Rnordman

Influencer marketing involves marketing products and services through those who have an effect over the things other people buy. This market influence generally stems from an individual’s expertise, popularity, or reputation. Influence can come from a broad range of places, such as a person, group, celebrity, brand, or place.

Existing trends in influencer marketing are constantly evolving, and new trends are appearing every day. Research shows that influencer marketing is on the rise, and is the best thing in marketing since, sorry for the cliché, sliced bread.

The following are five current growing trends in influencer marketing.

Trend #1: The growth of influencer marketing over traditional marketing strategies

The first trend comes from the Google Trends graph below. It compares the shift in interest from ‘content marketing’ to ‘influencer marketing’ over the last three years. In a recent study conducted by the Google Trends team, they found that print advertising continues to steadily drop, while influencer marketing is only beginning to gain momentum along with online video advertising. In fact influencer marketing has been steadily growing in popularity and is closing the gap with video advertising.

Trend #2: YouTube Stars Influence

In another study conducted by Google, they found that YouTube creators are some of the most effective influencers towards the teenage and millennial demographics. YouTube creators listen to and interact with their fans, resulting in communities that look more like friendships than “fanships”. This creates more honest and meaningful connections between the influencers and their audiences. Millennials think YouTube stars are the trendsetters of today, even more so than main stream celebrities.

“70% of teenage YouTube subscribers say they relate to YouTube creators more than traditional celebrities.” ~ Google“4 in 10 millennial subscribers say their favorite creator understands them better than their friends” ~ Google

Trend #3: High percentage of online consumers using ad blockers

According to a study done by the University of Oxford, they found that 47% of online consumers use ad blockers. Users are tired of being bombarded with ads while browsing the Internet. Due to people using ad blockers, marketers are instead turning to influencers to generate authentic sponsored content that actually reaches and impacts their target audience.

Trend #4: Invest in live video

Live video is still a new concept in influencer marketing, but it’s getting more productive and important every day. Investing in good equipment to make the production level better will result in rewards for a brand and influencer. Facebook is leading the way in this format and they are currently looking at the ability for brands to run 15-second ads in the middle of their live broadcasts.

Trend #5: Value of influencers on Twitter

In a study conducted by Twitter, they found that nearly 40% of their users say they’ve made a purchase as a direct result of a Tweet from an influencer.

From these five trends, it’s apparent that influencer marketing is on the rise, and is one of the top choices for marketers today to effectively increase brand awareness by enabling companies to reach a larger portion of their target audience than ever before. And since most consumers are on social media these days, I expect to continue seeing the importance of influencer marketing grow and new trends to develop for years to come.

Influencer marketing is not only the marketing of the future, but it is the marketing of today. If a company is not embracing the power of influencer marketing, then it is falling behind in their marketing efforts.

Hire the wrong social media manager, and your business might be in trouble. Learn the most important traits and skills to look for when hiring a social media manager.

Takeaways

• The importance of a top-notch social media manager is growing as social’s role in marketing continues to expand.
• A great social media manager is naturally curious, adaptable, and teachable.
• Great social media managers should also have experience with customer service, multimedia production, and analytics.

Christin: Get this hire wrong, and your business might be in trouble. Hi, I’m Christin Kardos, and I’m the Community Manager at Convince & Convert, and today I wanted to talk about some of the really important traits and skills for a good social media manager.

Recently, Jay Baer wrote a blog post that talked about how he thinks that agencies are about to experience a big boom due to the sheer number and variety of skills that a good social media manager might have today. The digital landscape is changing, along with customers’ consumption preferences. To be successful, businesses and their social media reps will have to stay in lockstep with these changes and continue to bring value to their customers and their leads. The days where lobbing out tweets and posts of your own content, magically resulting in sales, those are over. You also have to know what to do in the event something goes wrong. And you can’t do any of this if you don’t have the right philosophy and the right social media professional, or professionals, representing you.

If you’re a business owner or a decision maker, and you’re staffing for social media management, you’re going to need to carefully recruit and vet candidates for certain traits and skills that will help your business. Buffer has a recent post outlining what some of these are, and I want to talk through them just a little bit today.

Number one, you preferably want to hire someone who’s naturally curious. He or she needs to be willing to ask, “Why?” or, “What now?” or, “How can we help?” when dealing with customers or looking for ways to build your brand. Second, teachability and adaptability are also very key. The pace of content and the rate at which new platforms and technologies are emerging has been never been faster. So ultimately, it doesn’t even matter how much you know today or how great you are on a social platform. It’s far more important to be able to learn, to successfully navigate new platforms, new tools, as they become relevant to your customer.

So obviously, curiosity and teachability and adaptability are important, but those are more inherent traits. They’re not really skills. So the third thing that I would say is really important is to look to hire someone who has some skill with multimedia. Now we’re getting into skills that are actually learned and honed over time, but this one is important. Your social media manager is really going to have to know how to work with images, graphics, multimedia, to actually convey your message in different ways on different platforms. He or she might need to be able to make a video like this one. There are a lot of tools and resources out there that make this much easier for us today than it would have been in the past, but there’s still an amount of skill required, involved just to use those tools.

The fourth thing I would look for is skill and experience in customer service because that is utterly important to your social media efforts. Social media is much more for advocacy and awareness than it is for sales. So you need someone who really knows how to take care of your customer, someone who knows how to not only answer questions, but to ask questions and to read into and dig into things that are not said.

And finally, my number five top skill for a good social media manager today is analytics. A social media manager really needs to know far beyond just how to measure likes and clicks and that sort of thing, but to really get into the data and to understand what things mean and how to make recommendations based off of what they’re seeing in those numbers.

If you’re a business owner or a decision maker, you really should try to recruit and vet your candidates for social media management using these traits and these skills. They’ll be really important for your business. And if you’re a social media manager, or you’re aspiring to be one, then you might want to lean in to your existing curiosity and adaptability sides, and then also look at ways to strengthen your muscles with things like graphics and video. Also look for opportunities to go above and beyond with your current customers and think about your own experience as a customer, and keep those ideas and what was great and what was terrible really close for future reference. And if you’re not quite qualified to be hired for these things yet, don’t be afraid to volunteer. That’s actually how I got started.

So with that, let me ask a question: If you could only ask a candidate for a social media manager position one question, what would that be? Or if you are the candidate, what would be the one question you would ask a potential employer? Let me know your questions in the comments, and we will see you next week.

Getting fellow leaders around the company to buy in to switching to new software can be difficult, even when it’s in the company’s best interest. The conversations take time and the situation can can be more complicated than you realized. People grow attache to software they’ve used for years and don’t want to have to get used to something new. Oddly enough, it can feel like a breakup, so you might hear phrases like “but we’ve been with them forever” or “let’s try to work things out.”

Switching to a new customer support software solution requires involvement from various teams within your organization, even the ones who won’t use it everyday. But if you take the time to make your case and work with your organization, you can illustrate the benefits and get new software approved.

Here are some tips to help make it happen:

1. Identify and document current challenges
You might know that your current solution is getting the job done, but that doesn’t mean anyone else does. Provide specific examples of current business challenges, which link back to business ROI metrics, and how how a new solution can directly solve these issues.

For example: Our current solution doesn’t offer. This means our average response time is high, which can lead to customer churn. By switching to a vendor with action-based triggers and time-based automations, we could see a dramatic improvement in resolution time for our customers.

2. Ensure nobody is left out
Make a list of all the apps and integrations within your organization In initial conversations with a new vendor make sure the new support tool will integrate with core systems and other business applications that your organization uses.

For example: Pre-built integrations with your existing CRM and other tools like Dropbox, Jira, and Slack help with a faster implementation time and improved agent productivity.

3. Start with a free trial
Before you commit to a switch, start with a free trial. You can treat this as a pilot program to demonstrate the real-world value of the new solution. If you’re new to Zendesk, we’ll help you get everything set-up and provide best practices to help you get the most out of your trial.

4. Make sure the solution is user-friendly
Even if a new solution appears to have all the functionality you could ever hope for, switching will be a huge mistake if nobody wants to use it. Ask relevant stakeholders for what they want in a solution, and collect feedback from them while you trail it to ensure it will be adopted and well-received.

5. Create a sense of urgency
If your current solution is affecting your day to day performance, it’s important to stress urgency. Do you have an upcoming event or do you anticipate an increase volume coming soon? Make sure you have the right support solution in place before it affects a major business event.

We know choosing a support software vendor can be hard, so we’ve put together a helpful list of questions to ask when evaluating vendors.

Check out our support software evaluation cheat sheet.

Earlier, we talked about how Alexa is useful for finding potential influencers and super-affiliates. Part 3 in our Alexa series is going to show you exactly how.

It’s pretty easy to check engagement numbers to determine the social power of potential influencers. Site traffic is important in the assessment of both influencers and super-affiliates.

Suppose you have an online business based on mathematics.

And let’s say that you have identified math-only-math.com (an actual SBI! business) as a candidate for a potential joint venture to sell your math courses.

Note that despite having an older design that hasn’t been updated over the years, and other imperfections, this site demonstrates that great content can attract impressive levels of search traffic to power real revenue options. You’ll see why in a moment.

Start at Alexa, where you find a traffic ranking of 33,000. That’s Outstanding (the highest of our 7 ballparks). Few solopreneurs reach that level. You can be confident that it’s a high-traffic site.

Sidebar: “Scatter” is small when the Alexa rank is < 100,000. In our experience, less than 500,000 is reliable. As you reach 1,000,000, “scatter” is increasing — the “real” number might be 800,000, or 1,200,000. Either way, the ballpark is solid — still attractive. For higher scores, see this article from our blog.

However, you’ll be investing some time to develop a relationship. Cold-emailing is low-yield and may even anger your target. The subject of how to develop relationships is beyond the scope of this article — suffice it to say that it takes time, energy and social media.

So you want to be sure of your numbers. The following two extra measurements will nail down a good estimate of site traffic:

1) SEMrush.com: This free tool reveals both paid and organic (free search) traffic.

For example, SEMrush reveals the traffic of this SBI! business (math-only-math.com) at 113,000, huge for a solopreneur. It’s high for a mid-sized company!

A high organic count corroborates the Alexa finding — it was not a fluke. If you had found a high Alexa count but a low SEMrush outcome, you should definitely proceed to the final test…

2) SimilarWeb.com: SW confirms Alexa’s high traffic estimate (ranking of 53,000, with 1M visitors per month). We don’t really care if it’s 33K or 53K — both are outstanding (well within 100,000).

Note and Caveat: SW adds a traffic estimate of over 30,000 visitors per day (1M per month). However, the absolute traffic numbers can be quite inaccurate. When Alexa delivered traffic numbers, the same problem arose. Their methodologies are more useful for relative traffic ranking than absolute traffic numbers. Still, an extra data point is better than nothing!

Checking social media? Even though the Facebook presence is weak (@mathonlymath) and Twitter is private (@ghosh0), this is a solopreneur you would want on your side.

From here, you’d investigate the business, understand the monetization models, and plan how you can fit together.

For example, that right-column Google ad re-targets to whatever the visitor was searching for recently, in my case, “Learn Spanish.” Ugh, re-targeting.

So, if you have a terrific math product that does not compete with this SBIer, there’s a WIN-WIN in the air! Contact the site owner with a great deal — s/he may be delighted to dump bad Google ads and replace with your “site sponsorship.”

Conclusion? Yes, you want to develop an alliance with this powerful solopreneur business. It will be worth the time and energy. Luckily, the poor Facebook page will let you stand out if you engage there. Grow your relationship from that of “liker” to “noticed liker” to “sharing” until you get a personal reaction and ultimately, some conversation.

SW confirms that 92% of the traffic is from search. With 6% of the traffic being direct, very little comes from social media.

Hypothetical: If both Alexa and SW had been high, but SEMrush had been low, you would be seeing a site that has little search traffic. An examination of the site for other traffic-building methods will explain the difference (e.g., links from super-high traffic site(s), or perhaps a dominating social media presence). These three tools can provide many different types of useful information on potential allies (and competitors, too, of course).

But What About Overall Reliability?

You’re still stuck on that? Let’s summarize and wrap this one up.

You now understand the issues, as well as how myths have been perpetuated.

Sure, the rare site can be an outlier, with a result that’s more “off” than what a reasonable “range of scatter” might predict. For example, you may infrequently see a site with an Alexa rank of 500,000, but with traffic that would only justify a ranking of, say, 1,500,000.

After managing our Results page for more than 10 years, we can tell you that significant outliers are rare. We may get a result of 950,000 at Alexa, which is good enough to qualify for that page. But we also know the actual traffic since we maintain the hosting servers.

If that site only has 20,000 visitors per month, say, it’s cut from the Results page. Scatter is typically what eliminates a site from qualifying for that page.

Some articles state that Alexa can still be manipulated. We believe that this is, yet again, the perpetuation of information that used to be true. Alexa has greatly diversified the sources it uses, and has improved its algorithms to fight fraud.

That said, we can’t claim that it’s impossible. For example, some “outliers” could be explained by manipulation. If so, it’s rare. And it’s futile.

Really, what would the point be, especially since it’s so easy to cross-check with SW and SEMrush. These days, manipulation is a high-risk (to one’s reputation) / low reward game.

Sidebar: Some competitors blithely claim that we manipulate the Results page. No, those sites score well because they have the visitor count to back up their score. It’s just not possible to fake 500 sites like that.

The Alexa scores really do indicate high traffic. While there is some scatter, it’s minimized by our “actual traffic” filter.

Overall, the correlation of “visitor counts” vs. “Alexa ranking” (across thousands of sites) is good. There’s a clear power curve correlation between traffic and Alexa rankings, as the data plotting from this study shows.

We’re confident in that statement, based on our extensive experience of comparing many thousands of sites for Alexa vs. traffic since 2003. Is the correlation perfect? No — we have talked about “scatter” and how it increases as Alexa traffic rankings increase.

At the high end of Alexa (low traffic), small increases of just a few visitors per day can improve your score from 15,000,000 to 5,000,000 (and the reverse for traffic decreases). So what? It’s still “poor” traffic, good enough for what you generally need to know about other sites.

Again, think “ballpark.” A site with an Alexa rank of 1,000,000 is always going to have a great deal more traffic than one with a rank of 5,000,000. And double-checking differences with SW and SEMrush helps you nail down your estimate.

When you get into the habit of checking frequently, you’ll be less impressed about the importance of, for example, having a “stunning website” (a major selling point of companies like Wix). Plain sites (such as math-on-math.com) can have amazing traffic.

Many gorgeous sites have the “lights out” with Alexa rankings of over 30,000,000, aka “not known to Alexa.” That means that throughout Alexa’s massive panel of toolbars, extensions, pixel installs and third-party sources, a site has registered no data.

You’ll find the same when it comes to site speed — there are many sites that load very quickly but have low traffic. Developing the habit of using these tools can lend you some perspective. No Google factor is, on its own, critical to a site’s overall search success (aside, of course, from major factors such as content quality, and the cumulative effect of off-site signals).

We’re not arguing about whether they’re factors or not. We’re saying that way too much attention is paid to them, as opposed to mastering the art of writing to connect, for example. Alexa is also, therefore, a terrific teaching tool. The more you use it, the more you’ll value it.

It’s not easy to admit to being in the wrong. You’d think that, with a mere two syllables, uttering the word sorry would cause few people any strain. But, as Elton John so accurately identified in his 1976 masterpiece, for many it seems to be the hardest word.

Imperfection is entirely human

At one time or another we’ve all been guilty of committing an act that, in hindsight, we would happily eradicate from our lives. You don’t get to be an adult without going through a few moments you’d rather forget; that’s just how life works. Mistakes happen, and learning from them is a crucial part of becoming a wiser, more rounded individual.

Of course, it’s one thing to acknowledge a mistake to oneself, but quite another to openly confess it to other people. Conceding fault or owning up to a blunder can be embarrassing, uncomfortable and, in some cases, distressing.

At one time or another we’ve all been guilty of committing an act that, in hindsight, we would happily eradicate from our lives

Though doing so can be often be awkward, saying sorry when an apology is genuinely warranted is an act of significance. Regardless of the circumstances that have deem it necessary, declaring regret or remorse is a means of showing respect and empathy for the person, or persons, that have been wronged.

Saying sorry when an apology is genuinely warranted is an act of significance

And it is for these reasons that companies, as well as people, must embrace transparency and admit fallibility when something goes wrong. Companies are run by human beings, all of whom are capable of miscalculation and mix-ups. Even with the best of intentions, inaccuracies can, and will, occur.

Oversights and errors

Sometimes, mistakes can find their way into a finished article, no matter how thoroughly it has been edited and proofread. Every content producer has been there, and I’m no exception.

During my very first stint as a journalist at a regional newspaper, I managed to spell a woman’s surname wrong. In retrospect, I can see it for what it truly was; an innocent mistake made by a nervous, and somewhat naïve, young writer. But, back then, it felt like the end of the world. It was the first time I’d ever scored a byline, and I couldn’t have been more disheartened when, on the day of the newspaper’s publication, the misnamed woman called up and made my editor aware of the cock-up.

Despite the associated humiliation and the feeling of having let everyone down, the situation turned out to be an incredibly valuable tutorial in not only dealing with setbacks, but also in the value of assessing a situation from another person’s perspective.

It’s very easy to become transfixed on an error and blow its significance out of all proportion

The editor issued an apology over the phone, but I was determined to face up to the error and say sorry in person. I bought a bunch of flowers, headed round to the lady’s house, and we had a cup of tea and a chat in her kitchen. The reason that brought me there was forgotten almost immediately, and we nattered on for a good half an hour about gardening, the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, and her love of Wimbledon.

I returned to the office with a smile on my face. I’d seen first-hand the real value of saying sorry and truly meaning it. I realised that not only does the recipient sincerely appreciate an authentic apology, but the act of issuing one can forge a bond of trust and mutual respect.

It’s very easy to become transfixed on an error and blow its significance out of all proportion. And, while sometimes it may seem tempting to ignore a gaffe and pray that it disappears without anyone noticing, rarely is this the most apposite response. Nobody is immune to the odd flub, and, while the magnitude and importance of an error will vary from situation to situation, reacting in a way that is sincere and earnest is nearly always the most beneficial course of action.

However, if you are a business owner or a spokesperson for your company, there may come a time when you find yourself forced to issue a response of some kind on behalf of an entire organisation. Should this scenario arise, it’s even more essential that you take time to carefully prepare and hone your reaction.

When to say sorry

If a company values its customers – as they all should – then openly and honestly recognising mistakes, and suitably addressing the reasons that led to said mistake’s occurrence, is vital.

Remember when Samsung’s Galaxy Note 7 phones starting catching fire? Or when Snapchat fell victim to a phishing scam that ended up revealing payroll information about some of the company’s employees? Or the Volkswagen emissions scandal in 2015?

In each of these instances, the need for the culpable party to say sorry was a no-brainer; they were clearly at fault, and any failure to accept responsibility would have caused them even greater reputational damage.

Sometimes, however, knowing whether or not to say sorry is far less straightforward.

There can be a very thin line between what some will deem harmlessly provocative, and what others will regard as offensive. Marketers, advertisers and content creators are tasked with ensuring that which they produce stands out from the crowd, and one of the most effective ways of achieving this is to craft something that is somewhat confrontational. Attempting to engage the consumer without disillusioning them is a strategy many companies attempt, but one that is not without its risks.

There can be a very thin line between what some will deem harmlessly provocative, and what others will regard as offensive

In early 2016, Gourmet Burger Kitchen (GBK) ran an advertising campaign which suggested that its burgers were so good, even vegetarians would not be able to resist them. I remember seeing this at the time and thinking that it was quite a nice angle. I’m vegetarian myself, and didn’t for a second consider it anything more than a concept aimed at grabbing people’s attention.

However, GBK was inundated with complaints from furious veggies, with many suggesting that the burger chain’s posters ‘alienated’ customers that had made a conscious decision to refrain from consuming meat. In fact, The Advertising Standards Authority revealed that it received close to 200 complains about the ads, which prompted GBK to issue the following apology:

“Our intentions were light-hearted and not meant to cause any offence, but clearly we have, and for that we apologise. While we’ve served beef at the core of our menu since 2001, we’ve always catered well to the veggies out there, and always will.”

In this wake of this statement, Jasmijn de Boo, the chief executive of The Vegan Society, lambasted GBK, calling the company ‘totally out of touch’, before adding that the incident was a ‘wonderful example of the power of people to change things when they spot an injustice’.

Whether the advertisements offend you or not, it’s clear to see that this is not a cut and dried case. While some individuals considered the campaign to be disrespectful, others clearly didn’t see it that way. It’s no secret that some people are far more easily offended than others. A situation that would see one individual shrug their shoulders and carry on with their day, could lead another to become irate, incensed and incredibly angry.

It can be difficult to accurately anticipate how sensitive people will be to a design, idea or piece of writing, and it can be even trickier to know when an apology is compulsory. However, in the world of content creation, this is something you’ll likely be forced to confront at some point.

It can be difficult to accurately anticipate how sensitive people will be to a design, idea or piece of writing

Using your own judgement and standing firm, both during a concept’s inception and following its publication, is essential. If you don’t believe an apology is necessary, then don’t give one. But be aware that you might be called upon to defend your stance, and may have to fight for what you believe is right. There is very little, if anything, that will not be considered offensive by someone, but that does not mean you must bow down and accept wrongdoing if you do not believe it’s justified.

In conclusion

The long-term damage of appearing dishonest far outweighs the short-term unease associated with holding one’s hands up and taking ownership of a genuine slip-up. Saying sorry is something we’ve all had to do before, and will all likely have to do again.

However, sometimes you must be willing to stand up for your ideas, beliefs and output. If companies or individuals meekly apologise every time someone decides they are affronted, then challenging and provoking content could conceivably become a thing of the past.

Knowing when to accept blame is not always simple, but being prepared to say sorry when the situation calls for it is a fundamental necessity, regardless of whether speaking on behalf of yourself, or as the voice of an organisation.

Sorry needn’t be the hardest word.

How to Effectively Use Storytelling to Attract a Larger Following

All successful websites need a large number of subscribers, and should be designed for conversion. With great storytelling content that connects with your audience – your tribe – you can establish a credible brand online.

When authors don’t sell books, and business don’t attract new customers, I guarantee you that one, if not all, of the above is missing.

Your brand has a story to tell whether you are just in the beginning stages of your marketing or are well established. People want to know more about the human side of your company, and the response rate is high especially on social media through content marketing.

This is not a new concept, but one that can be easily overlooked. The power of stories not only provides more insight into a product or service, but increases the chances that your buyers will want to make a purchase.

It’s important to catch your audience’s attention right away with so much data coming in each day. According to a report by Hubspot 79% of people scan the Internet without reading each word. The right visuals will capture their attention, and coupled with an interesting or compelling video increases the chances of your content being shared.

Your ability to connect with your prospects can make or break their decision to buy from you. Building a loyal following depends on how you connect with your audience.

• Are you believable?
• Are you real?
• Do you understand the problems and needs of the people you are wanting to help?

Does your visitor arrive at a standard website that only sells to them? Or does it help, teach or tell stories so that your audience can get to know you?

We often think that people decide to buy from them based on qualifications or a good book or product, or their number of years of experience. In reality it is largely based on how they feel about you.

People decide to invest with a brand they feel can understand their issues, challenges and problems. If you cannot demonstrate that you get what they are going through, they will not connect with you. Connection is key. In this infographic on Technology for Publishing, engaging content appeals to the emotions of your audience:

The website that looks good or professional is important, but without the human element your community may perceive you as not being able to solve their problems or overly qualified to understand their needs.

The bottom line is that people want to know that you are authentic, transparent and can make mistakes just like them.

You accomplish this human element by infusing some personality into your content marketing. Include the personal side of your brand such as things you have done that haven’t worked so well and the mistakes you have made in business and in life. And let’s face it, that gives ALL of us plenty to talk about, now doesn’t it? And it also gives people stories to connect with you on.

The moment a prospect says “hmmm that sounds like me too” is the moment they have connected with you and also the moment they decide you are the person for them.

Storytelling has happened from the beginning of time and the hero story always shows the hero’s flaws, rising above it all and overcoming an obstacle.

So open up and let more authentic you come out, and watch the response you get from people!

Depending on your target market, your brand will approach your writing in a way that is unique to your company. Here are some tips on how to create your own message:

1. Improve your content

Find out what it really takes to write a great story on your blog through research and educating yourself with other niche blogs. For example, a powerful beginning will draw your viewers into a video, and the setup of the main point or issue should follow. The conclusion solves the problem and shows your audience how your brand can meet their needs over other books or businesses. Form an emotional connection with your viewers or readers and keep them interested in the story.

2. Give them a desire to know more

Creating a hook to your message will generate an interest to subscribe for more information or to make a purchase. Use social media and email marketing techniques to invite your audience to follow your brand, and continue where you left off in your story with valuable offers.

3. Save the sales pitch for later

Once your brand has already captured interested leads you can direct them to a specific sales page where they can learn more about what you have to offer them. By writing interesting and compelling content your brand is perceived as real, and honest. Stick to verifiable facts and the parameters of your market, but don’t shy away from being creative. Take a look at what other brands are doing in what is similar to your message, and create something unique for your target market.

A good storytelling strategy for your brand is one that represents your book or business in addition to connecting an interested audience. Brainstorm ways you can create several different types of stories based on what you have can provide for them, and bring something original and enticing to your market.

Interactive content has become the B2B world’s answer to creating enthralling brand experiences and forging profitable buyer relationships. It’s what buyers today want, after all. According to Demand Gen Report’s 2017 Content Preferences Survey, 87% of buyers agreed or strongly agreed that they prefer more interactive and visual content that they can access on demand.

So you would think if you built these immersive experiences, your buyers will come groveling at your feet, right? Wrong. We’re seeing many B2B brands follow the mantra: the more bells and whistles, the better. This is flawed logic. When you have too many interactive layers, pop-ups and animations, you’re distracting your viewers. Even worse: these animations don’t serve a purpose or augment the overall story, which ends up frustrating your buyers.

There are six foundational questions you need to ask to ensure your content not only captivates an audience but also serves a purpose:

1. Who’s my audience? I’d be remiss if I didn’t put this as the first question you need to ask. Before you start any content project, you need to identify who you’re trying to reach. You can think broadly, like focusing on a specific industry, or more specifically at the job role/function level.

2. Do they even want interactive content? This is definitely the “do not pass go, do not collect $200” question. If you know for a fact that your target audience has zero interest in interactive content, you need to do a quick pivot and find a new format for your idea. If you’re completely new to this whole interactive content thing and you’re not quite sure how your audience will respond, try to pick a format that won’t swallow up too much time and budget. It’ll be a great project for you to test and determine whether you can and should invest more heavily in interactive in the future.

3. What stage of the buyer’s journey is this content for? Each company leverages a different buyer’s journey model, so for the sake of consistency, we’ll just use the standard three stages: Top Funnel, Middle Funnel and Bottom Funnel. The specific stage you’re aiming to fill won’t necessarily impact the formats you can use. However, it will have a significant impact on the content you develop for the format and, of course, the interactive layers you incorporate.

4. What do we want buyers to get out of this experience? This is the next logical question once you determine which buyer’s journey stage you’re targeting. If you want to create an interactive top-funnel asset, you likely want to educate buyers about a new trend or challenge their thinking on a particular topic. If you’re creating content for mid-funnel, you’ll want to encourage them to assess their current processes or situations, and of course, spotlight a potential solution and ideal features capabilities. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, you want to present your brand as the ideal solution and expert to help buyers along their journey.

5. Which interactive elements will help us empower our audience? At this point, you need to take a hard look at your target buyer and messaging and determine what interactive layers or capabilities will help you get your points across. For example, if you’re trying to challenge your audience on their current knowledge or perspectives on a trend, a quiz or assessment would be great formats. If you want to encourage buyers to learn more about your new point-of-sale system and all of its supporting components, an interactive product-picking tool would be a powerful medium.

6. Where do we want our audience to go next? The worst faux pas I see marketers committing is creating a dead end with their content. This is especially detrimental with interactive content. Don’t let your buyers’ amazing experience fall flat. Think of the next step you want them to take after they engage with your interactive infographic, microsite, quiz or ROI calculator. Do you want them to contact a sales rep, sign up for a free trial or download a supporting content asset? Again, the ideal next step will vary based on the buyer stage and your goals, so think critically about what your call-to-action should be.

By answering all of these questions, you can guarantee you’re creating interactive content that serves a purpose for your buyers. The end result will mean your buyers are more engaged, happy with the experience and have a better overall perception of your brand.

This week’s podcast guest is Charlene Li, Principal Analyst at Altimeter, a Prophet Company. Back on episode 94, Charlene and I discussed key takeaways from her book The Engaged Leader. Charlene has authored five books and is a popular keynote speaker. As an expert in social media and digital technologies, Charlene gives a lot of attention and thought to the disruption of technology on business and how companies need to evolve.

On this episode, we dig into one of Altimeter’s most recent research reports conducted by Charlene, The Transformation of Selling: How Digital Enables Seamless Selling. You’ll learn a lot about what’s in the report on this podcast, but I strongly encourage you to download it. It’s free, and there’s just no way we could cover everything in this episode.

Two years ago, Charlene realized how significantly social selling is changing. This morphed her focus of the report to include more than just social selling. It now covers the entire sales process. Tune into this episode to gain insight into the research in this comprehensive report.

New Research from the Report

It’s common knowledge that the buyer’s behavior has changed due to digital. Buyers have much more information available to them early in the sales process. Research shows that 67% of the buyer’s journey is complete before there is any interaction between the prospect and the brand.

Traditional silos of marketing, sales, and service need to work closer together. Charlene says the salesperson is no longer the hero. Marketing and service teams participate in the process too. It can be difficult for organizations to break down silos, so Charlene says to punch through windows instead. This will help in creating a seamless buyer’s journey.

Charlene’s research shows that there are three stages of digital transformation (page 16 of the report). The first is platform integration and relates to the flow of data. The next stage focuses on how the organization is structured. It looks at how to bring the various roles together and align objectives across the business. Culture is the final stage and the number-one obstacle to transformation. During this period, organizations need to ask how to think seamlessly while focusing on the customer. Leadership must be involved in digital transformation too. Tune into episode 94 to learn more about engaging leaders on social media.

A few brands involved in the report showed a correlation between LinkedIn’s SSI (Social Selling Index) scores and sales productivity. The SSI is a good metric to look at because it is common for different departments. Anyone with a LinkedIn account has an SSI score.

Everything has to change including all the metrics and the hiring process to go from a lead generation mindset to a relationship-building mindset. It’s no longer just selling. Sales professionals need to have social skills and focus on the long-term relationship. The end goal with a relationship-building mindset is to do the right thing for the customer, not simply make the sale if it’s not a good fit.

The Future of the Digital Transformation of Sales

Artificial intelligence will impact the digital transformation of sales regarding the scale of how you have to engage with the customer. AI can discern what your prospect is looking for by taking their actions into account. By reviewing their history of interactions with the entire brand, and even others, AI will deliver the content that is best suited to the prospect in the moment.

Organizations must transform to adapt to the digital transformation of selling. Charlene says in the platform integration stage, there must be alignment between marketing and sales. She also points out that marketing, sales, and service teams must be clear on the customer they’re serving. Regarding technology, Charlene brings up an example of one organization that retooled their current marketing program to integrate it for sales instead of going out and adopting a new marketing stack.

In summarizing the maturity stages of the digital transformation of selling, Charlene recommends knowing where you are and where the gaps are in your process. She also makes the point that digital transformation is often considered a marketing function, and sales is overlooked. Sales is the function where people build relationships and must be centrally involved in digital transformation.

I highly suggest you download this report to get more of Charlene’s insightful research and advice. Download it here: The Transformation of Selling: How Digital Enables Seamless Selling.

Featured On This Episode:

• Charlene Li on Twitter and LinkedIn
• Altimeter’s website
• Download The Transformation of Selling: How Digital Enables Seamless Selling
• Download our Up Close Podcast Series with Scoop.it: A 5 Step Blueprint for Lead Generation through Content Marketing.
• Write a review of this podcast in iTunes
• Social Business Engine on Twitter: @sbengine
• Social Business Engine video channel | YouTube channel

In my travels as a growth marketing consultant, one the most common utterances I hear from B2B CEOs or Founders is “we need some help with our positioning” or “we need to tighten up our messaging.”

The nuance between positioning and messaging aside, the common underlying agita is a feeling that the company is not speaking to potential customers in the most compelling way possible.

There’s a feeling that there’s a disconnect between what’s being said, and the message that would resonate most strongly with potential customers. Or there’s just no consistency in the story that’s being told at all.

As I pondered this, I realized that I’ve never heard this request from a company that’s already doing well. Companies that are already scaling may want to go faster, may want more leads, may want to source bigger deals, or may want to experiment with pricing.

But it’s the companies who are under performing who tend to identify messaging as an area that needs some TLC. And it makes sense – if your messaging isn’t speaking to the pains and desires of your potential customer base, you can do everything else right and still really struggle to achieve your growth goals.

As I studied the companies that self-identified as needing help with their messaging, three patterns began to emerge.

This post will identify some of the common pitfalls B2B companies fall into with their messaging – if you read this and realize your company is guilty of one of these, it may be time to reevaluate the messaging you’re bringing to market.

Let’s dive in.

Self-identifying as #1

Everybody and every company wants to be “#1.”

That’s OK, but you’re not Nelly.

Think of it this way – selling almost any product is a lot like dating. People buy products from people they like on a personal level, just as they date people they genuinely like on personal level.

Most people are attracted to others who are self aware, and who can speak to their strengths and weaknesses honestly and comfortably. If a guy/gal approached you in a bar and the first thing they said was “I’m the #1 person you should consider dating,” you’d be a little off-put, wouldn’t you?

I find this message to be problematic for a few reasons.

First off, I would argue that the companies that are undeniably #1 in their market don’t often make this proclamation.

They don’t need to, because everyone already knows it.

Salesforce doesn’t tout itself as the #1 CRM on the planet – they don’t need to, as everyone is aware of their market position. That message would be nothing but wasted breath, a missed opportunity for them.

The second problem with this messaging direction is that often it’s either simply not true, or it’s such a vague proclamation that there’s no clear understanding of what makes them #1.

What’s the metric or source of data that you’re leaning on when making that statement? And is that the same metric or source of data that your competitors are relying on when making a similar declaration?

Ultimately this more often than not confuses potential customers and erodes their confidence in your business.

The good news is that the intention behind the “#1” message is most often a good one – what these businesses are after is credibility.

They are trying to increase consumer confidence.

It’s very similar to the notion that “nobody ever got fired for buying IBM.” Companies believe that by saying they’re #1, consumers will feel a level of comfort knowing that they are buying the best.

To solve this problem, ask yourself, “Are my potential customers really trying to buy #1?”

Chances are, probably not – they’re not trying to buy your product simply because it’s the best, they’re trying to buy some unique aspect or characteristic of your product that makes it the best.

What specific attributes of the market leading solution in your industry do buyers care about? The more specific you can be, the better. In the age of buyer empowerment, credibility absolutely does matter – probably more than ever before. Look for other ways to highlight your company’s credibility through social proof, user reviews, testimonials, or any other means that’s more specific and more human than simply declaring your business to be #1.

And if you feel like your company really is #1, take it one step further – what are you #1 in? What makes you #1?

Maybe you have the most customers. Maybe you have the most revenue. Maybe your product is the most reliable on the market by some concrete measure.

Call those items out specifically and more times that not your message will resonate more deeply with your prospective customers.

Self-Identifying as “Next Generation” or “Transformative”

How many times have you heard of a new product that represents the “next generation” of a product that you’re already using? How many times have you heard about a product that’s going to “transform” your industry?

Probably quite a few.

Now take a step back – when you’ve heard these sentiments, how many times has the “next generation” product really been that drastically different from what you’re using today?

Better yet, how frequently have you seen your industry “transformed?” Messaging in this direction is often exhausted and almost always results in a product falling short of the expectations that have been set.

Simply put, you can do better.

There are two trends that are common when I’ve seen messaging in this direction.

The first one is that the company guilty of this messaging is a technology company.

Think about that for a moment… this both makes sense, yet makes no sense at all.

Technology companies are interested in using applied science, their own knowledge, and technical means to build something new and better for a practical purpose. They are inherently trying to build the next generation of something that already exists; or they are trying to build something completely new to transform the way a practical task has historically been accomplished.

All of which is to say being “next generation” or “transformative” is part of their DNA – taking the time to state this outright represents once again wasted breath.

The second trend is that once again messaging in this direction comes from a well-intentioned place.

Entrepreneurs and business owners are usually excited about their products – they have to be if they are to have any chance of being successful. With that excitement comes a natural bias towards their own products, and a heightened sense of the differences between their product and other similar products.

With that bias and level of excitement, the differences between products appear larger than they actually are, most often well beyond what are perceived to be meaningful or truly significant differences to the business’ end customers.

Next thing you know, you’re bringing to market a product that you’re calling “next generation” or “transformative.”

The solution to this issue is once a gut check, as well as a higher degree of specificity.

Markets are sometimes transformed, no doubt – but if you’re an entrepreneur, ask yourself “how many times have I heard that? And how many times has it actually come true?”

If you’re honest with yourself it’s pretty rare that a product transforms a market, so take an honest, closer look at the transformative power of your product. Chances are your product is closer to “next generation” than “transformative,” so then ask yourself “what’s next generation about my product specifically?”

There is undoubtedly something specific that you are doing differently that you think offers your customers a better experience.

Call that out, as specifically as you can.

It may feel strange, and it may not feel “big enough” to be one of your leading messages… but chances are it probably is.

Specificity and honesty saves buyers time, builds credibility, and earns your business trust.

What’s more important than that when it comes to messaging that drives business results?

Serving Your Own Needs Rather Than Those of Your Potential Customers

The last messaging mistake I commonly see is less specific but even more widespread than the two I’ve mentioned thus far – and best yet, it’s perhaps the easiest to rectify.

Simply stated, it’s messaging that serves the needs of the company and its employees but not the needs of the potential customer.

The easiest way to identify this issue is to read your company’s messaging and simply ask yourself, “Do I care about this, or does our potential customer?”

This mistake can take countless forms.

For sake of illustration, consider “An energetic, innovative CRM company that’s taking down Salesforce.”

While this is a bad hypothetical example, you’ve probably seen messaging somewhat like this before. In fact, this message has some positive feelings to it!

The problems here could be…

• A) Who is looking for an “energetic” CRM?
• B) Are buyers specifically looking for an “innovative” CRM? Probably not – most CRM buyers want something functional that serves their needs well.
• C) Do buyers care about “taking down Salesforce?” Again, probably not.

Sticking with this example, all of these attributes likely DO serve the interest of the company and its employees.

Working in a fast paced, energetic, start-up environment is attractive to many potential employees. Likewise, working at an “innovative” company could help attract top level engineering talent.

And who doesn’t like a David versus Goliath scenario, where you’ve got a chance to take down or disrupt an industry leader? The message may very well be effective in helping the company with recruiting, as well as generating excitement and good will with existing employees of the business.

But if the message isn’t speaking to the pains and desires of the potential customer base, customer acquisition will suffer.

Conclusion

So much has changed in B2B marketing over the last 20, 10, even 5 years – sometimes it’s dizzying to consider.

But some marketing fundamentals are forever. Taking the time to carefully consider whether your business’s messaging serves the interests of your potential buyers is an exercise that will always pay dividends.

Watch out for the three pitfalls described above, and pressure test your existing messaging for self-serving bias as well as it’s level of specificity.

A methodical approach to outbound sales is the best way to produce predictable and scalable results.

Before you attempt to scale your outbound volume, fix your conversion rates. Try contacting 100 new prospects. If you don’t like your results, check out our post about doubling your warm leads. When you scale your outbound volume without optimizing your warm lead conversion rate, the only difference is that you will get a lot of unsatisfactory results instead of just a few. By doing this, you run the risk of exhausting your lead database without having much to show for it.

If you like the results of your campaign and are achieving a high conversion rate, it is time to scale your outbound volume and really start profiting from it. Of course, that is easier said than done.

Let’s say your team can convert a decent number out of the 400 accounts (5% maybe) they are able to handle every month. Despite this, the overall outcome of those efforts is too small to reach your revenue goals. So you have a dilemma.

On the one hand, you want to scale your outbound volume by having your team do more cold outreach. On the other hand, you don’t want to sacrifice your conversion rate by running a lot of generic email blasts. The question is: how do you scale your outbound volume without sacrificing the quality of the communications you and your team already have?

Think about the time wasted during your average sales person’s day

A typical sales rep is able to work on about 50 to 100 accounts a month. But what are they doing on a regular basis to service those accounts? They are emailing, calling, even stalking potential decision makers on LinkedIn. Basically, your sales rep is doing everything they can do to put their foot in the door.

And what’s the outcome of all of these efforts? About 9 sales qualified opportunities a month. If you think about how much you are paying each sales rep, you will probably agree that these numbers aren’t that high. Why is it like that?

I’ll let you in on a secret. Your sales reps waste their time on practices that prevent you from scaling your outbound. Not only do these practices not scale but they often hurt your conversion rate as well.

1. Fighting with gatekeepers

   Have you ever tried to reach a fortune 500 director by cold calling their reception desk? If you have, you would understand how futile an activity it is. Most executives have specifically hired people to prevent the ones like you from bothering them at work. Even if you can find a direct phone number of the executive (which is rare), he or she is probably already bombarded with cold calls, so will not be receptive to another person calling them with a sales pitch.

2. Reaching out to people who have no interest in what your reps have to say

   You have probably hired somebody you think is hungry to make sales. They diligently write cold emails and regularly leave voicemails to their prospects. It would be one thing if they were converting half of their prospects but the thing is, despite their best efforts, they still come across as impersonal and are not seeing good ROI on the time they spend pursuing their prospect.

   How could that be? Because they are trying to pack a ton of touch points into the finite number of hours they work each day, they keep writing emails (Hey Mark, I’ve just invited you on LinkedIn – would love to connect with you and talk about potential partnership… ) and voicemails (Hey Mark, It’s John from XXXXX, I’ve just left you a voicemail at 341-213-3123. Could you get back to me?) which are rather generic.

   Getting a call from one of these guys is like seeing a boring uncle on your caller ID. The difference is of course that with a sales rep, you have no familial obligation to pick up the phone or respond to their voicemail.

   Despite all that, your sales reps probably think that they are being super personal since they are making touches with their prospects across 3 or 4 channels. The reality is that they not only sound the same as everybody else but they are doing the same thing as everybody else. They don’t stand out and this approach doesn’t scale.

   Even if you can pump your conversion rate up to a decent level by working overtime contacting people, there are still a finite number of potential customers in the world who will respond to the generic messages your reps are constantly sending.

At Growbots, we have decided to flip the outbound process on its head

Instead of wasting time calling people out of the blue and hoping that they’ll be interested, we have decided to only talk to people who have registered some interest. We engage prospects solely by email. This made our process easy to replicate and scale while keeping our messages personal. In other words, we were able to automate the whole process of gaining interest.

The result of automating the process of initial outreach is that we now have a lot more time to convert our prospects. We effectively doubled our conversion rate.

If you want to scale your outbound activities, engage cold prospects through email exclusively.

• A short, personalized email is the best way to pique someone’s interest.

  This is especially true for somebody who is constantly busy. And let’s face it, if somebody is senior enough to make a purchasing decision about your product, they probably have a lot of work to do.

  Your prospect doesn’t have time to listen to a 2-3 minute pitch from you or anybody else but they do have a long enough attention span to read a 3-4 sentence email. It takes them only a few seconds to shoot off a “tell me more” message and from there the ball starts rolling. You can check out a campaign that got 10% of our prospects interested in learning more here.

• Email is the only sales channel that scales your outbound channel infinitely

  Unlike phone calls, email can be automated while maintaining the personal nature of the message. And thanks to various sales automation tools, one person can send out hundreds of personal emails per day. The result? Many more personal conversations with potential buyers than you would ever be able to achieve with calling.

• By automating emails, you give your rep more time to talk with clients

  Since all of the busy work associated with reaching out to prospects using email is automated, it means that your reps can spend their time speaking directly to interested customers. This makes your sales rep extremely efficient. They end up spending most of their time on activities where their presence makes the difference between qualifying the lead or not.

  At Growbots, that meant going from spending the whole day prospecting and managing campaigns to just 30 minutes, leaving the rest of the day to talk to interested customers.

In short: When you get a tool which automates the process of making initial contact with your buyer, it will make your team 3 times more efficient than before. They will have more direct conversations which will qualify more leads to be sold to.

Let’s do the math of scaling your outbound

As we said in the beginning, your typical sales rep is able to work on 50-100 companies to source 9 SQLs per month, using a mashup of different automation tools. But when you compare that with our experience at Growbots, those numbers start to sound extremely low, even pitiful. Since our solution automates initial contact with our prospects, it lets our reps up contact 600 to 700 companies every month.

And since those messages are still personalized, our conversion rates are the same as they would be if we were using personalized manual outreach (you can check out this guide to learn how to send personal emails at scale), prospecting with a mix of different channels. The result? Each of our reps is able to generate around 60 sales qualified leads a month. Just think what you would do if you scaled your outbound volume from 10 to 60 leads a month! You would finally be able to hit your targets without having to hire anybody new.

If you want to see the impact you could have using automatic prospecting, check out our outbound calculator to find out what a difference email outbound can make to your revenue goals.

Enough with the easy button – learn how to sell and make a great living doing it.

An open letter to sales people.

OK – I’ve had enough. Enough with the LinkedIn articles, tweets and blog posts from self-proclaimed “guru’s” who DO NOT HAVE A PROVEN TRACK RECORD AT SELLING who are telling everyone how they are “doing it wrong” and that there’s an easier way.

Some of these “experts” are killing your career by fooling you into thinking tried and true principles no longer work.

If selling is so “easy” – only if you would submit an article, write a tweet, like a post, send an email – why are a lot of the people that promote this stuff working for companies that need venture capital funding to survive? Why are they not profitable?

Let me go way back for a moment – when I sold my first company and decided to start a phone sales training company (this is back in 2007 / 2008) there was a guy touting how cold calling was dead and that the new way to sell was using LinkedIn and emails to drum up new business – basically anything other than picking up the phone.

This person even started a company “teaching” other companies how to avoid selling by phone and using his strategy.

Anyone want to take a guess at what happened a short time later?

Three words: OUT. OF. BUSINESS.

Wasn’t long before I noticed that this particular person, who was so against picking up the phone, who coincidently according to his own LinkedIn profile, had very little experience in the real world of selling by phone, was out of business with his company and took a job in marketing with another firm.

Recently also noticed another company that promotes “emails” as the way to drum up business got acquired – no word for how much – but I thought it was odd that a lot of the top talent at that company was abandoning ship in the months leading up to the “acquisition”.

Look, all I’m saying is this: THERE IS NO EASY BUTTON IN SALES.

Yes, salespeople today – we have it made in the shade when you compare it to when I first started – which was “you want leads? Grab the phonebook!” (If you’re too young to get that reference, look up what YELLOWPAGES and WHITEPAGES were)

It SHOULD be easier than ever in today’s age to find the right prospects and close business – all the tools are there, and many of them are free or next to free. But none of them replace the one skill that is absolutely needed to be highly successful – you still need to know how to sell.

You need to know how to have a real conversation. Not just a connection, or a like, or a tweet. A CONVERSATION.

By phone, face to face or web chat – sales people need to know how to get conversations started and then they need to know WHAT questions to ask, WHEN to ask them, WHY to ask them HOW to ask them.

There are no shortcuts to this. Not for 99.9% of us anyway. Sure, we will always hear about how some college dropout created an app and is now a billionaire.

For the rest of the crowd, there is real money out there for you. Making 6-figures as a top salesperson is more obtainable than ever. Making mid to high 6-figures is obtainable now more than ever – but you’re going to have to do two things: work smart and out work the competition.

There’s no easy button.

In 2009 Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shaw release a book called Inbound Marketing. The premise of the book was that marketing as we knew it was changing. People no longer paid attention to the mass messaging that was being forced upon us each and every day. Their hypothesis was that instead of interrupting people with products and services they don’t want or need, we needed to learn to attract them throw education. Today inbound marketing has become much more than just a buzz word and is being embraced by major companies across the globe.

Inbound can be broken down into four phases; attract, convert, close and delight. While the tactics around each of these phases differ from company and industry, the core concepts have not changed. It’s still about helping your prospects get the answers they need, right when they need them. My goal for the remainder of this post is to explore the phases of inbound and share a few tips on how you can use them across any industry.

ATTRACT

The first phase of inbound is all about attracting your audience to your message. Traditional marketing and advertising is all about interrupting people with commercials, ads and direct mail with the hope that they will pause just one enough to give you their attention. As you are well aware, we live in a world saturated with marketing messages. Most of them just become more noise that we ignore.While businesses know that marketing is important to reach new markets and potential buyers, leaning on outdated tactics end up costing more and delivering less results.

Inbound is a user-centric approach to marketing. The attract phase is all about learning what your user’s pain points and problems are and framing your product as a solution to them. This means you have to take the time to define your personas and get to know them. This information will help you create a message that resonates with your audience.

But…. just creating a better message won’t attract people on its own.You also need to deliver that message through the appropriate channels. This is where successful inbound marketers separate themselves from the rest.

The internet has open more channels for people to connect with family, friends, business and people around the world. If you stop for a moment and just think of the vastness of this tool, it’s truly amazing. What’s even more impressive is they communities that have been built across the web. Very niche communities can be found on that internet that is very devoted to very specific topics, products, learning, sports and more. It’s within these hyper-segmented groups where the power of inbound truly lies.

CONVERT

Attracting a lot of attention is nice, but if none of your traffic converts you’re not going to grow. The second phase of inbound is all about establishing a connection. A conversion is much more than just a lead. It’s a person who is in search of a solution to a problem they are facing. By building in multiple conversion points across you campaign, you make the process on connection much easier and more organic.

Traditionally the way we thought of conversions was through building a landing page with a form to capture information. Then we would send them to a thank you page where we would suggest the next step in the process. While this still works, there are now many other ways we can create conversions points throughout of site and social channels.

Before adding a new conversion point, you need to ask yourself a deeper question. “Why would someone click on this…” Using empathy to understand the why before your strategy will lead to a more human experience for your prospects. In testing your ideas, try to understand what someone outside your organization may think and feel like when coming across you conversions points.

From Facebook buttons, to exit banners, there are dozens of ways to add conversion points to your marketing efforts. Every audience is different and will react in their own unique way, so take some time to test your conversion points to see what is working and what is not.

CLOSE

This is term is most closing linked to sales and can at times carry some negative connotations with it. As the lines between sales and marketing blur more and more, we wall need to learn the power of closing the deal. But unlike traditional sales, inbound closing is focused on delivering the prospect a solution they themselves already want.

The hardest part in sales is convincing one partner to hand over their money to another. The reason transactions are hard is that ofter the person selling has to convince the buyer that they need the product or service. Inbound takes that process and flips its. By educating and serving your audience pre-sale, they themselves have already bought into the product by the time you get on a sales call.

Know I am not saying they won’t have any objections and that you’ll close 100% of your leads, but I will say that the groundwork is already laid. People change when what they are doing is more painful than what they could do. This physiological process is very complex and unique to the individual. By creating great content that speaks to your prospects pain points you can begin to help them uncover the root of their pain and offer up some alternatives in your products and solutions.

DELIGHT

The final phase on inbound is all about your community. Whether they are a long-time customer or one-time user, delighting those who come in contact with you can yield tremendous benefits. If done right, your users will become one of your best marketing tools. 68% trust online opinions from other consumers, which is up 7% from 2007 and places online opinions as the third most trusted source of product information. [Nielsen]

A lot of companies do a great job at the first three phases on inbound. Great companies put their heart and soul into the delight phase. This is because you can’t put a price on a solid, happy and excited to share base of users. The internet makes sharing easier and faster than ever. This can work both ways so be careful.

Delight is about value-added. Sure you loved their problem, but how do they feel about your company? If you think for a moment you can come up with a number of products that solved your problems, but you didn’t like the business at all. For me, I’ll go back to the old way of doing things if the business does match my values and I know I’m not the only one.

Connect with your users on a personal level and share the “why” behind you business. Give them a voice and walk with them along their journey with your organization. The return in the long-run will be will worth the time spent.

Inbound marketing is still relatively new. While many have heard and agreed with the concepts, few are executing them on a daily basis. The reason? I think the investment it takes up front to learn about your audience and test whether our not if what you are doing works is intimidating. It’s easier to spend money on traditional tactics and hope they work. With inbound, your marketing is tracked and tested. It brings more accountability to your marketing efforts and forces you to be disciplined. Change can be hard. But it can also be the greatest decisions you’ve every made.

Conveying a sense of scarcity and urgency are powerful marketing techniques that tap into the psychology of why we say “yes.” When utilized correctly, scarcity marketing can give your company and sales a massive boost.

Part of what makes urgency and scarcity techniques in marketing so powerful is its focus on the psychology that makes humans want what is hard to attain. An effective way to convey urgency in your marketing is doing it in a way that is different, well-thought out, and doesn’t read like another promotion.

On the other hand, when done wrong, you can hurt the reputation of your business and lose the loyalty and trust of your customers:

One research article published by Scientific Journal Publishers found “when consumers interpreted scarcity claims as a sales tactic, the positive effect of scarcity claims on product evaluation would be diluted.”

The effective scarcity marketing techniques are the ones you most likely never even notice. Eventually, consumers and readers will notice these sleazy urgency tactics and scarcity mistakes, and they’ll quicky become annoyed by them. That’s when those marketing efforts backfire on those companies who thought they could pull one over on their customers.

Urgency Without Scarcity Won’t Work

Bed, Bath & Beyond is known for their ‘20% off one single in-store item’ coupons. Looking back, the oldest proof I could find of them offering these coupons were back in early 2007! So certainly something must be working for them….

We all receive these coupons in the mail and then in our emails a few times each month. As consumers, we don’t worry about missing out on a Bed, Bath & Beyond sale. That’s because we now know that there will be another coupon coming from Bed, Bath & Beyond every few days. And we know exactly what it is going to be.

However, if you’re getting awesome results with continued urgent promotions, then keep on doing your thing.

For everyone else: don’t assume that your company or business will be able to get away with this type of promotion strategy. There’s nothing urgent or scarce about a promotion that has been happening every week or so for years.

Instead, if you want to cash in on the psychology behind scarcity marketing, ensure that when you are creating urgency in your promotions that there is some scarcity to your offer.

False Urgency Ruins Customer Loyalty

Creating a sense of urgency is a great boost for many marketing campaigns. Just make sure there is actually something that is worth the urgency and feeling of anxiety of missing out.

Some websites use a false scarcity tactic hoping to get customers to quickly act before the item disappears. Marketer, Mike Michalowicz noticed that one of his favorite online stores, CoffeeForLess, were manipulating their customers by creating a false sense of security.

When shopping for his Keurig K-Cups, Michalowicz noticed that as soon as he put an item into his cart, a timer began ticking. But why?

CoffeeForLess created a false sense of urgency to squeeze a few extra dollars out of their customers. It didn’t take long for Michalowicz and other customers to catch on. He explains it best when he says:

“I can’t fathom that they are really reserving coffee for me. First of all, it is quite likely they have more than enough stock so that ‘reserving’ coffee for 30 minutes is not necessary. Plus, if I sat on my filled up cart and did nothing, while another order processed for the same coffee, the coffee would go to them, not me.”

Many of the scarcity-focused strategies we’ve talked about create level of urgency and anxiety, but only use a countdown timer for legitimately urgent items.

By putting too much pressure on your customers to act, they may feel like you’re forcing them and not letting them make their own choices. It’s a guaranteed, sure-fire way to break ties with loyal customers while manipulating new visitors.

Accidentally Alienating Customers

Mailbox was an iOS productivity app that had a ‘controlled roll-out’ that released invites to the app to small groups. If you were not at the front of the line, you had to wait… For an indefinite period of time. If you weren’t invited, you could still use the app for one thing: to check how many people were ahead of you! 20K in front of you, and then you’re in!

Well backlash came fast, and it came hard for the young email app. Frustrated and irritated customers punished Mailbox for the wait. The people still waiting for invitations trashed the app by writing awful reviews in the App Store, never mind that they had never used Mailbox’s features.

Here’s what we can learn from that horrible marketing error:

1. People don’t like to wait.
2. Customers don’t like for companies to make them feel under-valued.
3. Finally, perception is everything. Many still believe the whole stunt was a marketing campaign from the app company.

Don’t Abuse the Urgency Email Flags

Groupon and their emails always claim the same level or urgency and scarcity, no matter if they’re offering tickets to San Antonio or a discount on a local jewelry story cleaner.

ACT NOW! HURRY! LAST CHANCE!

Those are just some of the commands that Groupon ‘shouts’ at you in nearly every subject line of their emails. It’s not just one or two emails a day where Groupon is abusing standard urgency words, subscribers usually receive 4-6 emails from them daily.

One problem with this approach is that visitors will remember which products and/or businesses have used (more like abused) the principles of scarcity and will look at future interactions with suspicion. Most likely, customers will avoid buy items newly listed as being scarce.

The Clothing Store Who Cried Wolf

The principles of scarcity are a strong way to boost sales and make more money. Yet, use it too frequently, and like the boy who cried wolf, people customers, influencers, everyone) will stop believing you.

Gap once used to strive towards creating massive sense of urgency in their email subject lines. That didn’t work out, but instead they ended up getting many of their messages ignored and unopened.

We spoke of it earlier, and yes, it is possible to use too much urgency. You can overdue the urgency to such an extent that customers, leads, and subscribers will ignore it all. In one article written by a frustrated marketer, Gap had sent him five nearly identical urgent emails, in less than a week…

Of course, customers may not notice the frequency of these kinds of messages, certainly not right away. A few too many emails about scarce supplies, limited-time promotions, and ‘Today Only’ sales, and visitors will stop paying attention to whatever you’re saying.

Scarcity Marketing’s Most Effective Techniques:

Scarcity in marketing is an old tactic based off the psychology of human persuasion. Even in today’s marketing world, scarcity principles still work.

Scarcity makes people take action if they are sitting on the fence, it can create a higher perceived value that will put you ahead in a competitive niche. Most importantly though, it gives your company an environment where you can to focus resources and maximize ROI.

Save this list below to make sure you’re taking advantage of Scarcity Marketing’s Most Effective Techniques!

1. Set a deadline
2. Advertise the deadline on your homepage
3. Restrict deals to ‘offer open until stock lasts’
4. Offer daily deals
5. Create urgency on cart page
6. Provide free shipping for a limited period
7. Let your customers know that stocks are limited
8. Use holidays to create urgency
9. Never falsely advertise or abuse the demand

Sincerity is vitally important because consumers are very good at sniffing out insincerity and exaggeration when it comes to marketing.

Don’t get caught up trying to beat your competition head on. Switch up normal format and take the higher, more honest road. Scarcity and urgency are two incredible marketing tactics that will help you along the way to success!

Have you ever seen a company used create a false sense of scarcity or urgency? Let us know how you felt in the comments!

Also, feel free to share this post on social media or with someone who could make use of creating a sense of urgency and scarcity marketing in their business.

The business development representative’s job is critical to the success of an organization. In fact, there is no role in a company that more directly impacts future prosperity, growth, and overall stability. After all, without sales, a company is quickly out of business. For this reason, it is vital to find a BDR that has the personality traits to thrive in this role.

The Right Fit

There are many important elements to consider before hiring a business development executive. It’s important to have realistic expectations for the role itself, and for the person who is hired. Every manager wants a BDR professional that knows everyone and has an easy affability that instantly endears long-term customers and prospects. This person would also be able to write killer proposals that net huge margins, build the company’s market share, bring in lots of leads, command the respect of the in-house team, and put out account fires when and if required. Does this sound like far too much for one person to handle? It can easily be if the wrong person is selected for the job, or if they do not have adequate support.

Intelligence and natural curiosity: They must be smart and passionate about learning. To effectively sell, they need to know the products or services well and be the company’s most vocal cheerleader.

Persistence: Obviously, taking the first ‘no’ for an answer is not the best sign of a closer. Successful BDR’s know that it is a numbers game, and every ‘no’ gets them closer to ‘yes’. For this reason, they won’t get discouraged; they’ll get creative instead.

They understand people: Marketers know that today’s buyers are well into the decision-making process before they contact a business. Lots of information is available online, and buyers are extremely educated. A BDR needs to be one step ahead, and take on the role of advisor that personalizes solutions to their challenges. Consultative selling is key in this environment.

They’re an integral part of the inbound marketing team: Inbound marketing is the way of the business world today, and a business development representative that buys into inbound and seizes the opportunities it offers can multiply successes. Owners and executives who understand how important connecting inbound marketing with their BDR is, will provide added tools to increase the growth of the entire company. A well-known statistic from a CMO study is often quoted by Michael Gass, the founder of Fuel Lines. He says that 80% of CMOs surveyed found their vendors, rather than vendors finding customers.

Good Internet abilities: Savvy sales development representatives know their way around the Internet; they understand Social Media and how it works like word of mouth on steroids. They also know that marketing online gains them a larger audience and a venue to craft a solid brand for the company. Communicating what is different and better about the company is what sets apart the average BDR and the star business representative.

Quick on their feet: Top-tier business development professionals ask the right questions and follow-up consistently. Through natural relationship-building skills, they can ferret out the information needed to provide the right solution for a client’s purposes.

Goal setters: – Although setting goals is often seen as the company’s job, the best BDR sales representatives set goals for themselves, as well as planning how to get there.
Overall, the new business development representative an organization hires can make or break the future success for that company. This is not a position that should be filled by a timid person or one that is not willing to think outside the box. They need to be creative in their work. Times have changed drastically, and the way people go about making purchases today is very different. Having a sales development representative that understands what it takes to get the job done is key. Hiring the person with compatible personality traits and arming them with all the tools they need to overcome any challenges, help clients solve business problems, and meet lofty financial metrics for maximum success, is equally vital.

Lead management is an essential part of growing your business. You need new leads to come in so you can convert them into new customers. But, do you ever feel like your leads aren’t converting? Or you’re not capturing enough leads? Or maybe that you’re not getting the right leads? If so, you may be making one of these seven deadly sins of lead management.

1. Your Form Submissions Are Working Against You

It is no secret that visitors tend to leave a page if the signup request is too long. We’ve all been there, admit it. Just like on a first date, you don’t want to ask for too much personal information too soon. New visitors typically just aren’t ready to divulge so much information about themselves. Try, instead, to only ask for information that is truly needed, like a name and email address, marking the necessary fields with an asterisk. A good rule of thumb is to try to keep your form within 3-5 fields. Remember, you can always ask for more information later on in your relationship.

Another mistake is placing your form below the fold (meaning users need to scroll down to view your form.) Per Jakob Nielson, a web usability consultant who holds a Ph.D. in human–computer interaction, “Web users spend 80% of their time looking at information above the page fold. Although users do scroll, they allocate only 20% of their attention below the fold.” In addition to keeping forms above the fold, it is recommended to encapsulate them as well. You can achieve this by formatting them with a framed box in a different shade from the background, which will make your form stand out.

2. You’re Not Optimizing Your Lead Generation Pages for Mobile

Google officially confirmed that more Google searches take place on mobile devices than on computers in 10 countries, including the U.S. and Japan. Users are quickly turned off if the landing page they click to has content that is squished and distorted. Not only are these pages displeasing to the eye, but they are often difficult to navigate without having to pinch and zoom in. This, over time, will harm your conversion rate and is essentially just telling visitors to go elsewhere. You need to make sure your website and all landing pages are responsive or mobile-optimized.

3. Your Call to Action Needs Some Help

While most business owners are well aware that a call to action is a necessity, it’s still very easy to make mistakes when crafting the perfect call to action. You want your call to action to be clear, concise, and encourage users to take the next step to contact you. And, there is such thing as having too many calls-to-action. The last thing you want to do is confuse your visitors and cause them to stray from your site before providing their valuable information. Keep it simple and scale back in order to maximize conversions.

Another common mistake occurs when your call to action isn’t easy to find. You want your call to action to be clearly visible to anyone who visits your website. This may mean you have a Contact Us tab on your website or a click-to-call on every page of your website.

4. You’re Treating All Leads the Same

It is simply unrealistic to have a one-size-fits-all approach for potential buyers. The buying process is as individualized as the buyers themselves and involves a variety of different factors depending on each buyer’s different budget, timelines, and unique needs.

So, the best solution here is to offer more personalization for potential buyers. By segmenting leads based on the factors mentioned above into smaller groups, you are then able to accommodate the buyer’s individualized needs. Remember that customization is essential to your campaign.

5. You’re Not Handling Leads Appropriately

In addition to treating leads with an individualized approach, it is also imperative that these leads are properly prioritized into a specialized database where they can be properly tracked. Not doing so could lead to a long, arduous process. Leads tend to disappear if the buyer is not ready to talk to a sales representative. Organizing a proper database ensures that leads that require more information will be channeled to marketing while more decisive buyers can be sent directly to the sales team. This will ensure that when the lead is funneled to another person or department, the efforts to engage are better targeted.

6. You’re Not Utilizing Social Media to Your Advantage

Social media has become an important way to generate leads via traffic and brand awareness. It is a convenient resource for lead generation and is available with a low cost. However, it is common for advertisers to find that they are not using these sources strategically to utilize its full potential.

An effective way to generate more leads from social media is to make use of blog posts and offers by linking directly well-organized strategy that works well with your social media plan.

7. You’re Neglecting to Include Testimonials

An influential marketing tool used for generating new leads is testimonials and reviews. They often have a powerful impact and lend credibility to your offer. The reason you see so many testimonials out there is simply because they work.

Testimonials from your clients used in the sales process tend to generate trust. Consumers are not always comfortable being the first to purchase an item or service. Knowing that a real person has already made the purchase and was satisfied provides them comfort and proof to trust you. When used properly, testimonials can be an integral portion of your lead generation process and produce successful results.

By avoiding these seven deadly lead management sins and evolving your lead management process to make it easier for customers to find and contact you, you can attract more customers. A lead management and tracking solution can help you determine where your leads are coming from and what you need to do to keep leads from leaking from your sales funnel.

1. The best-performing companies kept their reply time below 1 minute and also handled cases in one touch, even if it leads to longer chat times, up to 17m 32s.
– LiveChat Customer Service Report 2017

Keep the reply time low and avoid asking your customers irrelevant information. Each one of them is contacting you to resolve an issue, but not for a question-answer session.

2.Phone support volumes have dropped by 17% since 2015
–Dimension Data Global Customer Experience Benchmarking Report

Phone support is becoming less popular due to the increasing number of communication channels. Implementing live chat, e-mail, or social media support would make the process more convenient for your customers.

3. Within the last year demand for live chat grew by 43.41%. Businesses noticed a 3.27% average uptick in the number of chats with customers.
– LiveChat Customer Service Report 2017

Live chat is arguably the most popular support trend of the year. It removes the social awkwardness of phone support and lets you have an easy-going conversation. Try using live chat on your website to see how light the flow becomes on other support channels.

4. 63% of U.S. adults use their smartphone several times a month to seek customer or sales support.
– Comm100 Top Trends in Customer Service

Smartphones have become the tool-of-choice for customers who need support. Be sure to make all of your support channels available to smartphone users.

5. 72% of global consumers now expect a customer service agent to already know their customer, product and service history when the customer makes contact.
–2016 Microsoft State of Global Customer Service Report

Your flow of customers increases every day and some of them could have contacted you before. Take advantage of a customer database where all the important information would be kept (contact details, issue history, etc.)

6. 70% of service teams say their strategic vision over the last 12–18 months has become more focused on creating deeper customer relationships.
– Salesforce Research Second Annual State of Service

Close interpersonal relationships with customers have become more important than ever before. Pay attention to the customers’ issue and take the time to get to know them as a person.

7. More than 50% of US online adults will abandon their online purchase if they cannot find a quick answer to their questions.
– Forrester Contact Centers for Customer Service Playbook for 2017

A lack of support can lead to a loss for business. A well-documented FAQ section on your website will help you avoid such situations. Base it on support statistics and keep improving it regularly.

8. Social media continues to grow as a communications channel with 77% of consumers saying they use these channels as much or more than they did one year ago.
– The Northridge Group State of Customer Service Experience 2016

Social media is becoming a much more important support channel due to its growing popularity.
Implementing social media into your support strategy will ensure that all customers are always able to reach you.

9. 44% of customers feel that it takes them, the customer, more effort than it does the company to resolve their customer service issue or question.
– Fonolo Top 10 Customer Service Trends for 2017

Provide support in a way that is effortless for your customer. Be attentive and always stay on point. And remember, a good attitude goes a long way.

10. 90% of the 5,000 consumers surveyed say they now expect brands and organizations to have a customer self-service offering.
– 2016 Microsoft State of Global Customer Service Report

Some of your customers are ready to resolve their issue by themselves if the solution is easily accessible. Implementing a “help” section for your product allows them to resolve the simpler, more common problems in a few simple clicks.

The post was originally published here.

While SMEs cannot afford to invest massive sums in mass marketing and mass communication campaigns in the same way as large groups, digital offers them a tremendous opportunity to promote their offer and activity to their customers And leads. Here are a few tips.

MAKE YOURSELF VISIBLE LOCALLY

Thanks to geolocation and services such as Google My Business or Google Maps among others, SMEs can optimize their referencing at the local level. Becoming visible on its market via the web (at the level of a city, a district, a department, a region) makes it possible to meet a strong demand from Internet users seeking practicality in their Purchases because just for the past year, the search engines counted no less than 150 billion local searches.

The SEO and SEA (Search Engine Advertising) and SMO (Search Media Optimization) are all marketing springs that give the opportunity for SMEs to make themselves visible locally on both the search engines on social networks.

BRINGING THE CUSTOMER TO HIMSELF

Inbound marketing – is a set of techniques and marketing materials whose purpose is to attract the attention of a potential customer to bring it spontaneously to the brand. Social networks, natural referencing, newsletter, emailing and other content marketing allow us to weave the web around the public of a company.

In this context, content marketing, in particular, offers the major advantage of attracting the interest of a commercial track by offering it what it seeks: useful, informative, entertaining, engaging, attractive content. Blog articles, infographics, videos, surveys, studies, book-blanks, webinars … today’s consumer has a particular appetite for varied and fresh content.

Inbound marketing in general and content marketing in particular thus give SMEs the possibility to play on equal terms with the biggest structures by spontaneously bringing the customer to them.

CREATE AND MANAGE A COMMUNITY

With the explosion of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn among other things, SMEs have found a field of a conquest of customers particularly performing.

Being present and active on social networks can be done in a more than reasonable budgetary proportions and with a real impact on the activity in terms of community involvement, retention, and visibility, Branding or lead detection.

The vitality inherent to social networks can also increase the performance of the actions carried out there: dissemination of an article in the blog, contests games, special offers, exceptional promotions…

INSPIRED BY LEADERS AND DIFFERENTIATED FROM THE COMPETITION

Benchmarking is not the prerogative of large and multinational companies, far from it! The technique of analyzing the key factors of marketing success of a particular brand proves to be particularly efficient for SMEs as well.

It is a question of conducting a competitive intelligence, of scrutinizing how the leaders or the big names of a sector of activity market their offer, how they address their clientele, what marketing springs they use in their Communication, their positioning. The idea can be to draw inspiration from these best practices to adapt them to its purpose, its offer, its size, its human resources, technical and of course financial.

In addition, this competitive analysis will allow us to distinguish ourselves from its direct competitors. Because by sifting through their marketing and communication, it will be possible to identify opportunities for differentiation because spaces are left free. A differentiation that can be done by the price, but also by the message (consumer benefit, product benefits …). The important thing is to opt for a clear positioning that sends an equally clear message to current and potential consumers.

Thanks to inbound marketing, local referencing, but also to community management or benchmarking, SMEs have a range of strategic weapons to use to conquer their clients. Our agency is there to accompany you on all of these issues.

Do you know what to say when a prospect asks you, “Why should I do business with you?” If you were about to talk about yourself and how great your offering is, you are dead in the water. Instead, learn a response that will take total control of the sale, while also setting you apart from the hordes of other salespeople out there.

The post “Why should I do business with you?” The 4-Step Approach Any Salesperson Should Use to Respond… appeared first on Sales Speaker Marc Wayshak.

Author: Cassidy Milder

It’s been an interesting past few years for email marketing. From those who (loudly) declared email dead, to those who were ready to defend it with their dying breath, email has certainly opened up divisions between marketers. Still, the vast majority of us probably take a more reasoned position toward email campaigns: email isn’t dead, it’s just going to have to get smarter. Well-positioned emails still show high performance compared to other channels in the marketer’s tool belt. In particular, marketers (marketing in a traditional demand generation model) who want to drive sales through emails now have the double challenge of casting an ever-wider net while understanding the intricate workings of their audience—seeing both the forest and the trees.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that people get a lot of emails every day, but seeing the numbers broken down really shows how much noise is out there. For instance, Internet Live Stats counts about 2.5 billion emails sent every second. This means that if you want to stand out, you’re going to need more than a well-crafted message. First, you’ll need to find the widest reach possible with a well-built database. Second, you’ll need to get to get to know your database—and everything that makes this particular audience tick. Lastly, don’t be afraid to take advantage of engagement! Once you learn these three key steps, you’ll be able to send emails that sweep recipients off their feet—or at least get them to read past the subject line.

Cast a Wider Net—But Keep Your True Blue Subscribers Front-and-Center

A lot of percentages go into email communication: the percentage of opens, click-throughs, and—most importantly—what percent converts. Naturally, those numbers get smaller and smaller as you get closer to achieving ROI, so you need to make sure you’re sending to a large enough database that by the time you get to final conversion, you’re still seeing the results you want. And that means growing your email list to get those coveted percentages.

There are a lot of ways to build up your audience—it’s just a matter of determining the best methods for your business. You can use social media to ask for email subscribers, use a blog or other content to capture email addresses or use any of a plethora of lead capture platforms that integrate with your engagement platform, such as SumoMe or Justuno. The important thing is that you’re finding subscribers who are interested in your business and opt-in to receiving emails from you. In fact, if your list has gone stale, an opt-in campaign—together with clever messaging—can act like a fine-toothed comb for your database. Having an audience that chooses to opt-in means higher percentages across the board—with fewer unsubscribes and spam complaints! 

The Best Things in Life Take Time to Develop; Your Database Is No Different

We tend to hear about the one or two stories where marketers were able to capture lightning in a bottle, but most marketing campaigns rely on careful testing and thoughtful adjustments. There’s even ample evidence that data science and progressive profiling will heavily play into email campaigns over the next few years, especially as home automation devices like Echo and Google Home start to capture more and more behavioral data.

Testing with different samples and subsets of your subscribers should become more important than ever, which means you’ll need to be patient and nurture your database in order to see the results you want. It also means that you’ll need to take care not to rely too heavily on hunches or assumptions if they’re not backed by A/B testing. For instance, just because someone’s purchases or their browsing history correlates to home buying doesn’t mean that they’re getting ready to sell. You can only truly learn the intricacies of this audience through your own communication with them.

This is your time to test the waters and see what types of content and calls-to-action (CTAs) work with your new audience. It’s often helpful to warm up your audience with content and bonus offers before asking for your conversion. Your audience should feel like they’re gaining value from your emails. If you can capture their attention with top-of-the-funnel material, you’ll gain their trust (and boost open and click-through percentages!).

Get to Know the Most Engaged Members of Your Audience

Every concert audience comes to a show armed with different expectations: from the avid fan who has all of the albums to the significant other who just got dragged along with their partner. Your database is no different: some members are just more into your content than others. But in order for your emails to accrue value, you must be able to identify and empathize with the needs of your email VIPs. Who’s opening your messages, downloading your content, or even contacting you directly?

Drilling down into these kinds of details offers a more well-formed definition of your ideal client, and it lets you target them with stronger CTAs. Once you’ve gotten them to subscribe and earned their trust with top-of-the-funnel content, they’ll finally be ready to convert—and you can watch this all unfold right from your engagement platform. When you see someone fall into this sweet spot, you can start segmenting them for more direct asks, which all translates to ROI for your company. That will certainly breathe life into your marketing campaigns!

Is email still performing for you? How are you ensuring that email keeps pace with your audience expectations? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

---

3 Steps for Successful Email Marketing Campaigns in a “Post-Email” World was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 3 Steps for Successful Email Marketing Campaigns in a “Post-Email” World appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Working in digital marketing keeps you fairly up to date on many of the top trending topics in the worlds of media and technology. Sometimes, a new topic or buzzword will bubble up and take hold for a while before eventually fizzing out without much of a real-world impact. (Google Glass, anyone?) Other times, a trend will have real staying power. These are the instances that create wholly new industries and transform existing ones.

One trend that figures to have this kind of impact is artificial intelligence (AI). At its core, AI can be defined as the ability of machines to learn in a way that mimics human intelligence. AI has been a major part of the cultural zeitgeist for some time now, appearing repeatedly in serious research and science fiction alike.

Now, that theoretical relevance is almost ready to translate into real world applications. Consumer data firm Forrester recently posited that by 2025, A.I. technology will replace 7% of U.S. jobs. As you can see, these are dramatically powerful technologies. Let’s take a look at a few industries that will be most notably affected.

Customer Service

The customer service industry has been working on some tried-and-true maxims for at least a century. We’ve all heard them.

The customer is always right.

Service is not what you do, but who you are.

These ideas, despite becoming somewhat clichéd over the years, still hold merit. Treating your customers with genuine respect and working hard to resolve their issues will never go out of style. The technologies that facilitate those transactions, however, are in constant flux. As it stands today, the typical phone call to a customer service department still represents a pretty frustrating experience.

In many cases, businesses aren’t able to avoid those frustrating elements because of purely logistical concerns. They can only afford to employ so many service representatives, which in turn leads to wait times and infuriating, “Due to unexpectedly high call volume” messages. If a large percentage of those calls-in-waiting can be handled by an AI-powered chatbot, that would eliminate a great deal of wait time.

Now, it should be noted that the term “AI-powered customer service” won’t be warmly welcomed by many who’ve had bad experience with other automated service procedures. After so much time spent angered by the lack of an available human representative, it may seem counterintuitive for the solution to come in the form of an algorithm.

Nevertheless, that figures to be the case. However, the new age chatbots will make those antiquated phone button menus seem like the distant past. AI may still have a long way to go in terms of emotional intelligence, but its advances in the arena of common sense – perhaps the most important attribute for any human or bot working in customer service – have been dramatic.

This common sense quotient is what will separates the bots of tomorrow from those of yesterday: quickly determine whether a customer’s problem is simple enough for you to fix, and immediately either execute the solution or deliver them to a human representative who can. As soon as that simple order of operations can be established, at scale, we’ll start to see the customer service industry transformed at the (robotic) hands of artificial intelligence.

Ecommerce

For many consumers, the most important aspect of the rise of ecommerce has been the convenience. No longer forced to brave long lines at department stores, we can simply sit at home and spend to our hearts’ consent on sites like Amazon and eBay. New developments like one-click shopping and same-day shipping have ramped up the ease and convenience for consumers even further.

For brands and marketers, though, the ecommerce revolution provided new avenues for customer relationship management, data accumulation, and virtual buying assistants. These help businesses learn more about their customer base and what actions they can take to make them come back and buy again.

Artificial intelligence plays a major role in ecommerce because all that data requires immense computing power to get real value out of.

Also, AI-powered assistants can help accelerate the buyer’s journey in exciting new ways. For example, if you are considering purchasing tickets for a flight to San Francisco on a certain date in July, you may have quite the process to go through before actually pulling the trigger. First, you should be constantly checking prices across different airlines.

Plus, minor differences in supply and demand, day of the week (both of purchase and departure), and seating preference can have impact the eventual ticket price. Imagine, now, if a virtual assistant could scan travel sites constantly while you are going about your day. Then, when fares dip below a pre-chosen price point for the days you’d like to travel on, your assistant can immediately send you a notification. Or, if you prefer, it can go ahead and make the purchase right away.

So, going back to the history of ecommerce and its concurrent impacts on brands and consumers, AI will be a catalyst for progress on both sides of the coin. On the one hand, it can help consumers go from the spark of an idea to a convenient purchase in unprecedentedly short time. On the other, it will help brands learn so much more about its audience and how they prefer to buy.

Transportation

Self driving cars have been a part of the cultural lexicon for some time now.

While there are still definite hurdles for the budding industry to clear before it truly transforms our lives, the signs of change are already visible. The transportation industry is extremely wide-reaching, from public services like trains and buses to private taxi and rideshare companies like Uber and Lyft. In all cases, AI-powered self-driving cars will revolutionize the way people get from place to place.

In fact, in recent months it has become clear that those private companies consider AI a vital part of their business models, and have for some time now. Google and Uber, for instance, are in the beginning stages of a court battle over patents and intellectual property.

One of the most important questions facing the next few generations will be energy usage and climate change. Self-driving transportation – for both private vehicles and public transport – could be a major factor in finding a solution. These technologies could help us become far more efficient as a society and streamline many of our daily routines into much more sustainable ones.

In fact, Morgan Stanley has forecasted that self-driving vehicles could save the U.S. $1.3 trillion yearly between 2035 and 2050. A brave new world, indeed.

Ultimately, artificial technology will enter our lives at whatever speed we are ready to receive it. It’s become increasingly clear that the algorithmic capabilities are already approaching, and many important industries (including the three listed above) figure to be dramatically transformed as a result. The hope, as always, is that the new developments will change our lives in smooth, seamless ways, as opposed to jarring ones. Either way, the writing (or, we should say, the algorithm) is on the wall.

10 useful tips for writing copy for businesses to increase the conversion rate of your website

B2B copywriting is a different ball game to B2C copy, but a lot of the same principles apply. If you're writing to appeal to other businesses, then you need to look into creating a cohesive strategy that really brings in the business. If you're looking to improve your ROI, here 10 tips that will get you started.

1. Review your analytics

Look at what's already on your website. What's the data that people are returning to again and again? What pages aren't being visited? You can get a great idea of what other businesses want by looking at your analytics. From this data, you can create a new strategy to draw them in.

2. Avoid the hard sell

The hard sell may have worked once upon a time, but nowadays it just doesn't fly. No one wants to be told that they must buy your product. Instead, you need to convince them. Focus on how your product can benefit them, and why they should consider using it. You don't have to go too softly, but don't force your product on the reader.

3. Don't overload the reader

Obviously, you're proud of your product and want everyone to know just how great it is. However, resist the temptation to list everything that you get with your product. Readers can become overwhelmed, and then they can't decide on whether they want your product or not. You want to give them enough so they can see it's a good idea to buy, but then make them come to you for the fine details.

4. Make your Call To Action clear

Be clear on what you want the reader to do once they've read your copy. You need to show them what to do next, in an obvious and meaningful way. For example, if you want them to sign up for a newsletter, don't put the link all the way down at the bottom in a tiny font. Create a large, attention grabbing button that says 'Sign up now!' The reader can't be in any doubt what they need to do next. According to Michael Aagaard’s study, the answer lies in the messaging. “Order” emphasizes what you have to do – not what you’re going to receive. Whereas “Get” emphasizes what you’re going to receive – rather than what you have to do to get it. In other words, the treatment copy conveys value.

5. Be professional in your tone

When writing for customers you probably take on a lighter tone, drawing them in by being friendly towards them. Writing for B2B conversion though, you need to be more professional in your tone. That's because your tone will represent your commitment to the project at hand. You'll also be writing for senior executives, who will look at your writing as a representation of your business as a whole.

6. Think hard about your headline

Your headline, as with all copy, is something that will draw the reader in and get them interested in your product. When writing for the B2B audience, remember that more bombastic headlines won't work here. You're looking to meet a need that a business has. Rather than using a headline like 'You Won't Believe How This Product Can Help Your Business!' you should write 'How This Product Can Help Anyone In The Textiles Industry'. Give them a headline that addresses a specific need, and answers that need.

7. Your homepage needs to be perfect

If a reader lands on your homepage, they need to be able to find what they need instantly. If they can't find it, then they'll click away as they don't have the time to sift through your site to get to the page they need.

Look at what your site offers, and make it easy for readers to get what they want. For example, if your business sells writing services, break the page up into the sections that readers will want. Include links for 'prices', 'services', and 'discounts'. Using your analytics from earlier will help you decide what needs to be front and center.

8. Know your client

Of course, just as with writing for customers, you need to know what your client wants from you. You know what you sell, but is it what the client wants? For example, you may sell a cleaning service, so they'll want a fast, thorough service from you that works around the people in their office. How can you meet that need?

9. Learn the language your target audience uses

You shouldn't fill your posts full of jargon, but knowing what language your audience uses is very helpful. If you use it in your posts, then you show the reader that you've done your research. They're more likely to listen to you if it's clear that you know your stuff.

10. Use helpful online tools

If there are tools at your disposal, there's no reason why you shouldn't use them. As well as the well-known Grammarly and Byword there are plenty of other helpful tools you can use when writing your B2B copy. Headline Analyzer is useful to get the lowdown on your chosen headline. It'll give you a range of stats so you can see just how effective it will be. Easy Word Count will give you quick and accurate word count of any text you paste into it. This is a good way of tracking how long your posts are getting.

With these tips, you can get the readers in and convert them with much less effort. It just takes some tweaks to your current writing style. Give it a try, and you'll see just what a difference these tips can make to your business.

When it comes to promotional emails, you don’t just want to be – you know – that guy.

We all know this guy from somewhere. He’s the loudmouth who won’t stop talking. It’s not as though he’s chattering away about interesting topics (that would be awesome), but instead uses two thumbs to point at himself continuously saying, “Who’s got something important to say?!”

“This guy!” he responds, to his own question. If he’s not self-promoting his latest vacation, it’s some questionably hilarious experience at the Starbucks around the corner. Talk about tiresome and boring.

Yes, you want to avoid embodying this obnoxious email personality. Conversations, like brand relationships, will tolerate some promotion, but they should be rooted in meaningful exchanges between both parties. Simply, customers won’t hang around if they’re being sold all the time.

The best promotional emails are targeted calls-to-action that are effective at driving revenues and engagement with your brand. Your job as a marketer is to regulate the frequency, creativity, and impact of your messages relative to your marketing messages.

So let’s discuss how to succeed with promotional email marketing. Read on to see promotional email samples and winning campaign case studies from leading consumer brands.

We’ll also review industry statistics that showcase the power of promotional emails when used by savvy marketers. By the end of this post, you’ll understand how and why a bit of promotion – at the right time and place – can deliver engagement and revenues in a way that your customers appreciate every time.

What is Promotional Email Marketing?

Promotional email marketing is sending a message that’s focused on driving a purchase or conversion. These emails are either triggered or sent manually, but the hallmark is a clear call-to-action in order to convince viewers to take the desired action. These messages are part of a campaign aimed at generating revenue and helping customers move forward with your brand.

The best promotional emails drive the recipient to take immediate action. All things considered, the copy and design of promotional emails move the reader quickly through a persuasive process towards the end, whether that’s a sale, a download, registration, or sign-up. Most often, these are presented within a specific timeframe.

If you’re hooking the reader with an appealing, valuable idea that speaks genuinely about your brand, you’re on the right path. For example, limited-time-only events. But be cautious about the frequency of your promotional messages. Sending too many can erode consumer engagement and retention, as overwhelming an inbox is simply annoying.

Once a week, or even twice a month, is a better rate of delivery. This way you avoid spamming and harassing people’s inboxes. Setting a reasonable delivery schedule keeps your brand in mind, yet doesn’t consistently undercut the value of your product or service. These sparse emails are a treat by comparison, part of a rewarding brand experience. Less is more with promotional email.

Promotional emails are effective because:

• They’re affordable. Emails are cheap and only become cheaper the more you send. According to DMA, email marketing has an ROI of 3800%

• They’re targeted. Emails let you address customers by name, design messaging to meet their needs, and deliver whatever type of promotion suits you. Segmented and targeted emails generate 58% of all revenue, says the DMA report.

• They’re engaging. Emails allow you to engage and develop a 1:1 relationship with customers. According to eConsultancy, 74% of marketers say that targeted personalization increases customer engagement.

• They’re trackable. Emails can be connected to analytics, which shows the number of opens, clicks, and other engagement stats. This way you know what’s performing or needs further optimization. Email subscribers are 3x more likely to share your content via social media than visitors from other sources, according to QuickSprout.

• They’re far-reaching. Email is entirely digital and everyone has one, if not multiple, email accounts where you can reach them – even on mobile devices. About 53% of emails are opened on mobile devices, says Campaign Monitor.

• They’re flexible. Email allows you to send text, links, pictures, and video unlike any other. If you’re creative, emails can become a unique aspect of your brand experience that consumers look forward to instead of avoiding or deleting. Email marketing drives more conversions than any other marketing channel, including search and social, according to Monetate.

Promotional Email Case Study – Zachys

(Source)

Zachys is a New York wine merchant that wanted to bring wine time online with a promotional email campaign. Aside from the “live sales” auctions, of which the merchant runs a handful throughout the year, the online retail website is their only sales channel beside the one brick and mortar. Incoming e-commerce director, Victor Castro, couldn’t palate how the online presence was just an afterthought to in-store sales.

The challenge was managing and marketing the content on the website and driving sales across the web store. There was huge potential, he said, with “a very robust set of low-hanging fruit across all different channels — with probably email being one of the most important ones, in terms of our site and an ability to execute quickly.”

The campaign at hand was to overhaul the email program, then use email to improve retention and sales. Castro saw that trigger programs based on customer behavior “would be the next big thing that we could do to optimize that communication channel and increase our brand recognition … to be top of mind for customers looking to purchase wine.” However, the initial conversion rates on promotional emails fell flat, considering a customer lifecycle from web awareness to purchase being around 90 days.

This was because their triggers were lacking relevant customer data. But after some time collecting customer behavior onsite, Zachys was able to get a full view of customer behavior around wine. This meant developing beyond just what type of, say Malbecs, a customer was looking for – but also segmented by region, critic score, and price point.

The objective was to reach customers with triggered promotional emails while Zachys was still on their mind. The first email went out within an hour of the website action. The next behavioral promotional email went out 23 hours after the action. The thought here was if “they have time to shop at this specific day part today, they will have probably the same time to shop the next day,” said Castro.

A cart abandonment campaign of two emails was also added, the first more generic and the next being personalized to address specific items in-cart. “We have great performance on that program. I want to say it’s about a 30% conversion on it between the two emails. And we think that with a third email we can probably capture another 10% or so if we execute it properly,” he said. In the end, Zachys came to understand that promotional emails across the shopping experience were an effective way to drive sales.

“One of our main takeaways was the recognition that timing and messaging matter as much as product and relevancy in our industry as it pertains to email,” said Castro.

Results:

• Since Castro came on in 2013, e-commerce has grown 53% and now represents a 23% share of Zachys revenue
• Cart abandon emails saw a 65% open rate, 14% click-through rate, and $16 revenue per email
• Browse abandonment emails saw a 64% open rate, 10% CTR, and a $6 RPE
• Search abandonment emails saw a 57% open rate, 10% CTR and a $5 RPE

Promotional Email Case Study – Dannon

(Source)

Dannon sought to acquire new customers while re-engaging inactive email subscribers with their promotional email campaign. Using the Activia email club database, the campaign would drive awareness and traffic with a combination of email and social sharing.

The challenge was to reach beyond their list and drive awareness with new consumers for in-store purchases.Customer acquisition was the key goal through campaign social sharing so they could grow their CRM database. The last essential piece was re-engaging inactive users in the database.

Thix promotional email example would be delivered throughout a one-month period and utilize rewards-sharing software to facilitate engagement. The goal was to provide inactive database users with a $1.00 discount coupon for a 4-pack of Activia yogurt. To boost the appeal of the offer, these users were incentivized to share across social channels to receive another promotional offer, $1.50 off the same product. Both sharing behavior and customer loyalty were the key metrics to watch.

At the end of the month-long promotion, data showed top-performing retail locations and redemption rates. This was superb, as it allowed marketers to segment the database and assisted with future targeted promotional email campaigns. Dannon’s coupon-sharing promotion was an effective cross-channel program for driving sales and awareness while developing a deeper understanding of customer behavior.

The Results:

• 30,000 additional customers in the database
• 70%+ promotional traffic from new customers
• 250% increase in traffic to promotion
• 61% redemptorist for higher-value offer
• 40,000 shares on social media
• 22,000 redemptions
• 90% of new customers are Dannon email club subscribers
• 5% of current inactive database re-engaged

Promotional Email Case Study – Doggyloot

(Source)

A flash sale site for canine lovers, Doggyloot leverages shopper’s pets to fill out their customer profile. Instead of focusing on shopper data, the marketing team at Doggyloot segments and personalizes promotional email based upon “doggy data.” Namely, the size of the dog. For example, the owner of a Chihuahua receives different product promotions than the Greyhound owner.

“We can send a customized email for large dogs to a customer, which should have a better conversion rate because it’s more relevant.”

— Jeff Eckerling, CEO, Doggyloot

The marketing starts by collecting “doggy data” on the website. Visitors are prompted to answer “How big are your dogs?” when they land. The next step: an email address. Visitors are barred from seeing the flash sales until they register this information. Not your average, but effective nonetheless, as users who responded to surveys didn’t seem to mind the offer-gating in order to access discounted prices.

The challenge with segmenting came from getting users to provide more in-depth doggy data. “We knew if customers gave us more relevant information, we could deliver better products to them at the right time,” said Eckerling. The team added a “My Dogs” page to the user profile, complete with pet birthday, gender, size, breed, and name.

The email campaign started by offering the subscriber a $5 credit to share a dog birthday. The CTAs brought subscribers to the My Dogs page. Learning more about customers would enable Doggyloot to provide better sales, yes, but also offer more targeted promotions. The marketing team segmented the email list by size, as in small dogs, medium, and large. After all, a terrier and a rottweiler want for a bone of a different size.

Next came the automated email for dog birthdays (dog birthday cake anyone?). Owners were eager to spoil their pets at this relevant touch point. Cart abandon promotional emails were key as well, especially incentivized and time-sensitive for the flash site. An hour after leaving the site, the triggered email would arrive, declaring their product “almost sold out.” To make the cart conversion, each email was fitted with the product image and a clear, action-oriented CTA.

The Results:

• A 28% open rate for happy birthday emails
• A 750% increase in clickthrough rate on triggered happy birthday emails
• A 16% contribution to daily total revenue
• A 10% open rate for emails targeting large dog owners
• A 410% higher than average click through rate for promotional email sent to large dog owners
• A 13% contribution to daily total revenue

The Last Word

Email promotions reach subscribers in a targeted way in a personal space. This means that a data-driven promotional email campaign is effective if crafted with persuasive copy and linear calls-to-action. As we’ve seen through these promotional email examples, the best promotional emails are always relevant to the customer segment.

Brands can use triggered messaging to drive engagement, product sales and activate inactive customers. The first step is developing a clear view of the customer, using the existing customer database and their profile details (purchase, website, and email activity)

Next, design a visually appealing email with concise copy that drives action. Lastly, segment your email messages with personalized attributes so your messaging is relevant to your customer and fits the context of their shopping experience.

Ah—inbound links. Valuable. Coveted. Necessary. Not only do they provide validation that your content is good (even if it is internal validation), but inbound links also provide a signal to Google that your site is authoritative, which makes your SEO rankings soar.

No wonder there are entire corners of the web dedicated to getting inbound links (also known as “backlinks”) to your site. Here are four out-of-the-box ways you can get going on this valuable tactic:

#1: Create content that practically screams “link to me”

The easiest way to get inbound links is to create content that people love to share. No extra work required!

Round-ups, lists of resources, and other in-depth curation of data frequently fit the bill. Round-ups that feature other companies will naturally lend themselves to that company linking to the post. Resource lists similarly draw attention to the companies you feature. Other easily shareable ideas are outlined in this great post on our blog from last January, “9 Different Blog Post Types and How to Use Them.”

While a primary goal of an expert interview series on your blog might be drawing an audience, a secondary goal might be getting each expert to link to his or her interview from your site (and promote on social media!).

Neil Patel recommends creating content around original research in his blog post “5 Ways to Amplify the Reach of Your Content Without Spending a Dime.” He says: “After all, the first step to amplifying your reach is to create content people are genuinely interested in.

This is a natural catalyst for shares and links. One type of content in particular that kills it is content that includes original research. By this I mean statistics, graphs, charts, and other forms of data that provide readers with in-depth insight on a topic.”

Another type of content that people love to share and link to is anything funny or outrageous. Take, for example, the proliferation of April Fools’ Day business jokes and the ensuing round-up posts such as AdWeek’s “April Fools’ Day 2017: Our Roundup of All the Best Brand Hoaxes.” Do something funny—people will link to you. Inbound-link gold!

#2: Provide value and ask for a link in return

Emailing someone out of the blue and asking for a link will get you a-whole-lotta-nowhere-fast. Enough spammers/black-hat SEO enthusiasts have gone this route, and people just tune them out.

So how do you get someone’s attention? By giving them something of value. Everyone likes getting help, and if you do a good job, he or she might be open to a small request.

“The Most Creative Link Building Post Ever” by Jon Cooper at PointBlankSEO details some of the most creative tactics that professionals have used to get an inbound link. One story talks about trading an inbound link for the creation of a new blog header (which was then sourced from Fiverr). Using that same idea in the B2B realm might evolve to participating on a panel with one of your partners or providing a reference for a software company you do business with in exchange for a link.

Links from .edu domains are the creme de la creme for link-building marketers. This is because Google sees .edu websites as having high domain authority. Some ideas to get these coveted links by trading something of value:

• Offer to give a guest lecture to a business class and have the syllabus link to your website.
• If you have some funds, set up a scholarship and promote it through the school.
• Help the local business club put together an event or a new website.
• More ideas by Neil Patel in his post: “8 Unusual Link Building Strategies That’ll Catapult Your Rankings.”

Another version of this method is outlined by Brian Dean in his excellent blog post “17 Untapped Backlink Sources.” You start by Googling resource lists in your target market such as “dog sitting” + “resource page” or “dog sitting” + “recommended websites.” Once you’ve found a few websites that list sites (such as yours) that you want to target, go to Step 2.

From Brian: “Now you COULD email them and just ask for a link. But I’ve found that begging doesn’t work very well. Instead, give the site owner a hand by letting him know about any broken links that you happen to find. You can easily find the broken links on any page. Just use the nifty Chrome Extension Check My Links.”

Once you have a list of broken links on the resource page, write a nice email to the webmaster, letting him or her know about the broken links (with a list of the ones you found) and conclude with something friendly such as Brian’s recommendation: “Oh, and I have a website, mysite.com, that also regularly posts quality content related to whatever. If you think so too, feel free to post a link to it on your resources page. Either way, I hope this helps and keep up the good work!”

#3: Write, write, and write

Inbound marketers are looking for content. They know that content drives their machine and will take all they can get. So what does that mean for you, the inbound-link-craving enthusiast? You can be the one to provide that content (and earn a backlink in return)!

One form this might take is finding opportunities to guest post on other blogs related to your industry. You could do a Google search for “topic” + “guest post” or ask customers/leads/colleagues what blogs they frequently read in your topic arena. Then reach out and pitch your idea!

If you have some more free time to invest, another methodology suggested in “101 Ways to Get Quality Backlinks To Your Blog in 2017” by ShoutMELoud is to find broken links on high-quality sites related to your industry. Depending on the link and topic, you may already have content that fits perfectly, or you may have to create something from scratch. Then email the website owner, let him or her know the link is broken and that you just so happen to have an article that might work as a replacement!

#4: Invest in PR

Not sure how “out of the box” this suggestion is, but it’s an extremely powerful way to get high-quality inbound links to your website—and that is through public relations.

On the informal side, articles such as “Inbound Link Building 101: 33 White Hat Ways to Build Backlinks for SEO” by Corey Northcutt at HubSpot suggest HARO (Help A Reporter Out), which sends out alerts when reporters are looking for sources to quote on a variety of topics. If you are timely and relevant, you could be quoted in publications ranging from the obscure to the behemoth (and get a link to your website).

However, partnering with a strategic PR firm will get inbound-link-minded marketers much further along on their journey. A quality PR firm can get your company mentioned in more high-quality publications faster than you can. Trust me.

Bonus (easy) tip: Ask people who mention your company to add a link

This suggestion also comes from Brian Dean. Simply set up a Google Alert (or other service) to notify you when someone mentions your company. Then when you get an alert, check and see if a link to your website is included. If not, jet the author an email and ask if he or she will add one!

—

Inbound links can skyrocket your inbound marketing and traffic generation efforts. Do you have any other out-of-the-box ways through which you’ve gotten backlinks? Share in the comments!

How do you measure ROI in storytelling? Rhiannon Thompson, Director at Remarkable Content, puts the case for A/B testing.

The ultimate goal at the very heart of a content strategy is to create an action. That may be a sales purchase, a registration, a subscription, a payment, a donation or specifically a behaviour change. We don’t ‘do-what-we-do’ just to count industry metrics and prepare glossy reports.

Of course metrics and reports have their place, more of that later, but ultimately we create great content that not only demands to be shared but which also has a very real and direct commercial impact.

Storytelling is as old as time; we can all remember, regardless of our age, a story that we fell in love with as a child and that still resonates with us today. Be that a make-believe story from grandpa, a favourite learn to read book or a song with profound lyrics that meant so much to the younger you. The reason these stories remain close to you is possibly down to the fact that they have the perfect mix of ingredients. They are funny or emotive, informative or useful and ultimately they connect with you personally.

Now, we recognise that having an effective storytelling strategy may not always generate quick conversions, but it can certainly illustrate why a consumer should invest in your product instead of a competitor’s.

Storytelling, done properly — whether that’s generating your own brand story or embracing influencers to sing your praises — is a powerful top-of-funnel awareness tactic. It can generate the levels of engagement and brand affinity that translate to action, maybe not immediately, but over time.

Goals and business objectives need to be scoped out at the beginning of a campaign. Once they are confirmed, then the objectives can define the metrics by which the performance of the campaign will be measured. There isn’t really a right or wrong set of criteria, what matters is that the agreed metrics are adhered to

Extraordinary stories

The way in which we tell our client’s stories, or which our client’s stories are told by advocates, has evolved. So, too has the way in which we measure success. Simple publishing has gone, we know that today’s audiences are smarter than ever and can see right through self-serving content. However, by telling an entertaining story, we can endear brands to customers and turn fans into influencers.

As the industry continues to evolve at pace, and more and more players enter the ‘content’ arena, the issues surrounding ROI, KPIs and M&E (and many other acronyms) remain at the forefront of client comms. Efficiencies in delivery and a sole focus on commercial outcomes are essential to sustain client relationships.

It is only by working as a business partner, as a team, which ensures that we know the commercial impact of our activity in real-time. Using the tools available to us tells part of the story, but with client intelligence and bottom line metrics combined we are able to adopt an agile approach to execution.

Please stop looking at the glossy monthly reports that you and your team spend large amounts of time compiling. It’s important to examine key metrics on a more frequent basis, if your only interaction with metrics is on a monthly basis, you most likely will be reacting to the data at a point when you can no longer do much about it.

Daily analysis may be too often, weekly would be recommended, but each brand and business is different so make sure you find the right balance. It’s also critical not to compare metrics such as page views or unique visits month over month. Look at year on year instead as seasonal spikes can then be spotted e.g. summer holidays.

The importance of A/B testing

Ultimately the elimination of guesswork is the key to ensuring all content delivers great commercial results. The only way to know what works is to test and refine. A/B testing on content doesn’t have to cost the earth, just making small tweaks to content, or the posting schedule, can deliver improved results.

Assumptions about the best days for posting, the right call-to-action, the most effective tone can hurt results if you haven’t really tested for effectiveness.

Simple tests can deliver great impact:

• Try publishing more (as long as the content abides by your strategy)
• Shake up scheduling – do you post on evening and weekends? When is your audience most active?
• Use the right types of content – video for brand awareness = viral?; case studies/successes = sales?; value-add content = advocacy from current customers?
• Attract attention – be bold with your headlines, use emotional and personal pull
• Is your content long enough or short enough? Try a variety of content lengths
• Images – subjective, but when used right they set the tone, always use captions to bring the image into the story. Posts with images get more clicks, re-shares and engagement.

There is no right or wrong answer to what brands should measure against as long as the metrics are intrinsically linked to clearly defined business objectives and trackable goals. There isn’t just one solution for the best metric; objectives will define the metrics that are most suitable be that engagement, volume, sentiment or more importantly, action. The crucial point is to agree those goals at the start of the campaign so the correct parameters are adopted in order to measure effectiveness consistently throughout.

Access the full report here.

The more valuable you are to the business, the less valuable your business will be.

Ideally, as the business owner, you should be 100% replaceable. Unfortunately, many business owners try to make themselves irreplaceable without being aware that making themselves irreplaceable not only decreases the value of their business but also makes it much harder to sell.

The easiest businesses to sell have a wide universe of target buyers can be relocated anywhere in the U.S., and do not require its operator to have highly specialized skill sets.

Imagine you are selling your business, and the buyer must have highly specialized or unique skills to operate your business. Imagine further that only one in 1,000 has this unique combination of skills, abilities and talents. How hard do you think it would be to find and persuade this person to buy your business?

If the skills needed to operate your business are not easily found in groups of people who can be readily identified and targeted, selling your business will be harder. If running your business requires a rare blend of soft skills or personal attributes, finding a buyer will be more challenging. Hard skills are simpler to target because most of the groups of people who possess these skills have already been corralled in some form — for example, engineers would be easy to target through trade publications.

Hard skills are simpler to target because most of the groups of people who possess these skills have already been corralled in some form — for example, engineers would be easy to target through trade publications.

For this reason, absentee-owned businesses are worth much more than an owner-operated business.

Most absentee-owned businesses are successfully run by a team of core employees or a management team, and assuming the employees will stay after the sale, then nearly anyone is qualified to purchase the business from an operational standpoint.

Streamlining your business is not a weekend job. Doing this properly may take you several years; however, once you’ve implemented these steps, your skills as an entrepreneur and manager will increase, and your business will be much more valuable as a result.

As you streamline your business and make yourself replaceable, you will build a business that is inherently more scalable. This scalability will lay the groundwork for you to continue increasing the value of your business or will make your business much easier to sell.

Prerequisite 1 – Recognize the importance of marketing in scaling your business

Unfortunately, we run into a lot of business owners who have spent years streamlining their business while neglecting spending time marketing their business to improve its value. As a result of a lack of investment in the marketing functions in the business, they lack the revenue to pay competent employees to help them with the streamlining processes.

By focusing on marketing and growing your company, you will help grow revenues that will afford you the opportunity to hire a team to help you in scaling your business. Marketing your business properly, like running other functions in your business such as HR or finance, requires building systems.

Prerequisite 2 – Learn to manage yourself before managing others

One cannot manage others without learning to manage oneself. Managing yourself requires four things:

1. Learning new skills and improving existing skill sets (e.g., management, time management, sales, marketing, hiring, etc.)
2. Setting clear goals based on a sound strategy and then consistently staying focused on those goals
3. Time management skills
4. Energy management skills
5. Setting priorities based on the big picture

Goal setting, time management and energy management skills can be learned just like any other skill. Fortunately, learning is also a skill that can be developed. Learning is the master skill that allows you to master all other skills. The essence of gaining knowledge is to use it. The goal is to learn and create change in your life.

Here’s how you should streamline your business: build, document and automate

To streamline your business, you have to:

1. Build a strong team of core employees or management team. (‘Scaling Up’ and ‘Carrots and Sticks Don’t Work’).
2. Build systems into your business and document your operations.
3. Automate processes in your business using technology or other systems.

These methods of streamlining your business involve using either human talent or technology. However, don’t make the mistake of trying to rely solely on either people or technology. Most businesses must use both.

Option 1 – Build a strong team of core employees or a management team

Streamlining a business, whether through technology or people, takes an enormous amount of time. Some entrepreneurs are not good managers and are not able to successfully do this. That is why their companies never grow from a small company to a mid-sized business and beyond. Management is a skill that is difficult to learn, but again, if you are a proficient learner, you can improve your skills in less than one year of intense and focused practice.

If you can build a strong team, they can help you build systems and automate processes in your business. Remember that building a management team or a team of core employees starts with hiring the right people and learning how to manage yourself first.

Option 2 – Build systems and document operations

Building systems —processes, procedures and policies within your company — and documenting operations are almost impossible to do solo and are much easier to do with the help of a team. Involve your team in building systems and documenting the processes in your business. Be sure to hire employees who are willing to help you build systems (see ‘Carrots & Sticks Don’t Work’ and ‘How to Hire A-Players‘).

A lot of employees are reluctant to build systems because they do not want to make themselves replaceable. Yes, employees can be as guilty as you in trying to make themselves irreplaceable — if you allow them to. Ironically, an employee who can build systems is irreplaceable, and a rare employee at that. It is important to make your employees understand that their initiatives in helping you build systems will, in fact, make them more valuable to the business.

Run a lean business (see “Running Lean”), iterate fast, hire a strong first team, build and improve systems over time, and have your team help you document your operations.

Option 3 – Automate processes using technology or other systems

Have your management team or team of core employees do this for you.They should understand that their job is not to work in the business as ‘technicians,’ but rather on the business as ‘entrepreneurs’, as what Michael Gerber explained in his book, “The E-Myth.”

Buyers question sellers' motivations. There's nothing we can do about that. 

What we can control is our intent. We can check our motivations to sell and make sure we're not legitimizing our buyers' doubts.  

Too often, salespeople don't understand the buyer's world or needs, and don't know to communicate real value. But whose fault is it? The sellers'? They often get the blame, but it might well lie with Marketing... Read the full article at MarketingProfs

With holiday shoppers continuing to purchase gifts earlier and earlier every year, if you’re an e-commerce brand, you must start planning your holiday advertising spend months in advance.

In a survey we conducted last year, almost a quarter of brands told us that they begin planning their holiday advertising between January and June. A full 54% have their planning rolling no later than August.

Like these early birds, wouldn’t you want to go into the craziness of the holiday shopping season with a set plan and guide to ensure you succeed?

It makes sense to begin the process of planning your holiday advertising budget now.

Starting now gives you time to test, analyze, and incorporate your learnings and data so that your holiday advertising is as successful as possible.

Not to mention the highly competitive Q4 basically requires you to scale your ad spend with the marketplace primed with buyers. Since you’re going to be investing more money, don’t you want to make sure you’re spending it as effectively as possible?

I thought so. That’s why we’ve put together a guide on how to prepare, test, and budget so that your 2017 holiday season brings in your highest ROAS yet.

STOP BEING SCARED TO SCALE

Let’s start this discussion by dispelling the idea that scaling spend in Q4 is scary. You may be thinking, “Why would I WANT to scale my advertising? Doesn’t that mean spending more money?”

If we’re going off of semantics, then yes, scaling does mean you’ll spend more money. But scaling during the holidays is the way to drive real, profitable growth and expand your customer base that perpetuates throughout the other 10 months of the year.

Plus, scaling for the holidays is a necessity due to the massive amounts of competition that enter the marketplace. And unless you’re willing to risk throwing away money, you’ll want to make sure you’re scaling strategically. This will ensure that you can continue meeting your KPIs while also driving growth and increasing your bottom line.

That’s why we’re here to lay out a four step strategy on how to test and budget so that you can scale effectively during the holiday season.

YOUR FOUR STEP STRATEGY

(1) Start With A Plan

While that date may sound far off, it will be here before you know it.

Planning now gives you enough time to test everything from creative, to value props, to audiences, so that you can enter the holiday season with a brilliant plan of attack, armed with statistical significance and proper vetting of best practices.

No matter your brand, you need a personalized plan which lays out your holiday season strategy. To create this plan, you’ll need to start by answering the following questions:

• What are your best channels?
• What is your best creative?
• What are your audiences?
• Where are your audiences?
  • Desktop?
  • Mobile?
  • Both?

Finding and understanding this information, as well as looking back at your past successes (and failures) will give you a roadmap of what worked, what didn’t, and what you may want to try and test to see if youcan do even better with it.

In addition to planning out the the who (audiences), what (ad types & creative), and where (channel) of your testing, you also need to break down the exact format of the tests you’ll perform. Mike Zappulla, another Director of Ad Optimization, suggests a week by week plan that covers (at minimum) four to six weeks worth of testing.

You’ll want to decide for the first week, you’ll be testing X, Y, and Z, and for the second week, you’ll test Z1, Z2, and Z3, and so on.

(2) Test, Test, and Test Again

Now that you’ve got the outline of what your plan should contain, you need to focus on the types of testing that you plan on doing.

Because as nice as it would be to have zero competition for your ads during the holidays, we all know that’s never going to happen. The best offense for that kind of battle is a strong defense (i.e. knowing from testing what works).

We can’t reiterate this enough, but you absolutely must test what works best before the holiday season begins.

Costs will increase along with competition during the holidays and Q4. If you wait until then to test items such as your value propositions, you’ll run the risk of spending much more than you have to just to find out if something works.

Finding out which value propositions drive the most conversions and from which audiences as well as which creative means you’ll spend more efficiently when the holiday season hits and costs increase along with competition.

While it takes planning and preparation, by staying on top of testing and costs earlier in the game, you’ll arrive at the big dance better prepared to spend more effectively than your competitors.

(3) Don’t Be A Usain Bolt in a Marathon World

Trying to be a Usain Bolt when you’re competing in a marathon won’t put you on the road to success. Obviously, Bolt’s ability to power up and sprint is crucial when you’re running 100m, but if you’re running 26.2 miles, you want to keep an even pace throughout or you will burn out.

The same theory applies to when you have to budget your ad spend as you test and plan for scaling in Q4.

Moving methodically is the only way you can learn where your most efficient ad spend is located. This pace allows you to find new audiences, test new iterations of creative, and drive incremental sales while keeping your CPA/ROI in check.

If you decide to pull a Bolt and try to sprint, you can end up completely overshooting your CPA and blowing through your budget in a single day.

As you plan to test, you’ll also want to be sure you have a set of controls (audiences, creative, etc) so that you can analyze your results accurately.

It’s best to test a new audience or new creative against a consistently winning ad or an audience that you’ve already had. If the results of your test show that something isn’t working, you’ll know it’s whatever you’re trying that’s at fault.

For example, say you test an audience of females 18-24 and you plan on using your tried and true video that always succeeds in earning conversions. Yet after showing this audience segment the awesome video, the data comes back that the campaign’s conversions were down 65% overall.

Since you know that your creative is strong (i.e. the “control” in this experiment), you’ll know here that it’s the audience and not the creative that’s at fault.

It takes these types of measured tests to pave the road towards budgeting for your holiday ad spend.

(4) Keep Calm & Carry On When It Comes To CPCs

Finally, as you prepare for Q4, don’t do what many brands do and remain hyper-focused on your CPCs when the holidays hit.

Remember that during the holiday season you’ll have more competition and it will be aggressive – this almost always equals increased CPCs.

If you’ve followed the steps we’ve laid out so far, your conversion rate should also increase.

So even if your CPCs increase by 25%, if your conversion rate increases 55%, then your CPA should align as expected.

CONCLUSION

Even though we haven’t hit the official start of summer, there’s no time like the present to begin planning your advertising budgets for Q4 and the holiday season.

By starting early, you’re able to sustainably and thoroughly test your creative, copy, value propositions, and product offerings. Analyzing this information will lay the groundwork so that your budget in Q4 is narrowly tailored to areas you know will be successful.

Taking the time to prepare and plan so you can enter the insanity of the holiday season knowledgeable will help to make sure that your Q4 of 2017 brings in your highest ROAS yet.

Having the right sales strategy will make or break your startup. From doubling down on perfecting your cold email outreach, to identifying profitable niche markets, leveraging storytelling, knowing how to follow up the right way and more—here’s how the best are creating winning sales strategies.

Some sales strategies come and go with the bestselling book of the week, or the advent of new tools & technologies. Yet others are firmly here to stay—rooted in hard psychological principles that explain what really motivates people to buy or not buy.

Today, we’re sharing the 25 most effective, proven sales strategies that real entrepreneurs and successful startups are employing to grow their brands.

Want to develop your own sales strategy? Download our free step-by-step guide!

25 proven sales strategies from top entrepreneurs and startups

1. Lead with what's in it for your prospect

So many salespeople, entrepreneurs, and even freelancers employ a sales strategy that ignores what they’re really selling their prospects: Solutions to problems. When you lead your sales pitch by urgently diving straight into the different packages, price points and special promotions your prospect can take advantage of by signing up this week, you’re immediately showing them that you don’t have empathy for their position. You’re not even trying to understand them—which is the first step towards providing meaningful solutions that’ll actually turn them into happy, loyal customers.

Your sales strategy needs to lead with a clear articulation of the challenge you can help your prospect solve. Here’s why: During the beginning of a sales conversation, your prospect likely doesn’t fully understand the benefits of what you’re selling. The last thing you want to do is immediately treat your product or service like a commodity, rather than a valuable solution to a real business need they have. Do your best to research their needs up front and start your outreach conversation by explaining what’s in it for your prospect.

Grab these free cold email templates and get started in the right direction today.

2. Clearly articulate end results

People buy results, not just products or services. Once you’ve captured your prospect’s attention with what they’ll be able to achieve by using your solution, it’s now your job to clearly explain how that’ll happen and what they’ll get after signing up. End results equal value. If you’re selling a premium CRM system to SMB’s that have never used one before, you’ll need to educate them about how the platform will work, how much of a time investment they should expect to make in managing it moving forward and the types of ongoing support they’ll have access to.

This sales strategy is particularly relevant if you’re selling a product or service that comes with an upfront fee, requires a complex rollout, time-intensive integrations or ongoing collaboration with your customers after closing the deal. Your prospect needs to know exactly what they’re going to get as far as deliverables, when those milestones will be met, and the downstream impact they’re expected to have on their business.

3. Start with small niche markets

You can dramatically increase the effectiveness of your cold outreach by targeting specific niche markets of people that share common pain points you’ll be able to uniquely address. Rather than reaching out to businesses of all different sizes, industries, and offerings, focus in on a narrow grouping of companies to pitch.

For example, if you’re selling inventory management software, choosing a small niche market could mean starting with pitching only to businesses that manufacture construction equipment. You could narrow your beginning niche by focusing only on these types of companies that are located in the western United States and have 100 to 250 employees. By working your sales strategy only with this homogenous group of companies, you’ll be able to perfect your pitch for this space much quicker than if you were mixing in businesses of all shapes and sizes.

Don’t worry that choosing a small niche could limit your options, either. Entrepreneur and marketer, Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income shares, “Selecting a niche is a long-term decision, but if it’s the wrong one, it’s not a long-term loss. You may fail, but as long as you learn, it’s time well invested.”

Adding that choosing a small niche in the beginning allows you to specialize, Flynn continues, “It’s great to think big and shoot for the stars, but when it comes to niche selection you can get more results, faster, by thinking specialized. Start by picking a market that actually interests you. The competition doesn’t matter at this point—just pick something you like.” You can read more about how Flynn teaches his readers to find the right niche markets on his blog right here.

Here’s another example—let’s take a look at the email marketing software company, ConvertKit. They self-identify as, “email marketing for professional bloggers.” In the highly competitive landscape of well-established email marketing providers like MailChimp, Constant Contact, and Active Campaign, this small company has carved out a curated niche market of customers to go after—professional bloggers. By forging creative partnerships with big name bloggers and brands that reach an audience of bloggers, ConvertKit has gained invaluable brand advocates & affiliates to spread their message as a major component of their sales strategy.

4. Be flexible

During your sales conversations, you’re naturally going to come across new challenges and unique demands from your prospects. This makes sense, since each company you work with is structured a little differently, has a distinct set of internal processes and objectives. Since saying "you can’t," "won’t," "that’s impossible" and other variations of no to your prospect is a death sentence, your sales strategy needs to be flexible enough to adapt in the face of new challenges on the go.

As bestselling author and sales strategy coach Grant Cardone shares, “In selling you are seeking an agreement. Your customer is almost always distrustful and uncertain, not about you, but about themselves. Most salespeople think selling is about gaining trust, but in reality, selling is about getting the customer to trust themselves enough to take action and close—which often takes flexibility. Learn to close the sale not just make a sale."

It’s that simple: You can’t afford to say no. When you do, you lose your perception as a problem-solver and instantly close the door to a room full of possibilities. Instead of disagreeing with or flat out turning down a request from your prospect, use a response like, “I’d love to make that happen for you,” which will give you the opportunity to check with the rest of your team and see if there’s any possibility to accommodate their request. Even if that means coming back to the negotiation table with a minimum order quantity or project spend that’ll justify the out-of-the-box solution, you’ll keep the deal alive.

5. Use lead scoring to prioritize your prospects

If you’re dealing with a large volume of leads, incorporating lead scoring into your sales strategy is a must. After fully qualifying your sales prospects, lead scoring will help you prioritize your prospects based on the strongest possibility for closing the sale quickly—before even beginning your outreach efforts.

Lead scoring is simple. It’s a point system for ranking prospects on a scale of 1 to 10, that assigns a point to the value each lead represents to your company. For example, if a new lead comes across your desk and they’re a CEO, they’d likely be assigned a 10 since they have the ultimate authority and typically result in more closed deals. On the other hand, a manager level lead may be assigned a point value closer to 4 depending upon the relevance of their job title, since they’ll require additional stakeholder buy-in before signing up for your service. Work your prospect list from top to bottom so that you’re prioritizing time on the highest scoring leads who have the greatest potential for conversion and make sure you’re asking them the right questions.

Grab our free list of 42 B2B qualifying questions and make sure you understand your buyers—before reaching out.

6. Connect with the decision maker

It seems obvious that you don’t want to waste time spinning your wheels having countless conversations with lower-level managers who won’t ultimately be able to champion your solution through to implementation. However, there’s an art and science to the sales strategy of finding and connecting with the right decision maker for what you’re offering.

The best prospect relationships are built upon a foundation of providing immense upfront value without expecting anything immediately in return—they’re not strictly transactional, which (surprise!) takes time to create. Inventory your company’s core competencies and determine how you can best provide value to your decision making prospect before opening up a line of communication with them.

• Can you get them featured in a story you’re writing for a major publication?
• What about a positive mention on your corporate blog?
• How about sharing their latest thought leadership piece through your social channels?

Strive to look beyond just a “recommendation” that can conveniently be solved by purchasing your solution; people who’ve been in business long enough to become a decision maker will see straight through that tactic.

When your sales strategy includes reaching out to your prospect to let them know about the cool thing you just did for them, rather than jumping straight into selling your solution, your chances of building a meaningful rapport go up significantly. Keep in touch, continue providing value over the coming days or weeks and make the ask when it feels appropriate.

Will you close a sale from that new relationship the day you reach out with this sales strategy? Probably not, but if your product or service has a long sales cycle with a hefty price tag, building meaningful relationships and listening to the unique needs of your prospect will ultimately lead to your best long-term results.

7. Perfect your sales pitch (make it exciting)

Once you’re confident that you’ve connected with the right point of contact, you need to have an effective sales pitch. One that captures the attention of your prospect and keeps the conversation moving in the right direction. Spend too much time talking about your company, the benefits of your solution, the clients you’ve worked with, why your prospect should sign up today and you’ll risk ruining the relationship straight out of the gates.

Entrepreneur, investor, and co-star of ABC’s Shark Tank, Robert Herjavec has heard an elevator pitch (or two) in his day. When it comes to delivering an effective pitch, he says it’s more about showing your expertise—not just rattling off the highlight reel of numbers and clients you’ve worked with.

Herjavec shares, "You have 90 seconds, if you’re lucky. If you can’t make your point persuasively in that time, you’ve lost the chance for impact. Facts and figures are important, but it’s not the only criteria, you must present in a manner that generates expertise and confidence. If you’re not prepared for it, you may just miss your next big opportunity."

How do you demonstrate your expertise within your elevator pitch? Lean heavily upon showing your prospect that you’ve already developed an understanding of the challenges they’re facing, as related to the area of the business your solution will help with. Do the research up-front and use your knowledge about your prospect’s business to take control of the conversation in your sales pitch by teaching, fine-tuning your message and not being afraid to share controversial views if they’re ultimately in the best interest of your potential new customer.

8. Use storytelling

Humans have been telling stories in the form of cave paintings, books, radio shows, movies (and more) for nearly 40,000 years with the goal of educating, communicating with, and entertaining each other.

Incorporating storytelling into your sales strategy can help captivate your prospects on a deeper level beyond just selling them strictly on the benefits, thus netting you more customers over time. Storytelling works well as a sales strategy because we’re wired to absorb information much better when we encounter it through stories.

As Stanford Graduate School of Business professor Jennifer Aaker explains, “Research shows our brains are not hard-wired to understand logic or retain facts for very long. Our brains are wired to understand and retain stories. A story is a journey that moves the listener, and when the listener goes on that journey they feel different. The result is persuasion and sometimes action.” When you tap into storytelling as a component of your sales strategy, you’re exploiting the thousands of years of evolution that have designed our brains for storytelling.

You can use storytelling at every stage of your sales process. Explain product features through highlighting real-life customer problems a particular feature solved. An example of this is the story of a luxury furniture retailer that’s helping high-profile clients like Floyd Mayweather, Jamie Foxx, and Robert Duvall with their interior design needs. Their sales approach combined both highly targeted outreach and handling a high volume of inbound inquiries, often triggered when an Instagram influencer gave the company a shout-out from their Instagram account. Oftentimes, hundreds of inquiries about a certain piece of furniture would flood into the inboxes of the sales reps.

This presented its own unique set of challenges: How to move sales conversations forward with high-profile clients, while also responding promptly to a large influx of questions that come in through social channels. Close.io’s Inbox and Smart View features enabled the furniture retailer's reps to personalize their responses at scale while ensuring that no lead fell through the cracks. The result? An almost immediate 10% increase in revenue.

Handle objections by building trust and walking through a case study of how other customers moved past these same objections and now get positive results for their bottom line. Answer questions, negotiate and strive to use a diverse sampling of stories about your company, customers, product and yourself to keep them captivated along the sales process.

9. Listen to what your prospects are telling you

Do you frequently get pushback from prospects on just one area of your pricing structure? How about requests for the same new features over and over again that prospects cite as a top reason why they’re not interested in signing up for your product yet? Are there specific competitor solutions that tend to be easier to win over new customers from?

By building your sales strategy around listening carefully to (and recording) the most common objections, feature requests, competitor software in use and other key bits of information, you’ll be able to perfect your approach and gradually increase your close rate.

Behavioral investigator and author Vanessa Van Edwards agrees. She shares, "One of the most important aspects of selling or even going into business for yourself is being flexible. Listening to feedback from your prospects, watching the data and making changes as needed. Sometimes having a rigid plan can limit you."

More than just listening, how are you actually sharing this feedback with the rest of your team? Don’t let your learnings slip into a black hole where they don’t reach other team members who are making product decisions that could potentially increase the effectiveness of your product. Since side comments are often forgotten, use these strategies for sharing meaningful customer feedback with your team.

• Create an internal Trello board
• Keep a series of ongoing Google Docs
• Host a public feature request page with voting options like Asana does

Granted, you’ll need to filter whether or not the prospect who’s giving you the feedback or making a feature request is actually a good fit for becoming a customer of your product before rushing to make accommodations. A common mistake many startups make in their sales strategy is to make big decisions based on the sheer number of prospects requesting a specific function, even if they’re not an ideal customer.

Then, be sure to schedule a recurring review meeting with your manager and other key stakeholders at least once a month to compile & share this feedback in a productive manner.

10. Give your undivided attention to sales calls

Whether you’re making a cold call or following back up with one of your sales leads, it’s important to treat the call at hand as the most important thing you could possibly be doing at the moment. If you’re not engaging with your prospect, expressing interest while they’re talking or asking them questions that show your breadth of understanding, they’ll be able to see through your lack of attention.

Giving undivided attention to your calls, especially if your sales strategy relies heavily upon following a script, means that you also need to free yourself up to listen to your prospect. That requires removing yourself from distracting environments. If you typically make sales calls from a loud office space, try moving into an open conference room for your next set of calls and see if that gives you more focus. If you get sleepy at your desk, try standing up, walking around or making your next sales call from a quiet outdoor location.

11. Negotiate for a win-win

The real purpose of negotiating for a win-win with your prospects is to demonstrate respect and the intention to work with them again in the future. It’s valuing long-term relationships over insignificant details.

For example, if you bring a new prospect all the way to the finish line on a big deal and allow yourself to get hung up on a minor detail request that won’t significantly impact the success of the sale, your lack of accommodation will likely turn the prospect away for good. You do, however, need to know your walk away number—the bottom line price you’re able to accept in a negotiation before you even walk into a meeting or pick up the phone. If absolutely necessary, having this foundational number in mind and being willing to share it with your prospect near the end of your negotiation will give you clear guidelines by which to strike a win-win scenario.

Providing additional value, rather than axing your pricing structure is a must. Prepare yourself ahead of time with a list of additional features, bonus add-ons and special offers you can potentially throw in to sweeten the negotiation if necessary. Keep in mind the higher the value of the solution you’re pitching, the more important it’ll be to remain flexible enough—and get your manager’s buy-in for leveraging win-win deals that overlook the minor details as much as you can.

12. Follow up until you get a definitive answer

For Steli, following up is the necessary backbone of any good sales strategy. Having a couple of good sales calls with your prospect, only to let them silently drop off the face of the planet signifies a death spiral for your sales strategy.

Steli explains, “I follow up as many times as necessary until I get a response. I don’t care what the response is as long as I get one. If someone tells me they need another 14 days to get back to me, I’ll put that in my calendar and ping them again in 14 days. If they tell me they are busy and they don’t have time right now, I will respond and ask them when they feel like a good time would be for me ping them.”

As Steli continues, “The key here is to actually keep following up. If someone tells me they are not interested, I leave them alone. But here is the kicker—if they don’t respond at all, I will keep pinging them until they do. And trust me, they always do.”

The point of following up until you get a definitive answer is that you’re never leaving a maybe on the table. In the world of startups, maybe can kill your business and you need to strive for extremely clear outcomes with every prospect you speak to. Otherwise, if you have a great first call and you allow them to drop off the map without a clear yes or no, they’ll just hang around on your list of “people you should get back to” and you’ll never move on from them.

Get the definitive answer—no matter how long it takes or how many follow ups you need to send.

Grab your free copy of the book,  The Follow-up Formula and learn how to become a priority for anyone. 

13. Highlight risks and opportunities

Many salespeople tend to focus the majority of their conversations with prospects around highlighting all of the potentially amazing opportunities, benefits and quick results the prospect will get from using their solution.

Rather than presenting your solution as the sole solution to your prospect’s “problem,” be honest with them about any risks associated with making the switch to your platform or venturing into this new strategy.

The reality is that there’s no opportunity without some measure of risk in business, so why try and paint a reality that isn’t true for your prospects? That’s setting yourself up for failure. Instead, focus your sales strategy around proactively identifying the potential risks associated with using your solution—and present even more support that’ll show your prospect you’re already familiar with the risks.

For example, if you’re selling marketing software that includes a CMS platform for blogging and the prospects you’re pitching don’t currently have a blog, they need to be educated about how blogging is a long-term investment that typically doesn’t impact revenue overnight. In order to use your software, they’ll need to make a calculated risk of investing resources into people who can manage this new responsibility. If you close a client that isn’t fully aware of the potential risks associated with what you’ve sold them, there’s a good chance that they may close their account early or request a refund after running into their first speed bump.

Also, take the time to use research, share your own experiences or develop case studies with other customers in order to meet those risks head-on.

14. Sell yourself

Even if you have a great product that practically moves itself, if your sales strategy focuses solely on the product, you’re missing most of the equation that can turn doubt into trust.

Your prospects are buying more than just a product—they’re expressing trust in you and investing in that relationship. They’re also voting with their wallets and expecting your company to be around long enough for them to benefit from your solution.

Since most people you’re selling to likely don’t possess a strong understanding of how your product works from a technical standpoint, your sales strategy needs to get them to trust you—and your company. Build that trust by being completely honest, sharing both the good and the bad, sticking to your commitments and showing that you’ll be an advocate for them long after closing the sale.

15. Develop the right mindset

If you’re going to be spending a lot of time picking up the phone, knocking on doors or otherwise reaching out to prospects over the coming months, you need to prepare yourself for what’s coming your way.

• You’re going to hear no (A LOT).

• You’ll experience that rejection multiple times every day.

That’s part of the reality of being a salesperson, or even an entrepreneur focused on selling. What you’re selling isn’t going to be perfect for everyone—regardless of what you may think. Sure, it’ll take a degree of product or market education in order to close the majority of your prospects, but all the education or sales strategies in the world won’t turn some skeptics into paying customers.

Therefore, you need to develop a mindset of resilience. A thick enough skin not to take the inevitable dismissals personally. An attitude that allows you to dust yourself off and pick the phone right back up after hearing a hard no.

As the best-selling author, philanthropist and business strategist Tony Robbins explains, "The most painful mistake I see in entrepreneurs is thinking that just having a good plan or a great product is enough to guarantee success. It’s not. Business success is 80% psychology and 20% mechanics. And, frankly, most people’s psychology is not meant for building a business." He adds, “The biggest thing that will hold you back is your own nature. Few people are emotionally ready for the challenges of building a business.”

16. Be helpful

At the end of the day, if your sales strategy isn’t built around being genuinely helpful to your prospects, you’ll leave a lot of deals on the table. Being helpful throughout your sales process, whether through education, researching your prospect’s challenges ahead of time or coming up with creative solutions to present rather than simply pitching your product, is how you’ll win their trust.

SaaS founder and co-host of The Startup Chat podcast Hiten Shah adds, “The best salespeople have always been helpful. As humans, one of the most genuine things we can do is to help each other. When you're selling a product or services, it's hard to go wrong if you're genuinely looking to help the other person. That's really when selling becomes more than just sales. It becomes all about building a genuine, meaningful relationship instead of about just selling what you have to someone.”

By thinking of yourself as a proactive problem-solver for each prospect you engage with—especially if it’s primarily over the phone—you can shift your own perception of the role you’re playing in the sales process.

No, you don’t want to forget your sales goals, benchmarks and quotas, but if you set out with the primary objective of helping your prospects, you’ll naturally be leading them to the best solution for their business. If your product isn’t the best fit for their unique needs, be honest and point them in the direction of a more suitable solution—that’s how you create the foundation for relationships that have the opportunity to continue onward. You never know where your prospect may be working in a few months or a year, and you can’t predict whether or not they know someone else who may be a good fit for your solution after being impressed with how helpful you’ve been.

A good sales strategy is long-term; there’s no substitute for making a positive lasting impression. Don’t miss out on a future potential sale because you weren’t helpful.

17. Ask for specific referrals

We’ve all gotten the casual ask for referrals, whether in a LinkedIn message or over coffee with friends, asking you for introductions to anyone that “might be a good fit” for the product they’re selling. How often does that translate into new accounts? Not very.

In 99% of these scenarios, the person you ask for a broad referral from will tell you they need to think about it and get back to you—which rarely happens. Not because they don’t want to help, but because they’re probably busy doing their own job.

If your sales strategy includes tapping into your existing network or leveraging current customers to get in touch with new sales leads, you can get more high-quality referrals by taking the time to identify prospects in advance. Check out their list of connections on LinkedIn and look through previous companies they’ve worked with to create a shortlist of strong potential referrals you can ask for.

Eliminate even more friction by giving your connection a quick and easy referral email template, like the one below that they can use to make the introduction right away.

Hey [first name],

I wanted to connect you with Steli, their company does XYZ. I think this could be really interesting for you, and a conversation would be mutually beneficial.

I’ll let you guys take it from here,

[your name]

This direct approach of giving your connection a specific referral candidate and arming them with the tools they need to send that email right away makes it easier for them to take immediate action. You’ll be well on your way to getting more referrals with this sales strategy.

18. Give short product demos

Giving a product demo that sells isn’t just about knowing your product inside and out.

Summing up a recent interview on First Round Review, startup founder and author Robert Falcone of Monetate explains the purpose of giving product demos based on his own personal experience giving hundreds of them. He shares, “As quickly as possible, get to 'here's what you told me your goal is, here's the challenge you told me is in the way, here's what it will look like when our product takes down that challenge.”

By showcasing upfront how your product will specifically address your prospect's challenges, you’re leaving no room for ambiguity. Focus on showing the solution your prospect is most interested in rather than running through a laundry list of product features.

Rather than showing up to your next product demo meeting with the standard presentation you use for everyone, crafting your product demo to suit the needs of each prospect will translate into more closed sales. Personalization is what matters most and Steli agrees. He adds, “When you’re demoing a product, you always want to demonstrate value, not features or functionalities. Nobody cares about the features of your software—the only thing they care about is what it’ll do for them.”

19. Reach out to SQL's within 24hrs of sign up

Once you’ve qualified a sales lead, engaging them in direct conversation within their first day of signup is very important for keeping the momentum moving in the right direction.

Assume your prospect is also comparing competitor products, doing research and coming to their own conclusions—based on what they can see about your product from reviews, videos, and screenshots—about whether or not you’ll be the right solution for their needs.

By employing a sales strategy that allows you to stay on top of your qualified leads and get in touch with them as quickly as possible, you’ll be able to answer questions, meet objections and help walk them through the different ways your product will help achieve their goals.

Depending upon the amount of information you have about the qualified prospect and how much interaction they’ve had with your company up to this point, it’s usually best to keep your initial outreach email short. Engage them by asking if they have time to speak on the phone today or tomorrow about a few ways you think you can be helpful to them—make it easy to accept by giving a few options for specific times you’re able to connect.

20. Address uncertainty when you see it

Let’s say you’re in the middle of a product demo and there’s been some head nodding so far, but not too many questions from your prospects. You’re starting to feel that there’s a little uncertainty about whether or not this is right for them, but you’re not exactly sure why.

Instead of pushing through your presentation or sales script for the sake of finishing up quickly, pause and use this as an opportunity to address the uncertainty you’re feeling in the room. The deal isn’t lost yet and demonstrating how your product does what they need can help you recover in this situation.

However, if you ask something along the lines of, “Are you getting this?” or “Did that make sense?”, most prospects aren’t likely to give you an honest answer because they don’t want to sound dumb in front of their peers.

Rather, when you’re sensing that uncertainty, call it out. If you notice a questionable reaction to something in particular that you just said, acknowledge it by saying, “I feel that might not have come across 100% clear. Would you like me to explain that more?” If your prospects sound relieved to hear a better explanation of how a feature will help them achieve a specific goal, take note and consider these potential changes to your sales strategy moving forward.

21. Use the PAS framework

If you subscribe to behavioral psychologist Adam Ferrier’s notion that humans are ultimately motivated to take action by either pleasure or pain, then the PAS framework should be at the core of your sales strategy regardless of what type of product you’re selling.

P-A-S stands for problem-agitate-solution. This sales strategy is defined by shaping all interactions with your prospect around the context of identifying their biggest problems and positioning your product as the best possible solution to them—if indeed that’s true. Here are the three stages of the PAS framework in action.

• Problem: Identify and clearly state the #1 problem your product solves for prospects.

• Agitate: Highlight how dangerous the problem is and remind prospects about all the negative implications it can have.

• Solution: Position your product as the solution to their specific problem.

It’s important to note that the PAS framework isn’t about generating false problems or convincing people to buy out of misplaced fear—the goal of this sales strategy is to help your prospect identify their problems. To make their challenges more clear, which gives you the opportunity to agitate that problem with more context around further implications, how the situation can worsen and what would be different for their business if they could solve it.

Then, if your product can genuinely help your prospect solve the problem at hand, positioning it as the solution is the natural last step in this sales strategy.

22. Create urgency

Most people don’t buy until the last possible moment—until they absolutely need your product.

This makes sense. We’ve been indoctrinated with mottos like, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” despite this line of thinking being an excuse for inaction more than anything else.

However, creating a real sense of urgency for your prospect is built around the sales strategy of helping them realize why they need your solution right now. If your prospects aren’t sold on why your product is important for them to take action on immediately, they’ll push it off until the next quarter.

When it comes to creating authentic urgency instead of just employing endless tricks or tactics, small business coach and author Tara Gentile adds, “Urgency is about need. If you want people to feel a sense of urgency for buying your product, you need to know why they need it now. It’s not based on numbers or time. Sure, those things help people make a decision, but people buy now because they’ve reached a point of no return.”

Creating urgency is about helping your prospects acknowledge that they need to take action right now and do something about the area of their business or life that your product can have a positive impact on. This sales strategy is about showing them the understanding you have for their challenges, respecting their needs and getting them excited to take the leap today.

Once your prospect is fully on board with why they need your solution, here are three foundational strategies for creating even more urgency with SaaS sales:

• Limited enrollment: If your product is new or you’re rolling out additional features, frame your urgency around an offer to get them into your limited program of 10 clients who are testing out the new product.

• Upcoming price increases: If you’re adding more to your product over time, it’ll increase the amount of value your customers get. Be sure to announce price increases in advance to existing customers & prospects to encourage quick buying decisions.

• Custom offers: Consider offering prospects on the verge of making a purchase a special service, consultation, training sessions, plan upgrades or short-term discount in exchange for making a decision today.

At the end of the day, there’s no better sales strategy than guiding your prospects to a deeper understanding of the place your product can help them get to and showing them a clear path to that destination. You’ll naturally create urgency without the need for employing flash sales, 24-hour discounts and other tactics that won’t work forever.

23. Sell more to your existing customers

Studies have shown that on average, it’s about 5x more expensive to acquire new customers than it is to retain and continue providing value to your existing ones.

Of course, gaining new customers is an essential part of growing your business, but when you’re considering piloting new features, expanding into new related markets or thinking about potential shifts in company strategy, it’s easy to overlook the value of selling first to your existing customers. For one, you already have an established relationship that’s been built upon mutual trust and value.

Beyond just new feature testing, if your existing pool of customers benefit from your product, what are some additional ways you can provide even more value to them? If it looks like they’re frequently maxing out on their plan limitations each month, reach out to determine whether or not you can strike a mutually beneficial deal for an upgrade.

If there’s a plan with features you know an existing customer would get a lot of use from, invite them to test it out for a limited time, give them the resources and training they need to experience real results and help them through the upgrade if it works out.

24. Intelligently use free trials

Incorporating a free trial into your company’s sales strategy can lead to massive gains in paid signups—if you do it right.

What constitutes a smart free trial? A short one.

The real purpose of giving your prospects a free trial should be to help the right people commit quickly to signing up, while giving others the opportunity to verify whether or not your product is right for them. It’s a tool that needs to be used sparingly, which for 99% of startups means no more than 14 days in length, since usage statistics for most free trials show that only a small minority of people use products for more than three days in a row during trials. By keeping your free trial short, you’ll also increase the likelihood of prospects taking it seriously and spending time truly evaluating your product.

On top of that, instead of just handing over the reins and letting your trial customers poke around completely on their own (which isn’t much of a sales strategy), invest in onboarding. Be sure to create the onboarding flow with a clear, simple goal in mind that’ll help your prospects get to their first small win using your product. If you can get them to experience real results and begin to invest in your product, their likelihood of conversion will go up significantly.

25. Employ email automation

Email automation will become an increasingly important component of your overall sales strategy as your organization grows. In the very beginning, you can get by with manual outreach to people who sign up for more information on your product, but that won’t last for long.

From delivering a timed sequence of educational content like a free sales course that introduces your product to new emails subscribers, to activity-based emails that get triggered when your prospects take a certain action, email automation is ultimately designed to create (or reinforce) the right behavior for encouraging conversion to paid accounts.

To get started with email automation, think carefully about your customer’s journey from first discovering your website to eventually paying for your solution. Interview your existing customers to get a consensus on what was most convincing for them to sign up—then construct a series of automated emails that are designed to get your newest readers and subscribers to experience that same positive effect or result.

At the same time, it’s also essential to humanize your automated emails. Your subscribers want to know that there are real people behind your emails and that when they hit reply to ask a question, they’ll get an answer. Make your automated emails appear to be coming from the email account of a real person on your team and write in a conversational tone that represents who you are as a company.

Ready to get started with email automation? We have a direct integration with Drip and dozens of connections on Zapier to sync your Close.io account with your email automation provider.

What’s your most effective sales strategy?

Whether you’re running a startup of your own, trying to increase your organization’s sales effectiveness, or just become a better salesperson yourself, these time-tested sales strategies will help you hit the ground running.

At the end of the day, however, you can try all of the sales strategies in the world, but the best way to improve your close rate is through real experience. There’s no substitute for emailing your leads, picking up the phone, and having conversations with your prospects. Learn what you can from every interaction and develop an understanding of what motivates your customers to buy or not buy.

We’ve been teaching sales strategies for years, but we want to hear from you.

What’d we miss? What’s working best for your organization?

Share with us in the comments below.

Ready to scale your sales? Download the free sales strategy template. This step-by-step guide makes it easy to develop your sales strategy. Click below to get it now. 

Recommended reading:

How to get the first 10 customers for your B2B SaaS startup
In the early stages of your startup? Start here.

Early B2B SaaS growth: How to go from 10 to 100 customers
10 to 100 is one of the first real test of a startup’s sustainability. Learn to pass the test here.

5 metrics B2B startups need to focus on to scale from 100 to 1,000 customers
The leap from 100 to 1,000 is all about metrics, KPIs, and segmentation. Learn how to use data to fuel growth here.