Experts share how they use data-driven marketing strategies and tactics.

Today, data plays a more crucial role in business than ever before. Data-driven marketing is not just a buzz term, it’s a real business need for those who want to stay competitive.

Data allows marketers to build strategies and optimise strategies and, subsequently, to achieve tangible business results.

Data analysis done right provides deep insights but can also elevate the understanding of a complex situation. While data is not a panacea, 21st-century marketing relies on data to provide the customer experience, personalization and automation that is required to succeed.

Closed loop attribution is still the elusive Holy Grail that each marketer dreams to achieve. The reason this is still so difficult is that data analysis requires human “intervention”. It’s easy to mistakenly set metrics that are not actually delivering the full picture or that are misleading. Always questions your metrics and attribution models.

To chip away on cracking the code on closed loop marketing and to understand how modern marketers are implementing data-driven marketing, I’ve once again collaborated with my friend and peer, JC Giraldo, Marketing Consultant and Social Media Marketing Solopreneur.

We reached out to our networks to get insights from some of the industries brightest minds and added some of our own experiences.

We asked the following question:

“Everybody talks about data-driven marketing. Are you using data for your social media marketing efforts? How does it guide your decisions?”

Laura Martinez Molera

Regional Marketing Manager at HubSpot – Boston, MA

Nowadays, we have access to an important quantity of data regarding the behaviour of our consumers, such us what they are consuming, what is the frequency, how involved they are and what do they prefer. As marketers, we need to analyse it and base decisions on the data to optimise our campaigns, get the best results and increase our ROI.

At Hubspot, we base all our decisions on data, from the color and text of CTAs to the content of our nurturing emails. We gather information from our consumers such as the most visited websites, sources of our traffic (organic, social media, email, etc), the best topic for blog posts to get conversions, and the best time of the day to publish. With all this information, we analyse and extract conclusions, so every time we create new content, we apply these findings to optimise the results.

A common practice is that we create Smart Content on our emails so we can offer personalised content based on consumers’ past preferences to create more targeted and relevant experiences.

For example, I can easily adapt an email based on the response to the last received email, if they opened it, clicked it or converted on it. For the people who clicked but didn’t convert, I create a retargeting campaign so I can give them more information on the topic to continue nurturing them and, eventually, help them convert.

Another typical practice is to do A/B tests on our Landing Pages to understand the best title, images and CTAs so I can make the Landing Page more attractive, convert a greater part of the audience and close more deals.

@LauraMolera

Shino Tanaka

Digital Media Consultant, Mountain View, CA

Absolutely. You must use data to inform, develop and adjust your social media marketing efforts. This data impacts scope, timing, budget…so it’s a significant part of the decision making process. Ultimately, if you better understand your audience through data, you can leverage it to create more meaningful campaigns.

@ShinoTanaka

Shilpi Agarwal

Founder & Chief Social Data Analyst at Social Strategi, Silicon Valley

Data is abundant. Everyone agrees that you can’t create a winning social media strategy without knowing your KPIs and constantly looking at data. But the winning components are ‘contextual’ and ‘relevant’ data.

I look at data from my social media from this perspective. I try to understand the stories hidden in this data, what it reveals about our social media fans, followers, our customers, their behavior and our competition. Next, I look at how I can apply these social data insights to business growth, which guides my decisions.

@ShilpiAgarwal01

Simon Kemp

Founder at Kepios and Global Consultant at We Are Social

Yes, I’m a big fan of data, as evidenced by my ongoing series of reports into the state of digital, social and mobile around the world.

Whenever possible, I use data to help my clients in their marketing work, but I make use of it in my own efforts too. It doesn’t have to be ‘big’ data to make a difference though; simple insights can often add real value too.

For example, understanding which kinds of content drive different kinds of outcomes has particular value, and I use simple social media data to identify these insights.

For example, I’ve noticed that my longer, more in-depth posts like this drive many invitations to connect on LinkedIn, but often result in few ‘basic’ responses (e.g. likes) compared to my more simple social shares, like this one. Obviously you’ll need to work out what you’re aiming for in terms of outcomes for this to be most useful to you, but I’ve found this basic data has helped me grow different kinds of audiences – with different kinds of value – on different digital platforms.

These data also suggest that there are certain times of day and days of the week that perform well, but I find that this kind of data can be dangerous; if you always post at a similar time, it gets more difficult to broaden your network or audience beyond the one you’ve already established. However, knowing when certain kinds of content work (or don’t work) makes it easier to plan important updates and shares.

It’s knowing when – and how – to use data that makes the difference between empty numbers and meaningful insights.

I also like to look at other people’s results; a quick look at what performs well for my peers and competitors helps me understand what people and companies are looking for, and that helps to guide the kinds of content that I create. I suggest looking at which of their posts perform best, and then looking to see whether you can create content that adds new value to that conversation. Similarly, if there are any posts of theirs that you expected to do well but didn’t, try to see whether you can identify the cause of that disappointing performance.

Lastly, keep an eye on what platforms people are using, as well what they’re using them for. People’s behaviours evolve all the time, so keeping an eye on your network’s habits can help you to better plan your own platform mix and content approach.

@Eskimon

JC Giraldo

Marketing Consultant / Helping small businesses develop marketing strategies

Everyone is talking about data and its benefits but the most important thing is that we will do with this data. As podcaster, I am constantly checking my data, at least three times a week, for each of my episodes and their performance, during the broadcast and after an episode has been posted.

This data allows me to (re)direct my strategy towards my listeners or even create written content related to my episodes to increase the reach of my podcast. Libsyn (My podcast platform) provides me the information about how, when, where or from which platform (device or browser) somebody listened to an episode of my podcast. Data is essential in deciding the next steps in our marketing strategy.

@GiraldoGC

A big thank you to our contributors. Please share your own experiences with data-driven marketing with us!

Sandra Horbach, the cohead of Carlyle Group's US buyouts unit, is one of the industry's most senior women.

She and has been described as a trailblazer, having gotten her start in the fledgling industry in the 1980s.

Horbach's industry typically involves buying up companies, often with borrowed money, and changing the companies to increase their value at a future point of sale. 

In a wide-ranging interview, we asked Horbach how she would advise her 25-year-old self. Horbach was studying in business school at the time.

Here's what she said (emphasis added):

"I would advise myself to follow my passion and pursue areas I really loved as opposed to what I thought I should do or where I thought I was going to make a lot of money. I see a lot of young people going into private equity and I don't see the passion. They think it's the right thing to do because they look ahead and see people who have been successful. But those of us who started in the industry had no idea it was going to turn into the industry it's turned into.

When I joined Forstmann Little in 1987, right out of business school, it wasn't even an industry. We didn't call it private equity — it was leveraged buyouts. It was all about the love of finding great companies to work with and invest and help build. It wasn't about creating this mega industry that has since been created. It starts with the passion, and it's a lot of hard work, dedicating yourself to being the best you can be, and having a thick skin and not taking things personally, especially when you're young.

You know you're going in, you're the junior person and you have to prove yourself and you have to make yourself indispensable. You have to have a positive attitude and say to yourself, How can I make my boss' life better? What can I do to proactively and preemptively create value here in my organization? I think if you do all those things, more opportunities will be presented and you'll continue to grow and progress within the organization."

You can read the full interview with Horbach here.

SEE ALSO: We talked to one of the most senior women on Wall Street about big deals, investment mistakes, and career advice

Join the conversation about this story »

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Almost a year ago I wrote an article called: The Most Important Skill in the World Today – Public Speaking in which I said “Brilliant academic qualifications, world class technical training, status, position or experience are all severely hindered in the absence of the ability to express ourselves with the confidence.”

In other words, how often have you experienced a colleague who is clearly a highly intelligent, creative and talented professional almost send you to sleep with their presentation?

Sadly it’s still all too common.

A presenter inflicting such pain on their colleagues may continue to do so in the ignorant bliss that all their audience care about is their knowledge and expertise. However, the truth is we all know that today’s audiences are incredibly discerning professionals who are extremely busy and the one thing they don’t have time for is boredom.

Please don’t let how much you know lull you into a safe haven of believing that you can disregard your audience’s emotional needs by simply satisfying their intellectual interests. It may be 2017 but the fact is there are still a vast number of bad habits that professionals are exhibiting in business across the world every day.

That toxicity extends itself not only to the presenter’s audience but crucially to the longevity and success of some people’s careers. Here are 3 of the big ones that we see every week in some of the most successful brands in the world that we urge you to acknowledge and avoid yourself.

1. Noise

The phenomenon ‘Death by PowerPoint’ has been around for at least a decade and its one most of us are not only familiar with, but have been victims of. Only yesterday I was leading a presentation training workshop for a team of executives in London when I saw it again in the very next room.

During our short coffee break as I left the training room I noticed that in the meeting room right next door to the one we were working in another presentation was in full swing. As it was a glass wall I could of course see everything that was going on in the room and here is what I saw.

A speaker presenting PowerPoint slides to an audience of at least 20 people.

The slide on the screen as I stood discreetly to observe contained 12 bullet points, (I counted them) all appearing at the same time squashed onto the slide in a very small font. The speaker stood with his back practically facing the audience as he read out each of the bullet points to a room full of highly intelligent, creative, talented and responsible professionals.

This of course represents one of the most common and toxic bad habits we still see every day. It’s toxic because to the audience its nothing but ‘noise’.

If I had walked into that room in that moment and asked the speaker if he was familiar with the concept ‘Death by PowerPoint’ I’m confident he would have said ‘yes, of course’. Yet there he was doing it himself to 20 fellow human beings.

It has to stop.

The antidote

Stop using bullet points, your audience don’t like them and you don’t need them.

Present only one idea per slide.

Think ‘Billboard’ – Use images, big bold and compelling headlines.

Never read.

Ask yourself what purpose the slide serves your audience (not you) and its intended impact.

2. More noise

When we are training or coaching at Mindful Presenter and our clients stand to speak the very first question we ask them before they utter a word is ‘What do you want your audience to feel?’ Sadly, a common response to that question is ‘informed’. If that’s what you set out as your intention for your audience please know that it is a bad habit which is also toxic, let me explain.

Unless you are a comedian or entertainer, it’s a given that you are there to share knowledge and to therefore inform your audience. On its own, however, it is not enough. If that’s all you do, it can be very boring to listen to. We already live in a world of information and distractions and your audience are likely to perceive your information as ‘more noise’.

Information can very easily, and sometimes far more efficiently be delivered in an email or document. You don’t necessarily need to ask people to leave the comfort of their home or office or travel miles to listen to you.

They want the information, facts and data but not at the expense of their mental and emotional well-being.

The antidote

Decide in advance what you want them to do with the information and how you want them to feel.

Breathe life into the information by telling them the story behind it. Use anecdotes, give them examples and make them feel something.

Ask yourself whether they really need to attend a presentation and whether you could simply say what you have to say in an email.

Put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself why the information matters, why they should care, what tangible difference it will make to them and how you would like to feel about it.

Don’t dump information on them.

Deliver the information with energy, presence, purpose and impact.

3. Still more noise

At a recent presentation training workshop I asked the delegates to each write down any bad habits they were aware of whilst they were presenting. One delegate wrote down that she spent far too little time preparing and no time at all practicing her presentation.

She wasn’t too impressed with my response in sharing a strategy to overcome her perceived bad habit. I told her that it didn’t sound like a bad habit to me as from what she described I expressed by concern that it felt more a case of her being lazy and/or not caring enough about her audience.

I explained that given that every presentation is about the audience rather than the speaker, if we don’t commit and dedicate ample time to preparing and practicing our presentation we are doing our audience a huge disservice. In the absence of clear preparation and practice, all your audience will really hear is more noise. How could they possibly hear anything else if you haven’t very carefully, mindfully and creatively crafted and practiced your presentation?

The antidote

Never make the excuse that you are too busy. Either find the time to prepare and practice or give the task to someone else who will.

Craft your content, don’t just prepare it. A couple of years ago I wrote an article called, ‘Presentation Content is King – getting it wrong can ruin a conference’ in which I said:

“Every presentation has to begin with the end in mind.

How do you want your audience to feel when you’re done?

What tangible difference do you aim to make to their life or their business?

What can you tell them that will help them that they don’t already know or can easily find out for themselves?”

Be very clear on what your message is and why your audience should care about it.

Know your message and your content inside out. Don’t memorise it, just know it.

Practice the way you deliver it verbally. Pay very close attention to your pitch, pace, rhythm, volume, tone and emphasis. Practice pausing to give your audience time to think, for your message to ‘land’ and for you to breathe.

Practice the way you deliver it physically. Pay very close attention to the way you move your hands, your body, your legs and even your eyes. Be aware of the facial expressions you make, how animated you are and how the way you speak and move adds value to your message and creates the impact you wish to have.

Practicing on your own or in front of the mirror or your dog isn’t enough. Practice in front of someone you trust and be open to honest feedback.

None of these habits are new and of course there are plenty more where these came from. The good news is that they are all avoidable and all it takes is a level of consciousness to recognise them, understand and accept the damage they are doing and make a commitment to avoid them yourself.

Your audience will be eternally grateful.

Image Courtesy of: Flickr.

Any customer success team looking to thrive and grow must review and evaluate processes and procedures at the end of each and every quarter. Quarterly reviews aren’t just for sales teams—these built-in review periods are a great way to step back and determine what is working and what needs to be re-tooled.

Here are 5 ways customer success strategies to complete to prepare for a new quarter.

1. Hold a QBR to Align the Team on Critical Objectives

Before we go any further, let’s clear the air: Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs) aren’t just for sales teams. In fact, it’s equally important for existing business teams to reflect and review processes from past months to determine where growth and change is necessary. QBRs are a great way to uncover internal questions or issues and then get input from the entire department on resolutions.

In order for any customer success QBR to be effective, all members of the team must participate, from executives to analysts. This is also a great way for other members of the department to learn best practices and tips from their peers. Holding a QBR will add customer value because it ensures all members of a customer success team are aligned on critical objectives and goals. It can also open up new doors and ideas to increase customer satisfaction and sentiment.

2. Make Sure Customer Goals & KPIs Are Up-To-Date

The end of a quarter is a great time to review individual customer projects and gauge customer satisfaction and sentiment. Many customer teams are most likely holding their own end-of-quarter meetings, so it’s the perfect time to make sure both organizations are up-to-date on KPIs and goals. Asking detailed questions is a great way to uncover customer goals and determine how your organization will be involved. These types of questions can include:

• Are there any big changes (new product releases, new hires, new locations, etc.) happening at your organization in the next quarter?
• How do you foresee your organization leveraging our product or solution in the next few months?
• What are your departmental KPIs for the next quarter? What about personal KPIs? How can our product or solution be involved?

3. Schedule Importance Customer Face-to-Face Meetings In Advance

While Customer Success teams should discuss KPIs and goals with every customer account, sometimes flagship customers need a little extra time and care. Half-day or even full-day planning sessions are a great way to review past projects and innovative on new initiatives and opportunities. These on-site customer meetings are a way for executives from both teams to be in the same room discussing customer success on a fundamental level. Oftentimes the ideas discussed in quarterly customer on-sites fuel upsells and growth opportunities for months to come.

4. Meet Internally With Sales, Product, and Marketing Teams

While it’s common for individual departments to have their own individual quarterly kick-offs and QBRs, it’s crucial for these separate teams to then meet and share key items. When an entire company is on the same page with new releases, product rollouts, new sales strategies, and new customer stories, it’s easier to move forward with overarching, company-wide KPIs.

For customer success teams especially, it’s important to have first-hand knowledge of new product features for upsells, new sales strategies for onboarding, and new marketing campaigns for conversations around customer testimonials and use cases. Customers will often ask questions about other aspects of an organization, and CSMs should be able to answer knowledgeably and truthfully about company-wide initiatives.

5. Plan a Whole Quarter—or Even a Whole Year—Ahead

Where do your customers currently stand in their lifecycle? Although it might not be quite time for an upsell, it’s never too early to begin planning ahead for major customer milestones. Many of today’s CSMs are held to rigorous compensation plans that, much like their sales counterparts, make the end of the quarter particularly stressful. While Sales Representatives often become pushy and assertive to close that end-of-quarter deal, CSMs can’t take that same approach with current customers. Upsell conversations require patience and finesse to ensure a customer feels valued instead of feeling like just another logo on a map.

In order to nip this end-of-quarter stress period, CSMs should begin planning renewals and upsells weeks, months, or even years in advance. Understanding exactly where a customer account is at in the buying or renewal process allows the CSM to build out a gradual plan towards a sale, instead of a hurried phone call on the 30th of any given month. CSMs should take into account the questions and discussions mentioned above when determining the best process for upsell or renewal conversations.

By building a long-term plan and starting these conversations early, CSMs can often gain buy-in from multiple people and departments within an organization, not just from the decision maker or project manager. It’s also possible that the new deal amount is higher in value because the customer has had more time to research and evaluate the deal, and the CSM has had more time to build recurring value.

No matter the size of your customer success organization, the changing of quarters is a great time to look back and reflect on what worked, what needs work, and what should be removed from your Customer Success process.

Adversity hurts you if you accept it. It only beats you if you don’t push back against it, if you don’t push through it. If you accept that somehow, the tough hand you have been dealt isn’t a hand you can play, you have given adversity the power instead of taking the power from it.

Adversity hurts you if you define it through the negativity frame. The story you tell is is a survivor’s story or a thriver’s story. The survivor’s story is the story about how adversity prevents them from being more, doing more, having more, and contributing more. Those who have recognized the value in adversity tell another story. They tell the story of how adversity built them into someone who thrives.

Adversity hurts you if you believe that it holds you back, that it disempowers you. If you believe that adversity prevents, it does indeed prevent. If you believe that an event prevents you from succeeding, it will. If you believe that that same event requires you to act in some new way, adversity propels your forward, stronger than you were before.

Adversity hurts you if you use it as an excuse. If you want a reason to “not,” adversity will provide it. If you want an excuse for the things you believe you “can not” have, or the things that you “can not” do, or the person you ”can not” become, adversity will provide that excuse. Other people with the same or similar adversity use it as the reason they “can” and the motivation to “do.”

You are human. You are certain to face adversity. The human condition makes it unavoidable. But it isn’t something that defines you in a negative or limiting way, unless you choose to define yourself by the adversity in a negative or limiting way.

Pushing against adversity is one of the most potent and important ways that you grow stronger.

The post The Ways Adversity Can Hurt You appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Phone security is, without any doubts, one of the most profitable industries to explore these days. The reason behind such statement goes alongside with the importance of data as a monetary value for any industry, not to mention latest trends in crime as cyber kidnappings, extortions and so many other spiteful ways of harming other people.

For that sole reason, tonnes of users are always searching for new methods to protect their conversations. Paranoia or not, it’s best to be acquainted with the latest trends in mobile development and adapt to a new industry that is slowly taking its place as a stellar investment.

Unhackable phones

One of the trendiest news last year was the release by Sirin Labs of the Solarin Android, a $14k unhackable phone created by an Israeli startup. Including everything we can expect in a high-end smartphone while at the same time ensuring us the data we store is protected, this project isn’t just a daydream, as one of the experts working on the project is Rami Efrati, former head of the Civilian Sector Division of the Israeli National Cyber Bureau. This is putting smartphones up to an NSA-approved level, and in case you were wondering who would expend $14k in a mobile phone, celebrities like Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy were attending the event – remember celebrities are hackers’ preferred practice pool to test their skills, often leading to data leak of sensitive photos like actress Jennifer Lawrence was a known victim.

Photo courtesy of Chevanon Photography

Copperhead’s Recipe to Security

Another interesting approach to mobile cyber security comes by the hand of this Toronto-based startup. The idea is to fix Android liabilities by adding extra layers of protection through Grsecurity and PaX to their release of Android OS. The project proves to be interesting enough as Google is considering a partnership with this startup to fix what they already acknowledge as flaws through their coding experience. Most common liabilities for smartphone devices can be resumed in this infographic courtesy of Ooma.

Copperhead, welcomed as one of the most exciting news for Android security, has just one downside: it only works with Google Nexus devices. Remember that Samsung, Sony, LG and many other brands that feature Android-based devices also use their means of coding the OS, though it’s based on Android architecture. Hence versions aren’t compatible between devices.

The path of Biometrics

Just when the world is getting accustomed to fingerprint readings as ways for login to our laptops, smartphones and even as credentials for work, there’s still plenty road to cover in what regards to the partnership between smartphones and biometrics. Samsung’s Iris Recognition feature has come to make a revolution in what regards to safe access, especially for payment sites and its integration as password method with Google Pay.

Photo courtesy of Tofros.com

Apple, on the other hand, has fully integrated Touch ID technology with their Apple Pay system alongside with other encryption methods. When the stakes are as high as Citibank’s voice recognition methods for securing access to a customer’s account, it is expected to witness a considerable update in the quality of smartphone microphones and headsets, investing in digital audio technology as it’s the case of Apple’s switch to digital audio headphones.

Money vs. Services: the key factor for success

When there are many technological advancements to discover, the major downside to making these technologies available in mass distribution is the monetary factor. Like we stated above, who would spend $14k on a smartphone that, regardless of all security methods it can provide for data, it can easily get lost or stolen, thus losing the investment made even when data isn’t accessible to anyone else.

There are, however, attractive options to consider as could be the Blackphone 2 by Silent Circle, which is available for just a bit above $800, using AES-128 encryption system to keep your data secure and offering a policy of 72-hour for fixing critical vulnerabilities spotted at the system. Though when it could be interesting to integrate this smartphone to our lives, the fact that is still so much held back in what regards to technology if we compare it with high-end devices like the latest iPhone 7 or the Samsung Galaxy 7, spending $800 on a product that is prone to be outdated soon doesn’t seem wise for anyone.

Photo courtesy of Startup Stock Photos

If any startup wishes to take a huge step forward securing a position in this industry, studying the relationship between the technology offered and the costs of producing it would be crucial for becoming the next mass consumption product. And, who knows? Perhaps if security methods become accessible for common users, hackers will see the final stage of their criminal activities worldwide.

Introduction

As a blogger or Internet entrepreneur, you need traffic. If you are unfamiliar with the term, it simply means people going to your website or blog. Just like all of the people you encounter in their vehicles when you are driving to work constitute real world vehicular traffic, everyone surfing the web at any given time is a part of Internet traffic.

There are two ways to get traffic to your site.

• 1) You pay for traffic.
• 2) You get traffic for free.

Paid traffic is a smart part of a serious online entrepreneur’s marketing plan. You control every aspect of traffic when you pay for it. Ad campaigns with Google, YouTube, Amazon and Facebook make it possible to laser-target your advertising to the exact demographics you want to reach.

However, paid traffic can cost you a lot of money, delivering little to no results, if you don’t know what you are doing.

Even if you do eventually develop a successful paid traffic marketing plan, it doesn’t happen overnight. You have to pump a lot of revenue into buying traffic each and every day, spend your time and testing and retesting, and there are no guarantees that you will get the results you’re looking for.

The “Sexiest” Thing About Free Traffic

If you think the reference to free traffic as being “sexy” is a little overboard, you are incorrect. Free traffic is beautiful, sexy, attractive and desirable. Why is this so? The answer is simple … because it’s FREE!

In many cases this doesn’t just mean being free financially. A lot of methods you are about to learn require a little bit of your time on the front end, but then they just continue to deliver free, targeted traffic to your site or blog with little to no upkeep on your part.

Other methods will require regular input by you, but since your financial outlay is zero, and the Internet never sleeps, you can employ these free traffic methods anytime of the night or day, whenever you have a few minutes or hours of spare time.

Some of the free traffic sources are:

Start Building a List

You absolutely, positively must be building a list. This is true if your business is off-line or on, and technology makes it easy to do so when you have a blog or website. To build your list you need a freebie – Lists of resources work well here. A short PDF that answers one big problem your audience has is another winner.

Social Media

Social media can provide a lot of free traffic. However, there are so many worthwhile social media websites out there, you have to be careful not to spend the bulk of your time chasing this low-converting traffic. Regardless what social media “gurus” will tell you, the return on your time investment trying to get people from Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn back to your website to join your list is not very high.

People go to social media sites to hang out. They are socializing. Make sure you approach them in a social manner. Don’t ever attempt to sell on Facebook or the other social media sites.

The Best Times to Post on Social Media

HubSpot studied tens of thousands of posts and updates on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other social media sites. They discovered the best possible times for you to engage your audience. Those times are listed below (as of June 2016).

Facebook:

• 3 o’clock to 4:00 PM on Wednesdays
• 1 o’clock to 4:00 PM on Thursdays and Fridays
• Noon to 1 o’clock PM on Saturdays and Sundays

Twitter:

• Noon to 3:00 PM on Mondays through Fridays
• 5 o’clock to 6:00 PM on Wednesdays

LinkedIn:

• 7:30 o’clock to 8:30 o’clock a.m., noon, and 5 o’clock to 6:00 PM on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays
• 10 o’clock to 11:00 o’clock AM on Tuesdays

Pinterest:

• Evening hours every day
• 2 o’clock to 4:00 o’clock AM every day
• 5:00 PM on Fridays
• 8 o’clock to 11:00 o’clock PM on Saturdays

Instagram:

Anytime between Monday and Thursday, avoiding 3:00 o’clock to 4:00 o’clock PM

* Understand that multiple factors will influence whether your content is shared, liked, commented on and develops engagement. However, if you stick to the times just mentioned, you give yourself the best possible chance of driving a lot of free traffic to your blog or website.

Mobile

In late 2015 mobile searches passed desktop searches on the Internet. Experts say that now (in 2017) more than 60% of all web searches are on mobile devices. This means several things. First off, most people are searching from their smart phones. This display is tiny compared to your laptop, your desktop and even your tablet

Build A Mobile Application: Don’t worry; you don’t need to be a web designer or app developer. You can head over to Fiverr.com or UpWork and have a freelancer create a mobile application for your business inexpensively. This can be as simple as a checklist or list of resources, or some other helpful piece of information.

On-Page SEO

You are probably groaning at the 3 letter acronym SEO. In case you don’t know, that stands for search engine optimization. This means making your website, content and webpages attractive to Google and the other search engines. If you have fallen prey to so-called experts that promised to deliver search engine rankings by offering their SEO services, it is understood that search engine optimization is a topic you would like to avoid.

Blogging

Guest blogging doesn’t provide the big traffic boost that it used to. However, it is still a great way to reach a large audience. Contact the owners of the biggest blogs relevant to your niche or market. Offer to write an original, high-value blog post for their site. In return you ask for a link back to your website.

Answer Questions on Q and A Websites

There are sites which allow web surfers to post questions about anything and everything. Online marketers like yourself answer those questions, and the question that gets the most positive feedback is chosen as the top answer.

Start a Podcast

This may seem daunting at first. However, all you really need to start a podcast is a decent microphone and a computer. Odds are you have a blog. There is a pretty good chance that your competitor has a website or blog as well. On the other hand, podcasts are few and far between, which makes them the perfect free traffic source that sets you apart from your competition.

A theorist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has shown that, if quantum computer are fully realized, there may be fewer limits to their speed than previously put forth.

The findings—described as a “thought experiment” by NIST’s Stephen Jordan—are about a different aspect of quantum computing speed than another group of NIST researchers explored about two years ago. While the previous findings were concerned with how fast information can travel between two switches in a computer’s processor, Jordan’s new paper deals with how quickly those switches can flip from one state to another.

The rate of flipping is equivalent to the “clock speed” of conventional processors. To make computations, the processor sends out mathematical instructions known as logic operations that change the configurations of the switches. Present day CPUs have clock speeds measured in gigahertz, which means that they are capable of performing a few billion elementary logic operations per second.

Because they harness the power of quantum mechanics to make their calculations, quantum computers will necessarily have vastly different architectures than today’s machines. Their switches, called quantum bits or “qubits,” will be able to represent more than just a 1 or 0, as conventional processors do; they will be able to represent multiple values simultaneously, giving them powers conventional computers do not possess.

Jordan’s paper disputes longstanding conclusions about what quantum states imply about clock speed. According to quantum mechanics, the rate at which a quantum state can change—and therefore the rate at which a qubit can flip—is limited by how much energy it has. While Jordan believes these findings to be valid, several subsequent papers over the years have argued that they also imply a limit to how fast a quantum computer can calculate in general.

“At first glance this seems quite plausible,” Jordan said. “If you’re performing more logic operations, it makes sense that your switches would need to go through more changes. In both conventional and quantum computing designs, each time a logic operation occurs”—making its switches flip—“the computer hops to a new state.”

Using the mathematics of quantum systems, Jordan shows is that it is possible to engineer a quantum computer that does not have this limitation. In fact, with the right design, he said, the computer “could perform an arbitrarily large number of logic operations while only hopping through a constant number of distinct states.”

Counterintuitively, in such a quantum computer, the number of logic operations carried out per second could be vastly larger than the rate at which any qubit can be flipped. This would allow quantum computers that embrace this design to break previously suggested speed limits.

What advantages might this faster clock speed grant? One of the primary applications envisioned for quantum computers is the simulation of other physical systems. The theoretical speed limit on clock speed was thought to place an upper bound on the difficulty of this task. Any physical system, the argument went, could be thought of as a sort of computer—one with a clock speed limited by the system’s energy. The number of clock cycles needed to simulate the system on a quantum computer should be comparable to the number of clock cycles the original system carried out.

However, these newly discovered loopholes to the computational speed limit are a “double-edged sword.” If energy does not limit the speed of a quantum computer, then quantum computers could simulate physical systems of greater complexity than previously thought. But energy doesn’t limit the computational complexity of naturally occurring systems either, and this could make them harder to simulate on quantum computers.

Jordan said his findings do not imply that there are no limits to how fast a quantum computer could conceivably calculate, but that these limits derive from other aspects of physics than merely the availability of energy.

“For example, if you take into account geometrical constraints, like how densely you can pack information, and a limit to how fast you can transmit information (namely, the speed of light), then I think you can make more solid arguments,” he said. “That will tell you where the real limits to computational speed lie.”

Physical Review A- Fast quantum computation at arbitrarily low energy

ABSTRACT

One version of the energy-time uncertainty principle states that the minimum time for a quantum system to evolve from a given state to any orthogonal state is the energy uncertainty. A related bound called the Margolus-Levitin theorem states that the expectation value of energy and the ground energy is taken to be zero. Many subsequent works have interpreted a minimal time for an elementary computational operation and correspondingly a fundamental limit on clock speed determined by a system’s energy. Here we present local time-independent Hamiltonians in which computational clock speed becomes arbitrarily large as the number of computational steps goes to infinity. They argue that energy considerations alone are not sufficient to obtain an upper bound on computational speed, and that additional physical assumptions such as limits to information density and information transmission speed are necessary to obtain such a bound.

Over lunch on a Thursday I took twenty minutes to bang out a post about some breaking news in the social media industry.

Over the next few days, that post received over 20,000 views.

Let’s dig a bit into what that post is about, the methodology behind it, and both the short- and long-term benefits. By the end, you’ll be able to take home some tips and ideas that you might leverage for a trending topic of your own.

A Brief Blog Post About Vine

When I first started writing about social media news and information, I made it a point to subscribe to the blogs and press rooms of every major network. While not every newsworthy change or update is published there, many of the important developments are announced that way.

So late on a Thursday morning, I got a notification that Vine had published to their blog on Medium, a post cryptically titled, “Important News about Vine.” That’s how I came to find the stunning news that Twitter was shutting down Vine.

As I’ve mentioned before, every time you become aware of a piece of news that might potentially be interesting to your audience, you have to ask yourself these questions:

1. Is the news interesting and relevant to my audience (if not, ignore)
2. Am I interested in writing about this news (if not, share the original source)
3. Do I have time right now to write & publish an article (if not, share the original source)

Often, sharing that blog post from Vine would be the way to go. But in this instance, I had positive answers for each of the questions.

1. My readers might be interested in Vine, and there’s a potential to reach far more Vine users that aren’t part of my existing audience.
2. While I’m not an avid Vine user personally, I’ve written about Vine and have included Vine in my monitoring of social network active usage for years, so the topic is quite interesting and relevant to me.
3. Time… that was going to be close. I had about 25 minutes to finish my lunch before a weekly noon meeting commenced, so I’d need to write, publish and get some initial promotion started within that amount of time.

Piece of cake when it’s something you’ve done countless times.

Now, fortunately, shutting down of Vine wasn’t, in itself, a complicated topic. The post that I wrote simply needed to convey what was going on, when, what impact it would have on existing Vine users, and whatever Why could be gleaned from the original Vine blog post.

That took just 15 minutes to write – it didn’t have to be a massive article – plus a few minutes to create a graphic in Canva and then publish. “What’s Happening To Vine?”

Approaching Topics From Experience

This is certainly an example of where experience matters a great deal.

First, earlier this year, I’d published an article about the imminent demise of Blab and titled it “What Is Happening With Blab?” – and that proved to be an excellent title format as many people were wondering exactly that. So I mimicked it for this new post on Vine.

Second, as with Blab and Posterous and other networks before Vine, I’ve written about the shuttering of social platforms and therefore understand what readers want to know. They want to know what’s going on, of course, and why it’s all happening. But most importantly and immediately, they need to understand how they’re impacted and what the can or should do.

When Posterous closed, for instance (a blogging platform Twitter bought in 2012 and shut down in 2013), users needed to understand how to save their content so that they might recreate their blog on another platform. Vine was the same way. Vine users now need to know how to save their vines as video files that they can then choose to upload to another platform.

They also need to know how to try and get their audience to move from Vine to their preferred (active) network.

So those were points I knew instinctively I needed to make in the article.

Third, this wasn’t a surprise to me. I’d written at the new year that I fully expected 2016 to be a year filled with attrition in the social network space as there were already too many networks with similar functionality and demographics.

Not only was I prepared to write an article like this, it was a point I could easily make within the article.

I mention all of this to help illustrate the point that newsjacking, like any skill, takes time and practice to improve. And there’s no doubt that my skill pales in comparison to top new journalists who are covering breaking news every day – I just do it when the topic suits my audience and I feel like taking the time.

For most of you, you’ll need some time to get this level, so don’t be discouraged if you need a few hours to write the post, or if your first few newsjacking attempts don’t go over as well as you’d like.

Keep at it!

Spreading The Word About Vine Closing

The bulk of my motivation for writing about the topic in the first place was to make sure that as many people as possible heard about the news and, if it affected them, they’d have to prepare.

The fact is, if I publish content to my blog, I reach a far greater audience than if I simply share an article to my social channels. My blog content gets emailed, indexed in search, and shared by countless other readers and subscribers, resulting in tremendous spread.

So once I published the post, I shared it to all of my channels and it was automatically sent to my email subscribers.

Frankly, the initial interest was low – and in fact, days later the post still has less-than-average indications of social shares and interest.

I assumed that meant that my audience had very little interest in Vine… which was something I had figured from the start. It was the Vine community that I’d hoped to reach.

And boy, did I ever.

By Thursday evening, I began to notice a different kind of traffic coming in – Organic. Google had begun to rank my content among the top results for search terms like, “What’s Happening To Vine”.

Note that my article appeared just after a post by The New York Times and Vine’s own blog announcement.

Not too shabby!

So Thursday evening I spent a little more time optimizing the post.

• I edited the Title to include “Twitter Is Shutting It Down.”
• I embedded a video from a Viner reacting to the news.
• I added a forwardlink from related past articles.
• I added a Click To Tweet with the hashtag #RIPVine
• I scheduled additional social shares.
• I added a little more context and information.

On Thursday, the post got 1,943 views.
On Friday, the post got 8,704 views.
On Saturday, the post got 6,647 views.
On Sunday, the post got 2,757 views.

Nearly 92% of that traffic was via Google search.

These view counts also reflect the Google Trends graph for related terms over that period, which we’ll get into in a moment.

But it’s important to note not just the raw numbers but how they compare to the typical content that I publish. Because while I’ve had many successful articles, nearly every one has been a slow, gradual growth over time.

This one article accrued 20,051 views over a 4-day period but my normal articles see an average of 750 visitors during the first 30 days. That’s a 2500% increase in traffic!

So of course, I want to keep riding that wave for as long as possible.

You can also see my site’s overall traffic for the two months leading up to the Vine Shutting Down article.

That’s partly where this article fits in, to be frank. By referencing the Vine article and topics, I’m continuing to link to that post and use the keywords that people are searching. There will also be some people who read this article and who didn’t know about the first one, so this continues to raise awareness.

But I also used Google Trends, as I mentioned, to review where the topic was headed. I researched and compared a number of terms, looking for related keywords I might not have thought of, as well as any indications some might be trending up.

(Note that this is over Halloween weekend in the U.S. and therefore Monday might see renewed interest. It’s something I’ll continue to keep an eye on.)

The point here is that you can use Google Trends to watch hour-by-hour, day-by-day interest in a particular topic. While this may not help you determine whether to write about a topic, it might be a good indicator whether you should invest more time into optimizing and spreading a post you’ve just recently written. Or even publishing follow-up content! (I’ve seen some great articles that try to explore the Why behind the decision to close Vine, for instance.)

UPDATE 11/04: While interest and traffic has continued to wane, numbers for Monday and Tuesday were still significant. The What’s Happening To Vine post saw 1,493 visitors on Monday, 1,219 on Tuesday, and over 500 as of midday on Wednesday. So while readership of the post will no doubt die down to a trickle very soon, this article and topic has had significantly more staying-power than most.

UPDATE 12/30: Surprisingly, the Vine article has continued to perform well through the end of the year. This has been buoyed somewhat by the fact that Twitter announced a slight change in their stance on Vine. They said on 12/16 that instead of completely closing down Vine, Vine users would still be able to use the app to share photos and 6-second videos to Twitter. I updated the original article accordingly and within a few days, search engine traffic doubled from 250 a day to over 500 a day.

UPDATE 04/08: Traffic to this one-time newsjacking article continues to hold strong! There was an update to the story in January as Twitter decided to let Vine users continue to use the Vine app as a camera, and that uploaded videos of 6 seconds or less would automatically loop like Vines, effectively giving long-time Viners an ongoing medium for their creative work. At the time, traffic to the post continued at a pace of about 250 visits per day. Then in March, that doubled and wen back up into the 400-500 visits per day, and has stayed that way into April. After 5+ months, the article has received over 75,000 pageviews, of which 93% has been referral traffic from organic Google search.

The Benefits of Newsjacking

Some of the benefits are probably clear just from what I’ve already shared in this post, but let’s call them all out and differentiate between short-term and long-term. Even though this post is clearly just days old at the time this Case Study is published, I’ve written enough newsjacking posts in the past to be able to speak to their long-term benefits.

Short-Term Benefits of Newsjacking

• Traffic – potentially massive traffic
• Social Media Activity
• Authority Building

Obviously not every article is going to get the kind of traffic this Vine post did – but it’s always a possibility! I would also be remiss not to note that sometimes even a newsjacking article will continue to rank well and gain traffic long-term – it just depends on the topic. I quick blog post I wrote in 2013 about an update to the Twitter app continues to rank to this day for users searching how to set up multiple Twitter accounts.

Conversely, most of my newsjacking articles get far more social media activity than this post did. That can usually be attributed to the topic and audience fit. Had I been writing about a Facebook change, it would have seen far greater reach and engagement on Facebook. Regardless, when you share a piece of news with your social networks, many of your followers will be eager to share it with their own audiences.

While traffic and social engagement can be measured, the last short-term benefit of newsjacking, Authority Building, cannot be so easily quantified. Yet, it’s there nonetheless. When you write about topics, particularly trending ones, you immediately position yourself as ‘in the know’ to your followers and potential followers. The significance of that authority cannot be overstated.

Long-Term Benefits of Newsjacking

• New Subscribers for ongoing email marketing.
• New Website Visitors for ongoing remarketing.
• Increased traffic and ranked content for long-term SEO benefits.
• Alexa Rank. Domain Authority. Backlinks.

If your topic is on point – in other words, you gave Newsjacking Question #1 careful consideration and made sure that the news was both interesting and relevant to your readers – then it’s likely that readers of the article will be interested in subscribing to future email updates.

Similarly, if you’re using remarketing (or retargeting) to run Facebook or Google ads for people who have already visited your website, a smash hit like this Vine post really helps those campaigns by injecting significant levels of new visitors.

Now, a more subtle benefit could be long-term SEO improvement. Because you see, as long as your content is great – it answers the questions readers have – search engine traffic can beget search engine traffic. In other words, once Google begins to send more traffic to your site, and sees that those readers seem satisfied with that result, your content can be ranked higher and gain even more traffic.

And those results can lead to an increase in your website’s Alexa Rank (there’s no doubt that adding 20,000 visitors in a month is going to help mine), as well as domain authority. Depending on the topic and insight that you offer, you’ll often find other bloggers and writers linking to your content, creating valuable backlinks.

Those benefits can only be seen over time, so be sure to make a notation in your Google Analytics so that you can measure the impact a particular piece of content has on your traffic, referrals and goal completions.

What’s Next?

In order to begin to see some of these benefits for yourself, you’re just going to have to start newsjacking. There’s no substitute for experience.

However, that doesn’t mean you have to be wholly unprepared. We’ve reviewed the major questions to ask, but what most people struggle with is making sure that they’re informed well enough in advance to be able to write a newsjacking piece.

If you’re hearing about a topic from mainstream news, it’s likely too late to write about it yourself and still catch that news cycle.

Originally published on The Social Media Hat. Republished with permission.

America's business leaders are rethinking how they network.

Gone are the days when execs both young and more veteran had the time to spend hours at a boozy lunch or on the golf course. Taking its place are a whole new set of networking activities — think "sweatworking" on a run or at a SoulCycle class, or going on a cultural retreat with business associates. 

Leading the charge is a new generation of business leaders who value efficiency and multi-tasking more than ever before. Rather than devote a large chunk of time to a formal activity they wouldn't necessarily enjoy otherwise, many execs are seeing the value in combining their hobbies with their business. 

"I have found one of the most interesting ones has been music festivals. Several very compelling things have come out of Bonnaroo, Outside Lands, and Trans-Pecos for us over the past few years," Amar Lalvani, CEO of hotel group Standard International, told Business Insider. "It's a real opportunity where executives are way out of their element, let their hair down, and have the time and space to have unexpected conversations about shared interests that lead to ideas and initiatives."

"[It's] consistent with the almost total blending of work and play for most executives these days."

For many of those execs, that means getting a workout in while they catch up with contacts. The trend of taking clients to SoulCycle has been well-documented, but execs at the fitness studio say they see "sweatworking" becoming even more popular.  

"At first it was mostly people in media and finance, but now it's lots of industries," Gabby Cohen, SoulCycle's VP of brand strategy, told Business Insider. "We're all time-trapped, but it's important to stay connected to other people. Having the chance to connect with people in a positive, healthy way for a short period of time makes SoulCycle an appealing option for this."

During SXSW, Foursquare partnered with Cyc Fitness to host a spinning-while-networking event at different sites around Austin.

"Our attendance was really high," Justin Breton, Foursquare's head of marketing partnerships, said. "People felt that they did something different from the usual drinking and eating events at SXSW."

The power lunch is dead

In general, the idea of interrupting a day's work flow to entertain a client over lunch is becoming less popular.

"Running a startup, I rarely have time for a full sit-down lunch meeting in order to network and continue building our business," Adrian Aoun, CEO and founder of the AI-focused healthcare startup Forward, told Business Insider. "Many times I resort to eating a quick lunch at my desk, but as the founder of a startup that's health-focused, I know all too well how detrimental being sedentary all day can be. For this reason, I make almost all my meetings walking meetings.

"I even ask my office manager not to schedule a conference room so it forces good behavior. I find walking meetings to be much more productive because you have to focus and can't be distracted by your phone or laptop."

The trend of "sweatworking" is certainly more common among tech or media companies, where employees tend to be more willing to stray from tradition. But even on Wall Street, today's business lunches pale in extravagance compared to the meetings bankers held prior to the recession. Many businesses are becoming more image-conscious and, along with that, more cautious about appearing wasteful. 

Meanwhile, several of the restaurants that have famously been havens for extravagant lunches have struggled in recent years. Last July, New York's iconic Four Seasons restaurant closed following rent hikes and conflicts with Aby Rosen, the restaurant's landlord at the Seagram Building. 

Le Cirque, another storied Manhattan power-lunching spot, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy with its sister restaurant Circo in March. "We had a short-term cash-flow issue so we filed for Chapter 11 to ensure we would not lose the leases on the two restaurants," Mauro Maccioni, son of founder Sirio, told Page Six in the wake of the filing. "Both restaurants continue to operate as usual and fully staffed. We are in the process of restructuring ourselves and securing some additional outside funding."

Still, some say that for a certain set of veteran decision-makers, the draw of a power lunch is still very strong. And while attitudes around the tradition have shifted, high rents and other shifts in the New York real estate market are also big factors in a restaurant's success. 

"There's still something appealing about the energy and seeing all of those people. Face-to-face time spent with a client is really a good thing to do. It's a well-worn tradition," PR pro Leslie Stevens said to Business Insider. "But the two-hour thing — forget it. It's an hour. We're definitely into speed lunch now." 

While the team behind the Four Seasons is working on opening at a new location in Manhattan, Major Food Group — of Carbone, Parm, Santina, and Sadelle's, among others — plan on opening a new complex of restaurants in the Four Seasons' former home. The Grill, the first of three restaurants that are slotted for the space, will be opening soon.

"I think historically, as in places like the Four Seasons, 'power' was heavily defined by being seen and who you were seen with," Christene Barberich, cofounder and global editor-in-chief of Refinery 29, said. "Today power comes, more likely, from flexibility, freedom, and efficiency ... I don't know many people who have the luxury to travel 45 minutes to sit and 'lunch' for 2 hours, and then spend $300 on top of that."

Golf also isn't what it used to be

Meanwhile, golf, the longtime sport of business executives across America, is losing steam with the average consumer. According to data from the National Golf Foundation, golf participation has fallen nationally by 20% since 2003. The data suggests that while the core group of golfers continues to enjoy the sport, casual participation has fallen in recent years. 

Data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association has shown that millennials between the ages of 18 to 30 have a lack of interest in playing the game, and more than 800 golf courses have shuttered across the US in the past decade. From Las Vegas to New Jersey, many courses are being replaced with housing developments.

As NPD Group analyst Matt Powell observed in a Forbes blog post in 2014, the golf industry has had a hard time appealing to a younger generation of millennials who have a completely different set of values. Golf is expensive, time-consuming, and exclusive, which doesn't exactly jive with a generation who takes pride in "the hustle" and values experiences over luxury goods. 

"Millennials were hit hard by the recession. This caused them to seek value in every purchase," Powell wrote. "Millennials are willing to spend on things they think are important but always look at purchases with a value lens. Spending big money on rounds and equipment apparently does not connote value to millennials."

But getting some exercise, even if it's just for a walk, does. 

SEE ALSO: It's especially hard to find a home to buy right now — and it could get worse for millennials

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NOW WATCH: These haunting photos reveal what happens when a golf course becomes abandoned

LONDON — Valuations of financial technology companies are "frothy," according to one of the cofounder of a new fintech-focused investment company.

Andy Stewart, a managing partner at Motive Partners, said at the International Fintech conference in London last week: "I would call valuations right now frothy in general... tech generally is frothy."

A frothy market is one where valuations become detached from the underlining performance of a business. Stewart said: "I think that's a result of the success of many of the financial technology companies out there, I think it's a result of the amount of capital that's flown in, if you look at the last two years you've had record amounts of capital flowing into financial technology."

Stewart complained that many companies were now latching on to buzzwords that were inflating their value. He said: "One thing that people have to be careful of is buzzwords. Anything that has machine learning in it or blockchain in it, the valuation goes up, 2, 3, 4, 5x. We've seen companies come back to us multiple times and originally it's an AML/KYC engine which looks pretty interesting. Then it turns out to be AML/KYC [anti-money laundering/know your customer] engine powered by machine learning and using blockchain, and it's a much more valuable company. "

Motive is a relatively new player in the market, announcing itself at the start of the year. The new investment company, which has offices in London and New York, is aiming to raise a $1 billion. It is staffed by veterans of the financial technology and investment community — Stewart worked at BlackRock prior to joining.

While Stewart thinks a lot of companies may be overpriced at the moment, that doesn't mean there aren't good deals to be found.

He said at last week's conference: "I do think there continue to be investment opportunities, you just have to look a little harder for it, you have to stick to your process.

"In particular, venture seems particularly frothy to me but there seems to be quite a bit more of an opportunity at a later stage, transformational or buyout transactions.

"We've been looking at companies that need help, we call them stressed or distressed, that need help with technology or with their business plan, operating, just getting deeper into the operating mode with companies. As I said, being more creative with the transaction — layering capital overtime rather than just a big block of capital and waiting to see what happens."

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NOW WATCH: A financial planner explains why starting a new job is the best time to negotiate salary

Wouldn’t it be great if your prospects actually followed your neatly designed sales funnel or smartly outlined path to purchase?

But honestly, you know they don’t (even if your content marketing strategy assumes they do).

“Buyers are in control. And they’re not going from step one to step two to step three in this process that you define as quite linear,” Anna Talerico, co-founder of ion interactive, said in her recent ContentTECH presentation. “They are jumping around. They’re exploring. They’re comparing. They’re doing their self-education on their own terms in their own time frames.”

Buyers are doing their self-education on their own terms in their own time frames, says @annatalerico.
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More than 70% of buyers conduct over half their research online before making an offline purchase, according to research from Forrester that Anna shared.

Image source

McKinsey & Company research confirms the messy journey, which it dubs the consumer-decision journey.

Given (1) you don’t know when the consumer starts the journey, (2) the consumer rarely follows a neat path, and (3) the consumer who eventually buys usually learned of his or her brand choice early on, what’s a content marketer to do?

Give up on the buyer-journey model? Definitely not.

Don’t give up on the buyer-journey model, says @anngynn. #contentmarketing
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While your buyers take a chaotic journey, Anna says, you still need content to satisfy your buyers in each of the traditional sales stages. It’s the foundation on which to build your editorial plan – to detail the topics and formats that will help your buyers the most.

You need #content to satisfy your buyers in each of the traditional sales stages, says @annatalerico.
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If you haven’t detailed your buyer journey, do it now. For help, consider one of these useful guides:

• 4 Ways to Model the Buyer’s Journey
• Why – and How – to Map Out Your Customers’ Journey (Template)
• McKinsey & Company’s customer-destination-journey model

How to execute content

OK, so we agree it’s critical to align your content and your distribution with the messy buyer’s journey. But how do you deliver content that truly helps your buyers navigate their twists and turns? And how do you ensure that they can access that content when they want it?

Though the buyer’s journey is non-linear, you can conquer it by creating content for the traditional stages in unexpected ways to create a content mix that gives buyers what they need even when you don’t know they need it.

How do you create a good mix? Deliver for the chaotic – mixing your content formats and making them accessible no matter when or how the buyer arrives at that stage in the traditional buyer’s journey.

For this post, we’ll use a buyer’s journey model shared in Optimize Content Marketing by Facilitating the Buyer’s Journey and add a fourth stage – retention/loyalty.

Content formats

Let’s consider how to use a mix of content types that delivers at each step of the journey. The key is creating content within that format that’s the most relevant for a particular stage.

Interactive

A Demand Metric survey reveals that 97% of participants say interactive content was somewhat or very effective in educating buyers, while only 70% say the same for static content. Research also shows that interactive content’s ability to convert buyers is almost double static content’s ability. Interactive content, as Anna explains, allows for self-exploration.

Interactive content’s ability to convert buyers is almost double that of static content via @DemandMetric.
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• Discovery (early stages): Interactive infographics, look books, quizzes, diagnostic assessments
• Consideration (middle stages): Interactive e-books and white papers
• Decision (end stages): Concept-specific content – assessments, solution finders, calculators
• Retention (ongoing): Interactive support response

Video (and visuals)

As Juan Mendez writes: “Videos also are great for audience retention and can increase purchase intent by 97%. Besides, video is great for sharing cool content on your favorite social media channels.”

Videos are great for audience retention & can increase purchase intent by 97%. @juanjo101 @mediapost
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• Discovery (early stages): Educational – help viewers understand how their problems can be solved
• Consideration (middle stages): Explainer – detail (not plainly showing) how your product or service solves the problem
• Decision (end stages): Demo, testimonial or ‘About’ videos – show brand value and credibility
• Retention (ongoing): How-to on specific features of tools and solutions

White papers and e-books

CMI’s 2017 research shows that 65% of B2B marketers use white papers and/or e-books. Almost 40% say white papers and e-books are most critical to their content marketing success in 2017.

65% of B2B marketers use white papers and/or e-books via @cmicontent. 2017 #research
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• Discovery (early stages): Provocative research-based and interactive
• Consideration (middle stages): Solution-oriented
• Decision (end stages): Value-oriented
• Retention (ongoing): Advanced insight, forward-thinking concepts

Events

Almost 70% of B2B marketers use in-person events, while 58% use webinars and webcasts, according to CMI research. About one-third say in-person events as well as webinars are most critical to their success this year.

• Discovery (early stages): Webinars
• Consideration (middle stages): On-site activation at events drawing your target audiences
• Decision (end stages): Hosted events or meetings with your company
• Retention (ongoing): User workshops and customer-only conferences or meetings

Other content types

We know you use a lot of other content types. Here’s a quick rundown of a few of them to give you an idea of how to incorporate them in the buyer’s journey.

Discovery (early stages): Blog posts that answer questions
Consideration (middle stages): Email newsletters and content hubs
Decision (end stages): Testimonials on your website, third-party review sites
Retention (ongoing): Print magazines, mobile apps

Conclusion

The key to finding and delivering the right content at the right time is to stop thinking of your buyers walking a straight path to purchase. Instead, consider what type of information your potential buyers and customers need at every stage and create stage-specific content in a mix of formats. Then make it accessible when and where your buyer is ready to consume it.

To deliver right content at right time, stop thinking of buyers walking a straight line to purchase. @anngynn
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See how CMI uses its newsletter to support your content marketing journey. Subscribe today to the free daily version or the weekly digest.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post What to Do When Your Buyers’ Journey Isn’t Linear (Hint: It Never Is) appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

10 Best Sales Questions to Ask on a Sales Call

It’s happened to everyone.

You dial the number, get a hold of the lead for a qualifying call, and start having the conversation. Things are moving along and —BOOM!—you don’t know how to proceed.

It’s because you don’t know the best sales questions to ask on a sales call.

This may be rare, but it’s not lack of knowledge or poor communication.

Sometimes, you just blank. You have no idea what to do, but you have to get this call out of the ditch.

After all, you called them.

Qualifying a lead is a delicate balance between your natural ability to move a conversation and a predetermined set of things to find out. So, what are some of the very best sales questions to ask on a sales call?

That’s what we hope to go over today.

A Quick Word on Using the Questions

First, we need to talk for a second about extracting the data.

Yes, you’re trying to gauge how likely they are to buying. But this isn’t accomplished by simply asking questions and listening to the answer.

And getting it sometimes requires follow-ups.

If you’re too scripted, you’ll just move on to the next question and possibly miss out on the things that will actually close deals. You have to be careful to listen and keep asking until you understand.

Let’s do a little example question before we get to the rest.

“What might cause you to change suppliers?”

A classic question that gets some pretty typical answers. “If it costs less.” or “If another solution had X or Y feature?”

Those answers aren’t going to move the conversation along, but they could give you an opportunity to find out more.

Follow-ups are needed to set them up a bit. “Does your current solution solve X or Y well enough for you?” “How well do you think [solution] has been implemented?” “Is it living up to expectations?”

Getting answers for all of these questions under the framework of “changing suppliers” does several things.

• Really gets to the reasons they may switch.
• Reduces confidence in their current solution.
• Allows you to warm the lead by expressing the strong points of your product.
• Gives you insights into how they view the need and use of both the pain and solutions to it.

Bottom Line: All of the questions you ask should be connected to the goal of qualifying a lead and each question should have a follow-up or two that help you dive deeper and get that valuable intel. All of our suggested questions will have some additional suggestions, too!

Savvy? Let’s go.

Our List of Best Sales Questions to Ask on a Sales Call

Question #1: What’s it like living in/next to [insert weather, landmark, or natural marker] all the time?

For instance, “I see you’re in Ohio. What’s it like living with the cold winters out there? We don’t have those here in Arizona.” Or, “You’re that close to the beaches in Destin; you have to go there all the time, right?

You may be wondering why the first question doesn’t have anything to do with sales. Rapport makes or breaks a call. If you can’t build some sort of connection, you won’t get anywhere. This is another reason that you don’t want to just crank out a list of memorized questions.

There are dozens of ways you can build some red (if you don’t like the geographic approach). You have to make them listen and that makes questions like those essential to any “best” list.

Bonus Resource: Here’s a massive list of over 60 rapport-building questions.

Question #2: What are your top [business/industry] priorities right now?

Still in rapport building territory here, but you’re starting to switch things into the right place.

Finding where a decision maker’s head is can be a huge tell or how likely they are to buy in the near future. If you ask this and they tell you about some focus that has nothing to do with your solution—it could be a short call.

If their priority is one of your product’s features—jackpot.

Potential Follow-up: Do you have a current solution for this issue?

Question #3: Are you having problems with [insert a couple of pain points] like some of our other clients?

If they weren’t forthcoming with anything that is related to what you’re selling, it’s time to throw out some bait.

Just ask them if they are having the common pains as others in the same industry.

When they answer; it’ll either be a ‘yes’ that you can dig into or a ‘no’. Either one is good for you. This is really the first meaty question. You’ve built up a bit of a connection and this one will tell you if it’s worth going forward or not.

Potential Follow-up: One of the best follow-up questions ever—”Can you tell me more about [insert the pain mentioned here]?”

Question #4: Is your current solution not solving these as well as you would like?

It’s highly likely that your lead has some sort of a solution already.

That’s like hard ground that you’ll have to dig up in order to lay the foundation for the new product. This question helps with this problem. It’s also great for gauging how loyal they are to their current tool/service.

If they aren’t going to budge, it’ll likely come out here. Listen closely to see if you can start to pry it loose in their mind. If not, you may want to move on.

Potential Follow-up: What made you choose this provider?

Question #5: What would it do for your overall revenue/workflow/pain benefit if you could handle these issues more effectively?

Once you’ve seen a window for getting them to switch, it’s time to start gathering intel that will be used to close the deal.

The goal here is to tailor the “perfect world” you and the closer want to paint in order to get the lead to pull the trigger. You know what they want, but some aspects may be more appealing to the prospect. It’s important to pay attention here to highlight those benefits in the future.

Potential Follow-up: What would be the biggest difference for your role personally?

Question #6: How does the decision making look for a solution like this?

Pains, priorities, and roles are usually similar from one lead to the next. But buying processes are a different story.

Fiscal year and budgets are always different, a buying team may need to be constructed, varying levels of organization (or disorganization) exist. There is no telling how long it may be before a lead, even if interested, would actually buy your gizmo.

But that’s why we ask the question, right?

Potential Follow-up: What are the specific steps in that process?

Question #7: What concerns do you have about switching/implementing a new solution?

Just because they’ve made it this far doesn’t mean they want to switch.

The lead may not even like their current solution, but just don’t want to deal with the buying process they’ve just laid out—let alone implementing a totally new product. All of these are barriers that will be thrown up sooner or later. It’s better to get them talking about it now.

Pay close attention here, this is one of the last lines of defense many leads have before making a decision.

Potential Follow-up: Would any of those keep you from buying, despite finding a better solution?

Question #8: How comfortable are you with saying no to me?

We have to give credit where it’s due. John Barrows wrote a piece for Sales Hacker and included this question (among others)—and it’s genius.

So many leads have no intention of buying, but will sit on the phone with you and sound interested. They’ll politely answer your questions and then, when you ask them to set a time for a future call—they say yes!

You get excited and when the time for the call comes…crickets. Let them know that you want to figure out if their brand is a fit. If yes, great! If not, that’s great too. At this point in the convo, they’ve heard you enough to know.

The sooner they’re gone the better if it wasn’t going to work.

Potential Follow-up: Seriously, just let me know if you’re not interested—ok?

“…let them know you are cool with them telling you ‘no’ then they are more likely to stop the process sooner with you if you really aren’t the right fit.” —John Barrows

Question #9: What if we could set up a strategy call to explain how to implement and use our [product/service] for the maximum benefit?

If the call gets to this point, you have enough data to give to the closer (or use yourself) to get the deal.

Prospects will have shown themselves by now and it’s time to set a sales qualified appointment (SQA). If they’re a suspect (not interesting in buying), they’ll probably run scared at this point. A question like this isn’t a softball, but it’s time to get a demo on the books.

Potential Follow-up: Would you have [insert typical demo call length] to potentially solve the [insert pain] we talked about?

Question #10: At the end of that call will you give us a firm answer?

If you’re really feeling lucky, ask for a committed answer at the end of the demo.

Someone would be naive to think that they weren’t going to be hard-pitched on the next call. Asking if they’ll make a commitment either way sets the tone for your closer. It’s also the last protection against those who aren’t qualified to go to close.

If a suspect has made it here, it’s kind of like climbing to the top of a crazy tall water slide. Asking a question like this is the equivalent of a chicken exit. If they’re not ready to plunge—they’ll get off the ride.

Time to Mine the Data

It’s best to have a process for getting the notes from the call to your closers (or yourself to review before the demo)

Typically, things like these will fit nicely into most customer relationship management software. Reps can interact with the data for maximum impact.

What are some best sales questions to ask on a sales call that you’ve heard? Any you loved (or hated) on our list?

Want to get people to respond to your cold email outreach?

By Tibor Shanto – tibor.shanto@sellbetter.ca 

Communication, which at the core selling/buying is, will always be a mutual exercise, which why monologues work well in theater, but not in delivering revenue or quota. As such, a bit of forethought and focusing on how you’ll choreograph the sales are important. Which is why it is that much more noticeable to all, including buyers, when the effort is just not there in how sellers choose to engage and carry on a sales interview or conversation.

“I may make you feel but I can’t make you think”

Sellers need to put more effort into planning their interactions with prospects than many do. This needs to be on two levels, first the areas or topics they choose focus on, second the kind of questions they ask. Sellers forget that their prospect is talking to a range of people about the purchase they are about to make. If the questions I ask, the areas I choose to explore and drill down on, are no different than the three or four or eight other vendors they are speaking with, then the selection and decision will go back to the same old, usually the lowest common denominator, moderated by price (the lowest price).

Areas of Focus – Too often too many sellers start from the erroneous assumption that their buyer has their act together, know exactly what they want, and all that is left is to pick a product. That is a false premise, and as such leads to longer sales cycles and missed sales. While anecdotally we always knew that buyers are not as together as they sometimes appear, or sellers believe, the data is now in. Some will see this as good news, allowing them as sellers to bring more value to the conversation by helping buyers in ways much more meaningful than features and price. Sellers have the benefit of having worked with many buyers with similar experiences, allowing the perceptive ones to see themselves not as product reps, but conduits to others’ experiences, good and bad. The value they can bring is in helping buyers better understand what they are dealing with, and their best option, not options, in addressing those specifics.

Even if a prospect has advanced past the stage of deciding what they want to do and how, sellers benefit from starting “back” there, before moving to asking questions about how they plan to address things, i.e. product. Retracing a little, will show them as being different, and will also help the seller understand the buyer’s thought process, which may allow for more unique input, and to demonstrate they are different and truly “buyer centric”, by not jumping to product right away.

What we Ask – The kind of question go a long are key. You have to assume that you are the fifth sales person they spoke to that day; how will you make a different impression than the four who went before you?

If you ask the same as them, what will they base their selection on? If you reinforce perceptions rather than challenge them, are you not telling the buyer to base it on price and emotion?  Your questions are not just about the response, they need to get them to think, think beyond where they are now, and where the other sellers have taken them.

If they can answer your question without thinking, you’re in trouble! But many sellers I meet are afraid of asking questions that put the prospect on the spot. Remember the goal here is not to embarrass the prospect, but to help  them really think through the issue before they commit, whether they commit to you or another. I worked with one sales pundit who felt asking the prospect “Why” questions were not cricket as it may stump the buyer. Well if you can “stump” the buyer, it is evidence that they have not thought things through, and you are doing them a favour.

Getting an answer is easy, getting an answer that moves the process forward in a way that helps buyers is not. Which why the answers can only be as good or productive as the questions.

Become one of the thousands of sales professionals receiving my latest updates on sales execution, tools, tips and more.

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The post Answers Are Only As Good As The Question appeared first on Renbor Sales Solutions Inc..

Humans contain multitudes. We have a demonstrated ability to work hard, sweat and toil for our daily bread, and, as a society, achieve magnificent feats of science and technology. We’ve literally reached the stars!

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If you’ve been even remotely connected to digital marketing at any point over the last twenty years, then you’re no doubt well aware of the meaning and value of Search Engine Optimization. But you might not realize that SEO isn’t just a way to get higher rankings on the SERPs–it can also be used to generate personal job opportunities and career growth.

These days, SEO has a very specific connotation. That’s because most people consider the phrase “search engine” to be synonymous with “Google.”

That’s not unreasonable if your objective is to increase web traffic and conversions on your site. But what you might not realize is that there are a number of other search engines out there that have a surprising influence on your career prospects. And you don’t have to be an SEO consultant or guru to take advantage of them.

Search Engines in the Recruitment World

You’ve probably used Google or a similar search engine to find nearby restaurants, compare products, or research a topic you’re unfamiliar with.

In much the same way, employers and marketing professional recruiters use search engines to find high-quality marketing talent and sift through job applicants.

A few examples:

LinkedIn

For at least a while longer, LinkedIn is THE place to be online for developing a professional network and improving career growth prospects.

Marketing professional recruiters often search for potential candidates on LinkedIn via the social network’s own search engine. LinkedIn allows you to search by keyword and include a variety of filters like location and company.

Much like you’d include certain keywords and content on your web site to attract more visitors, you can optimize your LinkedIn profile to maximize its visibility to recruiters seeking your skills and experience.

Start by making sure your profile is complete and up-to-date. Add images, articles, media, and Featured Skills when available.

Consider what marketing skills and experience you have are most marketable, and feature them prominently in job titles and personal descriptions.

For instance, if you’re an SEO consultant you’ll certainly want to focus on that as much as possible. But you’ll also want to add related skills and keywords like Link Building, SEO Copywriting, or Site Speed Optimization depending on your experience and specialty.

LinkedIn favors displaying complete, active profiles. Optimizing yours will maximize the chances of a recruiter seeing it and offering you an opportunity–even when you’re not actively looking for work!

Happy with Your Marketing Job?

Keep in mind that, at the end of the day, LinkedIn is still a social network first and foremost. Furthermore, LinkedIn’s search engine prioritizes profiles that have a connection to the searcher. So you’ll find the most success if you’re active in cultivating valuable connections and participating in groups to extend your network.

For more tips on LinkedIn SEO, check these resource:

• LinkedIn SEO: How to Get Your Profile Ranking
• 13 Sneaky LinkedIn SEO Hacks to Boost Your Profile Views
• LinkedIn SEO Tutorial: How to Optimize Your Profile To Rank Higher In Both Google And LinkedIn’s Search Results

Applicant Tracking Systems

Most employers and recruiters manage candidates for their jobs through an Applicant Tracking System; software that helps organize, evaluate and communicate with applicants.

When a job is posted online, it might get hundreds or thousands of applications. Most businesses can’t afford to manually consider each and every one. You want marketing professional recruiters and hiring managers to easily be able to find you in their Applicant Tracking System when they search for certain skills or accomplishments.

When possible, customize your resume and application to reflect keywords in the position’s job description (but don’t just stuff them in haphazardly). Avoid vague phrases and titles that don’t have widespread relevance. Marketing is so diverse, a term like “senior marketer” or “media manager” could mean a thousand different things.

Most ATSs require a text document that they can parse out for easy review, comparison and searching, and can not make use of a fixed-image PDF or image.

How Your PDF Marketing Resume Could Be Holding Back Your Career

A well-organized Word version of your resume can easily be translated by the ATS so you can be moved along the hiring process. And it will also improve the possibility of being contacted with future opportunities, since the ATS user will be able to search for people with your qualifications when a need arises.

Job/Career Sites

Ever submitted a general resume or created an account on a big job aggregation site like Monster or Indeed?

Employers use search engines on those sites to search for candidates as well. In general, the SEO guidelines listed above for resumes and ATSs apply here as well. Make sure you’ve included critical information like where you’re located in your profile!

Portfolio Hosting Sites

Many portfolio hosting platforms also have some form of search engine. This is especially important for creatives and developers. However, nearly any marketer from an SEO consultant to a web analyst to a PR executive could feasibly display much of their work on various projects and campaigns in a portfolio.

A digital portfolio isn’t just a place to hang up your pretty pictures; make it a job opportunity generator by strategically adding applicable keywords to your project descriptions and profile.

Running an online business and selling products or services online comes with some inevitable paperwork. The compliance process may take a few weeks, but when you prepare for it wisely, you can shorten it and avoid unnecessary mistakes.

Online business owners need to ensure that their websites comply with banks’ or payment processors’ regulations. It’s better to make all the changes needed before the entire process start to make it go quickly and smoothly.

In this article, we will discuss a few must-haves you should include on your page.

Transparent Terms and Conditions

The terms and conditions agreement is not only for customers but also highly important for protecting your business by making sure customers know their rights and responsibilities.

It helps you avoid customer uncertainty and misunderstandings, so it should be written with absolute clarity about what should be done in any given situation. Consumers should be informed about all the issues that come with shipping and delivery, the return policy, and the privacy policy as well as information about pricing, payment, taxes, and so on.

Here is what you should include in your terms and conditions.

Customer Rights and Responsibilities

• A privacy policy with clear information about the use of personal or sensitive data. Specify what information you collect from your customers and what you do with it.Define what information is saved or transferred to third party applications. Also, if you gather data from a mailing list, provide instructions on how to opt-out of the list and how customers can correct or remove their data.Remember that customers will share their credit card details and sensitive information, so you have to do your best to keep that information secure

• Payment and pricing details with all taxes or extra fees included and the list of payment methods accepted on your website. You can also add information about how late or missed payments will be handled or what will be done in the case of payment disputes.

• A refund policy. The point is to make it as clear as possible for users so they know what to do with items bought on your website. In the EU, merchants have to replace, repair, or issue a refund if the products or services are not as described or don’t work properly.

• An opt-out policy to make it clear that customers can resign from your services. They can cancel or return the ordered product or service within 14 days for any reason and without any consequences.

Delivery and Shipping

In the case of shipping physical goods, include a clear statement of the delivery time frame.

Dispute Resolution Details and the Website’s Legal Liability

It’s better to include this information in your terms and conditions agreement to make it easy to resolve situations where a customer is not satisfied and asks for compensation.

Remember that your terms and conditions should follow consumer laws and cover things like the right to receive a refund. Of course, consumer laws apply even when you don’t put them in the terms and conditions on your website, but you can, for instance, limit your liability.

Imprint on Your Website

Putting contact information on your site is mandatory, so you need to include full contact details, such as:

• the company name,
• physical address,
• email address or phone number.

You can also include the information about available for after-sales services or VAT details.

Clear Product Descriptions

The content on your website needs to be updated and consistent. You have to especially be sure that each product or service you sell comes with a clear and understandable description that is not misleading.

Checkout Process on Your Page

If you want to sell online, you need to put a payment gateway in place. When your page is undergoing the compliance process, the bank rep will check how the payment flows from the customer perspective.

What if you’re just at the start and don’t have a payment solution on your page yet? You can add payments in test mode to make it possible to check the process.

Note that the checkout page should always be encrypted via an HTTPS connection. The payment page should include clear information about pricing with all taxes or extra fees included, as well as all payment details.

You should also display logos of card brands to keep users informed about what payment methods are accepted on your website.

Make the Compliance Process Less Painful

To sum up, before you start the compliance process, make sure your website includes:

• A terms and conditions agreement with a clear refund policy, privacy policy, and shipment details.
• An imprint including the company name, physical business address, and telephone number or email address.
• Credit card logos on the payment page.
• Updated content on a finished and fully functional website.
• Clear and transparent pricing.
• A payment gateway implemented on the website (if you are just starting, it can be a payment solution in test mode).

In general, your website needs to be in up and running condition. You can also think about including a FAQ page that summarizes all the information needed, but it’s not required.

The whole process could be time-consuming, but when you take the proper steps, it will definitely be less painful.

The sales follow up is a classic conundrum. How do you effectively follow up with a potential client to maintain momentum without being annoying?

It’s a tough question and varies based on the situation, but there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of maintaining an open communication flow, and decrease the dreaded “gone dark” scenario.

Try my proven sales follow up techniques and watch what happens!

1. Ask for guidance on the best way to follow up with them while adding value and not being annoying.

People ask me all the time: what’s the best way to follow up with a prospective client?  I have some ideas but I don’t know the client, the situation, or any of the details.

All I can really do is give a few suggestions based on my experience.  You know who does know how to effectively follow up with the client? The client. Ask them.

If you get off an intro call with a prospect and there seems to be a potential fit for your services but not in the near future, ask them how you can stay in touch with them without being annoying.

The one thing you should remember to avoid being annoying: focus on adding value.

Is there specific information that might interest them about the industry, their role, your solution, etc?  Are there milestones they’re looking to reach and once they do, will they be ready to talk?

Find out how you can add value to their world. Do the research, don’t guess. Your sales follow up will ultimately fail if you take the lazy route.

“You know who DOES know how to effectively follow up with the client? The client. Ask them.”
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2. Ask what their preferred form of communication is and if they will respond.

This is very different than asking about the sales follow up method itself; it’s about their preferred form of communication and getting them to commit to a level of responsiveness.

This is usually more appropriate after you’ve had a discovery call and it seems like there is an opportunity in the short to mid-term.

I literally ask people – “what is your preferred form of communication moving forward here? Is it cell, e-mail, text?”  I usually get “e-mail” as the answer.

This is fine but I want to make sure I know how to stand out from the 200-300 they get every day, so I’ll say something like:

“You probably get 200-300 e-mails a day like I do. Is there something I can put in the subject line that will help me stand out and get you to open up my e-mail?”

I had one guy who told me to put “Green Light” in the subject line and he would open it every time. Another woman told me to send her priority e-mails and another told me that text was by far the best way to connect with her.

Last but not least I want to set the expectation for responsiveness so I say something like:

“What should I expect for a response timeline on e-mails that I send to you? I’ll commit that I will respond to you within 24 hours of any e-mail you send me.  Is it realistic to ask the same from you?”

Establish a communication cadence early in the sales process. Earn their commitment immediately.

If you get them to tell you how they like to be communicated with, they’ll respond in a timely fashion. Then, it’s much easier to hold them accountable throughout the rest of the process.

3. Make sure you always end each conversation with a clearly defined next step.

It kills me how often I see reps get off the phone after a good conversation with a prospect without a clearly defined next step scheduled on the calendar.

The easiest time to get a commitment on a next meeting is at the end of the meeting you just had.  Hopefully the conversation went well and they agree to continue the conversation and take the next step.

It’s almost a guarantee they have their schedule in front of them or at least handy on their smartphone.

Capitalize on that moment. Lock them down to a next step by asking when they have time to meet next. Send an invite while you’re still in front of them so they can’t avoid it.

If they want a proposal, ask when they want to schedule a call to review it. Don’t let them get away with the old “send it over and we’ll get back to you.”

Once they leave without committing to anything on their end it becomes a game of cat and mouse as we try to follow up, and get them re-engaged.

4. Summarize your conversations and get written confirmation.

This is one of my favorite sales follow up tips.  At the end of every decent conversation I have with anyone in sales, I always send a summary e-mail that summarizes what we talked about and asks for their confirmation.

This is the best way to make sure your sales follow up remains focused on value based on previous conversations.

There are a few reasons I do this:

• My Notes Are Chicken Scratch – Aside from that, I have a terrible memory. If I don’t summarize the discussion immediately afterwards, I’ll look back at what I wrote and have no idea what I was thinking, or what they were saying.

• To Prove I Understood Their Needs – I want to make sure I actually heard what I thought I heard during the call, and show them I was really listening.

• Hold Your Prospects Accountable – I want to hold them accountable for what they told me in the most professional way possible.

By summarizing our conversation and getting their confirmation, I accomplish all of the above while keeping us both on the same page.

5. Always have a specific reason to contact your prospect. NEVER just call to ‘touch base’ or ‘check in’.

I am on a personal crusade to get ‘touching base’ and ‘checking in’ out of the vocabulary of sales professionals.

Those awful sales phrases simply mean one thing: there is no reason for your call. Therefore, there is no reason for me to speak with you.

We should always have a reason to contact our clients, prospects or whoever. This is why I always track my clients and prospects.

Set up a Google Alert to be notified when something is happening in their business that you might be able to make a connection to.

Always have a reason to contact your prospect. NEVER call to ‘touch base’ or ‘check in.’
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I even start all my calls with this specific phrase: “The reason for my call today is…”

I love this intro because it forces me to think of the reason for my call. If I can’t come up with a good reason, then I try to figure one out.

When my sales follow up is not 100% focused on me, my response rates and engagement numbers increase significantly.

For more tips like these check out my blog at www.jbarrows.com/blog and follow me on Twitter @JohnMBarrows. Good luck and happy selling!

*Editors Note:  Guest post by contributor John Barrows – Sales trainer for Salesforce, Marketo, LinkedIn, Box, Zendesk and more of the worlds leading tech companies.

The post Perfecting The Sales Follow Up: How to Gain Momentum and Win Deals Without Being Annoying appeared first on Sales Hacker.

Customer experience is clearly a key focus area for the majority of executives across a broad swath of industries, regions and company sizes. This probably isn’t a surprise to anyone reading this article – after all, research shows that nearly 9 out of 10 customers say they’ve left a company, switching due to poor customer experience. And although over 90 percent of senior executives state that customer experience is one of their company’s top priorities in the next few years, 30 percent of businesses don’t have a coherent definition for customer experience management across their organizations, much less a plan to execute on it.

Why the disconnect? After all, if the value is clear and the urgency is real, what’s keeping companies from pushing full speed ahead? One answer may be that organizations aren’t entirely sure what that “full speed ahead” looks like. In other words, the desire to improve customer experience implies that we are somewhere today… and are heading somewhere else to accomplish this. The strategic question is, “where are we going, and how do we get there?”

McorpCX has worked with several companies – including a handful of Fortune 100 orgs, as well as mid-market leaders – that aren’t entirely sure where to start. This is where customer experience strategy comes into play. A recent Aberdeen Group report titled “Customer Experience Strategy: Get It Right To Drive Success,” looks across the key activities customer experience leaders undertake to define and execute successful strategies.

When it comes to developing the right strategy, these are four of the best-practice activities common to CX leaders:

• Change company culture to be more customer centric: Weaving culture into CX activities is key, in no small part due to the fact that to accomplish this you’ll need to determine what customer centricity means to you, then communicate to all across the org.

• Align brand and CX strategies: Recognizing that your brand sets very real expectations of what your customers can expect, it’s crucial to crisply align your brand and CX strategies to ensure you’re organized to keep the promises you’re making.
• Assign a dedicated customer experience executive: Getting organizational buy-in is a significant challenge, and crucial to the success of your efforts. The right executive will lead, influence and educate, communicating the vision and bringing the broader organization along.
• Formally align business and CX strategies: Just as your brand and CX strategies align, they both need to ladder back to business strategy. For example, if you compete on innovation, this leads to a different posture for, and expectations of, CX than if you compete on value, or customer intimacy.

Your customer experience strategy needs to take many forms, accomplish several things at once, and balance the sometimes-in-opposition requirements of being specific enough to be actionable and crisp enough to be easily understood. The most effective CX strategies describe how you want customers to feel, the experience you wish to deliver and who those customers are. It also needs to describe how you will direct what your people do and how they will do it, and provide guidance for embedding the strategy into your organization.

The hard truth is that there is no universal customer experience strategy, any more than there is a single brand or business strategy that works for all. Unsurprisingly, it needs to reflect your unique business, brand, and vision for the future. Aligning these things in ways that inform, guide and inspire your people and provide a clear path forward is both a challenge and an opportunity.

For whatever it’s worth, as much work as defining and socializing your customer experience strategy can be, the rewards radically outweigh the efforts. The path to experience-based differentiation is a long one, to be sure. But it’s both tangible and definable.

And once you define that path and begin the journey down it, you – like many of the companies we work with – will likely find a tipping point where everything seems to start ‘going right’ as people, data, technology and processes start to sync, and the benefits of this hard work become clear to all – for those employees inside your organization, as well as the customers who are the true beneficiaries of a well-executed plan.

We love contests here at Wishpond because they’re one of the best ways a business can interact with their fans, build a strong community, and generate leads to turn into sales.

In this guide, I’ll cover 25 clever ideas for your next social media giveaway, including types of contests, prize ideas, and some contest page best practices.

Here we go…

Social Media Giveaway Idea #1. Run a photo contest

We love photo contests because they get your entrants invested – contestants are more invested when they’ve created something themselves. On top of that, photo contests help you collect user-generated content that you can use in your future marketing efforts. Use a third-party app (like Wishpond) that allows users to upload their own photos to a gallery where they can see others’ entries.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #2. Run a referral contest

A referral contest helps you generate massive social engagement. Because participants are rewarded with extra entries for sharing your social media giveaway with other people, they’re incentivized to engage with your brand and contest on social media. This is awesome because it helps you build your social following, and spread the word about your giveaway to your entrants’ friends and family.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #3. Run a hashtag contest

Creating a hashtag for your social media giveaway allows you to link your entries and more accurately measure your engagement. Pairing this strategy with a photo contest allows you to use an app to grab all photos with a specific campaign hashtag and automatically upload them to an entry gallery.

When creating your hashtag, use something unique to your campaign – don’t use something generic like “#friends”, or you’ll get a ton of unintentional entries.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #4. Countdown timer

Adding a countdown timer to your social media giveaway helps to create urgency. Urgency is a psychological phenomenon that makes potential contest entrants aware of the time limit on your giveaway, which causes them to act more immediately. Put the countdown timer front and center so your page visitors know exactly how long they have left to enter.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #5. Benefit checklist

When it comes to optimizing your giveaway page, you’ll want to consider different types of visitors. One big group of users comprises what we call “skimmers” – people who don’t really take the time to read everything on your page.

Creating a bullet-point list for the most exciting parts of your giveaway (usually your prize) makes it simple for people to see the benefit they’ll derive from entering your contest, helping to increase your entry rate.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #6. Cover photo/bio

Once your giveaway is running, you want to promote it as much as possible. One awesome way to do this on social media is update your cover photo (on Facebook) and banner (on Twitter) to a photo that promotes your newly-created giveaway. Highlight the prize (I’d add a photo) and a URL-shortened link to your contest to make it as easy as possible for your followers to enter.

For Instagram, update your bio link to a URL for your giveaway, and add a CTA to your bio (“Enter to win [awesome prize] in the link below!”) to prompt followers to visit your contest page.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #7. Checkboxes/more info

Usually, we advocate for less form fields – minimizing the number of these helps you increase conversion rate by making it as easy as possible for people to enter your social media giveaway. However, sometimes adding fields to your giveaway can help your post-contest sales efforts.

Let me explain. Getting some additional information (for example, the type of sport an entrant plays if you’re a gym) by adding a dropdown or checkbox field to your form gives you some more insight into potential customers. When you’re creating your after-contest email drips, you can segment your entrants based on this new information, allowing you to better personalize your marketing efforts.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #8. Share prompt

This is one of our contest best practices, since we’ve seen it work so well in the campaigns we run here at Wishpond. Basically, a share prompt is a popup that appears after a visitor has entered your social media giveaway. The popup asks entrants to follow the brand on social media and share the contest page in exchange for extra entries.

Because these people have already entered the contest, they’re more likely to respond positively to other things you ask of them, especially when they have an incentive to do so. Share prompts drive massive social engagement, giving you more leads for your social media giveaway.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #9. Coupon

We know that it can be tough to turn social media engagement into sales, even when you’re generating leads using a social media giveaway. One simple way to get sales from your list of entrants is to give them a coupon through email as soon as they’ve entered, or when the contest is over.

The leads you generate from your social media giveaway are “hottest” once they’ve just entered – that’s when they’re the most engaged and interested in your product. Using marketing automation, you can send them a coupon that they can instantly redeem for a discount on their next purchase, which is a great way to get them to become paying customers.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #10. Share entries

One best practice I see all the time for companies that run social media giveaways is sharing great entries. Though you shouldn’t do this for any type of vote contest (you don’t want to appear biased towards certain entrants), this is a particularly great strategy for photo contests because it lets you use utilize the user-generated content you’ve been collecting from your giveaway. Share these images on your social platforms, tagging the user who created the content.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #11. Highlight the value of your prize

One way to emphasize the benefit that your contest provides your entrants is to highlight the actual value of your prize. It’s one of our social media giveaway best practices, and we use it every day in the campaigns we run for our many clients.

Why? Basically, it takes something that can be quite vague (i.e. the value of the prize) and makes it concrete. This helps particularly when we consider most people won’t actually read everything on your contest page.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #12. Partner

Partnering with another business to run your giveaway can help you greatly increase the reach of your next social media giveaway. Because you’re now marketing to two email lists and two social media followings, you’re now reaching a new untapped segment of your target market – meaning more potential customers.

Of course, these people will only be potential customers if they’re interested in your industry. This means you have to find a partner brand that’s related to your business. This boosts your reach and can spice up your prize offering – it’s a win-win.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #13. Host in a Facebook tab

Facebook’s still the most popular social network around, and with good reason. Because of this, you may want to consider running your social media giveaway within a Facebook tab, making it more accessible to potential entrants who visit your page for other reasons. Pin a post or change your cover photo to direct people to the tab for your contest, which will help direct stray traffic to where you want them to be.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #14. Run Ads

As much as we love the idealism of organic reach, we also recognize it’s not a great way to reach new customers. As a result, we recommend you run ads to your contest on social media to help spread the word about your contest to relevant traffic with the potential to turn into new customers.

Run ads on Facebook or Instagram (they use the same editor) and target precisely to people who will likely be interested in your contest and your brand based on interest or location.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #15. Choose a theme

Though contests are great at any time, I’m of the opinion that they’re much more engaging when they revolve around some central theme. This theme could be a holiday (think Christmas, Valentines, or Easter) or an event (the Grammys, Super Bowl, Oscars, etc.). This makes your contest feel more relevant – someone is more likely to enter a contest if it’s related to something they’re already thinking about.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #16. Send to newsletter

Though you might think this is like preaching to the choir, you know best that your email list isn’t composed solely of customers. Chances are, it’s full of a few active customers, tons of inactive ones, and even more people who are interested in your products but have never actually purchased anything.

Sharing a contest with them is a great way to reignite their interest in your brand. Because you already know they’re interested in your products, they’re likely to convert – and even more likely to turn into sales once you begin marketing to them more directly after the contest is over.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #17. Win a free year

Let’s look at some prize ideas. The first is a free year (or six months, or what have you) of a certain product. I love this prize idea specifically because it’s attention-grabbing – a year of anything is an intriguing prize idea.

Obviously this won’t work well if your business sells big-ticket items, but for those with small production costs, it can be a great way to spread the word about your products.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #18. Getaway

I know what you’re thinking: that’s expensive! And it is, but it’s also incredibly enticing and can help you build a huge list of leads after your contest is over. Even if it’s a nearby getaway (for example, Vancouver to Whistler), a getaway can be a great prize idea if you’re confident that you can turn even cooler leads into sales.

Social Media Giveaway Idea #19. Prize package

A simple way to make your prize a little more exciting is to make it a package. Give away several of your products, or add other related items to one of your products, to create a prize package that’s more engaging than a single prize. Lots of entrants want to determine the value of the prize in contests they enter – adding multiple prizes together can boost the subjective value.

Social Media Giveaway Idea 20. Gift card

Gift cards are one of our favorite prize ideas because they ensure that everyone who enters your contest is directly interested in your brand or products. Though they’re not the most exciting prize, giving away a gift card ensures that each of your entrants is a high quality lead, and that means a better chance of sales down the line.

Social Media Giveaway Ideas: Wrapping it up

There you go – 25 clever social media giveaway ideas you can use for your next contest. Try a couple of them out, and let me know how you do in the comments below!

I read a post on the surfing blog The Inertia the other day titled “9 Surefire Ways to Get Punched in the Mouth While Surfing.”

And while this has absolutely nothing to do with B2B marketing, demand generation, MarTech or content marketing, it did cause me to reflect on some of the things I’ve seen marketers do on the job that can only be described as career-limiting.

Just to be clear, I’m not advocating that anyone be punched in the mouth for committing any of the below (it’s better just to imagine it). Besides, they’re already hurting themselves.

Here’s my quick list.

1. Reject the tech

We all hate dealing with new logins, learning new systems and adjusting our established processes to accommodate software rollouts. And the irritation is understandable, especially for us marketers when we’re usually dealing with marketing tech stacks made up of no fewer than 10-15 tools (not to mention all the other systems we use for travel booking, expense reports, payroll, training, etc.).

But when you stubbornly drag your feet on learning to use new software applications, you’re not just stalling your own productivity, but that of your entire team.

Establish goals and timelines for any software implementation that everyone signs off on. Working out the resistance and making compromises before you get started is key to having everyone’s expectations aligned – and enforceable if necessary.

“Ron, are you sure the company didn’t buy five software licenses?”
Business photograph designed by creativeart – Freepik.com

2. Be the quiet type…or the loudmouth

There’s two sides to this one, and both can be bad for your career advancement: speaking up too little or talking ad nauseum. I struggle with the first myself. I was taught not to interrupt people, and marketing meetings or conference calls can quickly turn into wars of attrition where people speak louder and louder until others back down. I feel physically uncomfortable when this occurs, and often tune out of the conversation as a result.

HOWEVER, when you’re too shy (or polite) to jump into a business conversation and voice your opinion, your silence can be misinterpreted as one of several negative characteristics: apathetic, uncreative, unknowledgeable, lazy, etc.

On the other hand, when you’re always the person who must be heard and steamrolls conversations, it can slowly create resentment with coworkers. They’ll then find new channels of communication to ensure their opinions are heard, bypassing you and your ideas. This isn’t good either.

It’s smart to balance how often and the manner in which you express your ideas. Pick your battles, as they say, and be the expert in your area of responsibility.

“I’d like to be the first to welcome you to the softly-spoken-yet-highly-productive bean bag team. Please use hand gestures from this point on.”
Business photograph designed by katemangostar – Freepik.com

3. Badmouth the the contract closers

I noted the importance of not deriding sales in a blog a couple months back. It’s worth noting again.

Sure, certain sales reps can be overbearing and full of themselves; case in point: Ben Henson.

…I’m kidding.

But while sales reps like Ben may wax endlessly on how great life is in Bend, Oregon (seriously, don’t get him started on this topic), they’re also the closers.

Sales is marketing’s most important teammate, and attending to the buyer’s journey is like a relay race; your team may comprise four Usain Bolts, but it’s not going to matter much if you can’t figure out how to pass the baton. And this can’t happen effectively without trust and mutual respect between sales and marketing.

4. Star in The Hangover

Socializing over a few drinks at company engagements or corporate-sponsored events is pretty much a marketing necessity. It’s easier for people to forge lasting bonds when they’re letting loose and having a good time.

And yes, this may even include making a bit of an ass out of yourself during karaoke. But there’s a line, and most of us have witnessed someone backflipping over that line and into some pretty bad consequences.

I once saw a newly hired marketer get really drunk at the company’s annual summit, overtly harass a few coworkers with what I’m sure he thought was George Clooney-like charm, and then pull the glasses from an exec’s face before trotting out to the dance floor wearing them. He wasn’t at the company much longer.

We all make mistakes, but some are inexcusable. And there seems to be a positive correlation between these incidents and not handling one’s alcohol.

Further, the occasional hangover should be concealed at all cost. Not even getting drunk with a prospective customer to close a deal is an excuse for not handling work the next day. Pack a few of these in your luggage if you no longer have a 23-year-old’s metabolism.

“Few more of these and I’ll be ready for that company brunch.”
Business photograph designed by katemangostar – Freepik.com

5. Flaunt your MQL metrics

This one is kind of like #1 – it’s about change management. The expectations placed on marketing teams have grown substantially in recent years. Lead volume is no longer a strong KPI.

In fact, a poll we took in a recent webinar on demand orchestration showed that “pipeline value/opportunity creation” is the top B2B marketing success metric.

This means our jobs have become harder, and the challenges will only multiply. But it also means the importance of marketing has grown, and thus career-advancement opportunities for those who drop the “marts and crafts” mindset and acknowledge that slinging branded knickknacks at events and even focusing on top-funnel lead gen won’t do much for company growth or your career development.

6. Job hop like it’s a race

Actually, this is a controversial topic – studies have shown that “staying employed at the same company for over two years on average is going to make you earn less over your lifetime.” I just put this one in here because we’re losing a well-respected member of our marketing team who’s moving to Utah to join a hippy snowboarder commune or something…and it’s fun to give her a hard time about it.

Seriously though, remember the MarTech world is small and word travels fast. If you’re going to jump, try not to burn bridges in the process. In fact, there’s an increasingly good chance you end up in the Boomerang club.

7. Write a passive-aggressive, thinly veiled blog post about co-workers

Hey, you should write about what you know. And though I’m far guiltier of most of the above than any of my co-workers, I’m sure I’ll receive a few unkindly worded emails for this one. Worth it.

“No, no, it’s just a coincidence we’re all going down to the parking garage at the same time, David.”
Business photograph designed by katemangostar – Freepik.com

The effect of California's housing crisis is reaching new heights.

According to a new report from the University of Southern California and the Los Angeles Business Council, exorbitant housing costs in Los Angeles, the second most populous city in the US, are inhibiting employers from attracting "high-performers," or top talent, to their companies.

For the study — which was led by Raphael Bostic, a USC Price School of Public Policy Professor and the newly appointed head of the Atlanta Federal Reserve — USC surveyed 14 of Los Angeles' largest employers, which account for nearly 200,000 jobs in the region.

Nearly 60% of the employers say Los Angeles' high cost of living impacts employee retention, with 75% naming housing costs as a specific concern, according to the survey results. Further, 10 employers (71%) view high housing costs as "a barrier" to hiring new mid- and upper-level employees.

"This study shows that high housing costs are burdening our leading employers, either by having to develop special hiring packages, or subsidizing transportation and relocation costs," Bostic said. By contrast, most of the employers surveyed said no special outreach or programs have been put in place to retain lower-skilled workers because local supply is abundant.

"It's concerning that high housing costs could lead to Los Angeles losing its competitive edge in recruiting top talent. That would be devastating to our economy," Mary Leslie, president of the Los Angeles Business Council, said.

In 2015, Boeing moved a manufacturing facility from Long Beach to Seattle likely to escape Southern California housing costs despite the state's pleas for it to stay, the report said. And Los Angeles-based SpaceX opened an engineering office in Seattle the same year in an effort to hire top talent who "just refuse to live in LA," founder Elon Musk previously said.

Southern California's real estate market has been red hot for a few years now, thanks to low mortgage rates, a strengthening economy, and dwindling home supply. Zillow pegs the median home value in Los Angeles at $616,900 and the median rent at about $2,860. That's compared to $195,700 and $1,500 for the US as a whole.

"Though we have yet to see a critical mass of businesses priced out of the region, this is an area of concern," Bostic said. "There's ample evidence to show that the time is now to implement strategies to reduce housing costs.”

But while expensive housing has become ubiquitous with cities like Los Angeles and San Francisco, overpaying for housing is a widespread problem. Over 10 million households pay more than half their income in housing costs nationwide, according to the report.

SEE ALSO: Crazy-high rent, record-low homeownership, and overcrowding: California has a plan to solve the housing crisis, but not without a fight

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: 4 lottery winners who lost it all

For architecture, engineering, and construction firms, winning business is key. But getting the meeting with the right person and cultivating that relationship over twelve, eighteen, or even THIRTY-SIX months until the request for proposal (or RFP) for the project is released can be nerve wracking and a huge expense of time.

According to SMPS’s recent survey titled “Sell. Do. Win Business.,” it is clear the trend in the industry is for more dual role work, or billable staff having additional business development responsibilities. Over the next ten years, the number of seller-doers will drastically increase as the amount of time they will be spending on business development activities rises.

To maintain profitability, seller-doers and business development staff need to be extremely efficient and effective at securing new business from existing and new clients. How do you do it? Here are some helpful tips.

1. Leverage base analytics and user behavior data.

You and your team have a constant stream of communication going between existing clients and prospects that could be giving you a head start on new opportunities. For example, what if you, a seller-doer, were notified that Susan, the director of design and planning for a major university you have been trying to talk to, was visiting your website. And, let’s say that you knew exactly which web pages she was viewing. Let’s go even further, and say that you knew whether she opened your e-newsletter, or clicked on anything, downloaded or watched a video?

With the right analytics, you and your team can have clear and highly-actionable insights into who’s checking you out and how buyers are behaving with your brand. This is essential if you hope to stay efficient with your limited time on non-billable work. Being able to focus your time and energy on buyers who are closer to making a buying decision is better than wasting hours of time on a buyer who is not ready to buy, or who you know won’t buy.

2. Implement technology that works for your business, not your industry.

We come across this objection a lot, “I like HubSpot, their CRM and sales tools. It would be perfect for our team and our business but it isn’t tailored to our industry.” Technology is changing and most software companies have realized that they can’t do everything, so they have decided to play nice in the sandbox and allow multiple systems to transfer data back and forth.

The successful implementation and adoption of a CRM or a new piece of software does not depend on whether or not the product was designed for your industry, but whether the products you use simplify your marketing or sales workflow.

3. Simplify and automate personal communications.

Supporting the seller-doer can be easily done if you arm them with the right tools. Business developers typically have a handful of go-to emails that they use for a follow up to a meeting, scheduling lunch or coffee, or the ever-popular “just checking in” email.

Taking the time to create these emails for all their contacts is time-consuming and, to be honest, not the best use of your seller-doer’s time. Instead, recreate these emails as a flexible template that can help a seller-doer use best practices and be efficient, meaning they are back to being either billable or highly valuable in the sales process.

4. Personalize automation.

With user data, you can personalize content— and we’re talking about personalization beyond using the person’s first name in your email greeting. With tools like HubSpot, you can actually have content on a web page change based on information you know about a buyer.

For our example, let’s use our old pal Susan again— our director of planning and design at a major university. Will she be interested in your latest retail fit-out? Probably not, even if she is looking for a firm to help with a new student center that will have a campus shop. Why? Because it is not PRECISELY what she wants. But, if you can deliver personalized information targeted at her specific situation, you can provide context to showcase unique elements of the fit-out that would be relevant to a university campus.

5. Distribute the right information.

You’ve probably had your marketing person or team tell you that you really need to focus on Content Marketing. However, you look at the amount of time you’re already spending on business development and wonder when you’ll be able to get back to your billable work. We’ve already touched on how your marketing department, whether it’s a solo effort or a whole team of people, or a freelancer or agency can create the necessary content, so for now, we’ll just focus on distribution.

Typically, content is viewed as blog posts; those blog posts increase web traffic via organic search. In reality, content is more than just blog posts, and those blog posts are much more than a one trick pony when used correctly. Let’s connect with Susan again. (Susan, we’ve missed you!) You notice that she is looking at dining hall projects on your website. Now is a great time to send her an email with content. Not just ANY content, but content that’s relevant to her user behavior. Remember that presentation you gave at a conference about the future of dining halls on college campuses two years ago? That is a great piece of content to share with Susan. Or how about a blog post with some thoughts on latest design trends for dining.

If you have the content share with buyers who would find it helpful, you will not only help build the relationship, but guide them toward viewing you as a trusted advisor. Bonus? Your information can be shared with the selection committee BEFORE an RFP is even created.

Tammy is my seat mate on a flight from Atlanta to Columbus after OutBound. She asked about dealing with irrational competitors and irrational buyers.

There is nothing you can do about irrational competitors. They are willing to go places you cannot—and should not—follow. They promise to deliver value in excess of their low prices, and even though the opposite is more likely true, they still win clients. As unlikely as it may seem, they also keep clients. But there is nothing you can do about your competitor, other than improving your ability to sell value.

Irrational buyers are different. There are some irrational buyers that simply can’t be reached. Despite how smart they are, and despite the level of their education, some people simply believe that the greatest value is the minimally acceptable outcome at the lowest price. They are immune to claims of greater value, and they are impervious to any attempt to teach them that “barely good enough” isn’t “good enough,” even when it costs them more money.

There are some buyers, however, who can be moved from irrational to rational. They can be taught that there are outcomes that are worth paying more to obtain, even though it may take a long time to make your case well enough—or long enough—to persuade them. If you can help these buyers who are susceptible to taking in new information, you can show them how they are spending more by being cheap.

The trick here is to spend your time where you have a chance of moving someone. Your most irrational buyers belong to your most irrational competitors. There is no reason you should stand between two irrational parties who are going to work together, even though they can’t stand each other, one promising more than they deliver, the other expecting more than they are paying for.

Instead, work only where you have a chance for success, and don’t spend time with people who refuse to perceive value in your solution.

The post Irrational Competitors and Irrational Buyers appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Overcoming Sales Objections: 9 Winning Strategies

Getting leads to respond to your emails or talk to you on the phone is difficult. Even when they do, overcoming sales objections needs to be your next goal.

But that’s only the start of the struggle every sales person has to endure.

Overcoming sales objections of all of those leads is possibly the biggest differentiator of those who succeed and those who don’t. This makes it the most crucial skill for reps to acquire and improve upon over time.

Sales is getting past common roadblocks of leads. The first of those roadblocks is actually getting a hold of them. Then, it’s getting through their other defenses.

Let’s face it, if a product could sell itself, a sales team wouldn’t need to be a part of that organization.

While the marketplace is getting more advanced and moves closer to automation, there will always be a need for conversations.

And in those conversations, there will always be objections. No matter who you are (rep, manager, or founder), how well you get around them will determine success.

It’s just one of those skills that will keep you afloat in hard times.

Today’s post is to give you a few (9 exactly) winning strategies to overcoming sales objections. Let’s get started.

Number 1: Predict the Sales Objections

The excuses you hear on the other end of the line will always vary, but they should never catch you off guard.

One of the easiest ways to do this is to understand as much about your ideal buyer as possible.

If you’re still using a generic list, or even a loosely targeted one, the reps on your team are at a serious disadvantage. They’re flying blind into a fight.

Even with the incredible knowledge about the products and a keen ability to articulate—reps don’t know what’s going to happen on a call.

Prospecting to find a list of leads that fit your business model (based on the data from current and past clients) will dramatically increase the likelihood of closing.

How?

One of the major reasons leads say yes easier, is the prep that your team can do before the call.

You should always equip yourself with quick, factual, and well-researched response to the common objections. This process is way easier if you know the common traits of your leads beforehand.

Number 2: Listen

A sales call is not a debate.

You’re not listening to their objections to respond, one up them, or get a sick burn. The goal is to create a partnership with your company by selling to people who can genuinely use your goods and services to their benefit.

The only way that is going to happen is to convince qualified leads of the benefits. The only way to do that is to understand why they aren’t convinced in the first place.

To understand that—you have to listen and comprehend.

Dwelling on the words at this point can beat the best script template on the internet.

Simply put, if you know:

• The product you’re selling
• The lead’s pain they’re having
• How to listen

No objection should stop you. But there are a few more things you can do.

“Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply.” —Stephen R. Covey

Number 3: Ask, Probe and Confirm

It is important to constantly move the conversation further and deeper.

A call is a very fluid thing and it stays alive as long as you and the lead are talking. If one starts dominating, it turns into a situation where no one benefits.

As they provide the answers to your open-ended questions, make sure to ask for clarification.

You will never understand the reason why they are putting up certain objections until they explain to you in details.

In fact, it might take you up 4-5 layers of questions to comprehend the reasons for their objection. Once you’ve listened well, it’ll be easier to address the objection.

Bonus Resource: We’ve got a great list of sales questions (and follow-up questions) for you to look at and use here.

Number 4: Empathize

Showing empathy is one of the most effective strategies to slay worry.

It is an emotional and mental exploitation that helps the salesperson connect with the buyer at a personal level. That sounds devious, but people need to both feel stuff and know stuff before they buy into something.

If you have the best product and all the facts to back it up, but the lead thinks you’re a jerk—they’re going elsewhere.

Likewise, if you are the sweetest person on the planet and have no clue about your product; the prospect will hate telling you no—but they will anyway.

Get around it by empathizing.

Tell them you understand and be able to repeat their concern back to them (hence the listening). The strategy convinces the customer that you are both reading from the same page.

Do not forget that buyers are taking risks every time they make a decision to purchase the product.

Show them that you understand where they are coming from. Doing so will give you an opportunity to show that there is nothing really to worry about.

Number 5: Justify

It’s important to make them feel justified in their objection.

This isn’t to fully agree with them, turn in your two-week notice because they’re so right that you can’t even work for the company anymore.

It doesn’t benefit either of you to convince them that they’re wrong. Even if you can, they’ll have to get off the phone and think about some stuff—not buy you product.

Telling them that you understand and even agree opens up more opportunities than proving leads wrong (especially using strategy number 8 on our list).

Number 6: Use Humor

Another (ahem) benefit of knowing the leads you speak with better is the ability to relate in a more human way.

Every seasoned rep knows the value of humor, but a scripted joke is worse than a joke not told. Every industry has lingo, problems, and laughable traits unique to them. If you can crack a joke about TPS reports, you’re more likely to close a deal with Initech.

It’s like you’re privy to the inside jokes of their office and it can work SO well if you can relate it to the objection and pains your products solves.

Have a few jokes handy that relate to the common objections of the contacts you’ll speak with and the industry they’re in to really move the rapport needle.

Number 7: Don’t Let Buyers Stall the Process

We’re all about providing leads with everything they need to make an informed decision.

Resources, webinars, and good conversations are all a part of ensuring that you are ready to make the purchase. That said, buyers who aren’t in an immediate need will stall (sometimes) for the sake of stalling.

It’s not always easy to gauge when a prospect is just enjoying themselves on the fence, or just a suspect that will never buy.

To get past this particular situation, you have to do a little “line in the sand” drawing. If they are trying delay tactics, turn the table around by asking them to make a quick decision and not you. I’ve never sold to anyone from talking until they say, “OK! Yes, I’ll buy it.”

It’s always when I ask them to buy. Always.

Number 8: Apply Law of Social Proof

You want to know another benefit to reaching out to pre-selected leads?

It’s a whole lot easier to tell them about previous buyers who shared the same objection and ended up purchasing anyway (e.g. case studies). Then, tell them about the success they’ve had using the product. The rich details reps can provide will melt the lead’s reservations.

Example Transcript:

Lead: “You know, we’re just not sure about [objection x].”

Rep: “Yeah, I totally understand [objection x]. In fact, [client in similar role/industry] had the same issues. They ended up switching to [product] and within six months they’ve [benefit y].”

This technique will easily diffuse not only the current objection, but could get them past the ones you haven’t even discussed.

Instead, it paints that “perfect world” that your clients want to create using your stuff. If you know your leads, you can have that data handy.

Number 9: Conditional Close

Set the tone for the call by (after the lead’s objection is presented) asking them, “If I could convince you that XYZ isn’t an issue, would you purchase/sign a contract today?”

Prospects will stay, suspects will turn into Jell-O (wobbly).

It’s called a conditional close and is fairly common in the sales world. The point isn’t to get a yes or no answer as much as it is to gauge the conversation.

Most people who are genuinely interested will say yes to this question, but the majority of those leads may not say yes after you do the convincing.

Don’t be afraid of this, especially if the lead has been qualified for a sales call.

Either someone has slipped through and should have never been on the call, or you just have a skittish lead that needs to start making a commitment.

Not a “One-Sized” Formula

Every call is different, no matter how well you know the leads.

The randomness is the reason listening is vital to overcoming sales objections. If you can listen and ask good questions, you’ll gain understanding and insight.

Then, it’s just a matter of taking the knowledge of the product and its ability to improve results and presenting them in a way that diffuses those concerns.

Sounds simple, but it’s the difference between awesome reps and the rest.

What are some of your best strategies you’ve seen for overcoming sales objections?

Last week I published a blog that provided five ways to avoid getting burned by outsourced B2B sales lead generation, qualification and nurturing. You can read the blog here.

In that blog, I wrote: “When the pipeline is weak, desperation and fear take over. Sales/B2B Marketing execs feel intense need to do something, but are afraid to risk budget. So, they settle for a cheap solution—which is how mediocre sales lead generation firms survive. It seems that there is always enough money to do something a second time—but never enough money to do it right the first time.”

No wonder this time of the year is filled with desperation (and fear). We’re well into the second quarter, and the CEO is clamoring for revenue. However, without more specific direction, he or she is going to find the organization enter into a familiar, frustrating cycle.

The need for sales pressures the CMO to deliver leads fast. Trouble is, that CMO is also under budget pressures, so corners are cut in the pursuit of needed sales leads. The result is low quality leads that don’t make people happy and don’t deliver the goods. The money spent is wasted and the whole scenario starts again.

The age-old problem is that:

1. Sales has been conditioned to expect poor quality leads from marketing.
2. Marketing complains that they do not get specific feedback from sales on leads.
3. CEOs couldn’t care less about leads (they’re only worried about revenue), but they should …

What is the solution?

1. CEOs need to care about lead outcomes. There’s a reason why there’s no alignment between marketing and sales. And, it can be fixed. The CEO (or in larger companies the SVP of Sales & Marketing) must ensure that there is a shared definition of a lead AND that a judicial branch is put in place to enforce marketing’s compliance with that definition AND that sales effectively executes lead follow up on leads that meet the definition. This is not just a good idea; it is a necessity. And top management must go there.
2. CEOs, Marketing and Sales must enter the Era of Accountability. Marketing needs to be accountable for lead quality, and Sales needs to be accountable for follow-up activity. That means Marketing has to wait to turn over leads until they are sales-qualified—including doing all the nurture activity needed to get them there. And it means Sales has to work all the leads turned over to them, fully. In the new era, there’s no throwing raw leads over the fence and hoping for the best; and there’s no “this lead’s no good” at-a-glance judgement. It will take this kind of coming together for Marketing to get credit for their contribution to revenue, and for Sales to sell more. Here’s a slide from a deck about the Era of Accountability. You can find the deck here.  

Here is an example:

The following is an example of what takes place without substantially more accountability in the Marketing and Sales process. It also points out the benefits of discipline in decision-making around marketing spend. We deal with similar situations on a regular basis:

A large healthcare solution and services provider provided us with 4,200 hospitals and 7,500 contacts. They asked us to call every contact.

As it turns out, in their target market there are only 804 hospitals that are big enough to be of interest to them (based on number of beds). Worse yet, the list they provided had less than 50% of the targeted hospitals.

Our recommendation was to fill in the gap in hospitals (provide them with the 419 hospitals that they were missing) and talk to about 1,200 people, not 7,500, because the role they were looking for was very specific.

In the end, we generated more the twice the number of leads at one-third the cost. If you want to read more, in this post I answer the question: Would you rather get 56 leads for $49,835 or 27 leads for $172,200?

Next, CEOs need to look at the effectiveness of sales lead follow up. Don’t assume your sales team members know lead follow-up best practices; don’t assume the agreed upon definition of a lead is top-of-mind; and don’t assume that the way lead deployment is handled is efficient and effective. Document the processes, and make them part of your ongoing training and communications. Here is a blog that covers the subject in detail.  

The expression “desperate times call for desperate measures” is believed to have originated with a saying coined by the ancient Greek physician, Hippocrates. In his work Aphorisms, he wrote: “For extreme diseases, extreme methods of cure, as to restriction, are most suitable.”

However desperate you might be, doing nothing is going to get you anywhere, and doing something on the cheap is not the answer either. Doing the right something is. Contact me at dan.mcdade@pointclear.com to discuss sales close rate, cost per lead and other topics of interest to you. I promise to help.  

Things have begun to progress further than chat and according to a study by HeyWire Business many people are already preferring texting and video chat options to live chat.

According to the survey, 52% of people saying they’d prefer texting as a customer service option and 36% wanted to use live video for support. As well as this 75% prefer texting over social media. It’s clear to see that customers want support to blend into where they’re already spending their time, which is on their phones.

Services like Textus.com, TextMagic and TextLocal, say there is a 3% chance of reaching customer via email and a 9% chance by phone, have created exciting and dynamic changes in customer service support.

How Can Slow Response Times Damage Your Business, Brand And Revenue?

Some alarming statistics have emerged in recent years, most notably in the 2015 State of Multichannel Customer Service report, that details the significant impact that poor or slow customer support can have on businesses in sectors relating to eCommerce and social media.

And here’s why:

• 68% of people asked said they have stopped doing business with a brand due to a poor customer service experience – so it can drive away customers in droves!
• 34% of people consider getting their issue resolved quickly as the most important feature of customer support, whereas only 10% think that finding answers without assistance is a key feature (for example, an FAQ’s page).
• 61% of people on social media expect a response from a brand in less than 24 hours.
• 56% of people have higher expectations for customer service than they had one year ago.

Finding the right customer support package for your site, business and brand are essential. Below are a list of support features than can be applied to your website in order to boost connectivity and maintain customer satisfaction:

Live Chat

Live chat technology has been around for a while. Yet, as the statistics show, customers are demanding more immediate attention. Businesses, however, have been relatively slow to adopt a live chat strategy, but the benefits can be huge:

Live Chat Is Convenient For Customers

This technology has the ability to provide the answers that customers want when they require them. Gone are the days of long and sometimes costly phone calls to busy call centres. Now customers can expect quicker replies that don’t get lost in translation and they can easily multi-task while waiting for a reply.

According to data collected by a e.marketer.com survey, 63% of online consumers were more likely to return to a website that offers live chat. As well as this, the 38% who had used the live chat service said they had only made their purchase due to the chat session itself.

Live Chat Cuts Down On Expenses

Live chat software has consistently demonstrated that it can save on both employee task time and phone expenses. With employees spending less time on the phones, they can multitask during chat conversations, increasing levels of productivity for the company.

Live Chat Increases Sales

For a successful sale, it’s essential that customers have someone who can immediately walk them through it if they’ve become confused or have a question that can make or break a sale. This helps eliminate bounces away from retail websites and ensures that purchases make it from shopping baskets to check out.

Once the customer is connected with the appropriate employee who can answer their questions, they’re in the perfect position to recommend additional purchases that may be the perfect fit for that particular person.

Live Chat Helps You Stand Out Amongst Competitors

Many top retail businesses are still not offering live chat. If you want to gain an edge on the competition, live chat is a key feature that websites must have in order to be competitive and to hopefully rise to the top.

In the same report by e.marketer.com, they found that almost 2 in 10 live chat respondents did more than 75% of their holiday shopping online, compared with 14% of those who did not chat – pretty interesting stuff.

Live chat has to be executed properly for it to work for your business, here are some important tips to ensure you make the most of live chat software:

• Train your team. Make sure they know the products, how to up-sell and interact with customers in a professional way. Consider hiring people with sales experience.
• Be aware of your shopping hours. It’s not good having chat software if the times that people are using, no one is manning it.
• Avoid being robotic. People aren’t and don’t like talking to robots or automated services, so make your chat friendly, yet professional.
• Be prepared for surges in chat volume. Prepare and plan for times in the day when there are surges. Employ an analytics service on what days and times you experience high volumes and ensure there are enough people to respond.

Beyond Live Chat: The Rise Of Video Chat And SMS Support

Things have begun to progress further than chat and according to a study by HeyWire Business, many people are already preferring texting and video chat options to live chat.

According to the survey, 52% of people saying they’d prefer texting as a customer service option and 36% wanted to use live video for support. As well as this 75% prefer texting over social media. It’s clear to see that customers want support to blend into where they’re already spending their time, which is on their phones.

Services like Textus.com, who say that there is a 3% chance of reaching customer via email and a 9% chance by phone, have created exciting and dynamic changes in customer service support.

They’ve introduced a business class, text message service that business owners can operate from their PC’s, which will not only allow them to connect and respond to consumer questions but engage in more direct advertising/sales. This can be a tailor-made service, individual to each customer.

Call Back

With over 60 percent of consumers feeling that even one minute of hold time is too much, a great way to combat this and keep your customers happy is by offering a call back service. This allows people to multitask and continue their day, as well as reducing overall frustration.

Decreased Call Abandonment Rate

Long holding time leads to abandoned calls which in turn lead to higher repeat calls and lower first-call resolution and ultimately dissatisfied customers.

But with the availability of call back service, your customers will no longer have to hang up the calls or think of switching to a competitor due to lengthy waiting queues. They can easily request a callback and go about their day while they wait for an agent to return their call.

Never Lose A Lead

With this technology, it’s pretty much impossible to lose a customer even when they are pre-occupied and couldn’t answer the call on time. As soon as the caller opts for a call back service, their information gets recorded and the suitable person contacts the lead as soon as he/she is free.

Improved Agent Productivity

Upon receiving a call back request from a customer, the agent would be able to access all the caller’s information on his/her screen. They just have to simply click one button to get connected to the customer. This process saves a significant amount of time and effort of the agents leading to increased productivity as they no longer have to search their CRM to get the customer’s information and other relevant data.

Reduced Cost

Long holding time advances to higher phone charges and increases cost for businesses to a considerable degree. But a call back option eliminates this possibility as the callers will not have to spend time waiting in the queue, thus saving a significant amount of telecom cost for the call centres.

Higher Customer Retention

Call back technology allows the customers to never lose their time waiting in the queue. They would be more satisfied and will stick to your brand, ultimately leading to higher customer retention.

It’s clear to see that the world of customer service and support is constantly evolving, so it’s important that your business is able to reply and respond to the needs of today’s consumers. Often this means continually assessing your support framework, ensuring that it’s the right package for the kind of customers you cater for.

Remember, you don’t get a second chance to make a good impression!

Believe it or not, Facebook is actually good for something more than just sharing really cute cat videos. In fact, in recent years, Facebook has become a very lucrative ecommerce marketing tool. Advertising on the social media platform has only been available since 2012, but within those short five years, Facebook’s ad manager has transformed significantly. You can run retargeting campaigns, create custom audiences based on super specific demographics, and even create “Lookalike” audiences (more on this later).

If you’re looking for a way to get your business on its feet, Facebook ecommerce marketing could be the answer. However, it’s not as easy as just handing over your credit card information. In order to maximize the success of your Facebook ad campaigns, there are specific tools and practices that you will need to understand. In this post, we’ll go over some of the best practices for Facebook ads that will help get you started.

Preparing for Facebook Advertising

Before we get into the nitty-gritty of how to advertise with Facebook, we need to go over a four other things:

1. Setup a Facebook Profile
   If you don’t already have a Facebook profile for your business, you really ought to. These days, an active Facebook business page is something consumers expect to see. Like adding client logos or testimonials to your website, social media presence has become a significant trust element. The good news is that setting up a Facebook business page is relatively here. The hard part will be gaining a following. Just be sure that you create a business page, and not a regular account for your business (unless you’re cool with looking like a total rookie). If you create a regular account, people will have to add your business as a friend to see updates rather than just being able to “like” or follow the page.
2. Optimize Your Profile
   Many people will look to your business page for pertinent information such as your website address, contact information, customer reviews, and store hours (if you also have a brick and mortar store). You will need to ensure that your page includes relevant and up-to-date information. Pages that don’t have this information or include the wrong information are off-putting to viewers and can cause them to lose trust in your brand.
3. Set Up Your Advertising Account
   Once your Facebook business page is created and optimized, you’ll need to set up an advertising account. You may have noticed that there’s already an ad manager available. However, if you ever plan to manage more than one ad account or you’d like to give ad management access to anyone else (such as a social media manager), you’ll need to use a Business Manager account instead.
4. Install Facebook Pixels On Your Site
   Facebook Pixels track your ad activity, allowing to see exactly how many conversions you get from your ads. If you don’t set up Facebook Pixels, there is no way of knowing how much of your sales activity is coming from the ads. Facebook Pixels also allow you to retarget certain users based on the URLs they’ve visited on your site. For example, Seal Skin Covers sells different types of vehicle covers. By targeting users who have visited URLs containing “boat,” we can set up boat cover ads to be displayed only to those users. We’ll discuss retargeting audiences more in section six.

   To set up your Facebook Pixels, you need to install the Pixel code on your site. Don’t panic—it’s not as bad as it sounds. First, go into ads manager and click on the Pixels tab. Click “create a Pixel,” create a name for it, and copy your base code. Note that to track certain user activity, you’ll need to add specific event codes to the base code:

   
   Install the code on every page of your site. If you’re not familiar with coding, this can be a bit tricky. But if you use an ecommerce platform like Shopify, Pixel integration is semi-automated—all you need to do is go to settings and enter your Pixel ID. However, even if you’re not a coding geek, manual installation is still doable. Take a look at this guide from Facebook for more detailed instructions.

Alright, Let’s Advertise!

Now that you’ve got your account and your Pixels set up, it’s time to go over how to actually create ads and run them on Facebook. In this second section, we’ll go over the types of ads you can create, the best methods for design those ads, how to set up your ad sets, as well as the types of audiences available.

Understanding Ad Types

Facebook offers a variety of different ad types, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. Currently, there are five formats to choose from:

• Single Image – Single image ads are the standard 1200 x 628 pixel ads that you see most often. While these ads display only one image at a time, you can add up to six different image options to cycle through when the ads are displayed. Because you only have one image displayed at a time, it can be difficult to get all your relevant information into the image. In fact, Facebook only allows you to use images that have less than 20 percent text. Any more than that, and your deliverability will be negatively affected. Instead of relying on text-based images, focus on using colorful, captivating images

Single Video – Similar to single image ads, these ads allow you to display a single video. However, you can not add different creatives to cycle through as you can with single image ads. The videos can be up to 60 minutes and a maximum size of 2.3 GB. They must have a minimum resolution of 720p.

Source

Carousel – Carousel ads allow users to scroll through two or more different images or videos like a gallery. These ads allow you to get a little more creative since you can add more material than you would with a single image ad. Note, however, that these ads are still subject to the 20 percent text rule. Each image or video must be 1080 x 1080 pixels. Carousel ads can be great for displaying multiple products or product versions in one ad.

Slideshow – Similar to carousel ads, slideshow ads allow you to cycle through multiple ads and images. The difference here is that they scroll automatically rather than relying on users to do it themselves. You can add up to 10 videos or images, though your ad can only be 50 seconds max.

Source

Canvas – Canvas ads also allow you to cycle through multiple images or videos, but the advertisements are full-screen, immersive ads rather than just native ads displayed within a user’s newsfeed. The Canvas format is great for adding a cinematic feel to your advertisements, though it’s only available for mobile ads.

Source

Designing Your Ads

When designing your ads, it’s important to keep in mind that people see a lot of stuff while scrolling through their newsfeeds. In order to get your ads to stand out, you need to make good use of bright colors, creative copy, and captivating images:

Just be sure that the image you use is still relevant to the product you’re selling and that you link the ad to an appropriate landing page.

Setting Up Your Ad Sets

You should never have less than four to five ads in one ad set. Why? If you only run one or two ads, users are going to see them over and over again. This is known as ad fatigue, and it can be a real budget and conversion killer. Adding multiple ads to one ad set will ensure that users don’t see the same ad too often. Take a look at your ad’s frequency to see the average time it’s displayed to the same viewer. As a general rule of thumb, anything over three is too much. Pull the ad and replace it with something new.

Set Up Your Audiences

Before you run your advertisements (and, ideally, before you even design them), you need to figure out who you’ll be targeting. Facebook offers a few different audience types for you to choose from, including the retargeting option we discussed in section four as well as saved, custom, and lookalike audiences.

• Saved Audiences – If you want to target new customers who haven’t already visited your site, go to the audience section of your ads manager and select “create audience” and then “saved audience.” You can then use specific qualities and interests to create an audience of people that you believe would enjoy your product. The cool thing about this feature is that you can get a lot more detailed than one would assume, allowing you to target people based on specific behaviors or interests. For example, if you were selling car covers like the company in our earlier examples, you could target people who have recently purchased a car. In fact, you could even target people who have recently bought a certain type of car. Crazy, right? Other options include income, age, location, relationship status, gender, education, and more.
• Custom Audiences – Custom audiences is very useful for targeting people who have already been to your site. You can either import a list of existing leads or customers or you can target people based on the URLs they’ve visited on your site. You can also create custom audiences based on app activity and Facebook engagement:

Lookalike Audiences – Lookalike audiences are audiences of new potential customers that Facebook creates automatically based on an existing audience. For example, you could use a custom audience of existing customers and Facebook would find 2 million similar Facebook users who are likely to be interested in your product.

Conclusion

Now that you know how to design, create, and target your ads, you’re well on your way to creating your own successful Facebook ad campaigns for ecommerce. To learn more about Facebook ecommerce marketing or to learn how to set up your bids and maximize your budget, download our free Facebook marketing ebook.

Kristen Pumphrey is the founder and creative director of 27-person P.F. Candle Co., a homemade candle business based in LA.

However, the road to running her own business was full of bumps.

Pumphrey, who's been making candles since stealing her sister's candle-making kit as a child, told Business Insider that some advice she received early on in her career kept her going.

"The best advice I got was from a guy who owned a bunch of bike messenger services in New York," she says. "Right before I left, he said, 'Just be prepared to eat a lot of beans.' I was like, 'Okay, I don't know what that means.'"

However, Pumphrey quickly figured it out after she moved from Austin to Long Beach, California, where her husband was pursuing his degree.

"I definitely understood what he meant during the time period when we relocated from Austin to California and we were basically living off student loans," she says. "I had some savings I was living off. And then whenever we'd get an Etsy sale or something like that I'd be piecing that money together and it would be like having an entire onion for dinner and a can of beans."

In Austin, Pumphrey had had to work part-time jobs to pay the bills — waiting tables, hosting, and working as a receptionist at an art gallery. One side business (creating pillows in the shape of states) went bust early on. However, Pumphrey could not get a side job in California, and finances began looking dire. Her craft business only seemed to take off during the holiday season, so she decided to focus on the more scalable candle products.

"I honestly got to the point where I was going to give up and I just said I don't know whether I can continue doing this, because I just feel like I'm chasing a dream that may never happen for me," she says.

Then, just in the nick of time, it all turned around.

"I happened at that time to get an order from Terrain which is an Urban Outfitters subsidiary company," she says. "It was about $1,000. That allowed me to keep selling for a couple more months. This was down to the wire."

More orders followed. Eventually, P.F. Candle Co. became a viable business and began expanding. Pumphrey is grateful her business caught a break at just the right moment: "I was really fortunate that my hard work and being at the right place at the right time paid off."

SEE ALSO: 6 simple tricks to make your coworkers like you

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NOW WATCH: Here's what it takes to make an intricately carved candle

Publishing high-quality content is an important part of developing a successful website. Not only does it help to attract viewers to your website, but it also establishes your business as an authority in the online space and can help improve your search engine rankings!

But what do you do if your content fails to attract readers? This article will identify 8 Reasons Why No One Cares About Your Content — and what you can do about it!

#1 — Your content doesn’t focus on the needs of the reader

Visitors to your website will only be interested in reading content that they find valuable. For content to be perceived as being valuable, it must be relevant to the interests of the reader and be educational, interesting or entertaining. If you are writing on topics that no one is particularly interested in, don’t be surprised if your readership drops off!

Find out what your readers are interested in by asking them questions on social media and in your blog comments section. You can also use Google Trends and BuzzSumo to find out which topics readers are currently interested in.

#2 — Your content isn’t unique

It is important to always write your own original content or hire a professional writer to do it for you. Not only will duplicate content be ignored by users — it may negatively impact your website’s search engine rankings. Although Google doesn’t issue penalties for duplicate content (unless the entire site’s content is scraped), your site will end up down at the bottom of page 10.

There are various tools available to help you find interesting and original ideas for articles, including Buzzsumo, EpicBeat, and ContentGems. Use these tools to find useful topics that your readers will enjoy. Even if your topic isn’t particularly unique, try to take it on from a different angle to give your readers a new perspective.

For instance, you can use a tool like Ahrefs to find best-performing content on other people’s websites and make a better, up-to-date version of it.

If you happen to have Ahrefs (if not, you can get a 14-day free trial), simply log-in to your dashboard, input a domain URL of any website and navigate to the left-hand sidebar.

You are then given a choice to see top content by links, links’ growth and social shares.

#3 — Your content is difficult to understand

When writing content, it is important to focus on readability. Because online users tend to scan content, they prefer text to be in small chunks that are easy to consume. That is why bullet lists and short paragraphs can make your articles more effective.

Additionally, you should keep your language simple when possible. Complex terminology and overly verbose prose will turn most readers off immediately. Learn how to make your content informative without it being unnecessarily complicated.

#4 — Your blog is too “sterile”

If your blog is very technical and does not read as if it was written by a human, expect readers to stay away. Most readers prefer articles that have a personal element to them, simply because the content is easier to relate to. For example, instead of reading about metabolic processes and the science of weight loss, users often prefer to read about someone’s personal experience and the weight loss advice that they have to offer.

While it’s always a great idea to pack lots of relevant facts and figures into your articles and blog posts, remember to maintain the “human aspect”.

#5 — No one can find your posts on social media

Many Internet users prefer to read content that reaches them via their social media streams. This is because they know they can trust the content reaching them via people in their social media network. If you are not promoting your articles on social media, you won’t reach these readers, and your content won’t be as widely circulated.

#6 — Your posts are too short and don’t delve into the deeper issues

Articles and blog posts should range in length between 800 to 2,000 words in length. There are a number of reasons for writing longer articles, but the main three are:

1. Search engines prefer long form content and rank it higher in search engine results. According to research carried out by Backlinko, the average word count of a 1st result in Google is 1,890 words.
2. Readers prefer longer articles that delve deeply into a topic
3. You will set yourself apart from competitors who are writing short articles that offer less value

If you are writing articles that are 200-500 words in length, it is unlikely that they offer much value, which will result in a gradual loss of readership.

#7 — You don’t write very often

Users will only return to your blog or website if you consistently produce valuable content that they enjoy. If you write sporadically, your readership will drop off, and it will be much more difficult to obtain traction from the content that you do write.

#8 — You focus too much on search engine optimisation

Too many writers create content that is focussed on ranking for a specific keyword or phrase. Unfortunately, this approach can result in poor quality content that reads like it has been purely written for Google bot. It is better to write exciting, original and useful content that is focused on being valuable to the reader. This kind of content is far more likely to be successful as it is usually shared via social media and mentioned by other websites.