Rnordman

All set for your app release? The battle isn’t won yet. According to a Statista report, ITunes currently lists over 2,000,000 apps. You may end up lost in the lot if you haven’t thought your marketing strategy through.

There are tons of articles on the internet that will tell you how to market your app, but few of them list resources that can help you do it. This is a list of 7 brilliant tools that can help you market your app and gain a competitive advantage.

1. Reddit

One of the top reasons why mobile apps fail is because a great idea in theory need not work as well in reality. App developers who work in isolation often miss out on the most valuable feedback – from the intended audience.

Reddit is a great place to seek honest, brutal feedback for your app, while also building relationships with prospective future advocates. Begin by identifying the SubReddits that have your target audience. Summarize what you intend to create with your app and request feedback or suggestions of features that people would want to use. Compile the suggestions on a Google Doc and refer to them when building your app. You can also store details of respondents who show interest in receiving development updates and contact them when you release the app. Alternatively, you can thank them with early access explaining what you did with their feedback – the advocates who spring off of these efforts are often the most passionate and influential.

To collect information in an organized manner, you can use Google forms.

2. Erli Bird

Erli Bird is a post-development version of Reddit. Once you have a Minimum Viable Product, I recommend that you test how the app is received by submitting it to a community like Erli Bird.

After you have submitted a summary and a URL access to the app, beta testers will use your app. Their interaction with the app will be recorded as screen captures and heat maps and their experiences as feedback. You can use this information to make another round of changes before you make your app available to the public.

3. Google Analytics

You can set up Google Analytics easily and for free on your app using an SDK. Once you have, the app will report number of users, user insights – location and characteristics, user actions and navigation, revenue and in-app payments which can give you an invaluable overview of your app’s performance.

You can use the audience insights to build out your PPC and content marketing strategies, based on who your users primarily are and their age, gender, location, reading level and interests. Analytics also gives you some insight into user behavior, helping you improve your UI and better app performance and sales.

4. Keyword Planner

An important part of driving traffic to your websites and apps on the internet is understanding the keywords that can help you do it. You can use Google’s Keyword Planner to identify important keywords in your niche to leverage them on content marketing and distribution apps and platforms.

• Long tail keywords have been found to be better targets than short keywords, because
• They are easier to rank for (less competition)
• They convert better, according to a MarketingHub study

On the keyword planner, type in a generic term related to your niche and click on “get ideas”. The planner will display a list of keywords similar to one you have inserted. Pick the most relevant suggestion and re-plug it into the planner. You will get long tail keyword options that you can use.

5. DrumUp

Once you have your keywords, you can use it to source high quality content that can attract a social media following and improve your brand’s visibility. You can use DrumUp to manage multiple social media accounts (so your Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter pages) without expending much effort.

Today’s audience spends 30% of all the time they spend on the internet on social media, according to a GlobalWebIndex report. To reach them there and stay on top of their minds you need great social media content. On DrumUp you can space out your original content on a scheduling calendar and schedule posts across multiple social media accounts weeks or months in advance.

You can also use the apps to content curation resources and fill in the engagement gaps with high quality, non-promotional and interesting articles related to what you do. Alternatively, you can use the app to store content for the future in a library and schedule them when needed.

A strong social media following can have huge impact on your app’s branding, sales and usership.

6. TalkWalker Alerts

Before you launch your app, you’ll need to create momentum or a buzz of sorts to carry your app for the first few weeks, so you can take advantage of PR and the excitement of being “new”. To do that, you’ll need a list of app review sites, directories and journalists you can hit to gain your app more visibility.

One way to do this, is to set up alerts for mentions of your competitors. By identifying places where they have been featured or published, you ascertain opportunities for your brand to facilitate the same. You can also use your keywords to find publications and in-turn journalists who talk about your niche.

Ensure that you reach out to reviewers and journalists well in advance so the articles come out in time for the app launch, because if the come out earlier, you will lose search traffic and disappoint interested individuals.

7. Canva

Graphic design is an important part of effective communication. If you aren’t well versed with Photoshop or Illustrate and need a quick online alternative to create graphics, Canva is a good tool to use.

You can use Canva to put together app teasers, social media posts and blog post covers. You can also create infographics and slides using the tool. Once you have created your graphic, you can add a link back to your app and directly share it to your social media accounts from the tool.

A checklist of 12 essential tips for mobile app marketing

The success of an app can be attributed to multiple factors, considering everything from design to release and marketing. This is a list of 12 tips that can help you cover the necessities in selling your app.

1. Design the app with users in mind

You can’t market a product that has no predefined audience. You could, but you would probably fail and waste a lot of money.

Many times, developers end up building products that people don’t want to use.

An app is easiest to market when you have considered its target audience from the initial stages of development. Many developers use active online communities like subReddits to seek invaluable feedback during development. Others rely on early adopters to get product defining feedback.

2. Optimize your web presence

For your app to be a hit, you need to have a strong presence on the web to point all your traffic to. A website is an important part of app success.

People who want to talk about you usually link out to your website, and not your profile on an app store, which is why you need to have an impressive, conversion optimized website.

You can direct people to download your app from the website, and if you have managed to create a great impression with your web pages, your conversion rates are likely to be high.

3. Optimize your app store presence

The tools mentioned on this article will help you direct traffic from external sites (top publications and social media networks) back to your website and your app store presence.

If you haven’t optimized your app store presence with detailed descriptions of the services you offer, the latest screenshots of your app and support on how your audience can use it, you won’t convert much of your inbound traffic.

4. Create an online event to mark your app release

People are more likely to try something when it is “new”, and you need to make the most of the hype created by a release.

Create online events to reach more people – a webinar, Youtube event, a Facebook live video or Periscope video. You could also follow up your event with a Twitter chat or engagement to
connect with people who are interested in your app. All you need is a strong content marketing strategy and the means to execute it.

5. Highlight and effectively convey your unique selling points

If there are 2,000,000 apps out there, you need to stand out to command attention of the market.

What sets you apart from the rest? Create strong messages that highlight your best features and distribute them on social networks and your web presences. Get listed on relevant app directories and lists of top apps in your niche.

6. Be creative and interesting

Several apps build their reputation via word of mouth offline and on online communities.

If you are interesting and creative, people are likely to talk about you on social forums. Be tweetable. Associate yourself with something powerful, clearcut and simple that people will post about and talk about on external networks.

You can also try and create viral content – like GIFs, memes or other entertaining bits that are likely to spread virally on online media.

7. Get users to join your social media communities so they can talk about their experience

Many apps get users to join their social networks as part of the registration process.

When you register for some apps you may have noticed that they have an auto-filled selection box asking you to follow their Twitter or Facebook page and tweet or post about them. You could consider this option for your app, in hopes of nurturing brand advocates.

8. Run social media contests

Social media contests can help you reach wider audiences, in short spans of time. Create a like and share contest that requires participants to like your social media page/ post and share it with friends to enter.

You also need exciting prizes related to your brand or app to give away to contest winners.

Pokemon Go ran a few of these contests to keep their engagement going during quiet periods – when they had no new updates to share with their audience. Most Pokemon Go users are fans of the anime, so Niantic (the company the created the app) offered contest winners Pokemon merchandise to like and share their Twitter page.

9. Create in-app prompts to review and rate your app

Reviews and ratings are an important part of how an audience chooses which apps to download. Since you can’t manually request users to review and rate your app, and emails and social media requests will yield limited results (you can’t be sure how many of your users you are actually reaching), in-app prompts/ notifications are a great way to get them.

10. Build a community around your app

If you build an engaged community around your app, you will need minimal external interference to keep users enthusiastic.

Many apps have communities within the app or externally that allow users to communicate with each other. For instance, Clash of Clans allowed users to communicate with each other, adding a whole new layer to experience they delivered to users.

It could be a chat box or even a simple discussion board, or even a social media page for your app users to express themselves. A community can add value and engagement to your app.

11. Plan app upgrades beforehand to keep your community engaged

Many apps enter the market with a bang, only to fade out and die over time. To keep your audience engaged, you need timely upgrades for old users and easy adoption for new users to ensure that both groups are taken care of.

If you don’t have upgrades planned in advance and to some extent ready to push out, you’ll lose users to next new app that comes into the market.

The idea is to sell app users a journey that you experience alongside them, so they never find the need to jump ship.

12. Respond to every comment on your app store account

It isn’t a good idea to leave negative comments unattended to on any of your official accounts – app store or otherwise. App store comments are in fact, a great way to identify the bugs you missed or ways in which you can improve UX on your app.

Respond to every negative experience showing that you care and intend to seriously consider what your users are telling you. It will help you convert more users who land on your app store page.

This is a preview of a research report from BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about BI Intelligence, click here.

Improving artificial intelligence (AI) technology and the proliferation of messaging apps — which enable users and businesses to interact through a variety of mediums, including text, voice, image, video, and file sharing — are fueling the popularity of chatbots.

These software programs use messaging as an interface through which to carry out various tasks, like checking the weather or scheduling a meeting. Bots are still nascent and monetization models have yet to be established for the tech, but there are a number of existing strategies — like "as-a-service" or affiliate marketing — that will likely prove successful for bots used as a tool within messaging apps.

Chatbots can also provide brands with value adds — services that don't directly generate revenue, but help increase the ability of brands and businesses to better target and serve customers, and increase productivity. These include bots used for research, lead generation, and customer service.

A new report from BI Intelligence investigates how brands can monetize their chatbots by tailoring existing models. It also explores various ways chatbots can be used to cut businesses' operational costs. And finally, it highlights the slew of barriers that brands need to overcome in order to tap into the potentially lucrative market. 

Here are some of the key takeaways: 

• Chatbot adoption has already taken off in the US with more than half of US users between the ages of 18 and 55 having used them, according to exclusive BI Intelligence survey data.
• Chatbots boast a number of distinct features that make them a perfect vehicle for brands to reach consumers. These include a global presence, high retention rates, and an ability to appeal to a younger demographic.
• Businesses and brands are looking to capitalize on the potential to monetize the software. BI Intelligence identifies four existing models that can be successfully tailored for chatbots. These models include Bots-as-a-Service, native content, affiliate marketing, and retail sales.
• Chatbots can also provide brands with value adds, or services that don't directly generate revenue. Bots used for research, lead generation, and customer service can cut down on companies' operational costs.
• There are several benchmarks chatbots must reach, and barriers they must overcome, before becoming successful revenue generators. 

In full, the report:

• Explains the different ways businesses can access, utilize, and distribute content via chatbots.
• Breaks down the pros and cons of each chatbot monetization model.
• Identifies the additional value chatbots can provide businesses outside of direct monetization.
• Looks at the potential barriers that could limit the growth, adoption, and use of chatbots and therefore their earning potential.

Interested in getting the full report? Here are several ways to access it:

1. Subscribe to an All-Access pass to BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report and over 100 other expertly researched reports. As an added bonus, you'll also gain access to all future reports and daily newsletters to ensure you stay ahead of the curve and benefit personally and professionally. >> Learn More Now
2. Purchase & download the full report from our research store. >> Purchase & Download Now

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How Silicon Valley's sexist 'bro culture' affects everyone — and how to fix it

If you’re reading this, you understand the value of cold outreach. You may even know that cold email is the most effective and straightforward way to get a response from business owners and decision makers. While that is true, it’s not always easy. That’s why I’m going to teach you how to improve cold email open rates with 4 easy steps. 

Ever since the beginning of the Internet era, cold emailing has been a very popular method of getting in touch with influential people.

So, why are there so many posts on “how to increase your XYZ” and “lower your ABC” regarding cold email?

Simple—consumers are getting smarter and more cynical.

Lazy marketers are sending more of the same old tactics while decision makers are sending more and more email into the spam folder. This sad fact doesn’t mean we have to switch from email to something else, it just means we have to write better emails. 

Busy entrepreneurs don’t have a lot of spare time to spend talking on the phone. We can get scrape anyone’s email address these days—but just because we can easily reach them, doesn’t mean we should waste their time. Not every cold email gets a warm welcome, let alone a response.

In this post, I’ll explain how to improve cold email open rates by highlighting common reasons why your emails aren’t getting any engagement—and what you can do to turn it around.

If that sounds good, keep reading

Real reasons why people don’t respond to cold emails

Nobody responding to your cold email? Here are the typical explanations and what to do about each.

Reason #1: Your Subject Line is Horrendous

The main reason why people don’t open cold emails is a long, unclear subject line. And, if you can’t get them to open—you can’t get them to respond.

This topic dominates the conversation when it comes to cold email simply because it is the doorway to your email. Long studies and trial and error have given us some excellent tips to ensure that our subject line gets attention in the right way.

How To Fix It

• Make it short: The data shows that short subject lines work better. But that’s only if you say the right thing. Sometimes a blank subject performs better than a long, convoluted sentence.

• Use a name: Got their first name? Use it. Got their last name, too? Use it. Even though brevity works well, using at least the first name gets more open rates and using first and last gets even more (in most cases).

• Get to the point: Read this out loud (if you want). What’s in the email should be described in the subject. What’s in the subject line should be expressed in the email. Do this and you’ll usually be okay.

• Keep Tweaking: This one is the worst. If you’re not trying new subject lines and tracking the open rates, there is no way for you to improve. Most companies will pick a line that works and won’t change it. This leads to a lower open rate over time.

Bonus: Here’s a full post on what you should do with your subject line.

Reason #2: Your First Sentence is Bad

A close second to a pitiful subject line is a bad first sentence to the email.

How many emails have you discarded when you opened them and read:

“Hi. My name is so and so and I’m the such and such of whatchamacallit.”

You don’t care, and neither do your leads. The thing is that some email clients (e.g. Google) can see the first line of your email without opening it. This means that a good subject line can still end up in a trashed email.

How To Fix It

• Can the intro: Take the intro line (about yourself) and turn it into the best possible elevator pitch you can think of. Leave the intro to your email signature at the bottom of your email.

• Test & Experiment: Write out a dozen or more ideas for a first sentence. Ask your friends, test the best ones, and narrow it down until you are using the absolute best option(s).

• Keep it short & sweet: It shouldn’t take up more than a line. Just an intro into what it is they need, and that you just so happen to solve their problem. The average attention span is only 8 seconds. Use that to drive you.

Source: VentureBeat

Reason #3: It’s a Canned Template Email (not personalized)

Don’t get me wrong, there are some awesome, research driven email templates spreading across the internet today.

Templates aren’t the problem, it’s how quickly you go from template to inbox—that’s the problem.

Just plugging in very basic data into your template is (in today’s market) the equivalent of putting “to whom it may concern” at the top.

In other words, “we don’t think you’re worth the time to know before we ask for money”.

What do you think the lead’s response should be? What would yours be?

Side Note: If it sounds like writing cold emails can be improved by using the golden rule (i.e. “Do unto others…”), you’re right. It can.

How To Fix It

• Research: Depending on how many leads you have to reach out to in order to make your quota/goals, it may not behoove you to do a LinkedIn search on all of them. That said, if you have fewer better quality leads—you’ll have time to make your emails more personal.

• Use that research: Once you do research, use it in your email. Use geographic things like weather, or “you live near the beach” type stuff. Sports teams, recent blog posts (that they wrote). Anything that could warm them up to you.

• Automate it: Just because it’s more personal doesn’t mean that it has to be ridiculously cumbersome. There are software products out there that can help you manage your cold outreach efforts

Reason #4: There’s Nothing in it for Them

A simple sales pitch doesn’t do the trick anymore. You have to include something that appeals to them that injects your benefits and value into it.

A resource or gizmo that they’ll go crazy for that just so happens to nurture them along the way.

You can’t just send, “We’re great at SEO! Do you want to use us for your SEO?”

How To Fix It

• Think outside the box: What does your client want? SEO may be the way to get them there, but it’s not what they’re thinking about. Give them what they need in a package along with something they want.

• Create something awesome: Once you know what they’ll want (e.g. white paper, industry report, podcast full of tips), create it. But do it good. Make it something worth consuming and sharing.

• Insert your message: Don’t make it all about them. Once you give them what they want, they’re much more likely to hear about you wanting to talk with them (thus they respond). Seriously, this works.

Go Look at Your Cold Emails

There are those who will read this post, and move on to another, and another after that. Don’t be like that.

Go take action. Get out your templates. Pull up your email service provider stats. And start looking at which points are causing you to have poor engagement in your outreach.

What can you do to improve your cold email today?

The post How To Improve Cold Email Open Rates With 4 Simple Steps appeared first on Sales Hacker.

A number of years ago, I wrote a Blog here entitled ‘Why I don’t care about Influencers and neither should you’.

As someone who now runs an Integrated Marketing agency with a specialist Influencer Marketing offering, I felt it appropriate to revisit the topic and discuss how the industry has, and continues to mature.

Yes, the title of my previous post was supposed to be controversial. I’m well aware of the idea – if it bleeds it leads and headlines that agitate, draw people in. That being said – times change and I have recently asked myself, what parts of that original post still hold true?

Well firstly I’ll say, I really didn’t think Influencer Marketing was a buzz term that had longevity. I have always believed there are people who wield influence and in that lies an opportunity for brands, but I figured people would see it for what it is – a practice savvy operators have always done. The only difference is, the influencers and the industry they find themselves in has evolved and that won’t stop.

Today there are so many kinds of influencers who have varying degrees of authority within their chosen space. It’s why as an industry we must be very careful about the wide-ranging ways of identifying and engaging influencers and tread with caution to ensure we don’t over-simplify the process of connecting with them in a meaningful way.

Brand managers will tell you, the time and energy spent considering how to establish an identity, produce content, and then amplify it through the correct strategy can be gruelling. There are so many factors that come into it. So, while I’m a technologist – there is an arm wrestle playing out in front of our eyes that restricts analytical tools’ effectiveness in their ability to intuitively pair influencers with brands in a universally impactful way.

Do automation tools have a role to play? Certainly. But they are not a panacea. Ultimately what I wrote all those years ago still holds true – “you want meaningful connections that build trusted relationships”. Influencers at the end of the day are still people, so when you start thinking about them as Social Media handles in a database, you are doing yourself a disservice.

Like I said then, it means rethinking your motives. So, what should you be aiming for today with Influencer Marketing?

Collaboration

Despite what some people might have you believe, influencers are not advertisers – or at least they shouldn’t be. Influencers should have a real reason to engage with your brand and this should be part of a long term, integrated strategy that has real purpose and clearly defined measurements of success. To maximise your return on investment, make sure there is genuine interest in the brand, product or service. Get the influencer involved in the planning stages of your marketing strategy to ensure you are working with them. They can’t be an afterthought. You will be amazed at how much more impactful influencer campaigns are when you aren’t just thinking of influencers as a channel, as much as an asset that helps create an experience.

Commercialisation

Influencer campaigns are a fantastic opportunity to tell a story about how we can now show the financial return of the work we do. But you must plan for it from the outset with clearly defined KPIs. It’s not something you can report on afterwards if you really want to show the impact a campaign has had on your business. Not all influencer campaigns will be about making sales, but if you aren’t thinking about how the activity can drive the propensity to purchase you’re missing a trick.

Context

As mentioned earlier, there are many different types of influencers, but there are also many different moments that can be leveraged to hero these partnerships. Have you considered building an influencer program in its entirety? Something that’s not just tactical – but allows you to strategically deliver on micro-moments when they arise, as well as bigger activations when the time is right. Think too about how you can infuse their content across multiple channels. Is it fuelling your internal comms? Is it featured in your ATL creative? The thing is – influencer marketing works best when it becomes an omni-channel approach. This way you will always have context and can better deliver a more powerful outcome.

Yes, some things change, but others stay the same. If you aren’t thinking about influencers as people first you will fall short in connecting meaningfully with your customers. Don’t forget – that’s the point.

Ideal Customer Profile: A Process to Identify Your Best Sales Opportunities

Trying to sell to someone you don’t know is hard, but it’s what most reps do every day. To dial in your sales messages and your marketing efforts, you need to have an ideal customer profile in mind.

You have to send a great cold email, build rapport on the phone, and convince people who you probably didn’t know existed the day before. Doing this is part of the job.

If you’re in sales, you will always be meeting new people. Some for a minute or two and others you may be friends with for years to come.

It’s hard, but there is a way to make it way less difficult—using ideal customer profiles.

The “Ideal Customer Profile” has been a concept that has grown in popularity over the past decade or so. It’s still not as widely embraced as it should be and it could mean the difference between higher conversions and happier clients.

There are a few terms for the same concept.

Some call the ideal customer profile as a “buyer personas”, “ideal client profiles”, “ideal customer persona”, etc.

There are subsets, too. Marylou Tyler has developed an entire strategy for creating “ideal prospects” that you can use to fill your funnel with the leads who are likely to convert.

We’ll use these various terms interchangeably throughout this post.

What we hope to do:

• Identify and Define the Term(s)
• Explain the Benefits
• Outline the Process to Create Your Own IDPs

Let’s get into it.

What is an Ideal Customer Profile (or Buyer Persona)?

Buyer Persona: A buyer persona is a semi-fictional representation of your ideal customer based on market research and real data about your existing customers. (Source: HubSpot)

Simple. To the point.

If you could look at your most common good customers and build your entire company with only those people, those are probably close to the semi-fictional leads you’re looking to acquire. But it’s more than just liking Bob or Sue—you have to know why they’re your good clients.

We’ll be going over that in detail a little further down, but it means identifying the traits and insights that will indicate a lead that you and/or your sales team can use to quickly target and sell to the right people for your business.

It’s about trying to get as close to “easy to sell” and “easy to satisfy” axis as possible. It may sound like finding a unicorn, but it’s not that majestic.

Now, let’s talk about some of the benefits.

Why You MUST Have an Ideal Customer Profile

First, taking (at least) a basic look at who you’re trying to reach and how they’ll possibly be interacting with your brand is no longer optional.

Your prospects are better at researching solutions, all the information needed is readily available, and your competitors are working hard to understand how to better reach and sell YOUR customers.

But it’s also beneficial to you. Here are a few positives.

Better Leads

Imagine if you could look for brands that share a few characteristics and then know that if you can get a hold of them, they’d be significantly more likely to buy your stuff?

This is exacty the point of an ideal customer profile.

You do a decent enough job looking at who it is that likes your stuff and you will be able to tailor make a list of prospects that are way more likely to buy. If you can find a lead that’s in the market for a new solution, it’ll be a much smoother walk to closed-won.

Better Understanding

If you know who’s likely to buy, what pain points really get under their skin, and the steps in their buying process—what else do you need?

All of these things, down to their demographics and other details can be known to a surprising degree of accuracy. Your reps will be a loaded weapon that will be able to know the common objections specific to your target before they get a hold of them.

Furthermore, ICPs help you look for the leads that are more likely to close (if they’re a fit). You’ll know that if you can convince them that they need a new solution—it’ll probably be yours.

Better Loyalty

This point is particularly helpful for SaaS and other software products.

Every month is another opportunity to sell your product, which is another way of saying that if your clients aren’t a good fit—they’ll probably leave. Churn isn’t a fun idea for any SaaS, let alone a startup or a software company that is trying to seek funding. Increasing loyalty is increasing your customer’s lifetime value.

Having a client base that you understand means:

• Your onboarding process will be easier to create.
• New features can be added that appeal to the majority of your client base.
• It will be easier to garner referrals (thus creating even more ideal clients).

Seriously, just take a minute and think about what you could do if you knew what your entire client base wanted.

How to Get Started On Your Own

By now, you may be intrigued to see the process of putting together your own ideal client profile.

It takes some upfront work, but it’s not as hard as you think. There are some deep level strategies available, but this post is intended to help a rep, sales manager, or founder get ideal buyers onto paper and make your sales goals this month, or at least this quarter.

To do that you’re going to look to one source of intel—your current customers.

The good, the bad, and even the ugly clients you currently serve are going to guide your personas until you are filling your pipeline with only the best leads. Looking at your current customers, you’ll want to identify the best and worst?

Which were easier/harder to sell?

Next, you’ll break down the traits to find out why. Here’s a rundown of the most common for B2Bs.

“Instead of grouping buyers based on who they are, you can group them based on your Buying Insights.” — Adele Revella

Industry (or sub Industry)

Depending on what you sell, the products could fit into many different industries. While this seems like a good thing, it often times ends up in a convoluted sales process.

Some of your reps try to sell to one industry, and others try their luck somewhere else.

A quick look at your clients may tell you who has had more luck. Depending on how long you’ve been in business, a niche that you can exploit has probably revealed itself in your transaction records.

Sure, it could be just one or two great sales reps. But not likely.

If you have a more specific product, you can still sub that down to make a much more focused sales approach.

Example: Let’s say you have a software product that is specific to more industrial businesses (e.g. manufacturing). Looking at your customers, you realize that the ones that are really excited about your product happen to be plastic injection molders.

Important: You don’t just have to stop selling to all but one industry, but there will be a few that work better than others. Concentrate on those until they’re exhausted and move on.

Role

Ok, you’ve got a specific subset of companies. Dig a little further.

• Who is often times the one in control of the purse strings?
• Who are their usual influencers (e.g. supervisors, direct reports)?
• What key pains were extracted?
• What were the things that made them buy?

You can get super deep here, but be careful to only track that data that helps make the sale. Even which gender the role tends to skew can be useful.

Think about the “day in the life” too. If they are busier during a certain time of day, month, year.

Things like this can be super helpful when doing your cold outreach.

For this one, you may have to pick up the phone to figure these things out. Have a conversation with those clients to find out; it’ll make them even happier to hear from you.

Employee Size

Pretty straightforward, but incredibly useful.

If a company has a certain number of employees, it may be a tell as to how easy/complicated their buying process will be.

If they have less than 10, you’ll probably deal with the founder. More than 100 and you’ll likely deal with a head of something. Greater than 500, and you’re looking at a full-fledged buying team (and a longer process).

Find that sweet spot and write it in your profile.

Estimated Revenue

There are companies you’ve probably sold to, who’ll cancel their subscription or won’t reorder because it doesn’t make sense for them.

Those companies either make too little or too much revenue. This is one reason why you should look at the customers you didn’t enjoy as much.

They all left, complained, or irritated you for a reason. It’ll help you hone in on the markers that make up the best.

Although, some organizations will absolutely love your product. We’d be willing to say that all of them will fall within a range of annual revenue.

The number is going to be different and it’ll affect the buying cycle as well, but you’ll probably see that in your research.

Putting It All Together

Once you have an idea of the people you should target, you write it down and—you’ll get scared.

It’ll seem like you’re slashing the number of leads going into the pipeline, and you are. But the quality of leads that’ll be moving means that less will be moving into the closed-lost and more into closed-won.

Have any questions on ideal customer profiles? Leave them in the comments below!

Your business depends on marketing to bring in qualified leads for your sales team. What do I mean by “qualified?” I mean leads who aren’t just interested in your offer. They’re interested in your products and services. They’re more likely to make the purchase.

Your landing page needs to convince these qualified individuals that it’s worthwhile and beneficial to them to give you their contact information. It’s not just about your promotional strategy on social media or your offer itself. Your landing page is your best opportunity to get targeted website visitors to become qualified leads. It’s how you’ll contribute to sales and overall business success.

 

— — —

Why Read This Article?

There are (at least) four big reasons why you’ll want to read this article. Other than simply to educate yourself, this article will help you:

• Build upon any existing expertise
• Find the value of an optimized landing page
• Develop a landing page that increases conversions
• See the impact of an optimized landing page

It is my goal with this article to give you everything you need to know (and maybe a bit more than that). I aim to make it easy for you to take this guide and its corresponding eBook, and make landing pages that bring you valued leads for your business.

---

Getting Started with Landing Page Optimization

Let’s start with the basics.

What is a landing page?

A landing page is a web page designed for one single purpose: conversion. It’s a site where you lead visitors to gather their information in exchange for something of value to them.

What is NOT a landing page?

• A blog article
• A website homepage
• Any web page that lacks a submission form

Why are landing pages important?

There are multiple reasons a business can use a landing page:

• Direct sales
• Lead generation
• Relationship building

Landing pages are key for businesses to make a profit in one way or another. It’s how you earn a sale or it’s how you build trust. Let’s briefly go into each of these types to help you understand the differences.

Direct sales

These are mostly ecommerce-based landing pages. They usually involve a product or service that the visitor purchases right then and there. When you create this type of landing page, your main goal is to get a sale.

Lead generation

This type of landing page serves one simple purpose: to provide something of value to your visitor in exchange for their contact information. Your goal for these pages is to acquire information from qualified leads to assist sales with further contact. These pages are the focus of this article.

Relationship building

This form of landing page is like a hybrid of the other two. It’s meant to nurture existing leads as they continue along the path to a sale. The main goal for this page is to continue getting your lead’s interest and keeping them moving through the sales process.

Before you start

Okay, I know you want to get moving on your landing page creation, but wait just a bit longer. You don’t want to miss these very important planning steps.

Setting your goal

Notice how “goal” is singular in the above heading? That was intentional. Each of your landing pages must only have one goal. You must create a landing page from one single campaign, such as a free trial offer. Your landing page will only succeed if it’s focused on one ideal result.

Be clear and thorough in what your goal is. Use the SMART method to create your goal so that it’s Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Time-bound. Alternatively, you can try Adam Kreek’s CLEAR approach to goal-setting. Although the former is more well-known, the latter has a more modern feel to it.

Choosing and creating your offer

Here, you want to know what you’re going to offer people in exchange for their contact information. Make sure your focus is first on what your target audience wants before you focus on what works for you. For example, if your research shows that people want to see more thought leadership from your business, an eBook or webinar would be a much better offer than a free trial of your services.

If you choose to offer an eBook, it’s essential that you make it truly worthwhile. If you offer an eBook that’s only a few pages long with little to no substance to it, you’ll upset your leads and hurt your chances at future interactions. Give them something well-designed and thorough, and have it good to go before you make your landing page live on your website.

Developing your strategy

Everything a marketer does should revolve around a well-established strategy. There’s your content strategy, social media strategy, and now your landing page campaign strategy. Although, these should all fit under your overall marketing plan.

When you’re building a strategy in this case, ask yourself the Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How questions that matter most:

• Who are we targeting?
• What are we offering?
• Where are we promoting it?
• When are we starting and ending the campaign?
• Why are we doing this?
• How are we going to accomplish this?

After you answer those questions and any others, you’ll be ready to get started with development. The important point is that you need this strategy to have everything in it. If you make it well, you’ll have a much easier time during the rest of your campaign development.

---

Landing Page Design

Congrats! You’re now ready to get moving with designing your landing page! These are some of the most important elements you need to fully optimize. They are what your visitors see (or shouldn’t see, in some cases) when they visit your landing page.

Consistent Design

Keep your landing page’s design consistent with the rest of your campaign: from your social media promotion to the gated offer behind your form. This will make your visitor’s path smoother, limiting confusion and lowering drop off.

Downloadable offers

When you’re starting out with design, you should already have your offer ready to go. So, it should be relatively easy to base your landing page design on how your offer is designed. Pay attention to coloring and any contextual elements. Apply these to your landing page to maintain design consistency.

This can also help when you’re promoting your offer on social media. When you share a visual of the offer in an advertisement, make sure your landing page reflects that visual. If it doesn’t, that will interrupt your visitor’s experience and increase drop off.

For free trials and other offer types, you should still do your best to make your landing page’s overall design consistent with whatever is offered. It could be as simple as similar coloring, or an image of the offer, but it would definitely be helpful to do something to maintain the flow of your visitor’s experience.

Navigation menu

When you’re creating your landing page, where do you put the navigation menu?

The top of the page?

The bottom?

The left or right side of the page?

That’s a trick question. You don’t want a navigation menu on your landing page at all. The only exception, which is only if you really need it, is your contact information. This can be on your landing page if and only if it is absolutely necessary. Even then, you should consider leaving it out.

Adding a menu to your landing page is a risk you don’t want to take. Visitors will be more likely to get distracted and, even worse, click-through to a different page on your site. This is not something you’d want when your main goal is conversion on your page form. Add the navigation menu to your thank you page, which should come after your visitor converts on your form.

Relevant multimedia

You have two main forms of multimedia that could enhance your landing page design:

Images:

For an eBook offer, use an image of its cover to let visitors see what the offer looks like. Even better, include a preview of the first few pages either as a static display or slider.

For a free trial, include an image of your product or your service in action.

You can also use other image formats, such as stock imagery, but this is not ideal. To make the most of images, make sure they’re relevant to your offer in the best way possible.

When you’re using stock photography, only use the photos you find from legit sources, such as Wikimedia, Pixabay, iStock, etc. Always check to see if you need to cite your source. Most of the time, you do unless you pay for its rights.

Alternatively, you might want to consider creating your own images that closely resemble your offer. It could be abstract or detailed, but the important thing is that you created it. For example, if you’re offering a Twitter guide, create your own version of the tweet bird to avoid copyright infringement.

Videos:

Videos are a semi-controversial option for landing pages. Some say they’re distracting, but many say they’re a great way to give visitors what they want. Video is the preferred method of communication today. It could greatly benefit you to take advantage of that opportunity by adding a descriptive video to your landing page.

Some examples of videos that could work are:

• Services in action
• Introduction video with CEO or other company leader
• Video explaining the benefits of your offer

Social sharing

Adding social sharing options to your landing page is very important. Even though you want the visitor’s focus to be on your form, you also want them to have easy access to sharing your page with their social networks. That’s how you get word-of-mouth promotion and free exposure.

Make your social options noticeable and well-placed, but make sure you’re not hurting your conversion rate. When you give visitors the option to share without leaving the page, that’s the best approach. It’ll allow visitors to remain there, making them more likely to still fill out your form.

Best Practices:

Be strategic with which social networks you include. Choose the ones your target audience would most likely use based on what your offer is. You don’t want to include buttons for every social network and service known to man.

Use a service, such as Sumo, to make your social sharing buttons move around for optimal placement and activity. Sumo does this automatically based on how people are engaging with your buttons each time.

Add your own text to the button settings for each platform so that visitors don’t have to create their own. This is an opportunity to optimize the copy to benefit you the most. Include your name and / or @handle when applicable.

You might want to hold off initially, but after some time, you want to show share count for each button. You may want to set up your sharing bar to only show a number after it’s reached a certain number. In some cases, you may decide not to show share count at all. There isn’t a single answer that fits with everyone, so you may just decide on your own whether you think it’ll be an effective feature.

Social proof

When you create a landing page, you want to be convincing enough to get people to submit their contact information. People are hesitant to disclose this information, so it helps a lot to give them every reason to do so. One big way is to add social proof to your page.

Social proof is similar to your client testimonials. In fact, you can use testimonials as your social proof. However, when you add input that’s relevant to your offer itself, you increase your conversion chances.

Whenever you add social proof, make sure you’re getting client approval. This is especially true if it’s the first time their comments are made public. With client approval, consider adding the person’s headshot or the company logo. A person’s face is better, but any relevant image would help. Be sure to include a name, their position, and their company with their quote.

If a client says no to any of that, it’s no longer a testimonial. If they give you a quote but restrict how you use it, it’s borderline useless. Be clear and upfront with your clients when you ask for a testimonial to avoid any future conflicts.

Above the Fold

The last element of landing page design is essential to its success. When people visit your website for any reason (to read a blog article, for example), they gauge their interest on what they see right away. They don’t want to have to scroll down to get to the point of the page.

Your landing page should ideally be entirely above the fold. This means that everything appears without the visitor having to scroll at all. Sometimes, you can get away with putting more important elements above the fold and any extras further down. However, make sure you are indicating that there’s more to see to your visitors. A simple down-facing arrow can work.

Some of the elements that must be above the fold are:

• Headline
• Benefits / description
• Form
• Call-to-action button

The rest of your elements, if there are any, can be a short scroll down. If a visitor is interested in reading your social proof, for example, they can scroll down. It would help if you notify your visitors as to what they’ll see by scrolling.

---

Landing Page Copy

Let’s give this some serious thought because your copywriting has great importance. It can significantly increase your conversion rate or severely hurt it. Your visitors will see your copy before anything else on your page, so make it stand out.

Headline

Your landing page headline is what your visitor sees first upon arriving. It plays an important role in visitor retention. Your headline is what keeps your visitor’s interest and attention.

Best Practices:

Be honest about what you’re offering behind the form. Pack in the most important benefit of the offer in your headline, or use the title of your eBook, when applicable.

You don’t have much time to get your visitor’s attention and keep them on your page, so it’s critical that you make your headline intriguing.

Also, your headline should be optimized for search engines by including your target keyword within it. You want your landing page to rank high, like you would a blog article. Pay attention to SEO best practices for your headline and throughout the landing page development process. We’ll get into that more in a later section.

Description

Your landing page headline isn’t enough to get visitors to convert. You need to include a short blurb describing your offer’s benefits. You need to give them the reasons why your offer is worth it.

A description can be in the form of a video, but more often than not, you’ll want to use text copy. Or, if there’s room, consider adding both. That would allow visitors with different preferences to still understand your offer’s worth.

Tell your visitors 3-5 benefits that would appeal to them enough for a conversion. For my own landing page for this article’s eBook, I list 3 things visitor’s would get from my eBook offer:

• Discover the value of an optimized landing page
• Develop a landing page that leads to conversions
• Get help going from the very beginning to the very end of landing page optimization

The format of your description copy can vary. You can use a bulleted list, a short paragraph, a combination of both, or whatever else works for your offer. As long as your copy allows for quick and easy scanning, giving readers your main points right away, it’ll work. You don’t have long before visitors lose their interest, so get to the point and be clear with them.

Call-to-Action (CTA)

Your call-to-action is a big element to getting that final step toward conversion. Generic CTAs don’t work, so make it compelling.

Best Practices:

Make your CTA stand out as a button rather than in-line text.

Use a different color that stands out from the rest of the form.

Use actionable copy that is specific and honest.

Answer your visitor’s “what’s in it for me?” question.

Make sure your CTA is visible above the fold, like we discussed in the design section.

Experiment with your CTA’s size and placement to make it more noticeable.

Bad CTA Practices:

Using in-line text rather than a visual button

Separating the CTA from the rest of the form

Placing your CTA below the fold, requiring the visitor to scroll down

Writing vague or dishonest text to trick people into converting

Blending your CTA with the rest of your landing page design

Links

The easy answer to this section is to not have any links on your landing page with one exception: include your privacy policy.

You want visitors to stay focused on your offer. If you include other links, that’ll distract visitors and maybe even draw them away from your landing page.

Instead of adding links to your landing page, consider placing them in your thank you page. Some great link ideas for your thank you page include:

• Relevant blog articles
• Additional offers

Your thank you page is the place for links, not your landing page. Hold off on including links till after your visitor converts on your offer.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

Even with your social media advertising and promotion, and even with your email campaigns, there’s still an essential missing method for attracting visitors. It’s search engine optimization.

Search queries on Google, Bing, and other search engines are a very popular way for people to find what they’re looking for online. You want your landing page to rank as high as possible so that people find it when they search for your offer’s theme. If you neglect this opportunity, you lose a large chunk of your potential leads.

The Different Components of SEO:

Your Page Title is the first element to optimize. When you’ve chosen a focus keyword, one that you’ve included in your landing page copy, add it to your page title. This article’s eBook is about landing page optimization, so I use that subject as my chosen keyword. It’s now included in my eBook’s page title.

You also have the Meta Description. This section isn’t necessarily for SEO, so you don’t really have to worry about keywords here. Instead, use this section as a way to attract search engine users to click-through to your landing page. Make the description attractive and compelling.

Another important SEO element is your URL. When you’re creating a URL for your landing page, it’ll help a lot with ranking if you include your chosen keyword phrase. For example, if your offer is a landing page optimization eBook, such as mine is, make your URL /landing-page-optimization-ebook. You’ll rank higher when your URL reflects what your offer is about.

Landing Page Form

Your form doesn’t have to be as fancy as the rest of your page. It mainly just needs to be visible without overwhelming the page. Let’s go into the different elements you should evaluate for your form.

Length

Your form length is dependent on what you’re offering. If your offer is valuable enough, people will be more likely to fill out more fields. Be strategic with how many form fields you add, especially the ones you’ll require.

Standard fields to require:

First name

Last name

Email address

Additional fields to add when appropriate:

Phone number

Company

Job title

Interest in being contacted about your product or service

Newsletter option

Within your form fields, you may want to include a selectable option for your leads to join your email newsletter. Giving them the option to opt-out will help your email campaigns be more successful. You’ll have fewer unsubscribes, spam reports, and inactive subscribers.

Best practice is to have the option to join selected automatically so that people will have to unselect it to opt out. This doesn’t mean you should make this option difficult for the person. The opt in should be as clear and noticeable as the rest of the form.

It is preferred that your leads allow contact through your newsletter because this is how you’ll nurture your leads toward a sale. However, it’s also a great way to filter your leads into two piles: qualified and unqualified. Those who select that they want to hear from you are qualified while those who opt out just want your offer and are unqualified for the sales team.

Privacy policy

Your website should already have a privacy policy set up, but if you don’t have one, now is the time to create it. Just look at my own privacy policy, which goes into detail as to what visitors can expect from both visiting my site and subscribing to my blog.

Your policy should explain to visitors how you collect and use their information. It should reflect both visitor behavior throughout your site as well as what you do with any contact information they provide through a form.

When you’re creating your landing page form, make sure you’re offering a link to your privacy policy to reassure visitors that their contact information is safe. It doesn’t have to stand out from the page, but it should still be visible enough for visitors to select if they want.

After Submission

Thank you confirmation

Now that your landing page is designed, written, and finalized, are you done? No. Your lead generation process is not complete after your visitor converts on your form. The next task is to provide a thank you confirmation page.

The most recommended method for thanking your new leads is to send them to a separate page. This can be where they get direct access to your offer, or it could simply be a confirmation note, such as for a webinar sign-up.

Along with a clear expression of gratitude for your lead’s attention, optimize your thank you page for further action. As stated in an earlier section, you can use this page as a place to share links to further resources. Use it as an opportunity to get your leads to continue down the buyer’s journey by linking to more gated offers.

Follow-up procedure

When you have your landing page ready to go, you need to be ready to test and measure its performance. You’ll need to know what’s working and what’s not so that you can make any necessary adjustments.

Testing

A/B testing is the most typical approach to seeing how different approaches work. You create two versions of your landing page with only one difference between the two. That way you can see which approach works better.

For example: you have one version with your form on the left side of the page and another version with it on the right. Track each one’s performance to see which layout performs better. Once you know which version is better, remove the other one and experiment with another change, if necessary.

Measuring

You should have a clear strategy for how you’re going to measure your page performance before it goes live. If you don’t measure performance, you’ll never know about any problems that may occur. You will lose lead opportunities.

Some of the typical metrics to evaluate via Google Analytics include:

• New and returning visitors as well as the percentage of each that convert
• Time on page
• Referral source for tracking your promotion campaign results
• Preset GA goals, which you can customize based on your own needs

To take full advantage of all the hard work you put into creating your page, you need to have a strategy for how you’ll test and measure its performance. You’ll want to test to improve, and you’ll want to measure to find errors right away.

Your marketing team is really hustling to get your sales team a ton of leads from your online marketing efforts. You’re working harder than ever, and you’re proud of the numbers you’re producing.

But wait! Do you realize you’re so focused on the quantity of your leads, you’ve lost sight of the quality? You’re actually hurting your sales process by racking up higher numbers! B2B companies that center their marketing on getting more leads don’t actually NEED more leads— they need more sales.

You’ll see a better ROI on your sales and marketing efforts and you’ll close sales faster if you concentrate on finding those prospects that are more likely to want or need what you’re offering and “get” what you’re all about.

Find Your Audience and Ditch the Rest

Telling your CEO, “Boss, we need to forget about these hundreds of leads here and focus on those dozens over there,” might lead to an, um, challenging conversation. But remember— you’re armed with the facts. Remind your chief that most online lead conversion rates are just 1 percent, and then pique her interest when you mention that extremely qualified online leads often result in a 2 percent (in other words, doubled!) conversion.

Target Your Perfect Prospects from the Get-Go

Talk to your sales reps and sift through information about your buyers to identify the general types of people who are becoming clients. Figure out what do they do and what their function is in their company. Determine their educational background, their gender, their age…anything that you can about them.

Above all, why did they end up buying from you? If necessary, talk to your current or past customers and ask why they purchased your product or service instead of a competitor’s.

Once you know who these buyers are, you can then create buyer personas. Be as detailed as possible as you create them because all your marketing will be targeted to these “ideal customers” – your perfect prospects – from now on.

Nurture and Sell To the Right People

Now that you know who loves you and why they buy from you, create content that speaks to their pains, their driving questions, and their desires. When you do this, your marketing will be relevant and valuable to them. They will continue to buy from you, tell their (equally qualified) colleagues about how amazing you are and then…your targeted audience will grow.

Fewer Leads = More Sales

This might go against your instincts, but it works: ignore leads generated via non-targeted means. Instead, identify your tribe and then reach out to them in meaningful ways. Give them something useful to help them solve their problems, reach their goals, and achieve success. Do this repeatedly to nurture your leads and watch them convert into sales.

Leaders tend to coach and mentor their “own,” and here’s the human impulse that drives it: Even those who believe that diversity improves creativity, problem solving, and decision making naturally invest in and advocate for the development of the subordinates who are most like them. They see less experienced versions of themselves in these folks, and so they’re inclined to believe in their potential — they want to nurture it. Of course, this also means that growth and advancement opportunities go disproportionately to those who belong to the demographic or social group that’s already in power. That’s what I’ve often observed in my leadership experience, and research confirms that this happens in organizations.

Telling our protégés that diversity matters won’t change a thing. We must demonstrate our commitment to it by deliberately mentoring people who aren’t like us. Otherwise, we do what’s comfortable, and we risk saying with our actions that we care about cultivating the talents of a homogeneous few. That’s the example we end up setting, the culture we end up building.

We may also overlook specific developmental needs on our teams, despite our best intentions, because it can be tough for people from minority demographic and social groups to speak up and voice their concerns. As an Army officer who has trained many diverse groups of recruits, soldiers, and staffers, I’ve always cared deeply about helping all kinds of people reach their potential. But it took me years to understand this basic dynamic: Those who look less like me might find it hard to share their concerns with me or ask for help. They might feel uncomfortable raising their hand if they aren’t sure I will identify with them. And it’s on me, as the leader, to help close that gap.

I’m reminded of one captain I recently mentored. This was a smart, high-performing officer who nonetheless felt invisible to the leaders in his organization. He thought he was being overlooked for opportunities because of his religion. Though I didn’t agree with his perception of how others viewed him, I understood why he felt that way — and talking with him made me see some of the complexities of social acceptance and integration. He had approached me for mentoring because I treated people from diverse backgrounds with respect and kindness, but he was still a bit skeptical about how much I could help him. Through many relaxed, exploratory conversations, I helped him examine his own thinking and behavior, assess the organization’s culture, and identify which jobs he could volunteer for to build the credibility and confidence he needed to succeed in that culture.

At first, he held fast to his negative assumptions about how leaders saw him. But after volunteering for some tough assignments — and receiving superior performance evaluations — he confronted his own unconscious biases, and his confidence grew. He realized he wasn’t as invisible as he had initially assumed. Leaders in senior roles took notice of his initiative and desire to develop, and now that he was communicating more freely and comfortably with them, they better understood what he had to offer and what his career ambitions were. They, in turn, coached him further on management and leadership skills. This captain went on to receive multiple prestigious assignments and continued to excel not just because of his expanded skill set, but also because several leaders in his organization were investing in him and advocating for him. They might have missed out on his talents and contributions if they hadn’t made a focused effort to mentor a promising high potential who didn’t fit the dominant social profile. And I would have missed out on an enriching relationship — one that deepened my understanding of the challenges in diverse groups.

That brings me to my last point: Mentoring across social and demographic lines is good for the mentor, as well. It has made me a more empathic, emotionally intelligent leader. I’ve become better at spotting potential outside the usual mold — and better at understanding the obstacles people face when they aren’t part of the dominant group. And that makes it a little easier for the next person to get leaders’ attention and support.

Did you know top performing salespeople talk about price during a specific “window” in their sales calls (the 40 to 49 minute mark)? They also use language patterns low performers fail to use (risk-reversal language).

And oddly enough, if a buyer asks about your competitor early in the sales cycle, you have a better chance of closing the deal than if the competitor was not mentioned at all.

All of these data points – and more – were surfaced after we analyzed over 250,000 sales calls using Gong’s self-learning conversation analytics engine.

We surfaced six distinct “patterns” of winning sales conversations, and put them into the below infographic. Check it out to see how your sales team’s conversations stack up:

Click to enlarge here.

To sum up the key takeaways:

• Talk to Listen Ratio: The highest converting B2B sales conversations have a 43:57 talk-to-listen ratio. Plus, the longer you can get your customer talking for an uninterrupted period of time, the better.

• Company Overviews (“About Us”): Keep the “About Us” part of your sales deck short. Two minutes or less in this section is okay. After that, there is a sharp dropoff in progressing your deal.

• Competitor Mentions: When your competitors are mentioned early in the sales cycle, you have a greater chance of winning the deal than if they were not mentioned at all. However, if they were mentioned late in the game, your win rates will drop. The takeaway? Competitive deals are good – but win the competitive battle early on in the sales cycle.

• Listen for Linguistic Cues that Indicate Timing: It turns out, there are specific phrases and words buyers will utter during sales conversations that predict their likelihood of buying.

• Risk Reversal Language: When sales professionals use risk reversal language with their buyers, such as talking about opt-outs, guarantees, and SLAs, they increase their sales win rates by 32% on average. Easy win, if your company is willing to implement those policies.

• Discussing Price: Top B2B sales reps deliver pricing in the 40-49 minute on their sales calls ( average and low performers tend to spread out their pricing discussions evenly throughout the call). We also found out that 3-4 pricing questions or mentions by the buyer correlate with the highest win rates. Less than three or more than four, and win-rates begin to shrink.

Of course, the quantitative side of sales conversation effectiveness only tells half of the story (really, it just points us in the right direction). Fleshing out the rest of the story involves understanding sales conversations qualitatively.

The best way I know how to do that is reviewing sales call recordings.

The post The Science of Effective Sales Conversations: What We Learned from 250,000 Calls [Infographic] appeared first on OpenView Labs.

I’ll admit it. Email marketing is scary. You pour your heart and soul into an email–crafting creative copy, compelling imagery, and the perfect subject line just to hit send and get judged by thousands of subscribers (or at least it feels that way sometimes).

Unfortunately, the reality is that not every email you send will be a winner. Luckily, with sound testing methodology and an exhaustive list of A/B testing ideas, you can learn how to better engage subscribers and send your email performance through the roof!

Email Elements to Test

Looking at which email elements to test can be a bit daunting. After all, there are plenty of ways to slice the pie (as a pie aficionado, I would know).

Here are 25 elements you can consider testing in your emails:

1. Subject line
2. From name
3. Day of week sent
4. Time of day sent
5. Cadence
6. Links vs. buttons
7. Image-based CTAs vs. HTML CTAs (aka bulletproof buttons)
8. HTML vs. text
9. Subject line character length
10. Social sharing icons
11. Preheader text (text preview following the subject line)
12. Personalization–first name, company name, address, etc.
13. Header height
14. One column vs. two columns vs. three columns
15. Video in email
16. Using lists and numbers
17. P.S. note in email footer
18. Using trust icons
19. CTA placement
20. Short copy vs. long copy
21. Social proof
22. Mobile optimization
23. Special characters in subject line
24. Declutter
25. Resending to non-openers

Alright, so maybe this list is a little overwhelming, but at least it’s exhaustive!

Since one of the most common email marketing tests is subject line testing, let’s take a moment to talk about what makes for a good subject line:

• Front-load the important words. People want to know why your email is worth their time, so put all the important, actionable words in the front of your subject line to entice opens. In other words, get to the point! In my experience, changing the structure of the sentence line to front-load the important keywords has increased open rates by 10-20%.
• Get personal. There’s usually at least one person in every office who can’t seem to remember anyone’s first name. For the record, no one likes that, especially not your email subscribers. Address your subscribers by their name or, at the very least, insert pronouns like “you” or “your” to give your subject lines a personalized touch.
• Use rhymes, alliteration, and puns. If you can write a subject line that rolls off the tongue, you will get a higher open rate. It’s like music to the ears! It’s not easy to come up with these but when you do, they will perform exceedingly well. In fact, I’ve seen extraordinary subject line performance where I’ve beaten the control by 30-40%!
• Write clearly. Let’s just come out and say it. When it comes to emails, we have short attention spans. We don’t have time to sit there and read everything carefully. We need to know what’s important and that’s it. Use clear and concise language when writing subject lines. The last thing you want is to write a subject line that requires a double take just to understand it.

Take these subject line writing tips out for a spin in your next email test! Remember that first impressions matter. The subject line is like a handshake hello. If you get it right, your subscribers will love you from the start.

5 Best Practices for Email Testing

Done right, A/B testing increases engagement, enhances campaign effectiveness, and informs marketers about audience preferences. For good measure, let’s go over testing best practices.

Here are five pro tips for email testing:

1. Keep it simple. Test basic elements first: subject lines, “from” names, and email copy. It doesn’t take too much time or creative work to come up with a few simple tests.
2. Standardize email send times. When running any A/B test, be sure to normalize your send times. Even a 30-minute difference can drastically change the results of your test. Do your best to send emails together at the optimal send time for your subscribers.
3. Choose your sample sizes wisely. If your sample size is too small, you may be calling a winner without actually having one. As a good rule of thumb, make sure that you have at least 1,000 observations for any test. For instance, if you’re running a subject line test, you need at least 1,000 opens per email to see statistical significance. If you can’t find significance, you should run the test again and aggregate the data.
4. Test one element at a time. It’s tempting to want to test more than one variable at a time because you’d assume the more you test at once, the bigger the impact you can make and the faster you can make improvements. But the challenge is that you wouldn’t know the individual improvements or decline in each variable. Test one variable at a time, measure the results, and roll out the winners into your new emails over time.
5. Listen to your test results. You’ll see testing results that make no sense. You won’t want to believe your eyes. But email marketing isn’t a cupcake competition. The best, most engaging email might not be the prettiest, or your favorite. Trust the data and your email results will be stellar!

Email Metrics to Track

As the saying goes, you can’t manage what you can’t measure. No email test is complete without the right metrics to measure them.

Let’s cover some important email marketing metrics:

• Total number of emails sent
• Total number of emails delivered
• Deliverability rate: Delivered emails/sent emails (expressed as a percentage)
• Unique number of emails opened
• Open rate: Opened emails/delivered emails (expressed as a percentage)
  • Use this metric when you’re evaluating your subject line tests.
• Unique number of email clicks
• Click-to-open rate: Unique clicks/unique opened emails (expressed as a percentage)
  • When you’re running an A/B test involving unique elements within the email such as copy, call-to-action, or imagery, the click-to-open rate is your metric of choice. Since your subject lines stay the same (just test one variable at a time), the click-to-open rate will tell you how the email performed AFTER it was opened by the recipient.
• Click-through rate: Unique clicks/emails delivered (expressed as a percentage)
  • A/B tests for subject lines can use the click-through rate metric. Subject lines affect both open rates and click-to-open rates. The click-through rate metric will give you an all-inclusive metric to measure your subject line tests. Remember that a subject line that beats the control on open rate but loses on click-to-open rate is not necessarily the winner. Look for subject lines that outperform the control across all metrics.
• Unique number of unsubscribes
• Unsubscribe rate: Unique unsubscribes/emails delivered (expressed as a percentage)

I hope this blog has helped give you some testing ideas as well as a foundation for how to test. Do you have a favorite test that I didn’t mention here? Share it below!

 

Four Facebook Ad Tools that will Increase Your Sales

Today I have some Facebook advertising resources to help you improve your strategy and conversion rates.

Social media advertising has become almost a must when it comes to building a business online. Many brands and businesses are turning to Facebook ads to increase their Page numbers and sales. Would you like to improve your ad reach, but don’t know where to start? Check out these great tools, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Outsource your advertising campaigns – Social Ads Tool

Managing multiple ads on Facebook can be time consuming. Social Ads Tool will help get the job done for you with customized options. Because they are a trusted Facebook partner they know exactly how to optimize your content with simple setup and in-depth tracking. New features are offered every two weeks along with segmentation and testing features.

2) Analyze and optimize your ads – AdStage

If you need deep analysis for your ads on Facebook then you will love using this tool. AdStage is an all-in-one platform, which helps you to track your campaign performance as well as automate your ads. The drag and drop interface allows you to easily schedule your ads and perform A/B testing for the best results.

3) Create targeted ad campaigns – adSpringr

Use this powerful tool to increase your sales and performance. adSpringr not only helps you create targeted ads, but also allows you to schedule them multiple times. Use this software to optimize your images and content then gather real-time data from your ads. This resource will help you stay one step ahead of the competition with graphical reporting and intelligent auto bidding features.

4) Target the right market – DriftRock

Would you like to find the right prospects? DriftRock can help you acquire more leads with a lower cost in advertising. Use this tool to improve communication with your customers from the moment they make a purchase and beyond. Learn new strategies and get advice from their team of experts for the best ad performance.

Hopefully you will find these Facebook advertising tools useful to your business sales. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

The other day, I wrote about how it would be nice if there were some sort of anger meter attached to online articles and social media posts. With new outrages happening virtually on a daily basis, it’s hard to keep track and know which to legitimately care about and which are the proverbial mountains out of molehills.

Companies might also benefit, since such a meter could warn them of impending disaster for their business, as was the case last week with United Airlines and its forced removal of a passenger. The violent incident, captured on video, inspired a boycott that knocked 4 per cent off the airline’s stock last week.

The funny thing is, most businesses do in fact have access to outrage meters of a sort in the form of social media monitors. Numerous companies watch and gauge social media reactions to events and smart businesses employ them to avoid United-style public relations disasters.

Keyhole is one of those monitoring services. The Toronto-based startup was able to see the United fiasco unfold in real time. Anyone following its metrics would likely have acted swiftly to contain the damage.

The sheer number of tweets on Twitter coupled with the common phrases showing up in those comments made it clear that United would have a real problem on its hands:

United chief executive Oscar Munoz initially reacted to the incident combatively, referring to the manhandled passenger as “disruptive” and “belligerent.” It took him days to adopt a more contrite and apologetic stance, a mistake that surely helped fuel the stock meltdown.

With online outrage so common, the services provided by companies such as Keyhole – housed in Toronto’s rapidly growing OneEleven startup accelerator – are likely to become increasingly more valuable.

---

MORE ABOUT CUSTOMER SERVICE:

• If you want to give great customer service, close enough isn’t good enough
• How to turn your best customers into an amazing marketing resource
• Focus on your existing clients to master the art of upselling
• Twitter is adding in-app customer service features for brands
• How to deliver consistently great customer service
• Why great customer service is the best kind of marketing
• Five easy ways to improve customer service over the phone
• Five simple ways to get paid faster

The post Social media monitoring is a distant early warning system for brands appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Marketing and PR greatness must include equal parts intelligence, creativity and a focus on results. But there’s one more important ingredient necessary to help you stand out: enthusiasm.

Serena Ehrlich from Business Wire has all of these characteristics and at the Digital Summit LA conference, she shared a cornucopia of practical advice about media relations and promotion of news content with zest and gusto.

Here are a few highlights.

It’s common sense and supported by research that industry media is a source of news and trusted information for buyers of every kind. Consumers and journalists have changed right along with the technology used to discover, consume and engage with content.

Therefore, it’s essential that marketing and communications professionals empathize with their audience to understand their preferences and give them what they want.

Because newsrooms have shrunk and journalists are overwhelmed with bad pitches along with a news cycle that runs 24/7 it’s a challenge to stand out. But no fear,  you can really increase your chances of successful media pickups by following a few news release tips from Serena:

• Include usable support data
• Be interesting
• Be relevant to target audience
• Be catchy
• Include quotes
• Include multimedia

Of course, outbound media pitching isn’t the only way journalists can be exposed to your news content. Search engines and social networks can deliver thousands of additional readers that are actively looking for information that your brand has to give.

That means making sure news releases and newsroom content is optimized for the right keywords and promoted through social media. Serena suggested using Google Trends to find keywords to add to your release headlines to increase opens, which is great. You can also use tools like keywordtool.io, Moz Keyword Explorer or if you have a Google AdWords account, their Keyword Planner. (we’ve covered press release optimization extensively here in the past in case you want to venture that way)

Serena brought up that since journalists are increasingly judged on the traffic or page view performance of the articles they write, be sure to let them know when they cover your story, that you will share what they write across your social networks. If they know you’ll help promote the article, they might be more inclined to use you for the story and again in the future.

When it comes to social media promotion, Serena stressed the importance of earning trust. How do you do that? Here are her tips:

Share smart content:
– News releases and coverage
– New ideas
– Stats and data
– Ask provocative questions
Share happy content:
– Case studies
– User generated content shares
– CSR content
– Employee life
Share negative-fix content:
– How can you solve this pain point?
– Share consequences

Social networks are where people spend their time, period. And to engage with customers, brands need to be where the customers are. To help you promote your news content where people are actually spending time, Serena shared these tips for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Instagram, Pinterest, Snapchat and YouTube:

LinkedIn Tips: Professional Competition
– Link with coworkers: Trigger LinkedIn’s algorithm by sharing updates simultaneously
– Include contact information in your release: LinkedIn promotes people mentioned in news releases
– Use LinkedIn blog opportunities to reach new audiences and drive traffic via company blog teaser
– Write content that includes the 6 Ws, you, lists, hacks, psychology, careers, talent and multimedia

Twitter Tips: Smart, Clever, First
– Format: 118-character count – include a headline, link, comments
– News content types to post on Twitter: Stats, releases, coverage
– Don’t forget to use relevant hashtags – up to 3
– Include up to 4 images, GIF or video
– Join hashtag chats
– Add Influencers to Twitter lists
– Create RT DMs groups – people you can reach out to for mutual sharing of content

Facebook Tips: Personal, Smart, Visual
– Increase Your Reach
– Facebook parses content by type
– Facebook matches word use in updates
– Use free audience targeting
– Upload video in early afternoon

Use Facebook Live for reach:
– 10 minutes in length
– Include surprise material
– Comment pinning pending

Be sure to try Facebook Notes for the SEO value

Reddit Tips: Passionate, Smart, Informed
– Reddit has a large audience with 45,000 targeted communities
– Share links to drive traffic, but be sure to participate with the Reddit community first to build relationships (don’t just dump your links)
– Only share relevant information

Instagram Tips: Fame, Recognition
– Instagram is a visual social network, so be sure to use high quality or interesting imagery
– Showcase behind the scenes, physical products, physical locations
– Highlight employee engagement

On Instagram, be sure to:
– Sign up for a business page
– Drive traffic via URL in profile or Stories
– Be descriptive
– Use hashtags (up to 30)
– Like other people’s images to increase interactivity

Pinterest Tips: Showing off + Smart
– Pinterest is the most aspirational network
– It is very focused on B2C, but there are opportunities for B2B
– Extremely high CTR

On Pinterest, be sure to:
– Fuel the smart board
– Be hyper-targeted
– Be descriptive
– Use hashtags

Snapchat Tips: Unvarnished Truth
– 71% of Snapchat users are 18-34 years old.
– Users have an average of 15 friends
– To maximize your impact on Snapchat, buy a geofilter!

On Snapchat, be sure to:
– Provide VIP/exclusive access to content
– Be highly relevant with real time discussion
– Include offers and coupons
– Consider takeovers

YouTube + BizWireTV Tips: Video News
– 33% of YouTube searches are for news
– YouTube TV is launching in 2017

On YouTube, be sure to:
– Create content for all sales funnel steps
– Determine what your audience watches in long form and shorten it
– Create a video of text content
-Try FB live to announce news
– Try www.gifyoutube.com
– Try Sponsorships with BizWireTV

There’s a lot to think about if you want to do well with your news content across so many social channels. Hopefully these tips are useful for your efforts at getting news content noticed by journalists through both outbound and inbound efforts.

You can connect with Serena on Twitter @Serena and on LinkedIn.

This is the first of two posts from the recent Digital Summit Los Angeles conference I attended. The second will feature Loren McDonald of IBM (Is Cognitive Technology the End of Marketing As We Know It?).

---

Gain a competitive advantage by subscribing to the
TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

© Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®, 2017. | Essential Search and Social Media Promotion Tips for News Content | http://www.toprankblog.com

The post Essential Search and Social Media Promotion Tips for News Content appeared first on Online Marketing Blog - TopRank®.

Ever written the “perfect” tweet, only to find it was 10 characters too long? Nutz!

Or maybe you had something important to say but just couldn’t say it in 140 characters?

What to do?

“Hack” Harder!

Most people “negotiate” their way to 140 characters. Forget that.

Start by saying what you want to say. Don’t sweat the 140, but don’t write a blog post either. Just make your point. It’ll “weigh in” at 155-175 characters most of the time.

If your first pass is 150, you’ll have no problem chopping to 140. Over 180? You’ll need to cut a thought — do that first.

Then turn what you have into a tweet…

It’s like making a sculpture of an elephant. Remove everything that does not look like an elephant!

Source: carefree.org

Seriously, cut out everything that does not look like a tweet! While doing that, watch for a cool turn of phrase!

Here’s what to cut without losing meaning or personality…

• Pronouns. Folks already know it’s you or your business, so ditch the “I” or “we.” (“I’ve written a new book, finished it last week.” → “Wrote a new book, finished last week.”).

• Articles (“the” & “a/an”). You can drop those without losing meaning. (“Wrote a new book, finished last week.” → “Wrote new book, finished last week.”).

• Combine. Twitter forces economical writing (the best kind). “Finished new book last week” is not only tighter, it’s better!

• Adjectives/adverbs. Use stronger nouns/verbs, or kill them outright. (“It’s already June and I’m behind with the new product launch.” → “It’s June. I’m behind with the product launch” → “I’m way behind on product launch!”).

• And. Save characters with abbreviations/symbols (“&” instead of “and”).

• Emojis I. No need to spell out how you feel. Say it with an emoji instead! (“Thrilled to announce I’ve finished the book.” → “Finished book! Yay!”).

• Emojis II. Save on more than emotions. If you carefully, you’ll ❤ this & feel like a . But don’t do it too much.

• Run-on sentences. Split ‘em because it’s sharper and you save a few characters by dropping the conjunction. Oops! → Split ‘em. It’s sharper. Save characters by dropping conjunctions.

• Long words. There’s always a more succinct one (“more succinct” → “shorter”).

• Two words (when one will do). Contractions not only save space, they are less stuffy (→ “they’re less stuffy”).

• Passive voice. “Activate” your writing! (“The course will be launched tomorrow” → “Course launches tomorrow!”).

Got the idea now? Great!

Bottom Line Takeaway?

A sharp “word machete” not only gets you close, it usually improves the message.

So get medieval on that first pass!

When you get down to the short strokes, “tinker” with the words using the best editing tool of all — your own (elephant) ear!

Along the way, a clever twist/combo/hack will turn a tweet into something really special. The more you watch for/try this bit of Twitter-magic, the more often it will happen.

You’ve put yourself in an enviable position as a salesperson. Over the course of several weeks or months you’ve worked hard to qualify a prospect, familiarize him with your product and build a relationship.

He likes you and he likes what you’re selling. You estimate that there’s a 90% chance you’ll close the sale during your next conversation.

But then, the (not so) unthinkable happens. You get a call from the prospect and he tells you he’s been talking to your competitor for weeks now, and they’ve just offered him an outrageously low price on their own product.

He puts you on the spot and asks you straight up, “Can you beat that price?”

If you’ve been in sales for any reasonable amount of time you’ve probably encountered this scenario. If you haven’t, or were unsure about how to proceed, the answer is pretty simple.

That’s because there’s one surefire way to win a price war. Get out of it.

(Want a shortcut to overcoming objections and winning sales negotiations? Get our free objection management template.)

Put price aside

When a prospect appears to be fixated on price, it’s up to you to steer the conversation towards what really matters, and that’s value. Answer his initial question with some questions of your own and let him know where you stand.

“Let’s put the price aside for now. Do you like our product better than theirs? Is our product more valuable to you than theirs is? If you view our products as equal and the only differentiator is price, then I want you to go with theirs, and I want to help you get the best price possible for it.”

What happens next depends on what type of prospect he truly is and what you really think about your product.

A prospect who tries to lowball you fits one of two profiles:

1.  He’s a tough negotiator

This prospect is comfortable being uncomfortable, and is perfectly okay with trying to make you feel uncomfortable as well. He might tell you that he loves you and your product, but the premium price tag that comes with it isn’t justifiable.

That’s okay. If you’re offering a premium solution, you have every right to offer it at a premium price. When you engage in a price war, you devalue your product. To make an exception for this prospect would be doing all of your current customers a disservice.

The conversation with Prospect #1 could be a hard conversation to have. You may lose the opportunity to make a sale. But even if he decides to go with your competitor, you haven’t lost the opportunity to add value to him and his business, which means you haven’t lost a potential customer. We’ll see why in a moment.

2.  He’s not the right customer (yet)

Maybe this prospect really is looking for the cheapest solution, and either hasn’t thought about or doesn’t care about the long-term implications of that strategy.

If you are in the business of being the cheapest – if you look around at your competitors and determine that their margins are where your opportunity lies – and you’re able to execute on that strategy, then read no further. The advice in this blog won’t apply to you.

But if you’re in the business of maximizing value for your customers, and thus maximizing value for yourself in the long run, then a prospect who is simply seeking the cheapest option is not someone you’re should attempt to sell to.

If your prospect’s goal is to get the best price right now, help him reach that goal. (I’m going to share how specifically to do this in the next section—not just generic advice, but a highly actionable tactic you should use exactly as I lay it out here when dealing with this kind of prospect.)

Regardless of whether you’re talking to Prospect #1 or Prospect #2 you should recognize in this situation an opportunity to build a partnership that can ultimately add value to you and your company in the long term.

Put the team first

At first, you may sweat a little a bit when you hear yourself boldly promise to help sell your competitor’s product to your customer. But this strategy makes perfect sense when you remember that the growth of any SaaS business relies on enabling the success of others.

In other words, you should be doing whatever it takes to add value to your prospect and his organization without compromising your own sales efforts or your product.

In this particular situation, you have an excellent opportunity to do exactly that.

When you say to your prospect, “I’m on your team. If the only difference between our products is price, I want you to go with the other guys. Leverage me as much as you can so that you can get their solution as cheaply as possible. I'll even help you negotiate a lower price by sending you an email underbidding their latest offer.” You are turning yourself into an undeniable asset and a valuable partner.

Here’s what happens when you do that.

Outcomes

Prospect #1: When you show a willingness to help him reach his goal, even if it means selling the competition’s product, Prospect #1 will recognize that you’re committed to adding value to his organization. Likewise, when you show that you’re willing to take the deal away rather than compromise, you set the tone for the relationship moving forward, and very clearly demonstrate your expertise as a salesperson and your belief in your product.

If Prospect #1 is as shrewd as he seems to be, it’s likely that he’ll quickly recognize you as the type of partner he wants to be aligned with.

Prospect #2: If you help Prospect #2 acquire the cheapest alternative to your solution, it’s only a matter of time until he realizes that he got what he paid for, and that he actually wants and needs more. When this realization finally hits, he’ll be well aware of your confidence in your own product and should be ready to pay for that added value.

Fortunately, he got the first solution for next to nothing thanks to you.

Build something that’s built to last

Don’t cheapen your product by letting yourself get lured into a price war and don’t settle for customers whose number one priority is price.

Remember that what ultimately will determine your long-term success, more than closing any single sale, is building mutually beneficial relationships that will bring value to both your own organization and your customers’ over time. 

Want more tips on overcoming objections and winning sales negotiations? Get our free objection management template.

 

In a traditional team structure, conflicts can be escalated to the boss to resolve. Can’t agree on how to prioritize projects, or on which deadlines need to shift? Ask the team leader to step in and make a call. Think a coworker is acting snarky, or that their work is too sloppy? Advise the manager to give them some feedback. But for flat or self-managed teams, that’s not an option. Self-managed teams must identify different ways to find and address day-to-day conflicts.

Self-managed teams can focus on three things to help them successfully resolve conflicts. (Traditionally hierarchical teams may benefit from them too.)

Encourage openness to productive conflict. First and foremost, self-managed teams must commit to openly discussing their differences. Conflict should be seen not as an annoyance that leads to anxiety and alienation, but as an opportunity for growth and strong working relationships.

To create this culture of open communication, try turning conflict resolution into an organized group activity. A technique called Planning Poker has opened my team’s eyes to just how productive having dissenting viewpoints can be. Using a point-based system, the technique encourages all team members to raise their opinions, weigh every option, and collectively vote on the best plan. Planning Poker is predominantly used by software developers, but it can facilitate virtually any business decision.

Come to a common understanding about which conflicts can be resolved without the involvement of others. For example, you might develop norms about what constitutes a low-risk decision (for example, it affects few people, or the related costs fall below a certain threshold), and encourage the team to resolve low-risk conflicts without group intervention.

Prioritize accountability over blame. Autonomous teams should win and lose as a group. When shortcomings occur, teams shouldn’t assign blame to the contributors closest to the debacle. Rather than looking at who was responsible, as people express only the symptoms, they should investigate why the issue occurred.

This mode of conflict resolution is akin to the “blameless postmortem” approach much of the technology world takes to understand why products and endeavors don’t reach their full potential. If a team is comfortable speaking openly about conflict and hardships, asking “How did this happen?” when conducting a postmortem won’t lead to the blame game; it will yield the root cause. As Etsy CTO John Allspaw says, people are “the most expert in their own error. They ought to be heavily involved in coming up with remediation items.” Punishing them for contributing to conflict discourages this productive dialogue.

Further Reading

To further enhance the blameless approach, a team can discuss the situation with several other teams at the company and gather multiple unbiased opinions regarding the conflict’s root cause and how it could be addressed. Even if this doesn’t result in a unanimous opinion or a clear plan of action, it shifts the focus from the responsible parties and opens the remediation process to many diverse, productive ideas.

Quantify the impact of the problem. A team at my organization was recently at odds because a developer preferred to work at night — which was inconvenient because everyone else worked during the day. This employee was absent from nearly every important meeting, and his teammates constantly found themselves taking extra time to fill him in on everything he missed.

The tension continued until the team quantified the impact of his absence. Each meeting the employee missed took 60 minutes, and the team would spend 30 more minutes recapping for him and hearing his thoughts. With six members on the team, that’s a combined three hours of unnecessary discussion. To top it off, the employee missed about 10 meetings each month, so his team was devoting more than 350 hours per year to these conversations. Instead of focusing on the symptomatic conflict and requiring the employee to work during the day every day, the team decided to develop a flexible schedule that worked for everyone. On meeting days, the night owl could arrive in the afternoon, share a few hours of overlap with everyone else, and then burn the midnight oil as he pleased.

Quantifying the impact of conflict provides several benefits. It encourages productive conversations, creates alignment around the gravity of the issue, and unlocks creative solutions as people identify both the source and the impact of their conflicts. Assigning a numeric value to waste helps teams find better ways to reduce it.

Public speaking anxiety is something which affects all of us to some extent. In fact, I believe that Mark Twain was right when he said,“There are two types of speakers: those who are nervous and those who are liars.”

Barbra Streisand, the 72 year old singer and actress is one of the highest-selling female recording artist of all time and even she still gets nervous.

Warren Buffett, the billionaire investor was once terrified of speaking in public and says he used to avoid college classes where he had to get up in front of people.

Nicole Kidman, Hugh Grant, Reese Witherspoon, and reportedly even Winston Churchill, JFK, Margaret Thatcher, Barbara Walters and Johnny Carson are believed to have had some anxiety about public communication at some point.

Even the late great, Elvis Presley once said, “I’ve never gotten over what they call stage fright. I go through it every show.”

If that doesn’t shock you then perhaps this will.

I believe that even Aristotle, Isaac Newton, and Charles Darwin all had stutters and were nervous speakers at one time in their lives.

The list of famous, successful, influential and powerful people is as surprising as it is long. If you have an important speech coming up and are feeling a little nervous about it then you can take comfort knowing that you really are in the very best of company.

For many people it can be a very scary prospect but the good news is, however nervous you may feel it’s not life threatening. To my knowledge no one has ever died from either speaking in public or worrying about speaking in public.

Personally, I quite like the idea that so many hugely talented and famous people have felt and still feel nervous when performing in some way. It tells me they are human, just like the rest of us and that if they can achieve so much despite feeling that way then there must be hope for all of us. It’s my belief that it really doesn’t matter who we are when we stand to speak in public we are somehow hard wired to feel some level of anxiety.

Here are 20 things you can do to manage your anxiety when presenting and speaking in public:

1. Enlighten your audience, don’t just inform them.

Make sure that you know a lot about what you will be speaking about and that you care about what you have to say even more. Don’t however craft your presentation with the assumption that just because you know what you know your audience will understand you. Your job is to make the complex simple to understand and to convert what some may perceive as boring into interesting. If you invest your time focusing on turning information into something your audience can relate to and remember you will be far less nervous.

2. Speak to your audience before you meet them

Make it about your audience, not about you. That means making it your business to get to know as much as you possibly can about them and prepare thoroughly for them when presenting. If you already know them because they are colleagues, clients or your senior management pick up the phone and ask them how you can help them in your presentation, find out how much they already know and what they would like to know. Find out what is on their mind or may concern them about the topic and get some insight into how they would like to feel after your presentation.

If you don’t know them try to get a few email addresses or contact numbers and go out of your way to get to ask them the same questions.

3. Do more than practice your presentation

Practicing your presentation the morning or day before you speak isn’t good enough and is likely to make you even more anxious. The works starts long before then. Set aside as much time as you can to practice the way you deliver your presentation and focus on the impact you are likely to have on your audience. Don’t just practice in front of your dog, find someone you trust who will give you honest feedback.

Practice three things.

Your content – in terms of understanding your key message and the supporting points.

Your verbal delivery – how you sound in terms of volume, pitch, pace, rhythm, emphasis, intonation, pauses, etc.

Your physical delivery – how you look in terms of facial expressions, hand gestures, stance, eye contact, movement, etc.

4. Be in the room

Always get to the venue at least an hour early – make sure everything works and then take as much time as you need just being present in the room before anyone else arrives. Spend 10 minutes standing where you will be speaking, notice the space, the temperature, the lighting, the air conditioning, external and internal noises, creaky floorboards,etc. Simply immerse yourself fully in the room as much as you can before anyone else arrives

5. Take a seat

Once you’ve arrived early and spent some time simply ‘being’ in the room spend a few moments sitting in some of the audience seats before they arrive to get to see what they see. If you are in a meeting or training room with just a few seats be sure to sit in each of them for a few moments. If you are speaking to a large audience in a conference room sit in a few at the front, back, middle, left and right.

6. Look your best

Dress for the occasion and make sure that you look great and feel great as far as your appearance is concerned. Don’t take any chances, find out well in advance how your audience have been asked to dress for the event and do your best to fit in with them but looking the very best you can. Don’t forget to polish your shoes, get your hair cut a few days before and if you are travelling and staying overnight to speak in the morning take a spare shirt or blouse just in case your breakfast gets the better of you.

7. Get moving

Exercise the evening before or morning just before you speak. Rather than spend the entire evening or morning of your big presentation worrying and playing all of those negative thoughts over and over again in your mind spend some time working out. Go for a brisk walk, go to the gym, go for a swim or take a yoga or dance class. It may sound like the last thing you want to do but the exercise will leave you feeling much better.

8. Get some sleep

Be sure to get to bed early the night before your presentation, many people don’t sleep well the night before an important presentation but getting as much rest as you can will help you and take the edge off of your anxiety in the morning. Some presenters believe that drinking alcohol will help them sleep the evening before but don’t try that yourself it will leave you feeling worse. Avoid junk food the night before too.

9. Take time to calm your mind

Spend some time meditating or practicing self-hypnosis a few days before you speak and be sure to do it on the day too.We all have a vast number or thoughts every day many of which are repetitive and negative ones. Take the time to slow and calm many of those negative thoughts down by finding a practice that works for you and makes you feel good.

10. Start as you mean to continue

For many speakers, especially those who feel more anxious than others the first two minutes are the hardest. With that in mind it would be really helpful for you to practice your opening in such a way that you will not only feel comfortable with it but remember it. You shouldn’t try to memorize your entire presentation, just the first two minutes.

Practice your opening over and over until it becomes a part of you.

11. Breathe deeply

Don’t forget to breathe but don’t leave it until the last minute; establish a deep breathing relaxation practice well before your presentation and stick to it

Breathe in through your nose to the count of five counting slowly in your mind.

Breathe out through your mouth softly pursing your lips to the count of five.

Do five rounds of breathing in and out to a slow count of 5 and focus on keeping your shoulders, stomach and legs relaxed. If your face or jaw feels tight then relax that too.

12. Please smile

Practice smiling and don’t forget to pause, breathe and smile before you say a word. Your smile tells both you and your audience that you can relax as everything will be fine. Smiling is contagious, not only do you get to feel better, your audience does too. The act of smiling not only releases endorphins to make you feel good it makes you look more friendly, trustworthy and credible as well.

13. Connecting is everything

Practice making eye contact with your audience even if it makes you uncomfortable. It’s the best way to connect with them emotionally and when you feel that connection yourself it feels great and will build your confidence. As far as public speaking and presenting is concerned there really is no more effective way of connecting with your audience than making eye contact with them; it really is the jewel in the crown of high impact presenting.

14. Please make them feel something

Switch your mindset, energy and focus to connecting emotionally with your audience and dismiss the idea of dumping information on them and trying to impress them or be perfect. As you focus your attention on making your audience feel something emotionally you will feel less anxious as you become far more interested in them than yourself.

15. Watch your posture

The way you stand and position yourself while presenting is important to both you and your audience. A strong, balanced and relaxed posure will go a long way to helping you to feel far more confident as you speak. A good stance will not only make you feel more alert and powerful on your feet but it will tell your audience that you are engaged and interested in them.

Stand tall and proud. Your physiology will play a huge part in how you feel.

16. Watch your language

In other words, stop telling yourself how nervous you are, what a terrible presenter you are or that you will forget what to say.

Tell yourself you know your content, you are prepared, it’s completely natural to feel nervous and that you have something to share which is of value to your audience. Remind yourself that your audience are on your side, you are the expert, they don’t want you to be perfect and they just want you to be yourself and connect with them.

17. See success

Visualize your audience smiling, looking engaged and thanking you afterwards for a great presentation.

Imagine your audience nodding in agreement listening intently to your presentation.

Don’t try to imagine your audience naked….

18. Be present

Before you speak switch your focus entirely on the present.

Listen to your favourite piece of music on headphones.

Practice saying a tongue twister.

Play a game on your mobile phone.

Focus on your breath.

Do something that keeps you in the moment

19. Have a clear message

Don’t try to memorize or read a script. Focus instead on your message, how you will support it and bring it to life.

Get to know your key points, stories, opening and closing by practicing out loud. Have notes prepared in case you need to refer to them but don’t hold them.

Think of your message in the form of a tweet, make it as clear and as simple and as compelling as possible. If you can’t express it with impact in a tweet do you really have a strong one.

20. Don’t try to be perfect

Remember your audience can’t see what you are feeling. They don’t want to see a slick polished speaker on a platform all they want is to hear another human being who has the courage to drop the ‘corporate spokesperson’ to connect with them and help them in some way.

Image: Courtesy of flickr.com

Glasses company Warby Parker hit its first-year sales target in three weeks.

In "Success! How I Did It," a Business Insider podcast that follows the career paths of some of today's most accomplished people, Alyson Shontell, the editor in chief of Business Insider US, spoke with two of Warby Parker's four founders: Neil Blumenthal and Dave Gilboa, who also serve as co-CEOs.

Warby Parker is now a billion-dollar brand, but as with any startup, at its inception seven years ago its founders didn't know it would take off.

They had built the company with their life savings — a collective $120,000 — and were operating on a shoestring budget. "When I say do this on a shoestring, we used to go to TD Bank, steal pens, and steal office supplies from other people," Blumenthal told Business Insider.

But they did hire a PR firm, and thanks to their Home Try-On service — something unusual at the time — and their "Buy One, Give One" model that donates glasses to people in need, they were able to land features in Vogue and GQ.

"It was literally that moment that the business took off," Blumenthal told Shontell when she asked about the moment they realized the business would stick. He continued:

"Our website wasn't ready to launch and the fashion director at GQ calls us up and is like, 'Guys the magazine's going to hit newsstands any day now, where is the website?' Because we were going to be in the March issues of GQ and it was February.

"We thought, 'Oh, we have a whole month.' Just to show you our naivete, it was like, "No, the March issues comes out in February."

"We literally scrambled, got the website up. We ended up hitting our first-year sales targets in three weeks — sold out of our top 15 styles. Had a wait list of over 20,000 people.

"It was mayhem and the question is, 'How do we maintain that momentum?' That was all about customer experience, so how do we make every single person have an exceptional experience, even when it's a crappy one?"

Giving each customer an exceptional experience is a value that the company has maintained over the years. "To this day," Blumenthal said, "you call Warby Parker and a human being answers the phone within six seconds."

The reason why is simple, he said: "So when we make people happy, they're more likely to tell other people about us. Word of mouth since inception has been the No. 1 driver of sales for us."

Listen to the full episode:

Subscribe to "Success! How I Did It" on iTunes to hear the latest episodes.

SEE ALSO: The founders of Warby Parker reveal how they run a billion-dollar glasses brand with two CEOs, and why Amazon won't crush them

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The first thing 8 highly successful people do each morning

Every marketplace has its gaps or customer pain points. Any new entrant to a market will have to scour the market for existing gaps and attempt to fill them with their business. As marketplaces evolve, so do the shape and size of these gaps. New entrants need to be aware of where they exist, how it affects the consumer and how to resolve it with their business.

This article is going to help you identify these customer pain points and guide you through using that knowledge to tailor a personalised customer experience for your target market.

Identifying customer pain points – present and future

Customer pain points, to put it simply, are problems faced by your target market. Your potential customers may or may not be aware of the problem, the problem could already be solved, or it may not yet exist. When your customers are aware of the problems, it is a matter of identifying them and coming up with a solution. If a supposed solution already exists in the market, it comes down to how your product can offer a better solution. When the market is not aware of the problem, it falls upon you to identify it through research, innovation and often a pivot from established systems.

The three processes to identify customer pain points are:

Customer feedback

It is not up to you to make assumptions about customers needs, it is for them to tell you. What you have to do is to make use of the means at your disposal to find ways to get your customers to talk to you. Polls, surveys, cold-calling, social media, live chat, and product reviews offer the easiest and most cost-effective ways for you to do that. Your goal should be:

(a) Pinpoint how you can add value to the market (read: fix problems) with your product.

(b) Identify the size of the market.

(c) Identify gaps in the marketplace that remain unfixed by existing systems.

Engaging with Influencers

Today, there are no isolated marketplaces. Be it the industry bigwigs or the small fry, every company exists as a part of a mutually reliant system. What this means for new entrants to a marketplace is access to an expert peer group of professionals with proficient knowledge about the industry. That list includes industry experts, educators, researchers, analysts, brand journalists, bloggers, and even competitors who engage with and advise one another on the industry and its trends and quirks. By engaging with industry experts, new entrants are better educated about the expectations and problems that affect their market. Unlike monopolistic markets which are wary of outsiders, current marketplaces are more open to new entrants.

Walking in your customer’s shoes

Not all pain-points are created equally. Some ensue from a wish for a better lifestyle (the iPod made it easier to listen to music on the go), some from the need to increase productivity (vacuum cleaners over brooms) and then some that came into existence because of systems that were supposed to solve customer pain points. When you use a website that’s tough to navigate, or call customer care to be put on hold for hours on end, these are pain points that were created by the marketplace and not the customers themselves. And therein lies your opportunity to push a competitor from its pedestal and take its place. Walk in your customer’s shoes and explore the marketplace from their perspective. Every customer does not take the same buying journey. Trying to map out as many paths as possible will help you find the gaps in established systems.

Tailoring a personalised customer experience

The market has a fair share of companies trying to push their product onto consumers without considering how the product can be a solution to customer problems. In the short term, a fancy marketing strategy coupled with a decent product can bring in customers. But if the company is not targeting and addressing the needs of specific market niches that stand to gain value from the product, it will not last long in a competitive marketplace. Companies cannot afford to work outside their niche and hope that the right customers will find them.

By understanding customer pain points, you are made aware of the exact market(s) where your product will work and how to tailor a customer experience that strikes the best chord with your audience. A blanket approach to your customer base works with relatively isolated markets with lots of room for new entrants. But when you’re working in a crowded marketplace personalised experiences are what will bring in customers.

Let’s talk about the 3 ways you by which you can create personalized experiences for your customers:

Content creation

Content is the easiest and most cost effective way to target specific groups of customers. Unlike with paid media where you’re renting advertising space, running a blog gives you lifetime rights to the content (assuming you haven’t plagiarized the content from another source(s)). It is up to you to write as much or as little as you want. Content can be specific to a niche or target multiple niches covering every pain point affecting the marketplace.

Product flexibility

You’d expect a cupcake store to have all the crowd favorites like chocolate, toffee, lemon etc. But then you’ll also find the sugar-free, gluten-free and eggless varieties to target a smaller niche market. You cannot go to the market with a rigid idea for your product if you hope to expand to a wide audience. You might make the best coconut cupcakes in the world, but not everyone (does anyone?) likes coconut cupcakes. Different markets with different pain-points will find value in your product in different ways. Identifying those types and being flexible with your product offering lets every one of those markets find value in your product.

Customer Behaviour

Based on the time spent and the frequency of visits to a particular webpage on my company’s website, visitors are engaged through live chat with material that assists with the use of that particular product (demos, pricing, support etc.). By mapping customer behaviour you can identify where they encounter barriers in the buyer journey. Through manual intervention or by using custom triggers, you can engage customers at pain points through personalized messages. Identifying these gaps also helps breed familiarity with commonly encountered customer issues which keeps service and support team well informed about possible customer grievances.

Final Thoughts

Your customers don’t want to feel like they’re being targeted, grouped, researched and analysed as statistical figures. They expect businesses to be human and personal in every interaction. While it’s not possible to cater personally to the needs of every single customer, the workarounds discussed in this article are your next best step.

A mathematical rethink suggests that carbon dioxide will warm Earth more in the future than it does today. But better satellites—such as those Trump wants to scrap—are needed to reduce climate uncertainty

It’s the end of the month or quarter, and you’re running out of time to hit quota. A deal you were counting on to close is stalling.

What do you do?

Pressuring your prospect to buy before they’re ready is never wise, unless you want to lose their trust and potentially their business.

But there are several non-manipulative ways to increase the buyer’s urgency -- like these six ideas.

1) Present Your Product’s Value in a New Way

Traditional selling advice suggests showing your prospect exactly how much they stand to gain by buying your product.

Here are the four main value propositions:

1. Increased revenue: “You’ll double your gross profit from X channel in Y months.”
2. Greater efficiency: “It will take one employee to produce what two produce right now.”
3. Reduced risk: “The probability of [negative event] happening will decrease from A% to B%.”
4. Lower costs: “You’ll save $X per quarter.”

The problem with consistently talking about your solution’s ROI? The buyer becomes a little desensitized. The fifth time you bring up how much money she’ll save has far less impact than the first.

To reinvigorate her desire to buy, present value in a new way. If you’ve focused on cutting costs, for example, now highlight your product’s efficiency benefits.

2) Use Social Proof

Prospects often get skittish in the final stages of a deal. If the product doesn’t work as promised, their performance, work reputation, and sometimes even job security will take the hit.

Give them the confidence to move forward with social proof. That might translate to:

• A blog post from a customer mentioning your product.
• A case study.
• A press mention.
• A positive third-party review.
• A happy email from a customer.
• An endorsement from an influencer.
• Names of well-known companies using your product.
• A favorable social media mention.

There are other, even more creative ways to demonstrate social proof, such as:

• A blog post from a company executive on a well-known site.
• How many customers you have and their usage data.
• Your integration partners.
• Pictures, diagrams, or videos of your product.
• Information about specific products and/or product lines, like “X is selling twice as much this month.”

Once you’ve found some compelling social proof, send it with a note along the lines of, “Wanted to share this with you because … ”

3) Add Some Humor

Are you and your prospect friendly? A humorous email can sometimes make them buy faster -- you’ll put yourself on their radar without seeming pushy or annoying them.

Follow this three-part formula:

1. The dollar value of something they like
2. Your product’s ROI
3. Their break-even point with your product

Calculate how many things they could buy with the savings from your product and how long it would take them -- if they pulled the trigger today.

For instance, you might write, “If you started using our platform today, it would take you two weeks to make an additional $4,000 -- that’s enough to buy 2,010 episodes of Top Chef on demand.”

4) Take Away the Risk

According to Gong.io’s analysis of 25,537 sales calls, using “risk-reversal” language increases win rates by 32%.

To get a deal over the finish line, remind the buyer how easily they can opt out, get a refund, or request support.

These lines may inspire you:

• “You have three months to cancel and get all your money back if you’re not seeing the results you’d like … ”
• “It takes two minutes to quit, and you can do everything online.”
• “Our support team is available 24/7 to answer your questions during the installation process.”
• “If you’re unsure what to do or want feedback on your strategy, I’m always happy to help.”
• “It takes our average customer two hours to get up and running.”
• “We guarantee you’ll see X results if you follow the process we’ve outlined.”

5) Lean on the Bond You’ve Established

Jeff Hoffman, creator of the Your SalesMBA™ program, advises letting the buyer know when their actions aren’t living up to your expectations.

Suppose you’ve invested a considerable amount of energy and resources over the past four months helping your prospect put together a new strategy for his team -- with the understanding you were working toward a sale.

Now, he’s dragging his feet.

You might say, “Tony, we’ve spent a lot of time together since January. I’ve helped you develop an HR strategy to target Cleveland developers, and we’ve also explored how EngineerWorks can increase your company’s offer acceptance rate by 20%. You committed to a full stakeholder meeting May 2 -- I’ll be disappointed if that’s no longer happening.”

Of course, you don’t want to guilt-trip buyers for commitments they haven’t made. But in the scenario they’ve reneged, Hoffman says respectfully calling them out will increase your status and motivate them to make up for it.

6) Offer a Discount

Letting your prospect know your company is running a limited-time promotion is an effective way to create urgency. 

Here's what you might send a prospect who's been unresponsive:

If they're at all interested, they'll get on the phone.

Closing a deal that seemed destined to stall is an exhilarating feeling. With these strategies up your sleeve, you can make 100% (or even 150%) of your number.

Now that social selling is a legitimate way of growing your pipeline, it’s crucial your LinkedIn profile makes a good impression.

The first major mistake salespeople make is targeting the wrong audience. But if your profile is tailored toward prospects, rather than recruiters, there’s another big pothole you need to avoid.

It’s easy to fall back on well-used terms like “experienced,” “strategic,” and “excellent.” However, these words will make buyers’ eyes glaze over. They’re so worn out they’re essentially meaningless.

At the beginning of every year, LinkedIn releases the top words people around the globe are using to describe themselves. If these are on your profile, you'll sound just like everyone else -- probably not what you're going for.

Here’s the 2018 list (from most-used to least), along with our suggestions for more convincing swaps.

1) Specialize

What it means: To concentrate in a specific area.

This is the most-used descriptor for the second year in a row. And it's not a great one -- unless you’re a Jack (or Jill) of all trades, you specialize in something. Announcing that fact to the world doesn’t make you seem more qualified: You’re stating the obvious.

The fix: Describe what you specialize in. That’s what you (and the people reading your profile) care about, anyway.

For example, if you’ve worked in B2B SaaS sales for most of your career, you might write, “I’m a senior Account Executive with seven years of experience in B2B SaaS.”

2) Experienced

What it means: You’re well-versed in a particular industry, market, product category, or role.

Like “specialized,” labeling yourself as “experienced” doesn’t do much to make you sound impressive. Experience is a function of your maturity in the job and exposure to different circumstances -- meaning it should be apparent from your work history.

The fix: Pinpoint what makes you experienced. Have you worked in real estate for the past 10 years? Do you know the ins and outs of startup sales after having been on the ground floor at your past two companies? Are you adept at navigating complex buying processes due to your time selling enterprise-wide technology solutions?

Once you’ve identified your areas of experience, describe them in your summary.

3) Skilled

What it means: You've got the knowledge, training, and experience to successfully do a task or group of tasks.

"Skilled" is a new addition to the list in 2018. Having skills is undeniably a good thing, but there are better ways to demonstrate your capabilities than "XYZ professional skilled at ABC things."

The fix: List what you can do, and, if it's relevant, how long you've been doing it. To give you an idea, you might write, "For the past three years, I've been helping clients identify and fix 'leaky' stages of their sales process."

4) Leadership

What it means: To officially or unofficially guide a group of people.

Leadership was also the #2 most popular word in 2017. And I get why so many users -- especially salespeople -- rely on it to describe their impact on the team. Whether you’re a front-line sales rep or a manager, you probably exhibit leadership in some way. Salespeople can motivate other reps to hit or beat their targets, as well as share best practices and useful techniques. Managers are clearly leaders: They’re responsible for helping their team meet quota month after month (or quarter after quarter). 

However, just because you're leading doesn't mean that's the best way to describe it. 

The fix: Highlight the specific impact you’ve had on your peers or reports. The more quantified, the better.

To give you an idea, you could say, “I organized a weekly session with the other SDRs on my team to discuss our highest-performing email templates.”

5) Passionate

What it means: You’re excited about your work. Money isn’t the sole (or even the main) reason you do what you do.

This adjective is overused and doesn’t say anything special about you. In addition, salary is a big incentive for many salespeople -- and there’s nothing wrong with that.

The fix: Talk about why you’re passionate and/or what you appreciate. Maybe you love selling healthcare equipment to hospitals because you know how many lives that equipment saves, or you’re enthusiastic about providing restaurants with inventory management software because your mom owns her own restaurant.

6) Expert

What it means: You outperform your peers at a specific ability, topic, or niche.

Since many people claim to be experts when they’re not, saying you’re an expert usually backfires. Prospects will automatically be more skeptical when they read this.

The fix: Delete “expert” wherever it appears as an adjective. Your sentences will normally read just as well without it -- if you’d previously written you were an “expert salesperson,” now it would say “salesperson.”

If you’ve used “expert” as a noun (e.g., “home security expert”), write about your typical results instead. To give you an idea, you might say, “My clients typically see a 60% reduction in crime.”

7) Motivated

What it means: You're highly driven.

"Motivated" made the buzzwords list for the first time this year. It's overused, yes, but that's not the only problem. Being motivated is one of those traits you want to show, not tell.

The fix: I'd recommend cutting "motivated" from your profile altogether. But if you want to highlight your work ethic and dedication, pull out a few experiences where you've gone above and beyond. For example, you could add, "I've completed 10 ultra-marathons. Most people (including my family members) think I'm crazy, but I love to set targets that push me out of my comfort zone and help me grow. I bring this  philosophy with me to work, figuratively going the distance for my clients."

8) Creative

What it means: You find out-of-the-box, sometimes unusual ways to accomplish your goals.

Creativity is a desirable trait, but it’s one of those things people have to take your word for unless they’ve worked with you directly. And in that case, you don’t need to promote your creative abilities -- they’ll already be familiar with them.

The fix: Call out a creative strategy or game plan you’ve used. Suppose a prospect was struggling to get foot traffic to their store, so you advised offering free classes to draw in random pedestrians. Citing these examples of creativity help buyers understand the value of working with you.

9) Strategic

What it means: You make intelligent, carefully plotted decisions.

“Strategic” is a buzzword. Ideally, every step you do or do not take at work would have reasoning behind it.

The fix: Share your decision making process. Writing about how your customers achieved a 20% growth in revenue after you analyzed their customer retention framework and found a major opportunity is five times more compelling than calling yourself strategic.

10) Focused

What it means: You zero in on your goals and pursue them relentlessly, ignoring less important projects until you’re done.

This tired adjective will prompt major eye-rolls. If you want to stand out, cut it from your profile.

The fix: Prioritization is an important skill. Although “focused” isn’t the best word to show you can prioritize, you shouldn’t exclude the concept from your profile.

Instead of calling yourself focused, come up with a time you met (or exceeded) an ambitious goal. For instance, perhaps you brought on five top-performing salespeople in one month by spending one-third of your time on hiring and recruiting.

You need to put aggressive goals at the top of your to-do list to be successful, so details like these will prove you’re focused.

Did you know top performing salespeople talk about price during a specific “window” in their sales calls (the 40 to 49 minute mark)? They also use language patterns low performers fail to use (risk-reversal language).

And oddly enough, if a buyer asks about your competitor early in the sales cycle, you have a better chance of closing the deal than if the competitor was not mentioned at all.

All of these data points – and more – were surfaced after we analyzed over 250,000 sales calls using Gong’s self-learning conversation analytics engine.

We surfaced six distinct “patterns” of winning sales conversations, and put them into the below infographic. Check it out to see how your sales team’s conversations stack up:

Click to enlarge here.

To sum up the key takeaways:

• Talk to Listen Ratio: The highest converting B2B sales conversations have a 43:57 talk-to-listen ratio. Plus, the longer you can get your customer talking for an uninterrupted period of time, the better.

• Company Overviews (“About Us”): Keep the “About Us” part of your sales deck short. Two minutes or less in this section is okay. After that, there is a sharp dropoff in progressing your deal.

• Competitor Mentions: When your competitors are mentioned early in the sales cycle, you have a greater chance of winning the deal than if they were not mentioned at all. However, if they were mentioned late in the game, your win rates will drop. The takeaway? Competitive deals are good – but win the competitive battle early on in the sales cycle.

• Listen for Linguistic Cues that Indicate Timing: It turns out, there are specific phrases and words buyers will utter during sales conversations that predict their likelihood of buying.

• Risk Reversal Language: When sales professionals use risk reversal language with their buyers, such as talking about opt-outs, guarantees, and SLAs, they increase their sales win rates by 32% on average. Easy win, if your company is willing to implement those policies.

• Discussing Price: Top B2B sales reps deliver pricing in the 40-49 minute on their sales calls ( average and low performers tend to spread out their pricing discussions evenly throughout the call). We also found out that 3-4 pricing questions or mentions by the buyer correlate with the highest win rates. Less than three or more than four, and win-rates begin to shrink.

Of course, the quantitative side of sales conversation effectiveness only tells half of the story (really, it just points us in the right direction). Fleshing out the rest of the story involves understanding sales conversations qualitatively.

The best way I know how to do that is reviewing sales call recordings.

The post The Science of Effective Sales Conversations: What We Learned from 250,000 Calls [Infographic] appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Given that U.S. companies spend approximately $20 billion per year on sales training initiatives, it’s no wonder why leadership teams expect to see tangible results from these programs. While it’s certainly possible to evaluate sales training effectiveness strictly from a financial ROI perspective, uncovering the holistic value of inside sales training requires a more thorough assessment. There are several benchmarks you can examine to give you a clearer picture of how well your training processes are preparing your inside sales team for success.

Evaluate the quality of phone conversations

Tracking inside sales activity metrics such as time spent selling and lead response time are vital to the ongoing success of the organization, because more time spent on core activities is one of the key drivers in improving results. However it’s just as important to pay attention to the quality of your reps’ phone calls with prospects, as this gives you an idea of how well your sales professionals are internalizing the training they have received.

Call monitoring is an important practice for any inside sales unit, but the idea of being recorded can initially make some sales reps nervous. However, if you clearly and honestly explain the reasons, procedures, and expectations of the program, you can set the reps’ minds at ease, help them improve their own performance, and add value to the company all at the same time.

Track your customer lifetime value

The ultimate goal of training your inside sales reps isn’t to teach them to maximize revenue at each possible moment, regardless of the context in question; it’s to give them the information they need to prove to their prospects your company can be a valuable partner for their business in multiple ways.

When you’re consistently accomplishing this with your training, it ultimately bears fruit in the form of customer lifetime value (CLV). Maintaining a roster of buyers with a high CLV is one indication your company is performing well on executing the overall customer experience — which, of course, rests on the shoulders of every member of the organization — but it’s also a sign your customers trust your sales reps and view them as a source of ongoing value. Considering that executing the customer experience is the most important priority for the vast majority of B2B leaders in this decade, this strategy will help you get a leg up on the competition.

Institute a ramping quota

To determine how quickly your sales professionals are able to produce reliable results following their training period, some experts recommend applying a ramping quota. Even new hires who have extensive sales experience are going to need ramping time as they adjust to the specifics of your company and internalize customer data and market realities. But it’s still important for these reps to achieve wins early in the process, and not have to wait until the end of the year to demonstrate their capacity.

Watch the consistency of your team’s work ethic

People with certain personality traits may gravitate towards an inside sales career, but all of your sales reps are still unique individuals who will respond to your training programs differently. That’s why you need to focus on their attitudes as a unit, instead of just looking at individual performance for your evaluation.

Are certain events or situations causing your team’s performance to wax or wane from normal levels? Are employees becoming more lackadaisical about tasks like entering CRM data or prospecting? Thorough, effective training programs generally result in workforces that are dedicated to delivering your value proposition to the right buyers and consistently reaching new heights. If there is an absence of a consistent work ethic across the team, it could be a sign that rebuilding the training process is necessary.

Survey your sales reps

One of the simplest ways to ascertain whether or not your training program is effective is to ask the people who are living it. As a responsible sales leader, you no doubt want to examine your training procedures with a fine-tooth comb to ensure it will position your best hires to reach their full potential, but the reps who go through the training program and put its lessons in practice are going to have insights you, as a manager, aren’t privy to.

If you don’t solicit these insights and use them to refine your approach, you’re neglecting an important resource that is readily available. Create an open and honest dialogue about the general trajectory and specific components of your inside sales training initiatives, and you’ll be surprised at how helpful your colleagues will be.

Examine the accuracy of your forecasts

It might sound strange to suggest that your forecasting has a direct link to your inside sales training program, but your forecasts can yield crucial perceptions across a variety of your core competencies. If you have a nuanced understanding of your sales team and the market, and your sales reps have the training they need to routinely hit their targets, then it’s likely you’re going to excel at forecasting. One thing accurate forecasting demonstrates is that the inside sales reps know their prospects well, understand which product configurations fit their needs, and can deliver long-term value.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging in applications like autonomous vehicles and medical assistance devices. But even when the technology is ready to use and has been shown to meet customer demands, there’s still a great deal of skepticism among consumers. For example, a survey of more than 1,000 car buyers in Germany showed that only 5% would prefer a fully autonomous vehicle. We can find a similar number of skeptics of AI-enabled medical diagnosis systems, such as IBM’s Watson. The public’s lack of trust in AI applications may cause us to collectively neglect the possible advantages we could gain from them.

In order to understand trust in the relationship between humans and automation, we have to explore trust in two dimensions: trust in the technology and trust in the innovating firm.

Insight Center

In human interactions, trust is the willingness to be vulnerable to the actions of another person. But trust is an evolving and fragile phenomenon that can be destroyed even faster than it can be created. Trust is essential to reducing perceived risk, which is a combination of uncertainty and the seriousness of the potential outcome involved. Perceived risk in the context of AI stems from giving up control to a machine. Trust in automation can only evolve from predictability, dependability, and faith.

Three factors will be crucial to gaining this trust: 1.) performance — that is, the application performs as expected; 2.) process — that is, we have an understanding of the underlying logic of the technology, and 3.) purpose — that is, we have faith in the design’s intentions. Additionally, trust in the company designing the AI, and the way the way the firm communicates with customers, will influence whether the technology is adopted by customers. Too many high-tech companies wrongly assume that the quality of the technology alone will influence people to use it.

In order to understand how firms have systematically enhanced trust in applied AI, my colleagues Monika Hengstler and Selina Duelli and I conducted nine case studies in the transportation and medical device industries. By comparing BMW’s semi-autonomous and fully autonomous cars, Daimler’s Future Truck project, ZF Friedrichshafen’s driving assistance system, as well as Deutsche Bahn’s semi-autonomous and fully autonomous trains and VAG Nürnberg’s fully automated underground train, we gained a deeper understanding of how those companies foster trust in their AI applications. We also analyzed four cases in the medical technology industry, including IBM’s Watson as an AI-empowered diagnosis system, HP’s data analytics system for automated fraud detection in the healthcare sector, AiCure’s medical adherence app that reminds patients to take their medication, and the Care-O-bot 3 of Frauenhofer IPA, a research platform for upcoming commercial service robot solutions. Our semi-structured interviews, follow-ups, and archival data analysis was guided by a theoretical discussion on how trust in the technology and in the innovating firm and its communication is facilitated.

Based on this cross-case analysis, we found that operational safety and data security are decisive factors in getting people to trust technology. Since AI-empowered technology is based on the delegation of control, it will not be trusted if it is flawed. And since negative events are more visible than positive events, operational safety alone is not sufficient for building trust. Additionally, cognitive compatibility, trialability, and usability are needed:

Cognitive compatibility describes what people feel or think about an innovation as it pertains to their values. Users tend to trust automation if the algorithms are understandable and guide them toward achieving their goals. This understandability of algorithms and the motives in AI applications directly affect the perceived predictability of the system, which, in turn, is one of the foundations of trust.

Trialability points to the fact that people who were able to visualize the concrete benefits of a new technology via a trial run reduced their perceived risk and therefore their resistance to the technology.

Usability is influenced by both the intuitiveness of the technology, and the perceived ease of use. An intuitive interface can reduce initial resistance and make the technology more accessible, particularly for less tech-savvy people. Usability testing with the target user group is an important first step toward creating this ease of use.

But even more important is the balance between control and autonomy in the technology. For efficient collaboration between humans and machines, the appropriate level of automation must be carefully defined. This is even more important in intelligent applications that are designed to change human behaviors (such as medical devices that incentivize humans to take their medications on time). The interaction should not make people feel like they’re being monitored, but rather, assisted. Appropriate incentives are important to keep people engaged with an application, ultimately motivating them to use it as intended. Our cases showed that technologies with high visibility — e.g., autonomous cars in the transportation industry, or AiCure and Care-O-bot in the healthcare industry — require more intensive efforts to foster trust in all three trust dimensions.

Our results also showed that stakeholder alignment, transparency about the development process, and gradual introduction of the technology are crucial strategies for fostering trust. Introducing innovations in a stepwise fashion can lead to more gradual social learning, which in turn builds trust. Accordingly, the established firms in our sample tended to pursue a more gradual introduction of their AI applications to allow for social learning, while younger companies such as AiCure tended to choose a more revolutionary introduction approach in order to position themselves as a technology leader. The latter approach has a high risk of rejection and the potential to cause a scandal if the underlying algorithms turn out to be flawed.

If you’re trying to get consumers to trust a new AI-enabled application, communication should be proactive and open in the early stages of introducing the public to the technology, as it will influence the company’s perceived credibility and trustworthiness, which will influence attitude formation. In the cases we studied, users who could effectively communicate the benefits of an AI application had a reduction in their perceived risk, which resulted in greater trust, and a higher likelihood to adopt the new technology.

Gone are the days when you needed a dedicated specialist or agency to handle all of your e-commerce stores’ marketing. With the rapid advancement of social media and email marketing platforms, anyone with an e-commerce store can get ads running and emails sending within a couple of hours.

But while it’s easier than ever for stores to hand over their money and advertise their products on multiple channels, a number of factors make it increasingly challenging for stores to personalize their campaigns across multiple channels at scale:

• Purchase journeys across multiple devices – The average American now owns 3.64 internet connected devices
• Lack of knowledge – Facebook’s targeting and functionality keeps improving by the day and e-commerce marketers simply can’t keep up
• Lean teams – The majority of ecommerce stores start with lean team of one to a few members. There’s simply not enough time to coordinate cohesiveness across each marketing channel while managing your usual day-to-day.

You might be thinking…With all these challenges should I bother personalizing my campaigns? Can’t I just run ads to acquire new customers?

Short answer: NO

The average e-commerce store generates 40% of their revenue from only 8% of their customers. It’s a whole lot easier and it pays a lot more to personalize your marketing and focus on selling to your existing customers!

According to Accenture, 75% of consumers are more likely to buy from a retailer that recognizes them by name, recommends options based on past purchases, or knows their purchase history.

Source: Accenture

The best way to personalize your marketing across multiple channels is to start with email marketing and replicate your campaigns to social. Email marketing consistently outperforms other marketing channels including social because it’s personal and direct. But if you don’t get your email opened, you might catch your customer on Facebook. After all, the average Facebook user spends 50 minutes a day on the platform!

In this post I’ll show you 5 targeted and personalized email campaigns that you should replicate outside of the inbox to personalize your marketing and get more sales.

1. Welcome Campaigns

Nice work! You’ve captured a lead.

You’ve probably automated a welcome emails series introducing your brand and most popular products, so now let’s replicate these emails on your lead’s Facebook page.

Your welcome campaign emails and ads should aim to:

Push leads to make their first purchase:

At this point people are most excited about your brand, they’ve just discovered you and you’re at the top of their mind. The excitement leads to them opening your emails 4X more often and clicking through 5X more than when you send regular promotional emails – so now it’s time to make a hard push with email and social to get your first sale with an introductory offer. Make your offer clear and don’t over crowd your message with branding, the customer has already seen a brand snapshot when on your site. Your one and only goal with your first email and social campaign is to make the first sale.

Introduce them to your brand:

Hopefully with your first sale out of the way, you can move on to some branding. Do you have an interesting story to tell? Now is the time to tell it. Put a face to your brand, introduce yourself to your leads, and let them know what makes you different. People are more likely to buy why you do something rather than what you sell.

Familiarize them with your most popular products:

Since you don’t have much data such as purchase history or browsing behaviour – it’s difficult to include relevant products in your emails and social campaigns for new leads. At this point it’s better to familiarize new leads with the most popular products from your store. Use a carousel ad that features your best sellers, shows a variety of products that you offer, and promotes any unique selling points like free shipping.

2. Abandoned Cart Campaigns

Cart abandonment continues to be plague e-commerce stores, with the average abandoned cart rate sitting at 69.23%. The good news is: savvy e-commerce marketers (like you) – can recover up to 63% of abandoned carts. All you need is a savvy tactic, like replicating your abandoned cart email series on social media.

Startup Drugz uses a combination of an abandoned cart email and a Facebook abandoned cart campaign to recover a significant percentage of abandoned carts. Their abandoned cart Facebook retargeting campaign generated $4,195.79 in revenue from only $288.09 in ad spend! In both your emails and ads clearly remind your customers of what they left behind and if you’re going to offer a discount – make it clear and visible in your creative!

How to Create Abandoned Cart Ads in Facebook

Pro Tip: Though Startup Drugz recover a significant percentage of their abandoned carts, they quickly gave away a large discount within 30 minutes of me abandoning my cart. With some customers simply getting distracted or forgetting to complete their purchase, it’s best not to offer a discount right away. Schedule a series of emails and social campaigns, then only offer a discount after 24 hours.

3. Post-Purchase Upsell and Cross-sell Campaigns

Upselling and Cross-Selling is the key to e-commerce hypergrowth. At one point Amazon attributed 35% of its sales revenue to on-site and in email cross-sells. That’s not surprising when you consider that over 78% of consumers will only engage with offers if they have been personalized to their previous engagements with the brand.

Luckily, you don’t need hyper-advanced algorithms or the 2nd richest man in the world leading your company to implement cross-sells and upsells for your own store’s emails and social ad campaigns. It’s as simple as segmenting your email list by product purchased, creating a custom audience in Facebook, and making a recommendation.

If someone purchased coffee beans – recommend them a coffee maker.

If you’ve just sold someone a suitcase, you can infer that they’ll be traveling and recommend them other travel products.

At SmartrMail we’ve built our email platform on top of a recommendation engine so you can automate product recommendation emails. However when creating Facebook and other social ads you’ll have to do the recommendations yourself with dynamic product ads. When creating these ads, first use common sense like the examples above, but also look at your data for purchase patterns. Ex. Customer’s who purchase “Product A” usually purchase “Product B” 2 weeks later.

Pro Tip: Be creative! Don’t directly push your products in every email campaign or ad. For example: If someone purchased a shaver, send them an article titled “5 Steps to a Better Shave” and subtly recommend creams, brushes, and replacement blades.

4. New Arrivals and Restock

Adding new products and restocking popular items to your store is exciting, but don’t go spreading the good news to anyone and everyone. By that, I don’t mean simply segmenting your list by gender or age. Segmentation by demographic is outdated and doesn’t work for all e-commerce goods, especially those outside of fashion.

To segment and personalize your new arrival and restock emails – you must create segments of customers who’ve purchased from specific collections.

Once you have these segments created, you can send them new arrival and restock emails and target them with similar social campaigns. Doing so will keep your message relevant and personalized across both channels, which will improve both engagement and sales.

Pro Tip: If you’re adding more than 1 product to your store, use a carousel ad to easily feature all your new additions. For larger stores that are frequently adding new products and styles, you can use dynamic product ads for to create ads featuring products that will only show to customers who’ve purchased from that collection previously.

5. Win-Back Campaigns

Even after all the campaigns above, some customers will eventually stop interacting with and purchasing from your brand

It may be after their first order, after a month, or after a few years.

At this point you have two options:

1. Do nothing and let them get away
2. Re-engage with inactive customers and win them back through email marketing and social

If you’ve read this far, I assume you’re serious about your marketing and want to implement the second option.

To start, create a segment of customers who haven’t purchased from your store in an irregular amount of time. To do this you’ll need to look at your sales data and find the average amount of time between purchases from your store. For example, if you’re an online grocery service, you may find your typical customer orders every seven days, whereas if you’re a clothing retailer, customers may order once per month or bi-monthly.

When you’ve set a time period and created your email segment, get started creating both your emails and ads. Let your customers know that it’s been awhile and you miss them, while reaffirming your unique selling points and making an irresistible offer to win them back.

Pro Tip: If you’ve run your campaigns and have failed to win-back customers, don’t hesitate to purge the deadwood. Unengaged customers will bloat your email list resulting in lower deliverability and higher email marketing costs.

Closing Note

While segmentation and personalizing your marketing can seem complex and advanced, I hope this article made it seem a little simpler for you. The strategies I mentioned above can be easy and quick to implement. Just do yourself a favor and stop using free and basic apps that aren’t built to get you more sales. Invest in the right tools, read the right blogs, and you’ll be growing your online store in no time. The fact you read this means you’re off to a good start!

Media empires rise and fall, but the explosive growth in popularity of websites such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy during the past several years ushered in a new phenomenon in content – the “curiosity gap.”

Mainstream media such as newspapers and magazines have long tantalized their audiences with salacious rumors and tawdry gossip to sell papers and ad inventory, but the emergence of clickbait and “snackable content” (perhaps one of the most loathsome terms in media) ignited an arms race to drive revenues and traffic by appealing to our innate sense of curiosity.

However, some experts have begun to speculate whether the curiosity gap is dead; some believe today’s media consumers have become desensitized to the constant barrage of amazement offered to us in our RSS feeds and on our smartphones, and that media outlets offering little more than rhetorical questions and cheap tricks are doomed to fail unless they try harder to earn their audience’s attention.

But are they right?

What Is the Curiosity Gap?

The curiosity gap is a theory and practice popularized by Upworthy and similar sites that leverages the reader’s curiosity to make them click through from an irresistible headline to the actual content. By creating a curiosity gap, you’re teasing your reader with a hint of what’s to come, without giving all the answers away. The curiosity gap can be used to compel people to click on a blog post they see on Twitter, an ad on Facebook, or a marketing email in their inbox.

There are three primary elements that go into the curiosity gap publishing model:

• Headlines
• Publishing frequency
• Virality

Let’s take a look at each.

The Curiosity Gap in Headlines

Arguably the most important element in the curiosity gap technique is the headline.

Upworthy is famed for its approach to headlines. The site requires all writers to devise at least 25 headlines per article, regardless of its length, topic, or angle.

This is a lot harder than it sounds.

Headlines have to be almost literally irresistible. They have to entice us in mere seconds (or less), and as such must balance information with intrigue; they have to tease just enough about the article to not only tempt us to click through, but also to give us enough information to decide whether the article is likely to be of interest to us in the first place.

Put another way, headlines have to be specific enough to entice the reader, but not so specific that the reader doesn’t need to click through.

As important as headlines are to the curiosity gap publishing model, they have rightfully attracted their fair share of detractors and criticism. This style of headline has also been accused of falling prey to diminishing returns – how long can audiences realistically be “amazed by what happened next”?

Oh dear.

Whether they have become less effective or not, there is no disputing that headlines are a crucial element in the curiosity gap formula.

Publishing Frequency

Another common element in the curiosity gap publishing model is frequency.

Sites like BuzzFeed and Upworthy publish a lot of content, with dozens (or more) of posts being published every single day. There are several benefits of maintaining this kind of editorial calendar, the first of which is being able to publish content across a wide range of topics and subject areas to appeal to the huge audiences that these sites have.

Image via Gigaom

Another benefit of publishing a lot of content is being able to mitigate the “losses” of poorer-performing content by simply publishing more; it becomes a numbers game when everything is a race to virality. The more content you publish, the more likely that one or more listicles will go viral.

Yet another upside to publishing a ton of content is that it provides the publisher with more raw data to work with in their A/B tests. Make no mistake – BuzzFeed and Upworthy didn’t become phenomenally popular by accident. This publishing model has allowed publishers to refine their approaches to headlines, content itself, and social promotion by analyzing ever-increasing volumes of data, which further drives the content machine.

Social Validation and Virality

The final piece of the puzzle is virality, or the likelihood that a piece of content will end up generating thousands (or even millions) of shares on social media.

Think about all the dumb quizzes you see your friends sharing on Facebook, for example. Many of them will be from sites such as BuzzFeed and Upworthy. This is because these publishers know (from looking at reams of data, as we covered a moment ago) that quizzes about which Harry Potter character you most closely identify with politically perform amazingly well in terms of social shares.

Virality is the endgame for publishers attempting to leverage the curiosity gap. The more widely content is shared on social, more traffic is directed to the site, engagement with the content is significantly higher, and – perhaps most importantly – the ad revenues are higher.

Is the Curiosity Gap Just Clickbait?

No – at least, that’s what publishers want you to believe.

Many prominent editors in publishing – including BuzzFeed’s Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith – claim their outlets do not publish clickbait. Yes, really.

Their argument hinges on the fact that clickbait is generally defined by the yawning chasm between the promise of the headline and the actual substance of the content. That’s why many publishers have veered away from the weary, sensationalist headlines we were all subjected to a couple of years ago; articles with the “one weird trick” to do something, or promises that “we won’t believe what happened next.”

Essentially, there’s one major difference between clickbait and content that attempts to leverage the curiosity gap, and that’s how the reader feels when they click through to the content.

Clickbait often leaves the reader dissatisfied, by either failing to deliver on the promise of the headline at all, or by purposefully deceiving the reader into clicking with little thought for what comes next. As we established earlier, successfully leveraging the curiosity gap requires social validation to promote successful content, something that isn’t possible if your reader is disgusted by your editorial trickery (more on this momentarily).

That said, there’s a very fine line between genuinely compelling content that pulls the right levers in our brains, and the sensationalist crap published by tabloids in a brazen attempt to get you to click through.

Say what you want about Brexit, but there’s no disputing that Britain has
the very worst tabloids in the world

So, now we know a little more about what makes this publishing model unique, let’s take a look at some external factors that have contributed to changes in the media landscape.

Overall Trust in Media at Shocking New Lows

Recent data from Gallup indicates that consumer confidence in the media has sunk to unprecedented lows. Less than a third of respondents polled said they had “a great deal” or a “fair amount” of trust in the media, with the largest drops in trust observed among younger and older demographics.

Data/image via Gallup

When you view this decline through the lens of political partisanship, it becomes even more dramatic. Gallup also compiled data for decreasing public trust in mass media by political affiliation, and last year alone, trust among Republican media consumers dropped from 32% in 2015 to just 14% last year:

Data/image via Gallup

What does this have to do with the curiosity gap? With consumer confidence in the media at its lowest level in recent memory, publishers have to tread very carefully when attempting to leverage the emotional triggers of their audience (more on this shortly).

Consumers are already leery of online content, and so trying to trick them is a particularly risky gambit – much more so now than it was even a couple of years ago.

How to Leverage the Curiosity Gap in Your Marketing

Trendy or not, the curiosity gap is a powerful technique that can really raise your click-through rates across channels from social media to your email campaigns. So, how can you – the small-business owner with a modest digital marketing operation – leverage the curiosity gap to drive traffic to your site? Here are six ways to use the curiosity gap to improve your marketing.

1. Leverage Emotional Triggers

Much of the fake news we saw throughout the election here in the U.S. last year was so popular because it pandered to people’s emotions. Sure, most of this content was trash, but one thing it did extremely well was leverage emotional triggers.

Data via BuzzSumo

Pushing people’s emotional buttons is one of the most effective techniques at your disposal when creating engaging content. Unfortunately, this process is as much art as it is science – not to mention extremely complicated. It’s also hugely dependent on the type of content you typically produce, your audience demographics, and numerous other factors.

It’s also important to bear in mind the kind of emotional responses you wish to elicit from your readers. Negative emotions such as anger may result in more social shares, but could also inadvertently harm your brand. Similarly, humor can be a highly effective tool in your content marketing, yet many B2B publishers shy away from trying to make their audience laugh for fear that such a tone isn’t appropriate.

Comedy may be easier for B2C companies, but that doesn’t mean B2B firms
can’t get in on the action

Only you can determine whether appealing to a certain emotion in your content is suitable for your audience. That said, however you choose to do it, be sure your audience feels something after reading your content; there is no greater sin in content than to be bland and forgettable.

2. Respect Your Audience (and Its Intelligence)

You’ve probably sneered at a particularly egregious clickbait headline or two in your time, so why would you resort to the same sleazy tactics to tempt your own audience into clicking through?

This tongue-in-cheek headline upset more than a few readers,
highlighting the risks of using even well-intentioned humor

Clickbait relies primarily on deception to drive traffic. These publishers don’t care about dwell time, or scroll depth, or other engagement metrics – they just want the clicks and the pageviews to drive advertising revenue.

One of the best ways you can maintain your credibility as a publisher is by treating your readers with the respect they deserve. Sure, you can (and should) try to create intrigue in your content, but don’t resort to cheap trickery. If you wouldn’t click through a blatantly deceptive headline, don’t try to make your audience do it, either.

Delivering on the promise of your headline is crucial, especially when it comes to content. However, this principle also applies to other instances, such as ad or email headlines.

Here’s an email that I received recently from Dev Bootcamp, a private coding school in San Francisco:

This email subject line gets my attention by posing a question that’s common among people considering attending a private programming school (which I’m not, but the point stands). Curious to learn more, I clicked through – and was immediately disappointed:

This is what I saw when I opened the email – an anecdotal testimonial from a Dev Bootcamp graduate who went on to become a product manager after completing the program.

The email aroused my curiosity with the question in its subject line, only to ask me another question. This is not only frustrating (as the question that interested me in the first place is left unanswered), but also misleading and – worse – irrelevant; what if I don’t want to be a product manager? This was enough to convince me delete the email after just a few seconds.

It doesn’t matter how compelling your testimonials are, or how attractive your emails are – if you fail to deliver on your subject lines, you will disappoint your audience. This could harm your conversion rates and even damage your brand, so tread carefully.

3. Focus on the Quality of Your Content

We know that readers crave quality content. We also know that social media platforms and Google’s search algorithm reward quality content with greater visibility. As such, you should focus on improving the quality of your content, rather than wasting time devising headlines that tempt readers to click through to mediocre articles.

That’s not to say you can’t create a sense of intrigue about your content, or that you shouldn’t try to leverage your audience’s curiosity at all. I am suggesting, however, that you try to focus on producing the very best content you possibly can. As tempting as it can be to resort to cheap trickery to increase traffic or other short-term benefits, focusing on publishing quality content consistently will yield far greater results in the long run.

As reluctant as I am to “name and shame” specific blog posts, this post published a few years ago at Kapost is a great example of content that could have been so much better but took the easy way out.

Firstly, it poses a question in the headline that it fails to answer, which often leads to disappointment (see above). Obviously the writer couldn’t possibly tell you with any certainty whether your content is turning people off or not, which begs the question of why the writer would choose to use this technique in the first place. Full disclosure – I’ve done this plenty of times, so no judgment.

Secondly, it’s too short. I’m all for brevity in content where appropriate, but this post is just a little too threadbare on actual content. Essentially, it’s 500 words that boils down to “don’t be overly self-promotional.” The post offers nothing in the way of actionable tips on how to craft better posts, and does little more than reference a third-party white paper that probably contains much more useful information – which the writer chose not to link for whatever reason.

There’s nothing “wrong” with this post per se, it just isn’t necessary. There’s no actionable tips, no unique insight, and no reason at all to read it.

Try harder – your audience deserves better.

4. Spend More Time Creating Compelling Headlines

If you’re going to ape any of the elements of clickbait in your ads, emails, or content, make it your headlines.

No. Also, I find it hilarious that Jezebel has an “Air Conditioning” blog tag.

There’s an adage known as Betteridge’s law of headlines, named after British tech journalist Ian Betteridge, that states that if a headline can be asked as a question, the answer is almost always “no.”

Put another way, asking questions in headlines is lazy at best, and purposefully misleading at worst – not to mention they’re often perceived much more negatively than “straight” headlines. However, one notable exception to this principle is when your content focuses on data.

Framing headlines as questions when referencing data can be much more effective than playing it straight. Let’s take two headlines from real blog posts, both of which were published by Moz. Both posts covered the same topic, and both contained hard data.

The first was written by our own Larry Kim:

The second was written by Roy Hinkis:

Which of these two headlines do you think is the most effective? Both posts contain valuable data and analyses, but I’d say Larry’s headline was much more enticing than Roy’s.

Regardless of your intent, headlines are arguably the single-most important element of any piece of content. Even the most useful, actionable guide or compelling blog post will bomb unless your headline is sufficiently captivating. If you want to drive the kind of traffic that BuzzFeed and Upworthy articles generate, you’ve got to put in as much work as they do when it comes to your headlines.

5. Don’t Give Everything Away in Your Headlines

Remember earlier when we established that headlines had to be just tempting enough to get readers to click, but not so specific that there’s no need for them to click? Well, this highlights the dangers of giving away too much in your headlines.

Take this example, which is a guest post on Noah Kagan’s OkDork blog written by ConversionXL’s Peep Laja:

This kind of specificity is common on conversion rate optimization blogs, including OkDork. Sometimes this is a good thing – it tells the reader exactly what to expect from the post and deals with a very specific problem or goal. However, it doesn’t leverage the curiosity gap beyond how to actually accomplish the objective established in the headline.

Now look at this headline from a Copyhackers blog post from 2014:

This headline does a better job of leveraging the curiosity gap (by actually mentioning it – meta!), but this technique isn’t without its risks, as we discussed earlier.

Ad headlines, blog post headlines, and email subject lines are all a balancing act. The trick is to give your audience just enough to entice them to click (and hopefully read), but hold enough back so that you don’t give everything away at the outset.

6. Pay Attention to Your Data – But Stop Focusing on Virality

Despite what media sales professionals would have you believe, it’s virtually impossible to “manufacture” virality. There are simply too many variables to consider, not least of which is the enormous gulf between consumer content such as that published by BuzzFeed, and the comparatively dreary world of B2B marketing.

A white paper on logistics infrastructure will never be as widely read as a quiz about which Taco Bell menu item speaks to you on a spiritual level. (Go ahead, take the quiz – I’ll wait.)

The more focus you divert to “making” something go viral, the less attention you can pay to factors you can actually control, such as the quality of your content. However, that’s not to say you shouldn’t be paying close attention to the data at your disposal. Just because you can’t manufacture virality doesn’t mean you can’t discover what resonates with your audience and give them more of it.

When planning your editorial calendar, be sure to examine your analytics data. Which articles were the most popular? What elements do they share? Did they contain original data or research, or feature a strong, contrarian perspective on a contentious issue? Identifying these commonalities should be an ongoing project that enables you to focus on giving your audience what it wants.

For example, here at WordStream, we know that our original data is hugely popular with our audience, and so we regularly produce research data that our audience finds useful (and that they can’t get anywhere else). This is far more effective a long-term strategy than tricking our readers with flavor-of-the-month “hacks” to drive social shares.

Mind the (Curiosity) Gap

Well, I made it almost all the way through this post without making a crappy pun. Despite this glaring personal failure, hopefully this post has given you some things to think about for your next content meeting.

As with virtually everything in digital marketing, there’s no one-size-fits-all approach to bridging the curiosity gap in your content, and what works like gangbusters for one publisher may not necessarily work for another.

What insights have you learned from your own content marketing efforts? Get at me in the comments below with your success and horror stories alike.