumped in with the “interruptive, self-serving stories,” Melanie explained. “In the age of fake news, we need to tell the truth.”

Embrace the TRUTH

For the remainder of her presentation, Melanie dove into each component of TRUTH and offered some tactical tips for marketers.

TIMELY: Perhaps the easiest to embrace, timeliness means B2B marketers should look to current events, timely trends and even seasons and holidays to conjure up top-of-mind story ideas and even content topics. Of course, this doesn’t mean brands need to hop on the latest political news updates; instead, they should focus on timely trends that impact their buyers. Melanie pointed to data security as an important trend that certain brands can speak to and be a part of the conversations buyers are having.

If you need to navigate a lot of internal red tape and legal requirements within your company, you can focus on more evergreen topics that teach buyers, according to Melanie. Do-it-yourself content and how-to resources are a great way to teach your audience and highlight your brand’s knowledge and authority.

REPUTABLE: All great content is derived from thought leader insights. Leverage internal or third-party experts that your audience trusts so your content has journalistic integrity. Relevant research and case studies are also great for integrating outside perspectives. However, Melanie noted that it’s important to have a diverse mix of sources “When you’re going through that process, make sure you’re doing it in a diverse way,” she said. For example, “if you’re gonna talk to three customers, you want them to be representative of different geographic areas, skill levels and demographics.”

UNIQUE: Melanie used her day-to-day live at Inc. Magazine as a way to reaffirm what makes a unique story. “More than 1,000 press releases are published by companies every day,” she noted. A company’s existence or a product’s existence is generally not newsworthy. To capture her attention with a media pitch, “you have to do something unique and different.”

Superlatives, or explaining why you’re the first or only company to achieve something is newsworthy. Highlighting what makes your brand and its team members different also makes for a great story. For example, if your founder went through a life-changing experience or has unique lessons to share based on your company’s growth or evolution, that would make for a great story or piece of content.

TENSION: No, you don’t want to manufacture drama, but you want to spotlight questions or issues that are unresolved. Do your prospects have any common questions or objections? Are there any overarching struggles at the customer or industry level that you’re seeing? Are there any risks or debates that are present in your industry? You want to highlight these topics of conflict or tension and offer some sort of valuable insight to solve them.

HUMAN CONNECTION: Perhaps most important, brands need to try and tell stories that reflect people or real events and stories. While detailed charts and tables inform your audience, you need to highlight the people and stories that will resonate with them on a personal level. This will make your story more immersive and memorable for your audience.

Melanie pointed to a paid piece she did for Netflix via T Brand Studio, highlighting the trials and tribulations women in the prison system face. The 1,500-word investigative piece was designed to show the current issues with women’s prisons and to, in some way, tie to the themes of Netflix show “Orange Is the New Black.” Rather than relying solely on third-party data, Melanie and her team embedded videos featuring interviews with current inmates, other real-life stories and complemented the story with animated illustrations and other effects.

The results were staggering: the piece was covered in more than 30 industry publications and ranked in the top 2% of all content on the New York Times website in 2014. The piece also won several awards including an OMMA Award for best native advertising and an accolade from Digiday for best-branded video.

As someone who studied journalism in school, has written for several publications and also writes content for brands, it was inspiring to hear Melanie’s personal growth and transition in the professional world. Although I was aware of some of the core journalism principles she highlighted, she aligned them to my day-to-day job as a content marketer in a succinct yet compelling way.

What do you do to think like a journalist as you create marketing content?

Not all conferences are made the same and neither are managers. Here’s a tried and true blueprint to convince your boss to send you to that killer event you keep seeing the hype about on social media.

Prove You’re Not Wasting Time and Money On the Company’s Dime

Nothing brings more hesitation to a manager’s mind about sending you to a conference than the thought of you mindlessly schmoozing away and not actually learning something you can immediately apply to your sales process. 

If you can bring your boss to realize that participating in a conference can measurably benefit your team and your company, then there’s a good chance you’ll get the go-ahead nod.

Otherwise, everybody will think you’re just planning to have a vacation in disguise — all at the company’s expense.

Attending conferences always involves an initial outlay of time and money.

Here’s the reality of what spending time at a conference means for you:

• Paused workflow
• Slight push back in project deadlines
• Colleagues stepping in to “fill your shoes” while you’re away. 

Here’s the reality of what spending time at a conference means for your company:

• Spending money for conference fees
• Transportation, food, accommodation
• Other unforeseen ad-hoc costs

That said, these aren’t losses by any means. It’s an INVESTMENT; you need to put your sales skills to the test and pitch why they should invest in your professional development.

This should be pretty easy to do if you’ve already added significant value to the company. That means your manager believes in the value you’ve added, and the value you will continue to add in the future.

Step Into The Mindset Of Your Manager

Some managers readily understand and embrace the multiple benefits of attending conferences.

Especially those annual events that are fiercely anticipated by just about everyone.

Think TED, CES, SXSW. Think Mobile World Congress or the Inc. 5000 Conference.

Think INBOUND, Forbes CMO Summit, Mozcon, Revenue Summit and Sales Machine.

These conferences already speak for themselves, but some managers — for different reasons — may take further convincing to sign their approval.      

What if your boss belongs to the camp of managers who consider rationalizing costs as the pinnacle of their responsibilities? What if your organization has a culture of scrimping on conferences?  

Take these three basic steps to convince your boss that sending you to a conference is one of the smartest decisions he or she will ever make:  

1. Fight Fear With Facts

For many people, aversion to risk and fear of the unknown fuel their reluctance to act.  

A few departmental heads might withhold their approval simply because they know nothing or very little about the conference you’re so excited about.

If you cannot use facts to demonstrate why attending a particular event will reap benefits that far outweigh the expenses, then the battle is already lost.

As cited in The Wall Street Journal, employees who have a higher likelihood of persuading their bosses are those who make the strongest case via data and clear projections.

While some of the benefits conference participants gain are difficult to measure (such as newly-found energy and inspiration), most are readily verifiable or measurable in some way.

A. But first, get your facts straight:

• Conference name
• Conference date and location
• Total cost of participation
• Relevance to your work (why you should attend)
• Potential impact on your workflow (milestones and deadlines to meet, etc.)
• Key activities (e.g., discussions of emerging industry trends, training on specific skills, new solutions to a common issue, etc.)
• Key speakers
• Who else — especially among your company’s competitors and target customers — might be attending.

B. Then prepare a list of fact-based or verifiable benefits:

Fact 1 – Sales is an ever-evolving field. New technologies, skills and approaches continually emerge. Many are explored and taught during conferences.

Fact 2 – Conferences serve as excellent venues for building new connections and relationships, some of whom might be decision-makers or influencers at key vendors, competitors, or prospective client companies.  

Fact 3 – Conferences present opportunities to market your brand.

Fact 4 – Conferences help meet some of HR’s continuing professional development (CPD) goals.

Fact 5 – Knowledge, skills and insights learned or discovered during conferences can be shared with colleagues to benefit your organization.

Fact 6 – Conferences generate fresh and timely content for your company. Participation signals that you are in the forefront of the industry.

2. Remove Doubt With Diligence

Your enthusiasm, diligence and willingness to go the extra mile will rub on your boss and make him/her wonder why you’re so passionate about the conference.

There are many ways to demonstrate your passion:

Option 1 – Conduct detailed research about the conference. Focus on important activities, intriguing topics, associated training, notable participants and keynote speakers.  

Option 2 – Write a letter or email requesting approval to join the conference. Provide ample justification for the costs involved. For example, cite the specific activities you want to participate in and what value can be derived by joining. Include proposals on how to proactively reduce expenses, such as room sharing, flying economy, and other cost-cutting measures.

Option 3 – Create a compelling presentation deck that:

• Clearly showcases the benefits of attending
• Describes your plan on how to share and maximize said benefits across your team/organization.   

3. Destroy Reluctance With ROI  

Beyond demonstrating the net benefits your organization can expect to gain from participating in the conference, you should also actively work towards meeting any promised ROI.

If you promise ROI and don’t follow through, you’ll never get an approval to join a conference…
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Here are some ways to demonstrate conference ROI:

• Qualified leads generated from networking / discussions.
• Improved performance on a particular sales metric.
• Impact on bottom line figures such as increased sales.
• Improved operational efficiency (i.e., cost reductions) via a new software solution, a well-designed methodology, or a new skill that lets you do your job faster or better.     

Any of these may be acquired directly from the conference or indirectly through the new relationships you have built.

Furthermore, a new batch of qualified leads, referrals and potential partners following a networking binge at the event is extremely valuable.

Itemize these ROI components and tie each with an existing metric whenever possible. This way, you establish accountability and the means of gauging success.

Strongly strongly suggest: Draw up a benefit-sharing and maximization plan and make a commitment to follow through on your word. 

When You Get The Golden Nod Of Approval

Remember to thank your boss for approving your request. But don’t just mention it in passing as you meet her on the hallway. A better way is to communicate gratitude with an expressed promise to deliver the results you’ve cited in your proposal.   

When You Get A NO

This might suck, but don’t take it the wrong way. The last thing you want to do is become bitter and act hasty about it. 

Thank your boss just the same for taking time to review your proposal.

Follow the conference just the same through available channels such as the event’s official website and social media.

Leverage your network and get updates, snippets and new learnings from contacts who were able to join.

Find and share cases proving that participation in the conference generated substantial benefits to rival or competing organizations.   

For subsequent conferences, consider alternative methods that will allow you to join. You can, for example, volunteer to be a panelist or a conference staff for sessions or activities on subjects or skills you are an expert in.    

Moving Forward

Conferences will remain a key venue for networking, learning relevant skills, discovering new ideas, and staying ahead in your field or industry.

To increase the likelihood that your boss will approve your conference request, do the following:

• Take more time to plan.
• Write a compelling request letter.
• Promise and Deliver ROI.
• Understand exactly how well-known challenges at your organization can be addressed by a solution, practice, or idea slated to be explored in the conference.    

The post The REAL Way to Convince Your Boss to Send You to a Conference appeared first on Sales Hacker.

As marketers look for new ways to connect with their audience, behavioral marketing could be the key to more opens, clicks and sales. This type of data is essential for creating rich, contextual experiences for your customers.

Think of behavioral data like a crystal ball—it gives you a glimpse into the future decision-making patterns of your customers and helps predict possible purchase opportunities. But what do you with all of that data once you have it?

Behavioral email campaigns.

Want to learn more about behavioral marketing and get a sneak peek at Movable Ink’s behavioral marketing expansion, Signals? Download our latest eBook, The Behavioral Marketing Playbook.

Why behavioral emails work

This type of email campaign is triggered when a customer has a specific interaction with your brand. Things like web page visits, past purchase behavior, link clicks, social media engagement and email opens can all be an indicator of what your customers are interested in and likely to act on. They can also include more dynamic approaches, like location-based messaging.

The key advantage as to why these emails are so effective? You’re able to deliver content that immediately addresses key moments in the customer journey and create a better experience. Behavioral email can lead to:

-Higher engagement
-Higher click-through rates
-Increased retention
-Increased customer happiness

Behavioral email marketing ranks as the most effective strategy for improving email engagement. It makes sense—73% of consumers are more likely to buy from brands who send them relevant, targeted information.

When to send

The concept of behavioral marketing seems simple enough, right? But the infrastructure and conditions needed to trigger an email can quickly become complex, even for the advanced email marketer.

We’ve put together 6 scenarios where behavioral marketing can come into play, so you can start sending smarter, more effective email campaigns:

Welcome—If you’re looking to optimize any email, make it this one. Your welcome email sets the tone for the rest of your campaigns to come and has an average open rate of over 50%. What sets off the trigger for your welcome campaign is a good thing—a subscriber was interested in learning more and opted in to receive emails from you.

Image via Really Good Emails

We love how this email identifies exactly where the subscriber is in their journey and gives them helpful information and resources that give them exactly what they need and will ultimately build trust.

Reactivation/Abandoned Cart—Abandoned cart emails are one of the most effective emails that retailers can send to re-engage visitors who left their site before completing a purchase. After all, no one is more ready to buy than someone who puts items in their shopping cart. But nearly 68% of online shoppers abandon their cart, so sending a friendly reminder of the items they’ve left behind can help you capture lost revenue.

Image via Really Good Emails

Not only does this Bonobos email serve as a reminder that items were left in the shopping cart, but it also identifies that they’re a first-time customer (and maybe a bit hesitant to place an order!). It serves them with a 20% off code to help give a gentle nudge.

Lead—Someone who opts into your list to download a resource or redeem a special welcome offer is likely interested in what you’re selling and wants to get to know you better. By sending targeted messaging to this audience, you’re helping to nurture the relationship as they make their way through the purchasing funnel. Depending on what they downloaded, sending contextual follow-ups that can help aid in the decision-making process can have a big impact.

Image via Really Good Emails

When you sign up for a course on Skillshare, for example, the content that you opted in to receive gets sent right away.

Onboarding—Help make the new customer transition a little easier with triggered emails that offer helpful resources and information they need to be successful. Effective onboarding emails can be the thing that makes customers “stickier” and improve your retention rate.

Image via Really Good Emails

This onboarding email from Hired is simple, straightforward and lets new users know exactly where they are in the setup process. Try setting up automated campaigns that are triggered when a person does (or doesn’t) complete a step when getting started.

Transactional—These type of messages are sent to give customers information on their purchase, invoices, shipping confirmations and more. But what people don’t realize is that it’s a great opportunity to engage customers while they wait for their order to arrive or return to process.

Image via Really Good Emails

This email from Tradesy is a great example of giving the customer the information they need, while also sharing other content that may be of interest (in this instance, a referral program.)

Inactivity—Sometimes customers go dormant—hey, it happens. Using behavioral marketing and data, you can identify when customers haven’t opened your emails or visited your website in a while. Sending emails that remind your subscribers that you’re still around helps keep your brand top of mind.

Image via Really Good Emails

This re-engagement campaign from Typeform does a great job of identifying a common customer pain point and offers a solution to fix it. Try sharing some helpful resources or ideas for using your product that your customers might not have thought of. If you’re a retailer, bonus points for throwing in a little incentive or bonus offer to give motivation to return.

Start sending today

Behavioral email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to take advantage of email automation. You can use them for retaining customers, nurturing leads and increasing your ROI. With this type of messaging, you’ll be able to increase the impact of your efforts all while sending customers information they actually want to receive.

Want to start sending better, smarter email campaigns today?

Want to learn more about behavioral marketing and get a sneak peek at Movable Ink’s behavioral marketing expansion, Signals? Download our latest eBook, The Behavioral Marketing Playbook.

Sales enablement is a holistic approach to improving Sales and Marketing’s alignment by effectively managing content, tracking content utilization & engagement analytics, personalizing content along every stage of the buyer’s journey, and providing both departments with the resources necessary to be as successful as possible. Many different tactics and disciplines are under the sales enablement umbrella and it is important to execute on those strategies as effectively as possible for the best results.

Sales communications is one of those disciplines that can become buried under competing projects and not receive the attention it deserves. However, the importance of regularly and clearly communicating with Sales cannot be understated. SiriusDecisions has found that 82 percent of decisions makers think sales reps are unprepared. When Sales can’t find the right materials or information they need, their chances of success are dramatically lowered. Within the purview of sales enablement, a poor sales communications strategy will prevent Sales from achieving a complete view of their buyers and thus speak directly to their needs with proper content.

Simply knowing how important sales communications is, and executing a successful sales communications strategy, are two different things. There are many ways to disseminate information to a global salesforce, but not every single one is effective or necessarily the best fit for every organization; each situation will be unique.

SiriusDecisions, in a piece on sales communications best practices, laid out some of the regularly seen delivery methods:

• Electronic Newsletter
• Web/Video-Conferencing Session
• Video and Audio Broadcast
• Internal Social Platform
• First-line Managers

Most large organizations will have a mix of these types of communications, but electronic newsletter is often the easiest and most prevalent way to quickly convey information to a sales team. These types of communications can quickly flood inboxes, however. The idea behind a successful sales communications strategy is not to bludgeon reps with information and hope they retain the important parts. Reps are less likely to invest time searching through their inbox for internal communications when they have emails coming in related to deals they are working to close. And so, the best chance to improve a sales communications strategy is to provide Sales with a solution that is designed to attract them to the information—like a moth to a flame.

To do so, it’s necessary to store the information where Sales spends their time and is likely to be receptive to digesting it. In their best practices piece, SiriusDecisions recommends “[Creating] a centralized sales communications function that acts as editor-in-chief and publisher, with guidelines and governance policies that make it clear that all communications to the field force must be channeled through this function.” The report goes on to state where they recommend this platform be housed. “In larger organizations (more than $500 million in annual revenue), we see this function residing with sales enablement.”

Ideally, a sales enablement platform facilitates all of the strategies mentioned in the opening paragraph. Both Sales and Marketing should be working in the system daily to manage content, access content, send materials to buyers, and collaborate on projects. The SiriusDecisions recommendation to house a sales communications tool within a sale enablement platform aligns with the idea of communicating with Sales where they are most likely to be spending their time.

The ability to communicate product changes, organizational news, industry trends, and competitor information within the sales enablement platform that individuals are utilizing on a daily basis is a huge boost for a sales communications strategy. Packaging the information in easily digestible formats with eye-catching design drives higher engagement rates and leads to a more informed sales force. Executing a well-designed sales communications strategy pays dividends down the road, and is part and parcel of any strong sales enablement function.

These Instagram business tips are for companies that are just starting on Instagram.

Also, if your Instagram business profile and content strategy need a wee bit of reboot, this is for you as well.

Your social media specialist can quickly implement any of these Instagram tips. That is if you seriously intend to use the social media platform to increase brand awareness, engagement, web traffic, and leads.

(Warning: This Instagram business tips article is long. I suggest that you bookmark it for reference).

Also, I have asked small businesses, just like yours, to share their tips on how they use Instagram. You will see some of their Instagram business tips below.

Understanding the Instagram Environment for Your Company

It is a visual story type of platform, and people are proud of their visual content. Hence, you will not see that many random selfies on Instagram.

Instagram, as a platform, only underscores the fact about how visual we are. Our tools are now advanced compared to sticks and stones back then, but we have always been visual.

Having a handy knowledge and sound strategy on how your businesses use Instagram can be helpful.

Who is Using It

Understand that any data we see is organic. It could change but here is where we are now in terms of Instagram use.

So, would I recommend Instagram as a marketing tool for YOUR company?

Let me answer that with two questions:

1. Are your clients and target audience there?
2. Do you have the resources? Meaning high-quality graphics, budget to pay people, time if you want to do this yourself and knowledge to use it effectively

If your answer to both of the above is” Yes,” then have fun reading these Instagram business tips that I and other companies had fun completing.

However, if your reply to the first question is “No” and you said “Yes” to the second one, you may need to go elsewhere where they are; otherwise, you are only wasting your resources. You don’t want that right?

If your answer to the first one is “Yes” and your answer to the second is “No,” hire someone knowledgeable in social media.

Instagram Business Tips for Companies

A

Ad Budget

Set aside a budget for Instagram Ads.

I wish I started this with a FREE tip, but I just like to lay it out quite plainly…Instagram, like any other social media platforms, is “pay to play.” Our use of Instagram is relatively FREE but free won’t get us far.

Want to get immediate results? Pay.

Want to scale organic reach? Pay.

Want to be in front of more leads? Pay

Want to get MORE potential clicks to your landing page? Pay.

You can use social media for free but to scale growth faster, then advertise your business. You will need a budget for that.

B

Brand Image

Decide on what personality you want to project on Instagram.

Do you want to be seen as fun?

Do you want to be perceived as the expert in your field?

In your posts, your tone, your choice of words, the types of posts you share and your rapport with your audience can influence their perception. However, you want to be perceived, as it turns out, honesty trumps snarky-ness according to

However, you want to be perceived, note that honesty trumps snarky-ness according to this.

C

Convert profile you use FOR business TO business

What an Instagram business profile has which a personal profile does not?

1. Instagram Insights.
   You need info about your demographics. A different audience has a different language, remember? Use Insights! It’s free.
2. The ability to include at least one contact information in your business account – email and phone number.
3. You can add your store address that people can click if they need directions.
4. Scale all your Instagram hurdles using the Ads tool.

If you think that you need the above for your company, then switch over.

D

Do not promote your Instagram post to profiles whose message is different from yours

Occasionally you will get an email from someone on Instagram with loads of followers “sell space” in their gallery to give you more eyeballs. Often you will get this from people who has thousands of followers vs a few that you have.

My recommendation here is if you have money to spend, use it on ads directly via Instagram not through such means as above.

Did you know that on Instagram ads you can refine targeting yourself – by location, interest, age and gender? This is something that you can control. The random email offers you get? You can’t.

Another recommendation: collaborate with other businesses in your industry.

E

Engage. Engage. Engage.

It is SOCIAL media after all. Each business may have different goals for using it, e.g., to create community, nurture relationship and gather more leads but keeping engagement going should be top of your list.

With many businesses strapped for time, companies tend to just “post and go.”

Want to stand out? Be an engaging business. Engagement is the SECRET sauce that is not a secret at all.

F

Follow Instagram-ers intelligently

Just because someone tagged #F4F or #Follow4Follow, doesn’t mean that you NEED to follow them back.

Do your research when you follow people back. Are they accounts that you your business would like to follow?

Check their Instagram profiles if it’s complete.

Check if their posts are on-topic.

Check if they are within your geographic target.

Should you follow private (locked) accounts? That will be up to you.

G

Geo-tag posts if applicable

“Post with a location see 79% higher engagement than posts not tagged with a location.”

This is ideal if your business is targeting local clientele.

How to tag location to your Instagram post:

1. Simply add location when publishing posts. Click heck the three dots (circled here), and follow what it says.
   
2. Use geotags or create your own. For example, if I live in Granite Bay, California, I ‘d use #GraniteBay #visitgranitebay or I’ll create something else.

H

Hashtag your posts

Hashtags are to Instagram what keywords are to SEO. ~ Rubyism

Instagram hashtags add visibility to your post for discovery and engagement.

Hashtags can either be by geography, niche, interest group, or generational. You can search posts by hashtags, and related hashtags.

Does it matter how many hashtags you use in a post? It does according to a study by QuickSprout. Apparently, posts with 11 hashtags received nearly 80% interactions vs. one with 10.

As of this writing, Instagram allows up to 30 hashtags per post including hashtags in the description and the comments.

It is also a superb idea to check the score card of the hashtags you use vs. the ones that are getting the most engagement so you can clean out your list. You don’t get this on Instagram but some paid tools have that.

I

Images still rule the engagement roost on Instagram – for now

In spite of the rise in the number of videos posted, images still get the most engagement.

Would it be possible for video to become the rage on Instagram in the future? Yes. Remember, Facebook owns it. Facebook’s darling posts changed from images to videos now so with Instagram, it can be just a matter of time. And of course, there’s the adoption phase too for users.

If you are a company using images:

1. Filters are great but why filter a perfect image already. Save time post it as is. Take great photos in the first place.
2. Filters are like masks to reality. If you want to post something about a product you are selling, then you may need to post it as is.
3. Do not over-filter (read: over edit) food that you are selling.

J

Jot down a compelling caption

Compel them to act. Examples for these are: visit a link, answer a question, call you, email you, tag your company for user generated contents (UGCs).

Do you tend to post a long-ish description? Then put your key message early in the caption. Instagram truncates it after three lines.

K

Key performance indicators(KPIs) need to be identified from the get-go

Whatever your goal may it has its key performance indicators.

Growing social media engagement may be your aim for using Instagram or social media for now. That goal has different KPI – and tactics.

The native Instagram analytics can be used for some of the above KPI’s, but if you like to dive deeper, there are free and paid tools that you can use for that. Google Analytics is free.

Social media goals are like roots. As your business evolves, you change leaves not roots.

L

Learn from other businesses

Research how other companies, including your competitors, are using Instagram for their business. Is what they are doing something that you can implement for your firm? Is it something that you can do now – or later?

M

Measure what matters

Measuring is not to determine that what you are doing now is effective. Measuring is trying to find where you are wasting your resources and time on what you are doing for your company.

You CAN track all the KPIs that are available, but it doesn’t mean that you should.

N

Never leave the caption section blank

You would probably be able to get away with this if you are National Geographic, but you’re not.

Tell your story in the caption section.

In case you are wondering if the longer your caption, the better the engagement rate, nope. It does not. There is little correlation between these two according to a study.

O

Optimize your Instagram business page bio

Your Instagram business profile is your most important real estate on Instagram.

It is one of the first places that Instagrammers check to verify whether you are worth following. Make sure it is optimized with your company’s relevant info.

Critical sections of your Instagram business page:

1. Photo Avatar: Decide if it is your face or your logo that you would like to use if you are a small business. Either way, you can change that later.
2. Link: Use a landing page that matters to you. It can be a promotional link – email sign-up, coupon, download or your latest blog. This is the ONLY place on Instagram where a URL is clickable.
3. Bio Description: Add in your description the reason people should follow your business page. It can be a promise to “be the first to get your freebies,” chance to join contests and more!

P

Publish relevant posts

How do you know it is relevant? That’s why you need to check your Insights.

What are your top posts?

What is the theme of your recurring top posts?

Q

Questions help create a dialog

You want engagement, don’t you?

“Ask them, answer them, rephrase them, encourage them. Create a dialog and keep your audience engaged.” Tip via HH Staffing services

Asking question in social media demonstrates:

1. Your willingness to begin a conversation. And respond back, within reason, when someone finally responds.
2. Humility. We don’t know everything, you see.
3. Your willingness to shift the spotlight to THEM, not you.
4. Get a solution. Some of the tips that you see here is a result of my asking for help from other businesses.

R

Relax and have fun. It shows!

That’s a tip shared by Realtor Gitta Barth of My Florida House.

We couldn’t agree more. It is social media after all.

Keep it casual. Use your audience’s language. Leave your product sales copy voice and language in your website’s sales pages.

If you are worried that the fun could get out of hands like other businesses or companies, manage it NOW by creating a social media guideline to keep things within bounds.

S

Strengthen a story, or theme, using a carousel

Carousel is a feature on Instagram where you can post multiple images.

It grabs attention

It can help build a story or a concept.

Did you know THIS? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . #SocialMediaHacks #SocialmediaOptimization #businesstip #businesstips #twittertips #twittertiptuesday #yoursocialsuccess

A post shared by ruby.rusine | Social Success (@socialsmktg) on Apr 18, 2017 at 7:16am PDT

T

Timing of posts

How do you figure this out? Again, check Instagram Insights. That’s another reason I like to use business profile for businesses.

Do you want to post when most users are active (not)? (Pro Tip: That means you will be competing with other users for attention and potentially less engagement.

In spite of what others say about best time to post, one thing we know is this. Each business is unique. It sounds like a cliché, but to prove our point here is an example of “best time to post on Instagram” for two different accounts.

That. Different.

U

Use a consistent theme

“It helps …to attract more people – whether it be what you post – messages or pics or color or filter.” ~ Adventure Photo Studios

Your theme can either be:

1. The message
2. The subject of photos you share
3. The filter or color that you choose

You can do some testing too by either asking your audience or by, again, checking data.

V

Vote out boring

From the get-go resolve that BORING posts should have no space in your Instagram gallery.

We know already that Pinterest is image-driven; it is even more so with Instagram. Quality posts thrive here. The inability to click a link in the description section on Instagram posts is an indication that the picture is the “main show.”

W

Website as your home, not Instagram

Do not neglect your business website over Instagram or other social media platforms. People might check your social media profile. However, when it comes to making a decision to buy, particularly for B2B companies, often businesses research the website before they start contact.

X

(e)Xplore (read: research) like a pro

Pros research the landscape before jumping ahead. Include this as part of your Instagram marketing strategy. This is where it should all begin: RESEARCH.

Using Instagram, you can research hashtags, users, competitors, location and a lot more.

Y

You can’t control reach and impressions on Instagram, but you can control engagement

How? By posting relevant content that your audience likes.

If there is no engagement, maybe your content sucks?

..and if no one seems to be home in your profile, that may be because you aren’t home too and you are just cross-posting elsewhere? Don’t blame the platform. Check your strategy.

What does your audience like? Check Instagram Insights or your Google Analytics. That’s one way to find out what your audience likes.

Another way is to ask THEM.

Z

Zero negativity

Keep things light and positive. People want content to be inspiring! Tip by HH Staffing Company

We can infer from Curalate about how positivity abounds on Instagram with the most popular positive emoticons that are shared on Instagram.

So yeah, you can’t control the negativity in social media, but you can control what you post on your profiles. Keep positivity shining in your corner.

Did we miss anything?

When I was nine years old, I ran home and told my mom with a wide grin on my face, “I got 9/10 in my last test!”

Instead of giving me a pat on the back, she asked, “what scores did the others get?”

That hit me pretty hard. Not gonna lie, that test was easy, and quite a number of my classmates scored 10/10.

But before we go off on a tangent about Asian parenting, the lesson here is you can’t evaluate how well you’re doing without comparing against others.

Same goes for your brand.

It’s always better to get that reality check yourself than have someone else tell you, “you aren’t as good as you think.”

And that’s where competitive monitoring comes in handy.

Why bother monitoring your competitors?

If you’re wondering why you should spy on your competitors, here are a few reasons:

• Benchmark your brand: you can’t tell how good your brand is doing if you don’t know where you stand in your industry. You may think having 500 mentions a week is great, but what if your competitors are bringing in 5,000? Competitive monitoring gives context to your own metrics.
• Learn from their hits and misses: You’re able to watch your competitors’ business strategies play out, and analyzing them helps you learn from others’ mistakes and avoid making them yourself. Likewise for their successes.
• Find new opportunities: Monitoring is not just about watching and taking notes. It’s also about using the intel to take actions. And that can range from reaching out to influencers talking about your competitors to generating leads from their unhappy customers.

But the list of benefits goes on. The thing is, competitive monitoring gives you key insights to make better decisions, and that can go beyond marketing and sales. It can be used for improving your product, your customer support, or your PR strategy.

The great thing about competitive monitoring is it pulls in all this data without you having to go searching. Your monitoring tools automatically collect a range of valuable information.

But what exactly should you be looking at, and what do you make of each of those metrics?

In this post, I’m going to explain all the different metrics you should track, and why they matter.

8 competitive monitoring metrics every brand needs to track

Some of these metrics you may need to track constantly. Others you can just take a look every once in a while, when you’re changing strategies or looking for new ideas.

Let’s start with the most important:

1. Share of voice

You may already know who’s the market leader in terms of revenue generated. But does more revenue mean more popular on the cyberspace? Share of voice tells you who’s creating the most buzz online.

If you’re generating a lot of sales but not a lot of online discussions, it may mean that your marketing team needs to step up their game, and that you’re leaving money on the table.

On the other hand, if you’re being mentioned a lot online, but your sales numbers aren’t reflecting that, you might want to look into what those conversations are about, or reevaluate your online marketing strategy.

2. Share of voice over time

To take it one step further, share of voice over time lets you see the evolution and identify trends.

You can track different time periods of holidays and festivals – if you’re in B2C – or campaign launches, to see the correlation between your competitors’ marketing efforts and the buzz generated.

For example, you can look for large spikes in social media activity for your competitors. Then go through the mentions to pinpoint why more people were talking about them than usual. Is it a successful strategy you could adapt? If you noticed dips in certain periods, see if there’s a pattern, and grab the opportunity to push extra hard on campaigns during their down times.

3. Share of voice by locations

This is crucial when your business is international, or if you want it to be. When entering a new market, it’s important to know what the existing playing field looks like.

Who’s leading in what countries?

By looking at what countries your competitors are present, you might also discover new markets that you should venture into. If you’re contemplating opening a new office, check where you’re most popular, and go where your potential customers are.

4. Top languages

This goes hand in hand with share of voice by locations. By looking at the top languages of your competitors’ mentions, you’ll discover new demographics to target. You may find that you need to adapt your marketing campaigns, website, and offer support in specific languages that you didn’t think about.

5. Brand sentiment

Sentiment is kind of like a metric that adds context to other metrics. So you might have the majority of the share of voice against your competitors, but you won’t want that if all those conversations are negative.

It will add more context to your share of voice metric, and compare and contrast the sentiment of different competitors’ social mentions. You’ll be able to report on how the market views your brand in comparison to your competitors in response to different campaigns and events.

You can also look at individual positive and negative mentions of your competitors. What do people like and dislike about their product or marketing campaigns? This can help your sales, marketing, and product team figure out how to offer more of what your customers are looking for.

6. Top platforms

As much as it’s important to know where your audience are physically, we need to know where they are digitally. That’s where top platforms come in handy.

You can have a clear view of which channels bring in the most discussions for you and your competitors, be it social media, blogs, forums, or more.

This helps you figure out where you need to double down and focus on, and which ones you should just forget about.

7. Top influencers

We talk about influencer marketing a lot at Mention. We know that influencers can help you grow your audience quickly. The problem is, they aren’t that easy to find, especially if you’re just starting out. And even if you’re an established brand, you can never get enough of them.

So tracking your competitors’ is a great way to build your influencers network. Since they’re already talking about your competitors, they’re more likely to say yes when you reach out. Their audience will also probably be a great fit for your brand.

So if you’re Samsung, you’d want to look out for the top influencers talking about Apple, and make sure they’re talking about you, too.

With Mention, you can find influencers on social media (Twitter and Instagram) or the web, see their interest topics and other info, and interact with them directly from the app.

8. Trending topics

Trending topics is a quick way to find out what conversations about your competitors are about, without having to go through every single mention.

This is useful for understanding what people are most interested in, so you can steal ideas for content creation and future marketing campaigns.

Start sleuthing

Over the past few months, we’ve given you all the reasons you need to start spying, a competitive monitoring strategy, how to do a 5-minute competitive analysis, and now, all the metrics you need to be looking at. Honestly, there’s only so much we can say. All that’s left is for you to pull the trigger.

If you’re ready to take the plunge into the exciting world of competitive monitoring, request a demo to see how Mention can help you:

I don’t know anyone who feels as though there are enough hours in the day. Whether you want more time to spend with your family, to chase a new business opportunity or to pursue that big dream you’ve always tucked in the back of your head – you could always use an extra hour or few. And to get there, your productivity needs to be at its peak.

We could absolutely do less and for some people, that’s a viable and attractive option.  But for those of us who aren’t ready to slow down but still want to be as efficient as possible – there are some tools that can help.

For me, there are some absolutes that must be present when I consider a new productivity tool.  Missing any one of these is usually a deal breaker for me.

• Must be accessible on all of my devices (laptop, tablet and mobile phone) if appropriate
• Must sync all data between my devices so no matter which tool I’m using to get to the tool – the data is current
• Has to be Apple/Mac friendly
• Simple, simple, simple – I don’t have the time or the desire to learn something complicated
• Responsive customer service team – if I run into trouble, I want to know there’s a human being somewhere in the mix who can help me
• Can’t cost an arm or leg but I am willing to spend some money to get the fully loaded version or some of the features (like sharing capacity) that I need

I thought it might be useful to share a few of the tools that I use on a daily basis to keep my world in order and to be as productive as possible.

Evernote:  Think of Evernote as a virtual super secretary that helps you keep everything you might need at your fingertips.  It’s like a virtual file cabinet that stores notes, visuals, web clippings, digitized business cards, audio files and so much more.

What makes this tool so useful is the ability to tag everything you add.  So searching for something that you stored two years ago becomes a breeze, as long as you’ve created a simple tagging system/hierarchy.

My Evernote is a mishmash of blog post ideas, notes from client meetings, web clippings of things I want to share with someone or refer to later, my digital Rolodex and a list of vacation options for upcoming trips.

Wunderlist:  I searched for a couple years to find a To Do list app that actually helped me get things done.  I can keep multiple lists, share them with other people so there’s built in accountability and it is easy to access on all of my devices.  Most To Do apps are unnecessarily complicated.  Part of what I love about Wunderlist is its simplicity.

My lists include client To Dos, things I need to do around my house, my grocery list, phone calls I need to make, next steps (tied to calendar reminders) for some new business prospecting and best of all – I can share tasks with others on my team and assign responsibility as needed.

Tiny Scan Pro: This phone app produces incredibly legible scans of any document. If you travel or are out of the office on a regular basis, being able to scan a document and then either email it to someone, upload it to Evernote, DropBox, Google Drive or other cloud tools is invaluable. If you have the companion app Tiny FAX, you can even go old school and fax it to someone.

Productivity – It’s all about getting things done smarter, faster and with less hassle. Hopefully, these tools will allow you to spend more of your time doing the things you love the most with the people you love the most.

The post Productivity Hacks appeared first on Drew's Marketing Minute.

Chart of the Day: What makes you choose your marketing automation platform?

There is so much choice with marketing automation platforms now, with nearly every Email Service Provider (ESP) adding them to their grades. But what are others choosing their platforms for?

Marketing Automation platforms aren't cheap, even the ones that are rather simplistic. So these are expensive investments, but what would drive a business to choose one platform over another?

In the chart below we can see that the most important reason why a business goes with a specific marketing automation platform. 54% said that it was the ease of implementation. Now, I have implemented a fair few marketing automation platforms and ESPs, and yes they are a ball ache and can take a lot of time and planning. But is this really a fair reason to go with a specific platform and spend all that money? Just because it's easy? I do no agree with this at all.

The other points make far more sense, with the cost of ownership at 43%, analytics capabilities at 40% and even cross-platform integration at 39%.

Remember this is for your company, so, what are the most important criteria for you to select a marketing automation system?

• Define your business goals - what do you want to achieve?
• Avoid shiny object syndrome - what functions are essential, key features and desirables
• Cost - look at how much you can afford, don't look out of your price bracket. There are a lot of different pricing options available
• Challenge vendors with a scenario - think about what you want to use it for, and ask the different vendors how their platforms could fit your requirements

• Source: State of
  Marketing Automation 2017
• Sample Size: Research subscribers 228
• Recommended Resource: B2B Marketing Automation Guide

You may be feeling like you have tried everything in the sales book to reconnect with clients or stay in touch over long sales cycles. But have you ever thought about sending them a personal video?

Video content has an innate ability to grab our interest. In fact, including video in an email can boost click-through rates by 28%. These videos don’t need to be highly produced -- think of them as video voicemails. They are professional in that you want to represent yourself well, but your personality should come through.

Here are the four main elements of a great sales video.

1) An Engaging Reason for Reaching Out

Less is always more. Here are three interesting themes that'll keep your video under 45 seconds:

1. Pay them a compliment: If the prospect or their company has posted something they're excited about or proud of, congratulate them and give some follow-up thoughts.
2. Provide sort of value to the client: Describe the content you’re sending to them and why you thought they’d find it helpful.
3. Share news: Give them an update that's important or relevant to their business.

You can also keep it light. One of our reps revived an old pipeline deal that was about to sign with a competitor when he sent a comical 15-second video with the email subject line “Hail Mary.” The video began with him catching a football and asking the client if we were still on their “roster.” The client loved it, and we ended up getting the deal.

2) A Strong Call-to-Action

Consider your objective before you create a video. Are you trying to get your prospect’s attention, schedule a call or meeting, reengage them after they’ve gone dark, or show them a compelling benefit of your product?

Once you’ve clarified your goal, structure your video and call-to-action around it.

For example, your CTA for reengaging them might be:

“We haven’t connected in a few weeks, but I have an idea for your upcoming [event, campaign, goal]. Respond to this email if you want to schedule a quick five-minute call.”

3) A Welcoming Set-Up

Keep your videos to 30 seconds or shorter when reconnecting with a client or sending a quick note saying hello. Remember to relax, smile, look directly into the camera, and use a plain, non-distracting background.

We also recommend starting with their name: “Hey, [name]!” or “Hope you’re having a great day so far, [name].” This makes your video feel more personalized and friendly.

4) Good (Enough) Quality

Your video doesn't need to be Hollywood-worthy, but it should be easy to watch.

Use your webcam or a cellphone and a tripod. Tripods for cell phones are important because they let you shoot your video in landscape mode at eye level.

If you're using your webcam, make sure it's high enough to avoid the “chin” shot.

Lastly, use an editing tool to cut out the dead time at the beginning and end of your recording. If you're shooting on your iPhone or Android, you can trim right on your phone.

Apple users can use iMovie; Windows 10 users can trim right in Photos after shooting the video using the Camera app.

We also recommend downloading a teleprompter app (like this one for Android or this one for Apple, both free) if you’re more comfortable following a script.

Our sales reps share their personal video clips in our owncloud-based video hosting solution, 2Win! Bridge. This software lets them upload videos quickly and host them in a non-distracting environment.

Sending your prospect a personalized video is a great way to revive a stalled deal. It might make more time to create one than write an email, but the results will pay for themselves.

Objection handling is one of the most dreaded occurrences that salespeople encounter in their careers. This is because objections are typically viewed as a hindrance to the sales process and can sometimes throw an otherwise confident sales professional into a frenzy.

Do you find that you’re continually thrown off guard by customers’ objections? Or that you never seem to respond in a way that helps move the sale forward after a customer raises an objection? If so, there may be some answers as to why your objection handling is falling short.

5 Reasons Your Objection Handling is Falling Short

1. You don’t actively listen to your customer.

Once your customer states their objection, are you ready to jump right in with a response? Are you formulating what you’re going to say before your customer has even finished talking?

Sometimes a customer may say a “cue” word that sales professionals have come to associate with a particular objection, such as “Our budget is tight this quarter.” When they hear this cue, some salespeople will immediately start formulating the typical response they use when that cue word is stated by a customer.

Instead of turning off your listening ears the second your customer states the cue word, try to focus even harder on what your customer is saying. Listen to them thoroughly to make sure you don’t miss out on any details that follow the cue word.

In the case of the budget concerns, your prospect might follow up with, “ … But this is a priority for us, so I’m hoping we can come to an agreement that works for both of us on price.”

You might hear your customer say something that would deem your usual “cued” response inappropriate. Cutting your listening short is a mistake that can cost you the sale, and, even worse, your customer’s trust.

2. You immediately get defensive.

Oftentimes, sales professionals’ first reaction to a customer’s objection is to get defensive. If the first thing you say in response to a customer’s objection is, “What do you mean?” this could be a sign that your defensiveness is interfering with your ability to effectively handle the objection.

Instead of letting defensiveness interfere, try instead to simply acknowledge what your customer said. “I understand how that might be a concern … ” is a much better start to objection handling than is, “What do you mean?”

Effectively acknowledging our customer’s objection demonstrates that you care about what they said instead of signaling that you’re figuratively “ready to fight.”

3. You don’t explore what your customer means by their objection.

After you carefully listen to your customer’s objection, it’s important to explore with them further in order to fully understand the meaning behind their words.

For example, say your customer tells you they don’t like your service. Maybe you’ve heard the “service” objection many times before, so you respond by guaranteeing they’ll always have a dedicated customer service rep.

But what your customer actually meant by “service” was that they didn’t like how your service area wasn’t as large as your competitor’s.

A simple, “Can you tell me what you mean by ‘service’…” follow-up question could have provided some further clarification that would have allowed you to respond to their objection more appropriately.

Don’t treat objections equally. Just because one customer means “customer service” when they say “service” doesn’t mean that your next customer will. Asking questions and further exploring with your customer will help you to treat every objection as a unique objection, even if you think you’ve heard it before.

4. You view objection handling negatively.

Many sales professionals mentally assign objections a negative connotation. Going into a sales call with the idea that an objection is a “bad” thing can cause you to lose a sale before you even walk through your customer’s door.

Rather than viewing objections as the demise of your sales call, see them instead as a way to help your customer solve their problem. When your customer raises an objection, it presents you with an opportunity to provide further value by clarifying and easing their concern. The process of proper objection handling can even help you build trust and grow your relationship with your customer.

5. You see the sales situation from your own perspective.

When walking into a sales call, some sales professionals are only focused on one thing — doing whatever it takes to close the deal. When this is the only thing on your mind, it’s hard to see the situation from your customer’s perspective.

But selling isn’t only about getting what you want — it’s about helping your customer solve their problem. If your sole focus is on closing the deal, it’s nearly impossible to get down to the root of your customer’s problem.

And if your customer happens to raise an objection, you’ll be so blindsided by your desire to win the business that you won’t be able to effectively handle their objection.

If you want to handle your customer’s objection in a way that moves the sale forward and builds trust in the relationship, you need to get out of your own mind and view the situation from your customer’s point of view.

This idea can be best explained by Carew International’s “Odds Are” Factor™. The “Odds Are” Factor states that the odds are 2:1 that at any given point in time, a person is viewing a situation from their own frame of reference.

So, if the odds are 2:1 that sales professionals are in their own minds, then how can they possibly solve their customers’ problems or answer their concerns in a way that helps their customers? Only once sales professionals are out of their own “Odds Are” can they truly focus on addressing their customer’s concern.

If you want to prevent your objection handling from falling short, try Listening, Acknowledging, and Exploring with your customers after they raise an objection before jumping in with your Response (Carew International’s LAER: The Bonding Process®).

Doing so will help you to handle objections in a way that moves the sale forward in a positive way and establishes long-term relationships with your customers.

Plenty has been written about bringing products or services to market. Practices have been developed to manage both direct and indirect sales channels. Literature has been written about product development models versus customer development models. And, the traditional process of creating demand is now very well known.

However, the exponential growth of products, solutions, and applications in the B2B space have created a new type of a sales channel—one that resembles, something we’re all familiar with, an appstore. In fact, leading platforms, like Marketo, have taken notice and built ecosystems and programs to facilitate the discovery of complementary independent software vendors (ISVs) for their customers.

These ecosystems require a fundamental change in how ISVs think about managing sales opportunities. Specifically, some questions an ISV should be able to answer include: How to quantify the opportunity? Do you need a dedicated person to manage the engagement and who should that person be? And, which ecosystems make sense to participate in? But unfortunately, the reality is that many organizations struggle to successfully evaluate and manage the opportunity. This blog will take a look at how you can successfully navigate the galaxy of enterprise ecosystems and choose a partner and an ecosystem that will work for your business.

Find The Right Partner

The growing number of opportunities—in the form of an appstore, a program or an ecosystem—means that you’re more likely than ever to find one that offers the right product-market fit and therefore helps you promote your product.

As you look for the right partner, it’s important to consider the benefits a program offers and how the platform’s program drives success for its participants. As you evaluate, you’ll find that some programs are backed by a solid plan to help you drive business, while others merely provide affiliate options. Make sure the program you choose has offerings that make sense for your business in its current phase, and as you look toward the future. For example, an early-stage startup may not need the same acceleration options that a later stage startup needs.

After carefully considering those criteria, you’re likely to end up with only a handful of programs to choose from. Ask yourself how many “merchants” are already promoting their merchandise in that ecosystem and its respective program; will you be able to stand out? Or, is this market saturated? Consider the distribution and the growth of the platform’s customer base. Ask yourself if the ecosystem is a known and established place to promote solutions like yours, or if you will standout—either as a refreshing outlier or an odd one. Then, prioritize your options and register for the program where you’d like to publish your solution/product/app listing. You should be able to quickly identify and validate if the right customers are there and will react positively to your product.

Assess The Opportunity

Many marketers and business development (BD) folks I have met underestimate the opportunity they have in aligning their go-to-market strategy with a large enterprise ecosystem. Most of them will size the opportunity by multiplying the number of customers the enterprise ecosystem is exposed to, with a wishful penetration rate, and their average sales price (ASP). While this calculation can offer a good estimate, it hides some components of revenue that are directly influenced by the ecosystem. By using Little’s Law, you can demonstrate that the revenue contribution of the business is a factor of four elements:

1. The number of sales opportunities at any given time
2. The average contract value
3. The win rate
4. The length of the sales cycle

Let’s look at an example using these four elements: If you typically work on 20 opportunities at a time and you think that participating in an enterprise ecosystem’s program can change it to 25, and if you estimate that your close rate will grow from 20% to 30%, and that the tighter alignment with the platform vendor will help you shave 10 days off your 100 day sales cycle, bringing it down to 90 days, you have just forecasted your business to double.

So, when marketing or BD plans their business, it makes sense for them to identify which of these parameters their participation in an ecosystem program is going to impact and evaluate if the platform vendor has a plan to help them achieve those goals.

The highly focused ecosystems also make a great foundation for your ABM strategy. Enrolling in an app/solution ecosystem should dramatically affect your teams’ ability to focus on a segment of accounts.

Manage The Channel Opportunity

Managing the opportunity an ecosystem provides requires commitment on your end as well as from the enterprise. Don’t just sit back and wait for your business to grow.

On your end, hire a person who can be the general manager of your ecosystem business, and who will ensure that the program gets the right marketing and product support from both sides. Hiring someone who can simply manage the relationship won’t suffice.

From the enterprise ecosystem that you choose, you should expect a solid infrastructure of partner folks, not only in the ecosystem business but also under sales and marketing. Without this infrastructure you will mostly likely interact with partner managers who have good intentions but can’t translate that into making a difference in the field.

Navigate The Partner Galaxy Fearlessly

Undoubtedly, it makes sense for ISVs to take advantage of the programmatic opportunities platform vendors offer to connect and promote complementary solutions to their customer base. While these programs vary by structure, distribution, maturity, and saturation of the ecosystem it’s important to choose one that most benefits the type and phase of your business.

At Marketo, we’re always working to make our Launchpoint ecosystem an optimal experience for not only our customers who are coming to look for technology that offers seamless data integration and platform augmentation, but also for our partners who we are now offering the opportunity to grow their business via a combination of new platform technologies and a growth acceleration program.

Lastly, don’t forget, a towel is the most important item a Hitchhiker can carry.

Did you know that Account Based Marketing is DEAD? There is a new concept that makes SO much more sense than Account Based Marketing and that’s Account Based Revenue. At the end of the day, that’s what it’s all about right? Your business will expand because of the revenue that it will generate, so let REVENUE be the focus! To introduce us to this new term, we have sales expert Trish Bertuzzi on this episode of #SellingWithSocial. Trish and her team at The Bridge Group, Inc. have worked with over 350+ B2B technology companies helping them to unleash the power of inside sales. They are on a mission to help companies build repeatable pipelines and accelerate growth using both traditional and account based strategies. If you are ready to leave Account Based Marketing behind and embrace the future with Account Based Revenue, then make sure to catch this episode with Trish!

Trish Bertuzzi

Goodbye Account Based Marketing, Hello ABR!

Even though Account Based Marketing is the “Buzzword” it’s helpful to move forward with a fresh understanding and a more focused approach. That’s why Trish coined the phrase Account Based Revenue (ABR). She wants to help business leaders like you hone in on a revenue focused strategy. Are you ready to adopt this new emphasis? Do you want to see accelerated growth and increased sales? Trish isn’t just tossing out old concepts for new ones on a whim, she’s an industry expert and she KNOWS what it takes to help businesses like yours push through to the next level of success. What are you waiting for? Listen to this episode of #SellingWithSocial to embrace this new approach!

Effective Storytelling with the Account Based Revenue Strategy

Often Trish will consult with a business and face push back on her mission to move from Account Based Marketing to an Account Based Revenue strategy. She will hear leaders say that they have adopted a revenue-focused approach because they are connecting with multiple individuals on a specific account. Of course, that is a step in the right direction but Trish wants to take businesses even further and help them craft a unified story that is so compelling and uniquely tailored to that client in a way they’ve never seen before. This approach requires a lot of trust and flexibility as Trish and her team brings marketing and sales into harmony so they can tell the same story. If you’d like to hear more about Trish’s strategy, make sure to listen to this episode of #SellingWithSocial.

Shedding Light vs Casting Shade on Social

Do you feel the need to add value or make a point? You might think that both can be true at the same time but Trish points out that these options represent two very different approaches on Social. She calls it “Shedding light or Casting Shade.” Shedding light is when you see a request for help or information and you present your solution, this adds value and brings to light new information. Casting shade is when you see someone’s solution and you tear it down to make a point and/or to bolster your information as being superior, thus casting a shade upon the information they brought to light. With her years as an expert with inside sales, Trish is trying to educate sales leaders like you to know these two different approaches and to work toward shedding light and stay away from casting shade. To hear Trish expand on these concepts, make sure to listen to this episode of #SellingWithSocial!

Why Sales and Marketing MUST Collaborate

You remember that famous line from “The A Team,” right? “I love it when a plan comes together.” A plan coming together should be the goal when marketing and sales collaborate on an account based strategy. But too often the plan gets one sided and the either sales or marketing gets marginalized. These two groups coming together play a KEY role in leaving behind the old Account Based Marketing and embracing the Account Based Revenue approach. On this episode of #SellingWithSocial, you’ll hear from Trish as she emphasizes the need for sales and marketing to work together for an account based revenue strategy to succeed. You don’t want to miss Trish’s valuable insight on this episode!

Outline of This Episode

• [1:20] I welcome Trish Bertuzzi to the podcast.
• [2:30] Trish tells her story, the cliff notes version.
• [4:00] The death of ABM and the rise of ABR!
• [5:30] Where do you want your revenue to come from?
• [11:30] Why the Account Based Revenue strategy works.
• [13:30] An example of how hyper personalization makes an impact.
• [21:00] How do traditional sales strategies fit into an ABR approach?
• [23:00] Social sales engagement and ABR.
• [26:00] The difference between sheding light and casting shade on Social.
• [29:30] Why Sales and Marketing need to collaborate.

Today’s leading organizations are using machine learning–based tools to automate decision processes, and they’re starting to experiment with more-advanced uses of artificial intelligence (AI) for digital transformation. Corporate investment in artificial intelligence is predicted to triple in 2017, becoming a $100 billion market by 2025. Last year alone saw $5 billion in machine learning venture investment. In a recent survey, 30% of respondents predicted that AI will be the biggest disruptor to their industry in the next five years. This will no doubt have profound effects on the workplace.

Machine learning is enabling companies to expand their top-line growth and optimize processes while improving employee engagement and increasing customer satisfaction. Here are some concrete examples of how AI and machine learning are creating value in companies today:

• Personalizing customer service. The potential to improve customer service while lowering costs makes this one of the most exciting areas of opportunity. By combining historical customer service data, natural language processing, and algorithms that continuously learn from interactions, customers can ask questions and get high-quality answers. In fact, 44% of U.S. consumers already prefer chatbots to humans for customer relations. Customer service representatives can step in to handle exceptions, with the algorithms looking over their shoulders to learn what to do next time around.
• Improving customer loyalty and retention. Companies can mine customer actions, transactions, and social sentiment data to identify customers who are at high risk of leaving. Combined with profitability data, this allows organizations to optimize “next best action” strategies and personalize the end-to-end customer experience. For example, young adults coming off of their parents’ mobile phone plans often move to other carriers. Telcos can use machine learning to anticipate this behavior and make customized offers, based on the individual’s usage patterns, before they defect to competitors.
• Hiring the right people. Corporate job openings pull in about 250 résumés apiece, and over half of surveyed recruiters say shortlisting qualified candidates is the most difficult part of their job. Software quickly sifts through thousands of job applications and shortlists candidates who have the credentials that are most likely to achieve success at the company. Care must be taken not to reinforce any human biases implicit in prior hiring. But software can also combat human bias by automatically flagging biased language in job descriptions, detecting highly qualified candidates who might have been overlooked because they didn’t fit traditional expectations.
• Automating finance. AI can expedite “exception handling” in many financial processes. For example, when a payment is received without an order number, a person must sort out which order the payment corresponds to, and determine what to do with any excess or shortfall. By monitoring existing processes and learning to recognize different situations, AI significantly increases the number of invoices that can be matched automatically. This lets organizations reduce the amount of work outsourced to service centers and frees up finance staff to focus on strategic tasks.
• Measuring brand exposure. Automated programs can recognize products, people, logos, and more. For example, advanced image recognition can be used to track the position of brand logos that appear in video footage of a sporting event, such as a basketball game. Corporate sponsors get to see the return on investment of their sponsorship investment with detailed analyses, including the quantity, duration, and placement of corporate logos.
• Detecting fraud. The typical organization loses 5% of revenues each year to fraud. By building models based on historical transactions, social network information, and other external sources of data, machine learning algorithms can use pattern recognition to spot anomalies, exceptions, and outliers. This helps detect and prevent fraudulent transactions in real time, even for previously unknown types of fraud. For example, banks can use historical transaction data to build algorithms that recognize fraudulent behavior. They can also discover suspicious patterns of payments and transfers between networks of individuals with overlapping corporate connections. This type of “algorithmic security” is applicable to a wide range of situations, such as cybersecurity and tax evasion.
• Predictive maintenance. Machine learning makes it possible to detect anomalies in the temperature of a train axel that indicate that it will freeze up in the next few hours. Instead of hundreds of passengers being stranded in the countryside, waiting for an expensive repair, the train can be diverted to maintenance before it fails, and passengers transferred to a different train.
• Smoother supply chains. Machine learning enables contextual analysis of logistics data to predict and mitigate supply chain risks. Algorithms can sift through public social data and news feeds in multiple languages to detect, for example, a fire in a remote factory that supplies vital ball bearings that are used in a car transmission.

Other areas where machine intelligence could soon be commonly used include:

• Career planning. Recommendations could help employees choose career paths that lead to high performance, satisfaction, and retention. If a person with an engineering degree wishes to run the division someday, what additional education and work experience should they obtain, and in what order?
• Drone- and satellite-based asset management. Drones equipped with cameras can perform regular external inspections of commercial structures, like bridges or airplanes, with the images automatically analyzed to detect any new cracks or changes to surfaces.
• Retail shelf analysis. A sports drink company could use machine intelligence, coupled with machine vision, to see whether its in-store displays are at the promised location, the shelves are properly stocked with products, and the product labels are facing outward.

Machine learning enables a company to reimagine end-to-end business processes with digital intelligence. The potential is enormous. That’s why software vendors are investing heavily in adding AI to their existing applications and in creating net-new solutions.

Insight Center

But there are barriers to overcome. The most important is the availability of large quantities of high-quality data that can be used to train algorithms. In many organizations, the data isn’t in one place or in a useable format, or it contains biases that will lead to bad decisions. To prepare your enterprise for the future, the first step is to assess your existing information systems and data flows to distinguish the areas that are ready for automation from those where more investment is needed. Consider appointing a chief data officer to ensure that data is being properly managed as a corporate asset.

Another problem is prioritization; with so many opportunities, it can be hard to know where to start. To ease this burden, software providers are starting to offer predefined solutions enabled with state-of-the-art machine learning out of the box. Many organizations are also implementing AI centers of excellence to work closely with business departments. Wherever you start, it’s important to link the projects to a long-term digital platform strategy to avoid having disconnected islands of innovation.

Lastly, don’t underestimate the cultural barriers. Many employees worry about the consequences of all of this technology on their roles. For most, it will be an opportunity to reduce tedious tasks and do more, but it’s vital that employees have incentives to ensure the success of new machine learning initiatives. You’ll also have to think carefully about customers. AI can augment the power to get insights from customer data — perhaps beyond the point where customers are comfortable. Organizations must take privacy seriously, and relying on computers for important decisions requires careful governance. They should implement procedures to audit the real effects of any automated systems, and there should always be recourses and overrides as part of the processes. AI systems that use data about people should involve informed consent.

AI’s continued rise is inevitable, and it’s advancing into the workplace at a dizzying speed. The question now is not about whether managers should investigate adopting AI but about how fast they can do so. At the same time, organizations need to be thoughtful about how they apply AI to their organizations, with a full understanding of the advantages and disadvantages inherent in the technology.

Your brain can identify and retain details of an image in 13 milliseconds. That’s less than a 20^th of the time it takes to blink your eyes. So it’s no surprise that visual content is on the rise as attention spans shrink. If you could choose between a consumer spending 20 seconds with a wall of text or 20 seconds with an image, it makes sense to go with the latter.

In other words, people like looking at stuff. As such, infographics are rapidly becoming an essential component of a solid content marketing strategy. Free tools like Canva and Pixlr make it easier than ever to turn your data into compelling visual content.

The best infographics give equal weight to both parts of the word – they combine essential info with stellar graphic design. I could write a whole blog post about how great infographics can be. But, of course, that would defeat the purpose.

Instead, let’s look at ten great infographics with a meta twist: They’re content marketing assets about content marketing! These examples can inspire your own infographic creation while they inform your strategy.

#1: How to Socialize a Blog Post

Creating great content is less than half the battle for marketers. You should spend roughly 20% of your effort creating, and 80% in promotion. What good is awesome content if no one sees it? This colorful gem from DigitalMarketer efficiently illustrates how to make sure your content reaches your target audience. You’ll learn how to create assets that help promote the piece, make your shares trackable, and analyze your results to do it even better next time.

#2: The Top 8 B2B Customer Marketing Trends to Watch Out for in 2017

This piece from Digital Marketing Philippines (via the good folks at HubSpot) really puts the “info” in “infographic.” It’s a good example of just how much data you can pack into a visual asset while still keeping it easily-digestible. The bright colors, solid organization, and statistic call-outs grab attention, while the text provides plenty of value to keep people reading.

#3: What Does It Take to Make a Piece of Content?

Dive into this cool blue infographic for an insider look at how content powerhouse Contently goes from strategy to creation to distribution. This piece is a great counter-example to the design-heavy look of the previous entry on the list. It relies on simple line art to create a cooking metaphor that provides visual interest without overpowering the text. A soupcon of highlighted statistics help make the case for the solid advice they’re presenting.

#4:  The Ultimate Content Marketing Strategy

There are plenty of resources out there that explain the “Big Rock” content marketing strategy, but this Curata infographic gets points for thoroughness and nifty graphical interest. Learn how to create a gated asset, slice it into top-of-funnel ungated content that feeds back to the gated asset, then dice it into even smaller gems to share on social media. One nifty trick to steal for your next long infographic: The progress bar at the top that shows exactly how far you’ve read and how far you have left to go.

#5: A Brief History of Content Marketing

Who better to give a primer on the 200+ year history of content marketing than the Godfather himself, Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute? This timeline serves as a reminder that quality content can help build a business, from John Deere’s The Furrow to the Michelin Guide to the Will It Blend? Videos. Wrapped in Joe’s signature orange, this bite-sized history lesson is well worth a read.

#6: 10 Visual Marketing Statistics for 2017

This infographic collects results from a Venngage survey of over 300 digital marketers. It’s a great resource for seeing how the industry is moving toward visual content, and what types of visual content are leading the pack. Compare your progress to the results here, or use it to inspire your strategy, or just enjoy the pink-and-purple visuals.

#7: The Ins & Outs of Awesome Infographics

Fans of marketing, infographics, and pentagons will enjoy this groovy piece from IBM. The simple, clean design work complements the solid advice on offer about how to create memorable visual content. Learn how to choose the right visuals for your data, pick the right layout, and avoid common mistakes.

#8: What Buyers Really Want from Content Marketers

The team at Uberflip demonstrates a lesson well worth learning in this piece: Not every infographic has to be six screens tall. They manage to pack a wealth of data into a fairly small space, distilling the message into something that gets the value across without spraining your scrolling finger. Find out what buyers want marketers to do, and not do, to create content that really resonates.

#9: The Importance of Visual Content

You don’t have to have a team of researchers and designers to create a solid infographic. This piece from kwikturn media is a good example of doing more with less. It’s essentially a stats blog post, compiled from sources around the internet. Add some thoughtful but simple clip art, a slate background, and it’s far more interesting than a text list would be.

#10: The Secret to Creating Scalable, Quality Content and Better CX

Static infographics have more visual interest than text does. But you can take it a step further with an animated, interactive infographic. Some people call these “gifographics.” Those people are wrong. But whatever you call them, they’re undeniably cool. We created this interactive piece on the Ceros platform.

Infographics are an indispensable part of a modern content marketing strategy. Use them to highlight data points from your gated content, replace a list-based blog post, or just to brighten up a how-to post. Just keep the design simple and clean, and the text informative and valuable.

Seen any cool infographics lately? Let me know in the comments.

And if you need help creating your own infographics, check out our content marketing services.

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The post 10 Infographics to Guide Your Content Marketing Strategy appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

It’s old news that influencer marketing can drive brand awareness and spike sales. But what makes this post stick out above any another marketing post about influencer marketing is that I’m about to dive in and explain how your brand can use influencer marketing tactics through the whole sales cycle and to improve customer experience. After all, when looking at a brand’s overall worth, both sales and customer experience (CX) are considered.

While many companies are throwing time, resources, and money at improving the buyer and consumer journey, your brand should consider inviting a different kind of guest: influencer marketing.

Review the Facts on Influencer Marketing

First off, check out this massively important study put out by Traackr and Top Rank Marketing, as there’s a ton of data and progressive ideas in there. The main idea is one we’ve talked about a lot: Marketing and CX are fluid and ongoing journeys, rather than finite and linear processes with a beginning and an end. One phase flows into the next, always with an eye on the past and the future of the cycle.

A campaign is never completely over, and the ways we measure CX and ROI need to incorporate more than revenue and clicks. Let’s work through the sales/CX cycle in both B2B and B2C situations, and see where and how influencers can connect with your customers.

Consumer Research Phase

This is the step where influencer marketing has proven to be very valuable, as it’s part of brand awareness. Businesses and customers are searching, researching, reading, and watching every video and blog and retail site review they can find. They might find their way to your website eventually, but first, consumers want trusted peers and experts to voice their opinions, concerns, and recommendations. Having your brand and products strategically in place with the help of influencer partners spreading word of mouth recommendations during this search/research phase is crucial.

Word of mouth recommendations from influencers during your consumer's research phase is crucial.
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Establishing Brand Credibility

By now, the customer has gotten curious enough to visit your site and social channels. Now that they’ve self-directed themselves to your channels, the potential consumer is far enough along in the journey that they actually want to hear from your brand now.

Still, a brand doesn’t need to be too boastful. While your site and social channels should be filled with your brand’s words, those words should be informational messaging about your product. On these channels, there should also be a second perspective woven throughout—the consumer and third party opinion. Influencer messaging is great content to weave into a brand’s owned channels.

Repurposing quotes, photos, post links, and more adds more depth and credibility to your brand’s channels while the voice of your brand explains sticks to the facts for interested potential consumers.

Purchase and Selection

Once a consumer looks at peer reviews, listens to what your brand has to say, and likes what they read and hear, it’s a logical next step that said consumer will be ready to buy.

What’s going through their head at this point? What do they need? Well, a little reassurance goes a long way. Employing influencers to relay their experiences at this stage can help the customer avoid that dreaded buyer’s remorse and gives your brand the chance to showcase a little social proof.

Once a consumer has purchased and their status is marked in the marketing automation platform of your choice, an onboarding process usually takes place. Whether it’s to train a consumer on a product, give them ideas of how to wear your brand’s new piece of fashion, or provide them with recipes that use their new cooking gadget, new consumers should be dripped and offered help and tips. Think of the popular unboxing videos or #lifehack posts where influencers share their direct experience with a given brand.

Partnering with influencers who will showcase your product and offer their own tips on how to interact with it, in conjunction with your brand’s words of advice, can reassure the buyer of their purchase and ensure they’re getting the most out of it, so that they, in turn, become influencers or advocates for your brand. See the snowball effect happening here?

Brand Immersion in CX

Keep in mind that while you are certainly trying to make the CX better from this phase forward, you are also trying to better understand how that experience feels—or, at least, should feel. Having a comprehensive knowledge of the new or repeat customer’s impression is extremely valuable and something many companies struggle to achieve.

Influencers with honest opinions can provide loads of pertinent data. They’ve already walked a day in the new customer’s shoes and can provide detailed and candid reports on how it felt. It’s their job to do so, as influencers are, by trade, excellent communicators and usually have the brand’s best interest at heart. All departments should pay close attention to this and constantly tweak and improve.

Usage and Maintenance

At this point, the customer is well into product usage. Every marker knows it is a lot cheaper to retain a customer than get a new one. This fact motivates strong customer service teams at plenty of companies, but many don’t use influencer power during this phase. Maybe they should.

An ongoing weekly video showing how much money your payroll software is saving, how effective your vacuum cleaner is after two months, or how many different meals you can create with your gluten-free pizza crust is authentic and evergreen content. Influencer-generated content can give customers new ideas about using your product, keep them engaged with your brand, and add a variety of resources for your customers.

Think of it like this: Influencers are building content for your brand that can potentially make your brand “sticky” to the consumer and will increase the chances of the consumer renewing a service, upgrading an item, or buying more of your brand’s products. Not only can influencer-generated content reassure the customer, but it can also reach backwards in the cycle to prospective buyers who might wonder how the product holds up over time. This builds and nurtures your relationship with both your influencers and consumers while increasing brand loyalty.

Looking to the Long Term

Keep your influencer relationships strong, and have them use your product for the long haul. Recommendations after a year of use have an authenticity and level of experience that is extremely valuable.

We’ve now come full circle into the first phase of sales and consumer journey with influencers along for the whole ride. Which areas of your brands customer journey can you strengthen with influencer partnerships?

Get a weekly dose of the trends and insights you need to keep you ON top, from the strategy team at Convince & Convert. Sign up for the Convince & Convert ON email newsletter.

There’s a round of discussions going on about Hunters and Farmers. Underlying these discussions are attitudes, “Real sales people eat fresh meat every day” (The hunter camp), “We need to develop our accounts to maximize LCV” (Farmers).

I even saw a post on, “Which is better, a farmer who generates $1M of incremental business, or a hunter who generates $1M of new business?” It’s as if $M from one is better than $1M from the other—they miss the point that each is developing $1M of incremental revenue!

That’s what sales people are supposed to do, they are supposed to develop incremental revenue!

Hunters do it in a territory, maximizing their share of territory. Farmers do it in a territory, maximizing their share of territory.

If you are reading carefully, you’ll recognize the hunters and farmers are doing the exact same thing. The are generating net new revenue from their territories. A hunter’s territory may be defined as a city, region, country, or industry. A farmers territory may be defined as a set of accounts.

Hunters may generate revenue from net new customers–organizations that we’ve never done business with or it’s been a number of years.

Farmers may generate revenue from customers who are doing business with us, but with whom we expect to get more business.

Is a dollar from one worth more than a dollar from another? If our goal is to grow revenue, we want to seize every dollar of spending that’s in our addressable market! This means finding new business–either from customers who are not currently doing business with us or from accounts that can be doing more business with us.

Whether we have a “new account territory,” or an “account based territory,” sales people are accountable:

1. They must have a mindset to pursue 100% share of territory and 100% share of account.
2. They must sell the entire product portfolio. We may start with one product line, but we expand within accounts and our territories by selling the entire produce line. Plus that’s our responsibility in executing our companies’ strategies.
3. They must find new customers–new enterprises, new divisions, business units, buyers within our current customers. There is a mistaken view that “farmers” don’t prospect. That’s plain wrong. If they don’t prospect, how do we get 100% share of account?
4. They must retain and grow the business. Let me be very clear about this. We have to keep the business we are getting–this is particularly relevant in subscription, recurring revenue models. But we have to grow the business–that is adding net incremental revenue to the base, always growing the base. It may be adding new subscriptions, it may be finding new opportunities in other parts of the business, it may be cross sell of other product/service lines. Some companies don’t make their hunters accountable for this, I think (with some caveats), this is a mistake.

Forget these ridiculous labels, forget the ego driven contests about who is a “real sales person.” Our jobs are to drive net incremental revenue in everything we do. Where ever that comes from is critical to our growth, share and success.

Hemlines rise and fall fast, but when it comes to the shelf life of a discounted $500 skirt, the number of days can drag on — to 106, to be precise.

That’s how long it can take an online luxury retailer to sell a piece of women’s wear, even when discounted, according to an analysis of discounts among 114 luxury, premium and mass-market apparel and accessory retailers. Furthermore, when luxury items were marked down at a higher percentage (40-50%) than they took 19 days longer to sell than if marked down 30-40%.

That translated to millions in lost revenue among select women’s luxury goods in 2016, according to the research by Edited, a retail analytics company with offices in New York, London and Melbourne.

Mass-merchandise items, meanwhile, sell faster at discount, especially when marked down by less. Women’s wear products sold 11 days faster when first discounted from 30-40%, rather than 40-50%. The difference cost retailers millions in needless reductions, according to the research.

The same unusual trends occur across retail, from luxury apparel to kids’ clothes, but why? And what does it mean? According to Katie Smith, senior retail analyst at Edited, merchants fail to factor in several basic but highly relevant factors. “The simplest missteps are obvious even when looking at the surface of retail’s discounting woes,” she said.

The same applies to cereal and eggs — issues from shopper behavior to competitive distractions can blur pricing strategies.

Let’s look at factors that should influence effective markdown strategies, and how grocery chains can apply the same.

Timing, Popularity And Other Factors

A key benefit for retailers is they have scads of data to analyze, Smith said. But that also requires that they understand what they have and how to use it. Retailers still miscalculate how much to discount because they fail to include pertinent factors in the formula. Specifically: timing, product type, category and popularity.

There may also be a psychological effect at play — ­the shopper may perceive a larger discount to mean the product is undesirable.

“As consumers increasingly purchase goods online and expect to only buy goods when they’re ‘on sale,’ retailers must invest in technologies that give them a holistic view of the market, consumer demand and assortments,” she said in an email. “Today, retailers can use analysis tools to understand a trend’s demand before they even put a style into production, which helps buyers know how many orders to place.”

Further, she said, real-time analysis of competitors and other market segments helps merchandisers track a trend’s performance, spot saturation and clear stock before a decline.

Retailers need to become more adept at considering how different factors may affect performance. Take color as an example. A specific item may perform better in one color versus another, and the result may be very different strategies to ensure the most value is captured from the line. Smith said there may even be strong regional variations that can be addressed by monitoring the data.

“Missing out on sale season by so much as a week could be critical for a retailer in a new market,” she said. “Only by having this comprehensive data at their fingertips to identify patterns and make insightful decisions will retailers have a greater chance of getting their discounting approach right.”

And, more importantly, they could put millions back on the table.

Learning From The Grocery Aisle

Similar factors, from customer spending habits to selecting which items to discount, cause supermarkets to make missteps when determining a pricing or discount strategy. First, let’s look at the shopper.

These elements should inform pricing and promotions and can result in a 1-3% increase in sales and profits above organic growth, according to Precima, a retail analytics firm.

But what tools put these elements into play? Among the most popular is the competitive price index. This is the practice of identifying a competitive price set among competitors and establishing a target price relative to that. Pricing within 5% of Kroger, for instance.

The challenge with using this strategy on its own is it treats all categories and items the same and does not factor in spending data. If the retailer folded in its insights on customer price sensitivity, along with competitive price information and price compliance, it could determine promotions based on a broader data-driven pricing strategy.

Lastly, there is the oversold power of the loss leader – discounts on price-sensitive items (like soft drinks or eggs) used to lure shoppers in with the expectation they will spend more elsewhere, offsetting the discount.

In truth, 25-50% of loss leaders don’t actually increase traffic or lead to ancillary purchases, Precima reports. Identifying those that do work requires an in-depth analysis and understanding of customer and basket data.

All this will make a significant difference, but only if the retailer also deals with pricing compliance across its stores. According to Precima research, 25% of supermarket prices are not aligned with the merchant’s own pricing policy, leading to inconsistencies, customer confusion and lost sales.

This article originally appeared in Forbes.

Instagram is growing and shows no sign of slowing down. There are currently over 700 million users, a user base more than double that of just two years ago. As an increasingly popular social medium, and one that yield engagement rates 60 times higher than Facebook and 120 times higher than Twitter, Instagram is attractive for all kinds of advertisers but using Instagram for B2B marketing can be tricky. If you’re a B2B brand, you might be wondering: could Instagram be your next big customer acquisition channel? Maybe, but only if you approach it in the right manner. Instead of jumping on the bandwagon, it makes more sense to take a strategic approach.

1. UNDERSTAND INSTAGRAM’S DEMOGRAPHICS

Irrespective of its staggering growth rate, Instagram is an effective social media platform only if its demographics match that of your customer. Instagram is extremely popular among 18 to 29-year-olds, with 59% using the platform according to Pew Research Center. Instagram reveals that 80% of its user base exists outside the U.S, with half of the last 100 million users coming from Europe and Asia. If this group makes up a small percentage of your total customers, there is still a silver lining. Your audience may be small, but it will be highly engaged. Trackmaven found that Instagram provides 20 times more engagement than LinkedIn, the standard B2B social media platform.

2. DETERMINE YOUR B2B BRAND KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

Establishing a key performance indicator (KPI) verifies your level of success when using Instagram for B2B marketing. A KPI brings objectivity to your efforts and helps ascertain the effectiveness of your endeavours. Examples of KPIs include number of followers, engagement rate, and traffic to your website. Which KPIs you choose will be a function of your marketing objective. B2B marketing efforts are typically focused on generating quality leads and getting sales. It is imperative that your Instagram audience finds their way to your website landing page, since sales within the app are only possible through paid advertising. If this is the goal, there are some characteristics of Instagram of which you should be aware.

3. WORK WITHIN THE LIMITATIONS OF INSTAGRAM

Instagram is a platform made for socializing through the sharing of pictures. It wasn’t made specifically for B2B brand marketers. Except for paid advertising, images that are shared don’t contain links. The only way for an Instagram user to get to your site is via a link in your bio. Consequently, your profile should be treated as more of a mini landing page, with a strong call-to-action. Some posts should encourage your audience to click on that link in your profile, to help drive traffic back to your site. Paid advertising is another option worth considering, as a call-to-action is allowed within the ad.

4. EXTEND YOUR CONTENT MARKETING EFFORTS

Instagram is a unique social media channel with its own customs and conventions. As such, your content marketing efforts must extend to incorporate the individuality of this platform. Images rule when it comes to Instagram, and this can pose a challenge for many B2B marketers. Here are a few ideas to help keep your stream interesting:

• Use video. If a picture is worth a thousand words, how much is a video worth? Instagram allows videos up to 1 minute in length to be posted to your profile, so you can even demo your product or service. Additionally, like Facebook, Instagram offers live video capabilities. Unlike Facebook, however, there is no way to access a live video that has already stopped streaming. To make effective use of a live video, you have to capture your audience quickly, and hope that your followers are responsive to the notification they receive when you go live. Alternatively, you can repurpose your YouTube channel content by providing small snippets on Instagram.
• Provide a behind-the-scenes view. Instagram stories are a great way to reward your followers with extra content highlighted at the top of their feeds. Stories can be viewed an unlimited number of times within their 24-hour life, and can consist of pictures, videos, and boomerangs. If you do not want to permanently clutter your profile with the less glamorous side of your company, stories are a great way to showcase that side in a controlled manner.
• Highlight company culture. Some B2B brand marketers just post images of their employee’s activities. It’s a great way to boost engagement and provide a personal touch. Instagram’s new gallery feature makes it possible to share up to 10 pictures or videos in the same post. The gallery provides an excellent opportunity to feature something you wouldn’t normally post while still being able to fully represent the message you want to promote.
• Think outside the box. Don’t just talk about your company. Instead, relate your business’s activities to the world as a whole or other interests you think your audience may possess. Use relevant hashtags and see if you can get involved in the conversation. It’s a great way to get discovered by people that weren’t looking for your company in the first place.

5. ALWAYS BE TESTING

Eventually, all good thing comes to an end. Uber’s Andrew Chen call this the “law of shitty clickthroughs.” So continually test and refine your marketing approach. Follow other Instagram accounts in your field to keep an eye on the competition, but don’t rely solely on their actions. Instagram has plans to add more data analytics to their advertising platform. Use this data to supplement your own findings to guide your decisions in determining what works best for your situation.

Depending on your market, Instagram can be an effective customer acquisition channel for a B2B brand when approached in the right manner. Start small, track your efforts, analyze your data and refine as you go.

Are you just beginning to build your own blog? Or one for your employer? It can be tricky business, starting a blog, especially when you aren’t fully aware of best practices. Mistakes can happen, but you’ll have better luck avoiding them by reading and applying the lessons in this article.

Many bloggers want to get their website at the top of search results right away. Some may want to build their subscriber list as fast as possible. Others may not know why or how to organize and measure their efforts. These are just a few of the common issues bloggers can have when they’re just starting out. It’s how mistakes can happen.

Let’s get going so that you can discover how exactly to avoid or fix these common mistakes…

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1) Wrong Priorities

Business bloggers are often guilty of choosing the wrong goals and techniques when creating content. These are two of the most problematic priority mistakes I see…

Mistake One: Prioritizing the Sale

A business thrives off of sales, so you may think your blog needs to push for that. Bloggers with the wrong priorities may create content that’s pushing self-promotion with the single goal of making an immediate sale.

That’s not how blogs are meant to be used, and it’s not how you’ll bring in business.

Writing blog articles that are sales-y and overly self-promotional will be a waste of your time and effort. Instead, take advantage of this better way to get sales from your blog…

Solution: Build Thought Leadership to Convert Qualified Leads

With this approach, you’re creating content that attracts readers because it’s informative and helpful.

Thought leadership pieces won’t bring an immediate sale, but you can optimize your blog content to attract the right audience and give them a reason to convert into leads.

These are some of the best ways of using your blog for lead generation:

• Tailor your content to your target audience by creating and following set reader personas.
• Be strategic with what call-to-action you use and its design and placement.
• Create a formal strategy that is designed around one goal: gaining qualified leads.

Mistake Two: Prioritizing Quantity Over Quality

You have a new blog, so you’d think you need to build it as fast as possible. This way of thinking is flawed, in a way. Yes, you want to publish content regularly and as often as possible, but the priority shouldn’t be on how many posts you can produce. You don’t want to publish a bunch of subpar posts for the sake of quantity because it’ll only hurt your efforts (and your reputation).

Solution: Publish Articles Only When They’re of the Highest Quality

Instead of prioritizing quantity, put more emphasis on quality. You’ll end up with a lower bounce rate, more social shares, and higher authority in your subject matter. The priority should be on publishing consistently, following a set schedule, not on publishing low-quality content for the sake of building your blog presence. Even if it means you only get one article out a week, that’s okay as long as the content is high-quality and valuable.

2) Forcing SEO

The word “forcing” above should be enough of an indicator that there’s a certain way to do SEO, and it’s not by trying to trick search engines. There are many mistakes you can make when trying to rank in search results, but let’s go over one of the most damaging ones…

Mistake One: Forcing SEO via Keyword Stuffing

Search engines are smarter than you think, but you still find blogs that try to trick them. Keyword stuffing is the bad practice of finding your target word(s) you want to rank for and adding them all over your article in ways that aren’t natural. It makes reading your article harder for your human audience, and Google will notice and penalize you for it.

Unfortunately, there are many bloggers out there who think they should focus first on writing for search engines before their audience. This is the wrong approach – in fact, it’s backwards.

Solution: Offer Content of Value for Humans First

If you truly want to see your content rank higher in search results, don’t focus entirely on SEO. Focus on readability first. The Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress offers a clear indicator of your article’s readability, including many evaluation factors, and it’s a tool I highly recommend for both that and SEO.

When you’re creating content for your blog, consider offering longform posts. These in-depth articles are often the highest to rank because they give readers a thorough understanding of the subject matter. Just make sure you’re creating worthwhile content instead of just adding a bunch of fluff to make your article longer.

When your content is of high value and quality, it’ll rank a lot better than if it’s riddled with keywords and robotic language.

3) Buying or Manually Adding Subscribers

You’ve probably been the victim of this at one point or another – people adding you to an email list without your permission. It’s equivalent to spam, and it’s even illegal in the USA. Let’s think about this mistake a bit…

Mistake: Neglecting to Get Permission to Email a Recipient

Buying lists for your email campaigns won’t help you. The majority, if not all, of the email addresses will be fake or unresponsive. Adding people manually will just increase spam reports because those people did not authorize contact from you.

When you use a tool or simply Google target contacts’ email addresses, you don’t want to simply add them to your email campaigns. Your email marketing isn’t the same as your sales outreach, so be careful.

Solution: Get Clear Permission via a Signup Form

For the sake of your email deliverability and to keep your negative responses low, give people a way to opt-in willingly. Add signup forms throughout your blog content and website. Use tools, such as Sumo, to add optimized popups to your blog. Look for a tool that gives you lots of options for where and when these popups appear, and it should easily sync with your email marketing provider.

Some great tips for making sure your email marketing campaigns get sent to willing recipients are:

• Use clear wording in your calls-to-action and forms
• Include a link to your website privacy policy, which should clearly tell people what to expect.
• Offer something extra, such as content upgrades, with your blog articles to increase the likelihood of organic form submissions.

Organic email list growth is the only way to see positive engagement and follow-through from recipients. It’s how you’ll get the results from email marketing that you seek, and it’ll prevent the negative consequences of adding contacts without permission.

If you want to see a high unsubscribe rate or be marked as spam and reported, you’ll get that by buying or manually adding email addresses. If you want to see recipients engage and enjoy your emails, get their permission and be clear with them what to expect.

Say you want to still increase your list of subscribers as fast as possible, but you don’t want to cheat or break the law. How can you build your list quickly? These are some great techniques you can try:

• Guest blog on top-notch sites, and include a link to your subscribe page in your bio. If your blog focus is about marketing or relevant topics, this guest site list could help.
• Create eBooks, white papers, checklists, or other offerings and secure them behind a landing page form. That way, people have to provide their email address (and maybe other contact information) to acquire the file.
• Add testimonials to your calls-to-action and landing pages to further convince people that what you have to offer is worthwhile and trustworthy.

4) Not Researching Your Audience

Has anyone ever told you about the importance of buyer personas? They are fictional representations of those people who would likely buy from you. Reader personas are the equivalent, but instead of buying from you, they’re likely to read your content and even subscribe.

Many bloggers make a mistake with this when they start their blog, and it’s important we consider it here…

Mistake: Rushing Into Writing Without a Clear Understanding of One’s Audience

You have an empty or barely-started blog, and you want to fill it out as quickly as possible. Similar to earlier when I talked about quantity versus quality, you don’t want to rush into things. In this case, you don’t want to start writing when you don’t know who you’re writing for. Your content will either be ignored or reach the wrong people, so you want to ensure the right people find and appreciate what you have to offer.

Solution: Create Personas For the Target Audience You Want to Attract

When you think you’re ready to start writing articles, step away from your blog site or document. You have another crucial step to take first, and that is to create personas of the target audience you want to see visit and convert on your site.

You know you also need to find your target audience, but how do you actually do that? These tips are a great starting point:

• Ask yourself: what problems will my content help solve? If you have an existing audience, such as customers, who are they and what are their interests? What is my competition doing with their blog?
• Gather data about who you want to attract to your blog, using real data when possible and hypothetical data as well.
• Ask your social media audience for their input, such as using Twitter polls or linking to a Google Forms survey.
• Use social media analytics to see who is already interested in your business / brand.

Personas are never static, and so they will change over time. Make sure you’re regularly monitoring your blog content using Google Analytics to see what’s working and for whom.

5) Insufficient or No Strategy

A blog strategy isn’t optional. It’s essential for staying focused and organized. Without one, you’re taking risks you don’t want to take, such as losing track of your blog content schedule or not understanding the goal you have for your blog.

There are two types of mistakes you can make with your blog strategy, so let’s go into each one here…

Mistake One: Not Having a Strategy At All

It’s absolutely essential that you have a blog strategy before you start writing. Without a strategy, you will be similar to a traveler roaming the land without a map or destination. Your efforts would be lost in the sea of content, and they will not be organized or effective. You won’t have a calendar to guide you, or you won’t know how you’ll determine your content’s effectiveness. You basically won’t know what you’re doing and why.

Solution: Take the Time Before You Blog to Create a Strategy

When you take the time to create a strategy, you boost content performance because that guide will optimize your blogging efforts based on your overall goal.

So, what should be in your strategy? Let’s go into a few blog strategy components:

• Include a short, 1-2 sentence mission statement, which states who your audience is, what content types you’re offering, and what benefits your content offers.
• Have one overall SMART goal for your blog, which should be Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time bound.
• Do thorough research on competitor blogs to see what they’re doing and how it’s performing.
• Develop a content calendar, which will allow you to organize your ideas and schedule.
• Know the exact topics you’ll cover, including the overall theme of your blog and each of its categories and tags.

Your blog needs a strategy. There are no exceptions. Every blogger needs an official document that they follow and maintain every time they write content.

You can create a document in Word or Google Docs for most of it, but I recommend using Excel or Google Sheets for your calendar. You can create a DIY content calendar or pay for a service, such as CoSchedule. The manual content calendar is helpful if you have a tight budget, but CoSchedule is a must-use service if you want to stay organized and make the entire blog process easier for you.

Mistake Two: Creating an Insufficient or Incomplete Blog Strategy

If you’ve already put some effort into creating your blog strategy, that’s great! However, if it’s not thorough and completed, it won’t be as effective when you start to blog. When your strategy isn’t filled out enough, it will be hard for you to follow and use it when you’re writing content. A strategy is meant to guide your efforts, but if it’s neglected, it won’t help you as much as it potentially could.

Solution: Finish Your Blog Strategy

Each part of your content strategy needs to be detailed enough that you can follow it effectively. It’s important that you take time before creating any content to refer to a completed strategy. That document should have everything needed for you to create the right content.

6) Not Measuring Content Outcomes

Performance measurement is critical for blog growth and success. If you simply publish content without any plans for measuring its performance, you won’t have the information you need to improve.

Mistake: Publishing Content Without a Plan for Measurement

Bloggers might think that the most important parts of content creation are writing and promoting it. Yes, those are two blogging essentials, but there’s another necessary step you can’t ignore: measurement.

Say you just published a content piece. If you’re not measuring its performance, you won’t know whether it was a success or flop. You won’t know why it did well or why it failed either. This is why measurement is so important.

Solution: Know the Metrics You Need to Measure Every Time You Publish Content

When you’re planning to measure content performance, you need to know the specific metrics to track as well as how you’ll track them. For example…

1)Your content goal is related to lead generation. This will require visitors to fill out a form that you’ve strategically included either on the content’s page itself or via a call-to-action that leads to a landing page. You want to track these metrics if you’re looking for whether your content is bringing in leads:

• The number of conversions vs the total number of page visitors / visits
• Referrer
• Time on page
• New vs returning visitors
• And more, depending on your content type

2)Your content goal is related to thought leadership. This is harder to track, but there are ways. This goal means you want your blog to have increased influence, so these are a few of the best metrics to measure:

• Social shares
• Article comments
• Domain authority
• Search engine ranking
• And more…

Measure your content’s performance every time you publish, even on a daily basis. It’s not just new content you should measure either. Evergreen content needs regular attention to remain of value. Sometimes your most popular content could be older, so don’t focus all your measuring on new pieces.

7) Expecting Immediate Results

When you decided to start a blog, were you expecting it to be an instant success? Business blogging is part of marketing, and it’s not a sales tactic. Yet, you’ll still see so many businesses shut down or misuse their blog because they’re not seeing the instant results they expect.

Mistake: Thinking Your Blog Can Bring In Immediate Sales

If you’re the marketer in charge of a business blog, you probably have leadership looking to you for proof that your efforts are worth their investment. They may ask you questions like:

“How long will it take to generate leads?”

Or worse…

“Why are we not getting hundreds of sales leads by now?”

These executives don’t have a clear understanding of how blogging works, so it’s important you prepare the best ways to explain its value to them.

If you’re an independent blogger, you may want to go viral or earn hundreds of subscribers after only a few articles or months. You aren’t keeping in mind the hard truth…

Bloggers rarely, if ever, achieve their goals instantly.

What can you do to convince your leadership and yourself that blogging is worth the investment? You have options, but these two solutions might be most helpful…

Solution One: Put Together Real-Life Blog Success Stories

Do a thorough search of blogs in your niche or industry. Using Buzzsumo can help you see which of these blogs is getting the best social attention. Don’t hesitate to include competitor blogs. In fact, you should examine those because you want to learn how to be better at blogging than them.

Some data you need to include in these real-life stories include:

• Their domain authority
• How their best content does on social media
• What topics receive the most social shares
• What topics rank the highest
• How long they’ve been blogging
• Any other data that describes the blog’s results and timeline

Did you notice the bold bullet item? If you’re getting questions on a regular basis about blogging deadlines, you want to make sure your stories talk about those blogs’ timelines. When did that blog reach 100,000 social shares for the first time from when they started? What topic was the first to rank on the first page of Google search results, and when was it published?

With enough data about why these blogs are successful, you can create your own “success stories” or even a comparison chart with your own blog. This can help you when you face your own doubts or those of your company’s leadership.

Solution Two: Create Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and Yearly Reports

Blogging can take 90 days to over a year to really gain momentum, so it’s important you create reports every step of the way that clearly show its progress, even if it’s just a little at a time.

Tell executives what they can expect from the blog over time. Explain how you’ll calculate its return on investment. What is working compared to previous reports, and what is needed to bring better results in the future? These are all things to include in each report, and they’ll help you demonstrate that blogging is, in fact, worthwhile.

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Don’t build your blog the wrong ways. It’ll hurt your results and make it seem like blogging is not worth it. These are just seven of the mistakes I’ve seen or done firsthand and learned from. That’s right. I’ve made some of these mistakes with my own blog, and trust me… They didn’t help.

If you’re building a blog for an employer, perhaps it would help to share this article with them to help them understand better. On the other hand, if you’re blogging for yourself, did this article help you be better prepared for success? Avoiding these mistakes will help you prevent failure, so keep them in mind with every step you take – every action you make.

Did you like what you read here? Please share it with your friends and colleagues!

Would you add anything to this list? Leave a comment with your input!

Sales Reps: how many times must we learn the same cautionary lesson with generic templated emails? One more touch, it seems.

Last weekend, I went out for drinks with some friends in the Mission District in San Francisco. We’re all recent college grads, so we keep our working triumphs, woes, and learning experiences in conversational rotation — no matter how similar our stories are to each other. This time, however, one exchange I had with another SDR stuck with me.

Sales Representatives spend the majority of their days writing emails and leaving messages in the hopes of getting a reply from management at a promising account. We feel elated when it goes well, and dejected when we end up with an empty inbox by day’s end.

However, as I spoke to my friend (let’s call him Nate) about how his week went, I realized that I was (thankfully) missing out on a key component of the typical SDRs workday — receiving hate mail.

As he downed his beer, Nate told me about the daily mess of colorful responses he received from prospects that either weren’t the right fit, had received dozens of emails previously, or took issue with the automated email clogging their inbox. Nate told me he kept the most creative replies in a separate folder for when he needed a laugh at work.

Good humor aside, Nate’s story made me stop and think. Why was Nate of all people sending these robotic canned emails? Nate had already gotten Master’s degree and CPA by the time I finished my tenure at Northwestern — he’s clearly not slow on the uptake.

Missed Opportunities and Potential

Nate’s story encapsulates a problematic trend within Sales Development in the SaaS space. Loads of bright young people enter the Sales force in tech every year, only to be underutilized as a result of outdated business habits that enjoyed success back in the early days of marketing automation.

Young people value multi-channel communication and leverage it constantly outside of work (thank you, Social Media), yet still send uninspired outreach cadences whilst in their office chairs. B2B companies strive to hire capable and hungry young salespeople, but undermine their human capital by focusing on volume whilst prospecting.

Nate’s folder full of hate mail clearly highlights another issue with this mass-produced approach: the more leads you spam, the more opportunities you burn! I’ve seen Account Executives smooth over a mispronounced name on a phone call, but I’ve yet to hear of any SDR winning back an account after emailing a contact the same message three times in two days. Mass emailing leaves money on the table for salespeople and business alike, plain and simple.

If you can’t win business, you need to cut costs and focus on your ROI.

Mass emailing is inefficient with your leads/accounts because of the burn rate — on the surface, it seems like mass email batches are more effective than slower account based practices, but it’s not sustainable. If you’re a boot-strapped startup, slash and burn tactics will come back to haunt you as you move up-market.

Moving Forward with Account Based Engagement

B2B companies must move forward by moving away from bad sales and marketing habits — marketing orchestration is now the name of the game. Set a clear marketing vision by targeting the accounts and buyer personas that move the needle for your business. Act on it by trusting your sales team to craft the right message at the right time for their particular accounts. Sales outreach supported by account based engagement nets more business, causes less burn, and better leverages the true potential of your SDRs. As more businesses adopt an Account Based Everything approach, SDRs may get a break in their inboxes.

There are billions of internet users all over the world. As of 2014, the Internet Live Stats reported that the internet population reached its 3 billion mark. But though there are billions of users all over the world, it does not give you an assurance of selling products and services effectively. If you have a marketing campaign that works very well in your main branch, there is no assurance that you can still market using the same campaign on a different location.

Culture, sentiments and needs play an important role in business and marketing. You are maybe a click away but if you don’t provide for their needs and preferences of your local market, you can only do so much.

To Go Globally, Start Localization

Localization is a marketing strategy that is tailored specifically to the preference of consumers in different business locations. In today’s online industry, one of the best ways for localization strategy and go global is to digitally transform your business.

The digital world is very diverse. In this vast global marketplace, you need an effective campaign to deliver your message across. This is an important element of online marketing that most marketers often overlooked. If you continue to stick to the global marketing approach you may miss out the opportunities of successfully connecting to different kinds of audience from various parts of the globe.

A survey in 2016 revealed that advanced personalization and user-centric approach in business are becoming a competitive advantage. It is expected that in 2019 location-targeted mobile ad revenues will grow up to $18 billion. With this opportunities to come, it is about time for businesses to start their digital localization. Though nothing is certain, there is a clear path for digital localization to effectively drive growth and optimize sales funnel of businesses.

Here are some tips to start your digital localization strategies.

Localize Content Without Compromising Context

Different people have different needs and every country has their own culture. You can’t just copy and paste your online marketing campaign from one location to another. You should provide diversity so can address their needs and respond to their culture accordingly.

Translating the English language into different variations is the basic digital localization approach you need to consider but it isn’t enough. Your overall content matters. Take for example, Forever 21, which is doing a great job in providing a seamless way to switch language and also currency depending on the location.

Localization By Transcreation

Transcreation is also one of the fundamental elements of localization which you need to include in your business. It is the adaptation of the original message of the campaign and translating it into different languages without compromising the style, context and the emotional encouragement it provides.

Mobile app localization uses transcreation so apps can be found by global users. Because of the limits in UI and low content volume, translation of language is not applicable for mobile app localization. So transcreation is used to change context without altering the message of the campaign.

Humanize Your Brand

You are dealing with people and people needs businesses that can provide them with genuine and humanize interactions.

Localization can help you cross cultural boundaries. It allows you to solve the needs of consumers from different cultures. Try to talk to your web development team on how you can tap into people’s emotions through your website.

Mapping out your target market based on their needs locally will help you understand their emotions and effectively structure a digital campaign which targets local sensitivity. But, without going overboard.

Before you run your ads in certain locations, try to ask the following questions.

• What are the important human needs of my target local audience?
• How can provide for their needs through my campaign?
• Will my approach bridge cultural differences?
• Am I being one of them through this approach or will this show disrespect to their sensitivity?
• Am I really providing regional relevance or am I taking advantage?

It is crucial for any campaign, digital or traditional, to know when, how and up to what point they have to traverse local and cultural boundaries. Visuals or imagery is a great way you to relate your product to culture. But you have to be very careful. You don’t want to end up like the recent Pepsi commercial where their cultural concept received a public backlash.

Always remember that culture is a sensitive matter. If you want to cross-cultural difference and increase sales from different regions, you have to be aware of sensitive topics which each region is very concerned about.

Trust Drives Localized Conversion

According to Global Website Assessment Index 2016 research, the languages used in a website correlate to the financial success of a business. This is an indication that consumers would rather buy or avail the services of a business which is localized. Why? Because it is easier to trust a business in a native language.

But as mentioned above, localization is not just about the language. It is also about the localized message and the whole concept of your localized campaign. Before consumers can really trust your business, you need to understand first what they are up for. Determine the different interest of your target markets.

From these, you can create variations in your marketing which will help you connect with your consumers.

A little tweak in your marketing can bring out a huge appeal for your local audience. The data you gathered from your website or social media channels could give you an idea what to localize in your campaign. Analyze engagement, traffics, interactions and consumers purchasing habits in every region. This may be able to provide localized variations of your strategies.

To successfully localize to convert, you should see experiences in different angles. Not everyone sees the same scenario as you do. Trust is gained only when you see the same picture as they see. So try to navigate your brand marketing campaign to different audiences to create a localized campaign.

Conclusion

Localization is not simple, but it is neither as complicated as you think it is. You can come up with an effective strategy to help your business grow by using the right data to analyze of your target location and market.

Localization is about connecting to people through their culture and needs. And there is no faster way to connect to people from diverse communities than by digitally incorporating localization technique in your business. With the right mix of these important factors, you can enhance the consumer’s experience, build a positive brand identity, drive leads and increase lead conversion.