Rnordman

Approaching important people can be awkward.

They're busy. They're successful. And they probably don't want to talk to you — right?

On Pat Flynn's Smart Passive Income podcast, Flynn asked business and publicity strategist Selena Soo, "How do you respond to somebody who says, 'Selena, I'm too afraid to go up to somebody?'"

Soo, who calls herself "a really big introvert" explains that she tells herself two things:

First, "the moment you put someone on a pedestal is the moment they start looking down on you," she said. She continued:

"It's not to say that we can't appreciate and admire people, but if we're approaching someone and in our head we've got this internal dialogue like, 'Who am I to talk to them? I'm nothing. I've accomplished nothing in my career. I'm just a beginner. What can I have to offer? They're just a much bigger deal. I don't want to bother them,' we're bringing that kind of negative energy and unbalanced dynamic into the relationship. The thing is we're all equal as people, and I know for me and many others we love talking to people who appreciate our work."

She points out that, as a coach for people who run seven-figure businesses, she's sometimes in the position where people want to meet her. "In fact, when I'm at an event and someone comes up to me and will say, 'I got so excited to come to this event when I saw that you were a speaker,' or, 'I'm on your newsletter list. I love that recent email that you shared about X, Y, Z,' all of a sudden they're the most interesting person in the room to me," she said. "The truth is that we care about people who care about us."

The second thing she tells herself, she told Flynn, is a question: What's the worst that can happen? "I mean, there have been situations where I've been in the room with very influential people. I know that if I don't say hi now, I might never see them again," she said, "so let me just go up to them, and just say hi, and talk to them for a minute or two ... Really, what's the worst that could happen?"

Listen to the full podcast »

SEE ALSO: An entrepreneur who makes $135,000 a month shares 2 productivity hacks for balancing a side hustle with family life

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: I'm a 34-year-old who has never had a credit card — and it's the worst financial decision I've made in my life

Bikes are hard to spot and hard to predict

With over 2.5. quintillions of data created daily, organizations struggle to structure and use it in the right way. Artificial Intelligence emerged disruptively in business environment and offers immense opportunities for organizations that know how to put data to use. According to a recent study, 80% of executives believe artificial intelligence improves worker performance.

AI powered tools enable marketers to build more effective marketing strategies, improve their marketing performance and stay competitive outperforming the rivals. For this purpose, every marketer can and should consider intelligent tools.

AI powered data enrichment and segmentation

Approximately 37% of companies experience difficulties converting data into actionable insight. Intelligent tools allow marketers to translate the data into knowledge-based customer and prospect interactions enabling them to act smart with the data collected and ensure more predictable marketing outcomes.

With intelligent data enrichment marketers can obtain a 360-degree contact view and get a better understanding of the resources required to convert a specific lead into an opportunity. While intelligent segmentation tools enable marketers to automatically assign new leads to the most relevant segment base as well as map them to existing customers based on specific criteria increasing sophistication and efficiency of the lead-to-revenue cycle.

Intelligent marketing campaigns

In addition, intelligent tools can help digital marketers swiftly react to market changes and keep their products and services on the forefront of their audiences’ minds. Intelligent marketing automation systems provide marketers with advanced yet easy to use tools to effortlessly adjust their marketing processes and optimize marketing campaigns on the fly. Furthermore, the system with next-best-action capabilities defines the sequence of actions that will most likely lead to the highest lead/opportunity conversion rates and offers marketing professionals the next-best-action to help them choose the most relevant and efficient process flow.

Predictive lead scoring and enhanced lead management

Marketing teams can benefit from intelligent lead management capabilities like predictive lead scoring, intelligent lead routine, and more intelligent nurturing campaigns to deliver smarter customer experiences across marketing interactions. As recent research shows, 90% of users agree that predictive lead scoring provides more value than traditional lead scoring approaches, while 98% of respondents say they would purchase predictive lead scoring again.

In addition, AI-powered tools allows for building smarter marketing strategies to convert more prospects and streamlining processes across entire customer journey.

Leveraging these intelligent tools enable digital marketers not only to generate more high-quality leads but also become more customer-focused crafting the most personalized nurturing messages as well as delivering these messages to relevant audiences right at the needed time and in the most effective channels.

Mobile World Congress, the smartphone world’s biggest conference of the year, kicks off in a few days. Though Samsung’s Galaxy S8 isn’t likely to make an appearance, several new, not-crazily-different phones are still expected to be on display.

With this year also being the tenth anniversary of the iPhone — which effectively kicked off the smartphone era — surveying the phones at MWC is also a good time to look back at how much the smartphone has altered the tech industry at large.

This chart from Statista shows one way of looking at it: Over the past decade, smartphones have made a number of once-popular gadgets all but irrelevant to society. While the dollar value of smartphone shipments has grown 536% in that time, those of the MP3 player, digital camera, and portable GPS have sank.

Still, time has a knack for not stopping: Recent sales figures now suggest the smartphone boom is over, and major tech firms are now hungry for new tech like augmented reality to eventually redo the cycle all over again.

SEE ALSO: Samsung is still overloading the smartphone market

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Meet the forgotten co-founder of Apple who once owned 10% of the company

Your dream client is going to determine who you are and how to respond to you based on what you show them.

If you begin your conversation with your dream client by introducing yourself,  your company, and your solutions, you will have established yourself as a traditional salesperson. Your dream client will perceive the interaction as typical, and you as a commodity. This is too low a level to result in a better outcome for you, because the outcome isn’t great for your prospect.

If you begin your conversation with an attempt to elicit your dream client’s existing pain as a way to compel change, you will have established that you are very much like the salespeople who have visited this prospect in the past. Those salespeople also looked for ways to displace your dream client’s existing provider by promising better outcomes and a greater ROI.

If you enter the conversation at a much higher level, a more strategic level, then you will have positioned yourself as someone who may be a strategic partner and a trusted advisor. By demonstrating that you think like a business person and someone who knows how to compel and lead change, you differentiate yourself in a meaningful way, creating a preference for you, your solution, and your company.

You are now the largest part of the value proposition, especially early in the process of change, like it or not. You can no longer rely on products and solutions to carry the load when it comes to differentiating you or your company.

More importantly, your dream client is going to allow you to be whatever you are, and they will treat you accordingly. If you look like an undifferentiated commodity, they’ll accept you as just that. If you look like a peer, they’ll accept you as such.

The post How Your Dream Client Perceives You appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Lego topped this year's ranking of the world's most powerful brands, according to a survey compiled by the business valuation consultancy Brand Finance.

Six of the top ten most valuable companies in the 500-strong ranking were technology companies. Google led the pack of most valuable companies, overtaking the 2016 leader Apple.

The survey ranks brands by their monetary value and also calculates the most "powerful" brands  – companies whose financial value is most impacted by their branding. 

10. McKinsey & Co

Brand strength: 92.7 

Brand value: $4.3 billion

Brand value rank: 392

What happened: McKinsey's global network is home to 10,000 consultants, 2,000 researchers and 1,400 partners from a variety of backgrounds. Former McKinsey employees have gone on to lead a number companies with revenues in the billions, such Boeing, Vodafone, and Credit Suisse. 

9. Johnson & Johnson

Brand strength: 90.1

Brand value: $9,1 billion

Brand value rank: 154

What happened: The CPG company agreed to buy the Swiss biotech firm Actelion for $30 billion at the end of 2016. 

8. PricewaterhouseCoopers

Brand strength: 90.9

Brand value: $18.5 billion

Brand value rank: 66

What happened: The consulting firm has 21,000 employees across 64 offices in the world. In 2016, it expanded its activities into the burgeoning tech disciplines blockchain and virtual reality.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

You’ve heard this cliché many times before: innovation is all about people. Even if you’re an avid fan of artificial intelligence, you hardly expect robots replacing humans as innovators any time soon. And if you agree with another popular cliché, the one saying that innovation is a team sport, you will come to a natural conclusion that in order to pursue a corporate innovation project, you need to create a dedicated innovation team.

Do you need an innovation team?

Or maybe you don’t. Many folks don’t believe in structured innovation arguing that any “structure” kills creativity and stifles innovation. Even some innovation experts claim that “innovation is everyone’s job.” Actually this notion that “innovation is everyone’s job” is quite popular in many companies. Why? Because it allows its leadership to adopt a hands-off approach to innovation process. It obviously takes time and effort to formulate the company’s innovation strategy, align it with corporate strategic goals and identify key problems to solve. In contrast, it’s so easy to just announce an open season for “ideas,” launch an innovation hackathon (or two) and then claim that the collective wisdom of the whole company has been harnessed. The popularization of this hands-off approach to innovation can be at least partially attributed to easy-to-use innovation management platforms, such as Qmarkets’ Q-open and Q-max which support on-the-ground innovation initiatives.

And yet, the majority of corporate innovation leaders do understand the need and value of creating a dedicated innovation team. To be sure, every employee in your organization should ideally take part in innovation projects, but it’s the ultimate responsibility of the innovation team to take ownership of the process: to make it efficient, measurable and accountable. Anyone with a glimpse of corporate experience knows that when “everyone” is responsible for something, no one is.

Innovative people for innovative teams

And here we come to a crucial question: how this innovation team should be formed? Several approaches to addressing this question exist.

The first approach emphasizes the personal skills of the team members. That’s why you will often hear that the best way to staff your innovation team is to hire…innovative people; great advice, but unfortunately with limited practical value. This is not to say, however, that more specific directions are completely unavailable. For example, a recent publication lists five “innovative” qualities each member of the innovation team is supposed to possess:

• Leapfrogging mindset: a desire to view the world with the goal of changing it
• Complementary knowledge: the expertise that will help your organization create new technology or a new business model
• Strategic relationships: the existence of a strong network of business partners
• Ambiguity tolerance: the capacity to make decisions based on limited data
• Optimistic persistence: the risk-taking mindset needed to persist through the tough times

Although I agree in principle with all five suggestions, I nevertheless suspect that the majority of corporate HR departments, even equipped with advanced Myers-Briggs-style tests, will have troubles with finding enough candidates meeting such a high standard.

Who is your partner?

The second approach pays little attention to the individual skill sets of the team members, but it stresses the need of an optimal mix of individuals the team is composed of. In particular, this approach focuses on the functional roles each member of the team plays in the project. For example. For example, it was suggested that each innovation team should include nine innovation roles of which the most important are the following:

• Revolutionary: team member generating and sharing ideas
• Connector: team member bringing people together
• Customer Champion: team member responsible for interactions with customers
• Magic Maker: team member responsible for implementing developed ideas and solutions
• Evangelist: team member creating a “buzz” around the organization about the project and its results

This approach is obviously much more practical than the first; in fact, many organizations have already adopted the “spirit” (if not the exact “letter”) of this approach by having created innovation “joint task forces” composed of representatives from different corporate units and functions (or locations, if appropriate): R&D, sales and marketing, customer service, accounting, legal, HR, etc.

Implicit in the formation of an innovation team composed of members belonging to different parts of an organization is a belief that this team can only be successful if it includes people with diverse professional expertise and experience. In recent years, this concept of diversity was augmented by a growing body of scientific evidence (summarized in a 2014 article in Scientific American) showing that socially diverse groups (that is, those with a diversity of race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation) are more innovative than socially homogeneous groups. Research shows that socially diverse groups are better at solving complex problems not only because people with different backgrounds bring new information, but also because the mere presence of individuals with alternative viewpoints forces group members to work harder to get their own points across.

This is good news for HR managers in charge of innovation teams: in our rapidly globalizing workforce environment, finding people with diverse professional, personal and social attributes is much easier than chasing rare individuals with nebulous qualities such as the “leapfrogging mindset”.

It’s all about process

There is the third approach to the formation of innovation teams. This approach emphasizes not the team composition or individual skills of its member, but the way the team operates. The logic behind this approach was eloquently articulated in a 2015 article on Google. The article argues that the composition of a team matters much less for its success than how the team members interact, structure their work and view their contributions. The article listed five key factors that set apart successful Google teams:

• Psychological safety: team members taking risks without feeling insecure or embarrassed
• Dependability: team members counting on each other to do high quality work
• Structure & clarity:the availability of clear goals, roles and execution plans for each team member
• Meaning of work: team members working on something that is personally important for them
• Impact of work: team members believing that their work matters

Characteristically, it is the first factor, psychological safety, which was by far the most important of the five. The safer team members felt with one another, the more likely they were to admit mistakes, to work together and take on new roles. All this obviously positively affected pretty much every aspect of their work.

The power of this particular example obviously derives from the fact that it comes from Google, arguably one of the world’s most innovative companies, for the very notion that innovation requires taking risks without fear of negative career repercussions is hardly new. We all used to hearing calls to “fail fast and fail often” (or even to “celebrate failure”) as a surrogate invitation to innovate. Unfortunately, while voiceful in cheering risk-taking, relentless experimentation and learning from mistakes (all being parts of the elusive “culture of innovation”), companies fail to introduce specific corporate policies that would encourage and reward such a behavior of their employees.

Previously, I proposed two such corporate policies. First, I proposed to make stock option grants, as opposed to cash bonuses and other monetary rewards, the principal incentive for engaging employees in innovation projects. This proposal is taking cue from a 2015 finding that companies offering stock options to non-executive employees were more innovative and that the positive effect of stock options on innovation was more pronounced with longer-term grants. Second, I proposed to place employees involved in innovation projects on fixed-term employment contracts, as opposed to employment-at-will. This proposal is based on a 2001 study showing that labor laws making it more difficult to fire employees increase their participation in corporate innovation activities.

In other words, try first to provide all of your employees with incentives to engage in innovation activities along with immunity for failed innovation projects. After you implemented these or similar policies, you may well discover that the number of qualified people in your organization is larger than you expected.

Speak to a member of the Qmarkets team today and discover how we can help you create and maintain a culture of innovation which will deliver measurable value for your organization.

5 Key Components Your Website Requires to Attract Your Ideal Client and Get the Sales You Want

Is your website attracting the right people who are actually interested in purchasing from you?

Or is it just sitting there and not really accomplishing what you hoped it would?

Every business owner wants to get more qualified traffic to their site and then convert that traffic into sales. I mean there’d be no point in having one if that weren’t the ultimate goal!

But it seems to me a lot of business owners miss the mark in HOW to make that goal a reality.

The truth is, you’re not going to get the results you want from a purchased WordPress theme or worse, a free WIX or GoDaddy site. Sorry, but throwing up a cheap, pre-built site just for the sake of having something up is not going to win you any Brownie (or Scout) badges in the Business Marketing category (if there is such a thing??)

Why? Because those types of free, low-cost or DIY sites are not going to do the job you want them to unless you have expertise in all of the different factors a website requires that converts visitors into buyers.

This is why we design and build custom websites and never touch the purchased themes or drag and drop DIY sites. They simply aren’t going to get the job done that our clients expect.

What do I mean by that?

First, it’s important to understand your website serves many purposes such as:

• A way to showcase your business and its offerings
• A means for constant marketing and promotion 24-hours a day
• A platform that emphasizes your brand positioning
• A facility for converting visitors into paying customers
• A device for attracting your ideal clients into your sales and marketing funnels so you can continue to nurture them

And in order to accomplish all of that, a lot of planning, strategy and design needs to take place.

This article provides five factors that go into building and promoting a website that converts. Each factor requires the right expertise to make your site a client-attracting, lead-generating machine:

1. Visually-Appealing Branding

Your visual brand is extremely important. The impression people instantly get about you when they land on your home page or landing page will greatly impact their decision to keep exploring or move on to your competitor.

Not Just a Pretty Logo…

Branding is not just having a pretty logo designed by you or someone on Fivrr. It’s a visual representation that shows your understanding who your ideal client is and how to position yourself in front of them in order to appeal to them.

Identify Your Ideal Client

The first thing to do is define who the people are in your ideal target market. You need to clearly understand what problems they have and how your product or service will be a solution for them.

This analysis needs to be a deep exploration not only of the typical demographics such as age, gender and location, but also a psychographics study of what emotional state they are in.

The analysis will then help you understand what specific colours, imagery, fonts and other style assets to use on your website, logo and branding so that it strongly appeals to them.

By going through this process and designing a website with a specific purpose of positioning you favourably in front of your ideal client, you will then “speak their language” and reassure them they are in the right place.

2. Compelling Marketing Messages

Having a visually appealing website is just half the battle. You also need it need to be user-friendly and not cause confusion that will potentially send them away.

But more importantly, when your ideal client lands there, the words they read and the images they see also need to appeal to them.

This is why you need to create a powerful marketing message through excellent copywriting that speaks directly to their situation, needs, challenges and struggles.

Let Your USP Shine

Your unique marketing message needs to be prominent on the home page through the use of headlines, videos, testimonials, and images. This message also needs to showcase your USP (Unique Selling Proposition) – why should they choose you over your competitor?

Here’s more tips on what your home page should include.

Your Home Page is Just the Tip of the Iceberg

The rest of your site pages also need to stay focused with this intent. And having other means in getting your marketing message out to the masses is also a big factor to consider.

3. Consistent Content Marketing

Whether it’s a blog post, newsletter, podcast or YouTube show, pick at least one or two of these content marketing strategies and consistently get your message out there in front of the right people.

Frequency is the key. But not only do you have to be consistent, you also have to create and stick to a marketing calendar where, at minimum, you should be producing informative content on a weekly basis.

Create a Free Giveaway

Most first-time users to a website won’t make an immediate purchase. This is why you want to get them into your newsletter database so you can continue to nurture them where they will eventually make the purchase when ready.

This is often done using a free giveaway. Something that your ideal client would want to receive from you that would be very helpful to them.

Do some market research to find out if a free report on a specific topic would be something they would find valuable enough to provide their name and email address for. It might be a video series that is more compelling to them.

You need to find out what they will find irresistible and then create it.

Create Shareable Content

Your blog is a prime place for you to showcase your expertise and provide solutions to your ideal clients’ problems.

By being consistent with creating and sharing new, informative content, the more you are developing the “Know, Like and Trust” factor with them. This then creates a better chance of them converting to paying clients.

4. Implementation of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Strategies

Once your website is built, it needs to be search engine optimized in order to be found through Google and other search engine results.

The text, titles, descriptions and keywords all need to be in alignment with what your ideal client will be searching for when they are looking for a solution to their problem, of which your product or service will provide.

Your website should also be submitted to various search engines and directories to ensure it is being properly indexed and found.

5. Active Social Media Involvement

When you know who your ideal client is, it’s easier to find them on social media and draw them to your website.

Provide valuable, informative and inspirational posts you know they will want to receive from you to help build your brand exposure. This will compel them to want to check you out further by visiting your website.

Be sure to use the 20% rule and sprinkle in promotional posts amongst your value-driven posts that will drive traffic back to your website.

Also make sure your visual brand is consistent throughout all your social media accounts. That’s very important for brand continuity so your ideal client will begin to recognize you and your business just by seeing your brand visuals.

‘Cheap and Easy’ Could Be Costing You Qualified Business Leads

As you can see there are several factors involved in having a website that will actually get you results.

So before you convince yourself the cheap and DIY route is the best way to go, take into consideration how much potential business you could be losing because your primary piece of marketing, your virtual storefront if you will, is not appealing to the right people.

Willie Sutton robbed banks. He is credited with stealing over $2,000,000. When they asked Willie why he robbed banks, he replied: “Because that’s where the money is.”

There are two groups of people who struggle to recognize the wisdom in Mr. Sutton’s strategy: struggling salespeople and many startups.

Those Who Wish to Make Selling Easy

Struggling salespeople want selling to be easier. They call on the companies that buy a lot of what they sell and benefit the most from doing so. When these companies resist their efforts to meet with them to entertain changing providers, these salespeople look for easier and more receptive targets. Eventually, they find their way down to companies that don’t buy what they sell.

In their minds, these struggling salespeople believe that companies that don’t buy what they sell are virgin territory. They don’t already have a partner, so their are no loyalty issues or switching costs. And, they don’t yet recognize the value of what these salespeople sell. By moving down to non-users, they have swapped the challenge of not being competent enough to execute a competitive displacement for an even greater challenge, the challenge of selling to non-buyers. Sutton would be confused.

Startups That Don’t Start

Many startups make the same mistake. They believe that anyone and everyone can benefit from what they sell. They believe this is true even when their product or service is a solution in search of a problem. Silicon Valley is full of companies that have identified a capability that they believe in so strongly that invest their time, their money, and other people’s money bringing a product to market, only to discover their is no market.

The very best test as to whether or not there is a market for your product is the willingness of people to pay for it. In many cases, people who will pay for a product are harder to come people than people with money to invest in building the product.

The Willie Sutton strategy is to go where the money is. Call on the prospects and clients who spend money trying to achieve what your product, service, or solution can help them achieve. This means you do not call on people who can’t, won’t, or shouldn’t spend money on what you sell.

Your efforts are always better spent improving your skills than trying to make selling easier.

The post The Willie Sutton Strategy appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Have you and your business joined the 88% of B2B marketers that have built content marketing into their strategy?

Chances are, if you read this blog regularly, you’re at least dipping your toes into the content marketing pool. I just want to let you know that the water is fine! If you need some more encouragement to dive right in take a look at this interesting infographic that lays out the importance of improving your content marketing game and tells you how your peers are working at building it into their marketing approach.

Let’s have a look at what the infographic has to say.

1. Content marketing isn’t just for B2C.

B2B companies can benefit from content marketing just as much as B2C companies – just look at brands like Adobe and Microsoft. That being said, there are some variations between B2B content marketing and B2C content marketing, including the subject matter, content formats, distribution channels, promotion, and objectives.

2. The majority of B2B marketers use content marketing.

Last year, the number of B2B marketers using content marketing was 86%. This year, it’s risen to 88%. You could say that content marketing is a popular strategy! But why have so many marketers started using it? It produces sustainable value, helps them to communicate with their clients, and is a great way to exchange information in a meaningful way.

3. Most B2B marketers use at least 13 content marketing tactics.

There are a LOT of different content marketing tactics out there, including blogs, newsletters, infographics, webinars, white papers, newsletters, case studies, social media content, videos – the list goes on. Why stick to just one, when you can use a number of different formats to reach different segments of your audience? You can even re-use the same information in multiple formats to extend your reach.

4. LinkedIn is the top choice to distribute content.

For B2B marketers, LinkedIn is the place to post – it’s been rated the most used and effective tool for content marketing. LinkedIn is a great way to build relationships and brand recognition, establish thought leadership, run extremely targeted advertising, boost traffic to your website, and research your prospects.

5. The most effective B2B content marketing tactic is in-person events.

Some of the best content marketing can actually take place offline, through in-person events that allow for engagement between a brand and its audience. Many marketers consider in-person events to be one of their most effective tactics. In-person content can offer the same information as written content, but also provide a personal experience for an audience. Strengthen relationships by following up after the event and use audience feedback to improve your future online content.

6. Lead generation and sales are the two most important goals.

Lead generation is actually rated as more important to B2B marketers than sales, at 85% v 84%. Finding qualified leads is a great long-term goal which can lead to sales in the future as well as support and investments for upcoming projects.

7. Creating engaging content is the top priority.

72% of content creators are driven by the goal of creating compelling content for the audiences. What can be considered engaging varies from audience to audience – B2B audiences tend to respond to information that is more data-driven and focuses on benefits in terms of ROI. B2B audiences want educational, detailed, high-quality content that helps them make decisions for their business.

8. B2B marketing can be broken down into five maturity levels.

First steps: Beginning to experiment with creating content, but have not begun to put together a strategy.

Young: Experiencing growing pains, working on building a strategy and measurement plan.

Adolescent: Have developed a business case and starting to see a bit of success. Gaining experience with measurement and scaling.

Mature: Finding success and beginning to work on integrating the strategy across the organization.

Sophisticated: Able to accurately measure the impact on the business and can scale the strategy across the organization.

32% of B2B marketers would rate their contenting marketing maturity level as Mature or Sophisticated. Where does your company fit in? Share your answer in the comments!

Everyone has a favorite position.

The right one just feels better – it’s more comfortable, it had better results, and it leads to more satisfaction all around.

When it comes to the CTAs in your marketing campaign (Call to Action), all positions aren’t created equal. In marketing, there are numerous different factors to consider if you want to create the perfect web experience for your users. From designing easy-to-use navigation, to enhancing your SEO efforts so that you rank higher for various crucial keywords. CTAs are just another part of the puzzle.

Your CTA needs to be placed in the optimal location to give you the best chance of achieving your desired action. After all, CTAs have proven their worth in countless different ways, for instance:

• FriendBuy boosted their signups by 34% when adding anxiety-reducing content and explaining the key benefits of their service beside their CTA.
• Adding CTAs to a Facebook page can increase click-through by 285%.
• HubSpot found that adding anchor text CTAs increased conversion rates by 121%.

Source: Pixabay

While the perfect position for you will depend on several different factors:

From the type of business you’re running, to your own personal preferences, it’s worth noting that there are a few tried and tested options that could help you to maximize your conversions.

As with anything else remember to A/B test your CTA placement, and keep in mind that the ideal location will change according to your website layout, and various other design features.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

The Cream of the Crop

Let’s start with the best options – the crème de la crème. If you’ve just started placing your CTAs on your website – which is more common than you might think – then it’s best to start simple. Here, we’re going to look at some of the “high impact” areas used by other major websites. Over time, you’ll be able to get a better insight into which positions work best for you.

Location 1: Above the Fold

Not sure just how lazy your customers might be?

Increase conversion rates by ensuring that buying your product is simple. Putting your CTA above the fold helps to ensure that your visitors see it straight away – which is perfect if your customers don’t want to learn anything more about you before they convert.

What does “above the fold” mean?

The area “above the fold” in your website is the place that your visitor sees first when they arrive on your website – They don’t need to scroll at all to get to your message – it’s instantly there, drawing attention.

Though “above the fold” positioning doesn’t work for everyone, it can be beneficial because it’s easy to locate, and doesn’t require any additional effort from leads that are already in the buying stage of the sales funnel.

Of course, it’s not always the perfect solution. For instance, Neil Patel believes that his users prefer learning about his offers before they’re asked to click on a CTA. By placing his CTA above the fold, he found that his conversions decreased by 17%!

Source: Pixabay

Location 2: Inline

If placing CTAs above the fold doesn’t work for you, there’s always the opportunity to blend them into the body of your web copy. When most people think of calls to action, they imagine big, bold, in-your-face buttons, but the inline format is different. It’s far subtler.

HubSpot’s analysis into anchor text CTAs found that between 47% and 93% of the leads generated by a post came exclusively from anchor test CTAs. In other words, ignoring these options could mean robbing yourself of crucial conversions.

These solutions for CTAs often work well for people further up the sales funnel because they give you a chance to prime them for conversion with lots of relevant content. In other words, you’re convincing your reader to act before you actually ask them to do anything. At the same time, a lot of users prefer the Inline CTA format because it’s not as disruptive – it takes attention away from the content as much as a big flashy button.

If you’re writing extra-long content, like white papers or three-thousand word blogs, then you might need to include more than one CTA to help break up the text. Don’t ask your reader to go searching through the rest of the article if they want to click on a link they saw twenty minutes ago.

Source: Pixabay

Location 3: Popups

Hate them, or love them – popups remain to be one of the most effective ways of getting your visitor’s attention.

The truth is that most of us browse the web in a zombie-like state, and popups force your visitors to wake up- even if it’s just to press the little “x” button. Even if your reader just has to move their mouse to exit out of a pop-up, they’ve been jolted into action.

Pop up CTAs won’t work positively on all your visitors – but they can help to convert at least a portion of your traffic into active customers – so it might be worth giving them a go. Some companies find that relying on their visitors to click on passive CTAs at the bottom corner of a blog post is a huge missed opportunity. It’s all about finding what works for your business, and your customers.

Some people will always find popups annoying, but it doesn’t take much effort to close a window that appears on your browser screen. If they don’t want to click through and learn more about your offer, they don’t have to. Just be sure to keep an eye on your metrics and ensure that your pop-up efforts aren’t having a negative impact on your audience.

The CTA Gutter

We’ve covered the best, now let’s look at some of the worst. Some CTA locations are repeatedly proven to be ineffective when it comes to boosting conversions. Unfortunately, despite the evidence that they simply don’t work, many companies still use them because they seem simple, straightforward, or better for design purposes. If you’re using any of the following methods for your CTA, it might be time to make a change.

Location 1: Webpage Footer

The bottom of a website page turns out to be one of the least-effective options for converting traffic into customers. Though a small number of people consider the bottom of their web page to be an effective location for a call to action, most get nothing from the banners and buttons that come beneath the text. Note, we’re not talking about placing an in-line call to action in your last sentence of a blog post here, but rather embedding a button somewhere below everything else.

Why is the bottom of a page so useless for turning your visitors into customers? Well, there’s a few reasons:

• First, your visitors have to scroll for miles to see whatever it is you actually want them to do. That’s way too much work for the average web user.
• The bottom of the page is brimming with other navigation links and buttons – meaning that your CTA has to compete for its attention.
• Your lower CTA is frequently ignored thanks to the problem of banner blindness.

The truth is that you won’t accomplish much with a CTA in your footer. Instead, your footer should be simple, and filled with helpful links that allow your visitors to move seamlessly throughout your website.

Location 2: Website Sidebar

Another terrible place to put your CTA? The sidebar.

The “classic” CTA option for some, the sidebar call to action is still used across the web – but it ranks poorly for conversions. Rather than being the home of your call to action, your sidebar should be where you house things that are constant across your website – such as blog subscription options, popular resources, and more. Just remember to use your sidebars sparingly.

Too much info in your sidebar distracts from other conversion goals on your website, and they’re frequently ignored because of the banner blindness issue. An experiment by Impactbnd.com found that removing their sidebar helped to increase their conversion rates from inline CTAs.

The reason for this was that too many distractions were pulling the visitor’s attention away from the CTAs, and reducing the clutter helped to keep visitors focused. The increase in downloads was around 71% higher for their free eBook – which represents a pretty incredible result from such a simple solution.

Source: Pixabay

How to Place Your CTA

At the end of the day, you can put your CTA wherever you want – I can’t stop you.

However, we recommend that if you want to make the most of that all-important traffic – you should be placing your options in the best places first – above the fold and inline. Don’t be afraid to try new positions and discover what works best for your business. Building the perfect website requires a lot of dedication, a lot of testing, and a lot of learning from your past mistakes.

As a business grows, it becomes harder to manage especially when it comes to issues of customer service. Small business owners should take note of that and use it as a tool to counter competition from the big enterprises, stay in the market and grow. Research has shown that over 50% of customers have walked away from intended purchase due to poor customer service. Small businesses can take advantage of their size in beating the huge competitors in the following ways:

Small businesses can create a meaningful, personalized experience with their customers; that is not possible with big companies. While big businesses spend more time with their investors, small businesses do so creating a personal touch with their customers. Being located in the midst of communities, the customers are centralized in a particular geographical location that enables the business to know and identify with them. This kind of conduct is of significant benefits to small businesses that companies can use to their advantage in achieving success at different levels.

1) Build Loyalty:

To begin with, customers can relate to the business or brand and build strong attachments that result in customer loyalty to the products or services. Customer loyalty to small brands and businesses has extended to levels whereby customers are becoming investors in their treasured brands (crowd sourcing). It also proves much more costly to attract more customers than to retain a customer. So it is much more important to retain that customer by making them loyal to your business by use of your personal touch and remarkable customer experience.

2) Drip-Feed Your Customers:

It is not only easy but very necessary for small businesses to stay connected with their customers. Small businesses can keep their customer contacts and follow up with their customers through phone, email and social media. That is in an attempt to inform them constantly of new products and services in the market, giving after sale necessary services and also giving them relevant support at a personal level. In achieving this, the business should identify who its customers are, what is going on in their lives and where they are located in order to engage with them at a personal level. It is, therefore, necessary for the small business to find the most suitable communication platform from which they can constantly engage their customers. This way, they show their customers how valuable they are to the enterprise as well as making them feel part and parcel of the business enterprise. That consequently leads to building and maximizing on the customer loyalty to the business products and services. Customer loyalty is a very important marketing goal for any business as it is the most important tool for success in any business venture.

3) Earn a Positive Word-of-Mouth:

Customers, through such wonderful personalized sales experience and attachment to the business, act as marketing agents for the business. Word-of-mouth can be very beneficial to a business since it works in bringing in more customers building a community and a family-like setting. That can also work in online marketing where customers post positive comments on the business website or social media platforms.

4) Small is Good:

Due to their sizes, customer support in big businesses is composed of a huge pool of marketing teams which may not be unified towards common goals. However in general employees give the overall image of an organization contributing to customer value. In this case, small enterprises are at a great advantage as the employees are few and able to work towards common goals of wooing customers through their attitude and behavior.

5) Hear, Listen and Understand:

In countering competition, small businesses can use customer feedback in identifying areas of strength and weakness in their competitors’ products and services and building on them to attain a competing advantage over such competitors. That is made possible due to the agility of small businesses and their ability to communicate directly with their customers. Flexibility and agility are huge advantages to small businesses over large ones. A well-tuned small business enterprise can easily outdo its larger counterparts in customer service, trend identification, product output and quantity control. The decision-making processes for large businesses is their weakest point, and small businesses can readily take up changes at realistic time outdoing big businesses in keeping up with trends.

6) Tailor-Make and Customize as Far as Possible:

Small businesses are able to customize their products to suit specific customers’ needs thus gaining leverage over big businesses. That is enabled by their ability to communicate directly with customers that are a huge problem for big businesses. Small businesses should, therefore, go over customer comments keenly and respond appropriately in meeting their customized needs in an effort to compete with the big businesses.

7) Adapt Faster To Race Out The Big Fish:

Small businesses are also able to provide more consumer suited products and services. That is highly motivated by the customers’ feedback as they engage directly with the business. It is important for small business to recognize the feedback advantages at their disposal and seek to use them to their benefit in staying in the market as well as competing with the big fish in developing their products. Customers in small businesses can define their needs, and the business can use such information to create more customer friendly or suited products through making the necessary changes that are not readily possible for big businesses. As a result, the small enterprises have an edge over other competing big businesses that have to spend a lot of resources in terms of time and money in market research, which is not at the disposal of small businesses. Small business can easily and readily adapt to new trends to suit their customer requirements and also respond to customer requests. Due to their small size, small businesses are able and should also respond quickly to their customer requests that are not possible with big businesses.

Ideally, a small business has a lot of advantages over the big enterprises in regard to customer service, marketing and customer retention. The small businesses can survive the cut-throat competition in the industry through selling good products and providing personalized services. Therefore, if you have a small business, you can still compete fairly with other bigger companies by following these techniques without being intimidated by their size.

For healthcare professionals, the days of hanging a shingle and waiting for patients is long over. So what are the best strategies for healthcare organizations, doctors, and physician practices in today's digital world? Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Today is the day that you launch that new marketing campaign. Everyone is excited. This is really going to drive demand and create leads for your B2B company.

The ebook is written and produced with its PDF poised to be downloaded. It is itching to be downloaded. Every time someone clicks the big red download button, the ebook has fulfilled its purpose. Or wait, should that button be blue? Or green?

The blog posts are drafted and ready to publish—same with the social posts, emails, and landing page. You are even talking about a webinar and a podcast, plus lots of visual content for Instagram, Pinterest, and Slideshare, and an infographic. Your influencers are lined up to help amplifiy your reach. You even considered a Snapchat takeover.

This is a full-on, all-out, integrated campaign driven by relevant content to your target audience based on your personas’ pain points. If there were a giant switch in a secret backroom laboratory of the office—just like the one Dr. Frankenstein uses to bring his monster to life—and you could throw the switch to launch it all, you would. But there isn’t. Everything needs to be scheduled and launched using a variety of tools over a period of several weeks, rather than barfed out all at the same time.

So you do that, and out it goes. And goes and goes.

Once the Campaign Is Launched

Now you start monitoring for that big spike in interest, and you continue to watch how the content builds to drive downloads and marketing-qualified leads. You’ve set your goals for this campaign, but you seem to be missing your weekly and monthly goals of downloads and leads generated. These goals were based on improving the results of your last campaign by 10 percent. That’s a big increase without any significant changes to the campaign, but better than the 20 percent your boss asked for initially.

Dread turns to anxiety, and anxiety turns to panic. Once the adrenaline starts coursing through your body, you are unlikely to make the right decisions. This is a physiological response that results in one of two survival techniques: fight or flight. Neither seems like an appropriate strategic response for a B2B marketer in this situation.

If you really are panicked about not generating enough leads from this new campaign, the first thing you need to do is take a deep breath. It is more important now than ever to put your strategic hat on. You may think this is a metaphor, but if you really are panicked, putting an actual hat on will help. Too many marketers get caught up in the tactics, especially at times when we need to fall back to our strategies. And a hat can really help with that focus.

Unless this is your first fully-integrated content campaign, you should have some metrics from a previous campaign to measure performance against. If you do and the new campaign is not tracking the same way as the benchmark one, try to isolate the differences. This is where all the elements of content strategy come into play.

Start with Your Audience

Has the audience changed since your last campaign? Do you know more about them now and how they respond to your content offers, both on an individual level and as a segment?

You should continue to build your audience through your campaigns, as well as learning more about them. Every campaign should be a learning experience where your knowledge builds upon the previous experience.

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Every campaign should be a learning experience.
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Continue with Your Personas

Think of your personas as a subset of your target audience. These are the people that are more likely to become customers. You should have very detailed information about who they are and how you can help them.

Has something changed in your target market? Are there new and bigger challenges that your solution no longer addresses? Has your product market fit moved on?

Next, Look at Your Content

We try to create content that resonates with our prospects, but sometimes it just doesn’t. If your previous campaign was built around the best topic for your audience—solving for their number-one pain point—it is hard to match those results the second time around. Maybe you just had a better title last time. Are there any seasonal differences or industry events that helped the last time or hindered this campaign?

Finally, Your Channels

If you are like many content marketers, your first instinct may be to push out all your content to all of your channels. That is not always the best approach and certainly seems to be falling out of favor. While this may not hamper performance, it can consume resources. You really need to make sure your prospects are on the channels you are using, so you can get engagement on those channels. Consider a roll-out that lets posts achieve success on one channel before sharing to another channel.

With more and more content being created and distributed everywhere, focus on learning something with every campaign that can improve the next campaign. If you do the same thing every time, you risk achieving less each time and not meeting your goals.

Get more content like this, plus the very BEST marketing education, totally free. Get our Definitive email newsletter.

When I ask sales managers to describe a typical day, they often say that they come into the office at 8:00am with a good plan for the day, then at 8:05am a rep calls up or walks into their office and says “We’ve got a problem.” The next thing the manager knows, it’s 6:00pm and […]

The post 3 Things Great Sales Managers Stop Doing appeared first on TopLine Leadership.

I’ll be the first to admit the somewhat scary level of my geekdom.

No, I’m not part of the Sherlock fandom. I don’t (often) wear t-shirts with 80’s video games prominently featured. And, I don’t have a man-bun.

But, there is this: I absolutely love to read and research – probably for far too much of my working day – about subjects like SEO, inbound marketing, conversion optimization, and other topics guaranteed to glaze the stares of nearly anyone I’m likely to meet outside of Comicon or other similar networking events.

Amid all this research, I’ve come across the concept of growth hacking repeatedly, and it’s always intrigued me. But, since I make my living helping companies accomplish great things with inbound marketing, for the longest time I felt like growth hacking was from “the other side of the tracks.” Like it was nefarious magic they could use, but that nice guys like me didn’t get caught up in.

And here’s why:

One authoritative article after another from sources I love and respect seemed to put growth hacking and inbound marketing on opposite sides of the table, with many of them pitting the two against each other in a no-holds-barred battle for supremacy. In many cases, these marketers even painted growth hacking in an ugly light, as if it was the new kid on the playground and they didn’t like how their girlfriends were smiling at him.

So, I started to investigate. I was hesitant at first, almost feeling like that kid who accidentally comes across an old magazine in the back of his dad’s sock drawer, only to realize a moment later that it’s just Sports Illustrated – and not even that issue. But once I gave into my geek tendencies and started really diving in, I realized that this seeming dichotomy simply doesn’t exist.

In fact, the principles of growth hacking can and should work hand-in-hand with solid inbound marketing to create a killer strategy for impressive results.

Here’s an overview of what I discovered:

First of all, what exactly is growth hacking?

I think this is where some of my fellow marketers and marketing bloggers have gone off-course. Over the years since the concept was first introduced and the phrase was coined by Sean Ellis, then CEO of Qualaroo and an experienced tech startup growth hacker from before it was cool, it’s been both expanded and watered down through overuse and misapplication.

Here’s Sean’s original definition of a growth hacker from 2010:

“A growth hacker is a person whose true north is growth. Everything they do is scrutinized by its potential impact on scalable growth… The common characteristic (among growth hackers) seems to be an ability to take responsibility for growth and an entrepreneurial drive. The right growth hacker will have a burning desire to connect your target market with your must have solution. They must have the creativity to figure out unique ways of driving growth in addition to testing/evolving the techniques proven by other companies.”

How do people view growth hacking?

As you can clearly see, when the concept of growth hacking was originally put out there, it wasn’t about growth at all costs or deceiving the public into funding a company’s growth as quickly as possible.

But that seems to be what dominates the view of at least some modern marketers when they discuss growth hacking. Like it can be lumped in with performance-enhancing drugs in sports: an enviable, obviously functional, but nonetheless unethical way to go about achieving success.

And, unfortunately, there are plenty of “experts” out there – in the marketing field and many others, I’m sure – who call themselves growth hackers, but who are actually just individuals looking for the fastest way to get from point A to point B, regardless of the long-term effect on the reputation, resources, or future of the client they’re “helping” with their questionable advice.

How can growth hacking and inbound marketing enhance each other?

When you get down to it, inbound marketing is a marketing framework that includes both strategies and tactics. The bottom line goal is to draw in your ideal customer by offering them informative, helpful, and engaging content that answers their questions, boosts their confidence in your brand, and eventually makes them want to do business with you.

Growth hacking – although it informs numerous strategies and tactics – is actually a mindset more than anything else. It’s a way of looking at commerce, marketing, and many other topics with a singular focus on growing a business.

Growth hacking – although it informs numerous strategies and tactics – is actually a mindset more than anything else.
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So, we can bring together the best aspects of these two ideas – and actually end up with something more than the sum of its parts – by applying a growth hacking mindset to our inbound marketing strategies and tactics. It’s really that simple.

Here are some quick examples:

Inbound Strategy / Outcome	Inbound Tactic	Growth Hack
Increase traffic to my website	Publish quality SEO’d content on my site that appeals to the target audience	Distribute a link to that content on every available channel my target audience may frequent
Increase qualified leads	Create a premium piece of content that appeals to the target audience and require an email address for access	Change the download form to require both an email address and a social share to access the premium content
Enhance my position as a thought leader	Write an authoritative book on my chosen niche and self-publish it	Include no less than 50 interviews and/or quotes from established thought leaders in my niche and ask them to notify their audiences about the book

These are very simple examples and applying a growth hacking mentality to inbound marketing will get a lot more involved and granular than that. True growth hacking is very much a data-driven discipline that relies on analytics, testing, and optimization to determine just how to keep the company driving forward.

But inbound marketing should be highly data- and analytics-driven as well. If we’re practicing inbound marketing but failing to collect and analyze data regarding its effect, how would we even know we need to grow, much less how to go about doing it?

Can you apply a growth hacking mindset to your inbound marketing strategy?

There’s a lot more to be said about this topic, and I hope to write about it some more in the near future. But for now, take a look at that question in bold above and give it a few minutes of real, earnest thought.

If you really think about it, I’m confident you’ll find the answer is definitely a resounding “yes.” In fact, I’d be amazed to find any organization in business today who couldn’t apply some level of the growth hacking mentality to whatever inbound marketing strategy they already have in place.

With that in mind, here’s your homework assignment:

Make up a table like the one above and use it as the template for a brainstorming session with your marketing team at your next staff meeting. Fill in your current strategic goals for your inbound program, and what tactics you’re employing right now to reach those goals.

Then, start spitballing ideas for hacks that could produce massive growth. They’re not all going to be viable or even wise. But get them out there on the whiteboard anyway. The more input you receive, the more creative you can be, the more likely you are to run across the ultimate growth hack for your unique inbound marketing program.

Ann Pettifor, leading economist and author of "The Production of Money" told Business Insider that bitcoin is flawed as money because it is a "finite asset."

Speaking about the origins and usage of bitcoin, she said: "Bitcoin was invented by some big bad guys on the dark web as a secret currency, for which they could exchange goods and services.

"The idea was similar to the gold standard which is that you would have a finite asset - which is your bitcoin, which would then increase in value over time because it is finite.

"The problem with a finite asset is that the economy is not finite, and if you have a limited amount of money to match this almost unlimited capacity of people in the economy to do things, money doesn't work."

Produced by Joe Daunt. Filmed by David Ibekwe.

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Bounced email addresses can be one of the most frustrating aspects of email marketing. A bounce means your reader didn’t get the information they wanted to get and you wanted them to see. But a bounce is something technical that only delivery pros can deal with, right? Nope. In fact, there are many things you can do to help your emails make it to your readers’ inboxes.

In this post, we’ll go over the differences between hard and soft bounces, why they occur, and how to prevent and resolve issues with high bounce rates.

What is a bounce?

An email bounces when it can’t be delivered to a receiving email address. The reasons can be permanent or transient, solvable or irreparable, so when a bounce occurs, a return to sender message is sent back from the recipient’s mail server to help diagnose the issue. Bounces are usually categorized as either hard or soft, depending on how series the problem is.

What’s the difference between a hard and soft bounce?

Hard bounces are permanent delivery failures. This could be as a result of an invalid, erroneous address, an outdated domain, or an address which has fallen out of use. At Campaign Monitor, if an email is marked as a hard bounce it’s automatically suppressed and won’t be sent to again.

Soft bounces are temporary delivery failures and can occur for a variety of reasons. There may be a temporary issue with the receiving server, the recipient’s mailbox may be full or the receiving server may have identified an email as too large, to name just a few. There are many reasons that soft bounces occur, though by carefully maintaining your list and ensuring your data is sourced with opt-in permission, you can mitigate the potential for these kinds of bounces.

In most cases, an address will soft bounce five times before being automatically converted by Campaign Monitor into a hard bounce.

If you’re seeing bounce rates above the 2% industry standard, continuing to send to those addresses without action and investigation on your part will damage your sending reputation with receiving ISPs and will degrade the deliverability of your future sends.

What is a high email bounce rate?

It’s important to understand that a small number of bounces are to be expected over the lifetime of an email subscriber list. Addresses are changed or abandoned by their owners, people change roles or jobs, and temporary delivery issues can result in a small number of bounces too. The benchmark for bounces is less than 2%. Anything above a 2% bounce rate for your email campaign is worthy of your attention. If you’re seeing bounce rates over 5%, or even as high as 10% or greater, this suggests a significant problem that you will want to resolve.

Now that we’ve covered why email addresses bounce, you’re probably asking yourself if you can do anything to prevent high bounce rates? Although there are some aspects of email delivery that are out of your control, there are still plenty of things you can do to make sure you have a low bounce rate.

Use permission-based, opt-in data

It all starts with your list. Lists that are not created with opt-in permission of each individual recipient are more likely to see issues with high bounces and invalid addresses. Ensure you are in compliance with our policies, that your lists are built with permission and that your sign up forms include an opt-in checkbox.

Non-compliant sources such as scraped, purchased or third party email addresses are strictly prohibited from use at Campaign Monitor and will always see issues with high bounces, low engagement, and deliverability.

The key to the success in email marketing is the strength and compliance of the list – use only opt-in, permission-based lists that comply with our policies and best practices and you will already be on your way to engaged, active lists with low bounce rates.

Be smart with incentivized signups and competitions

Common sources of email addresses that see high bounces are competition forms, WIFI sign-up pages (where you get free WIFI for signing up) or other incentivized sign-up forms.

Sometimes, people are tempted by a competition prize or want to sign up to use WIFI though they do not wish to be added to a mailing list. These people use fake addresses or abandoned mailboxes in order to take advantage of the offer without receiving future emails.

Step one, as always, is to be compliant with our policies and ensure that you have an opt-in checkbox on your sign up form so that only people who check the box and want your emails are added to your list. Be clear with your subscribers about what they will be receiving and let them know they can unsubscribe at any time.

Show the value of your newsletter at sign up and make sure that your content is valuable and relevant. Bad newsletters with good incentives attract bad addresses that aren’t likely to engage with your emails. Give people a reason to sign up beyond any incentives for becoming a new subscriber and give them absolute clarity about what they are signing up for.

Use confirmed opt-in

Confirmed opt-in can help assure data quality across all of your subscribe forms. By ensuring that people must activate their subscription with a confirmation email, any erroneous or inactive addresses simply won’t make it onto your active subscriber list. This can greatly reduce potential bounces, and lists using confirmed opt-in tend to be more engaged and active too.

Don’t use a free domain send-from address

Using a free domain email address such as Gmail or Hotmail can mean that your emails will fail a DMARC check by receiving domains operating a DMARC policy. Your emails will automatically bounce at Gmail and Yahoo and are likely to be bounced or be routed to junk by many receiving domains.

Be sure to use a send-from address at your business domain and authenticate it too. This will help ensure your emails are not caught in spam filters unnecessarily. Not only will you improve your bounce rates but your general email deliverability will be improved.

Send consistently and frequently

Regular, consistent contact with your subscribers is an integral part of a successful email marketing program. Lists can go stale in as little as 6 months, and lists that have remained dormant over a longer period of time can see issues with engagement and spam complaints, as well as with bounces.

Send your recipients a welcome email to engage them from the start, and send them regular, relevant communications.

People often change their email addresses or leave previous ones abandoned which are subsequently likely to bounce. By contacting them regularly, you can be sure any bounces happen in low numbers over time, rather than seeing a large number of bounces at once from a list that is only contacted sporadically.

There is no one size fits all solution to email sending frequency, though if you only email your subscribers a couple of times a year, you should probably connect more regularly with your subscribers so they expect to hear from you on a regular basis and engage when they do.

Use a preference center

Be sure to include a preference center link in your emails so that people can update their email address and encourage them to do so. Not only can this have a positive effect on preventing future bounces, but giving people control over the emails they receive is great for engagement and for cultivating trust too.

Use a list verification service

If your list has been dormant for a period of time, or if you have been sending via a system with less than stellar bounce management systems, you may want to use a third party list verification service to identify and remove undeliverable addresses ahead of sending.

You can use our App Store to integrate with services such as BriteVerify or Kickbox and verify your list.

Removing the undeliverable addresses is a no brainer, though you may also see some services classify some addresses as risky, or unknown. In those cases, removing them entirely may not be the right step, though we would highly recommend staggering sends to those kinds of addresses.

Add a small number of those risky or unknown addresses to your list to begin with, monitor the results, and then add some more if all goes well. If you see high bounce rates from these addresses, you may want to rethink using them at all.

Preventing a huge spike in bounce rates by proceeding carefully with riskier data is essential for good email deliverability. Inbox providers and spam filters pay close attention to bounce rates and attempts to deliver mail to invalid addresses. If your bounce rates are sufficiently high, they may take steps to reject or block your emails entirely, and you could see bounces at legitimate inboxes too.

By verifying your list and adding any risky or unknown data steadily, you will prevent undue damage to your sending reputation and help the delivery of your emails with all inbox providers.

Be vigilant and monitor your results

As with engagement and other deliverability issues, the longer you leave bounce issues to fester, the greater the damage to your sending reputation. Monitor the results of your campaigns and journeys closely. If you see a spike in bounce rates, take a look at the bounce activity report. Are you seeing an influx of hard bounces, or have you see a huge upswing in soft bounces, perhaps at a particular domain?

Take action to improve your sign-up form, double check your data sources and the age of your lists. Ensure your authentication is in place and that your send-from address is from the same domain. If you’re still at a loss over why you are seeing high bounce rates, reach out to our support team, who will be able to help diagnose and resolve any issues.

Authenticate your emails

Email authentication is now one of the most important factors in a strong email marketing strategy. Failing to authenticate your sending domain means that receiving servers are likely to bounce or junk your emails as they cannot determine the legitimacy of your sends.

By authenticating your sending domain, you are proving the legitimacy and authenticity of your emails to receiving ISPs and this alone can have a profound effect on reducing soft bounces and improving the deliverability of your email campaigns in general.

Ramp up

In the event that you have a large email list that has not been sent to for some time, you’ll want to ramp up your sends carefully and monitor the results of your smaller campaigns ahead of sending to the full list.

Sending to the entirety of an older list and seeing a large number of bounces can be a disaster for the deliverability of your future emails. By sending to a smaller segment of your list first, you can monitor the performance and take steps to improve those results. By ramping up to send to your full list steadily, you can better control the impact of your campaigns, course correct if necessary, and preserve your sending reputation.

Wrap up

The key to understanding email bounce rates is to acknowledge that a small number of bounces are always to be expected, but preventing a large amount of bounces is often in your control. High bounce rates are usually an indicator of issues with the age, permissions or previous maintenance of your email list. By following the above steps and taking ownership of how your list is created and maintained, you can prevent high bounce rates and see further success with your email campaigns.

Storytelling, as explained by Douwe Bergsma, Georgia Pacific’s CMO, is indeed a different way of looking at marketing communications, one that requires new processes, metrics, and staff. Below, you will find some fascinating details that often separate a good story from a great one, including three secrets to crafting a successful marketing story, specifically. H4>

Drew: Are your KPIs different than you would have had in a pre-storytelling era?

Douwe: On a high level, I don’t think so. We still look at brand awareness and key brand attributes and the impact it has on penetration, loyalty and ultimately our profit. We just noticed that the way we were approaching it, we were not optimally achieving our KPI. We still want to see how Brawny does with the idea of toughness and gentleness. We still want to know if our core consumers—our key target segments—still appreciate Brawny in a way that they are receiving the right value for their money, compared to their alternatives. At the highest level, it didn’t change. At the lower level, it did, because before we were single-mindedly measuring the impact of a 30-second ad on this metric. Now we look at the combined impact recognizing that at the end of the day, it’s still about driving conversion from intent to purchase.

Drew: Do marketers need to be more patient with storytelling?

Douwe: Good question, I haven’t thought about that. In the development, yes. It takes longer for a fully integrated story to develop because design plays a key role. One of the things we’ve learned is that a story needs to be holistic including the design of the brand packaging as well as the design of the products inside. One example of this is the way the Brawny giant comes to life on our packaging. And packaging, in our industry, has a longer lead-time. So in order to do it right and holistically, it takes longer to prepare and develop. In actuality, I don’t think the level of patience is different from what we used to do.

Drew: Let’s get specific. What’s your leading example of storytelling?

Douwe: Brawny is the only brand where we have completely overhauled our packaging as well as our other touch points. We’ve developed our story framework—the conflict is really between tough and gentle. And then the fundamental human truth is about protecting yourself and those you love. This requires you to be understanding and open to what life throws at you, but also have the tenacity, toughness, and strength to tackle any challenge. We were inspired by a quote from Roosevelt: “speak softly and carry a big stick, you will go far.” We translated that into a campaign, featuring the Brawny giant. How do you tackle and handle life’s challenges? By staying strong while continuing to be gentle as these challenges come at you. We showcase The Brawny® Man with the larger-than-life look he had in the 1970s — so there’s kind of a double meaning here—in our campaign, which represents kind of a gentle giant, which is gentleness and strength in there.

Drew: Tell me more about your partnership with AOL.

Douwe: With AOL, we were able to develop and sponsor content that helped tell our various brand stories. For example, in Brawny®’s Everyday Giants series, we featured Khali Sweeney, who started the Downtown Boxing Gym in Detroit, which basically became an afterschool academic support program, where he gives kids free boxing lessons after they finished their homework. The program was for inner-city kids in Detroit and every student who went through his program that’s been going on for several years now, there’s a 100 percent graduation rate and 80 percent went to college.

Drew: In a programmatic real-time world, how do you adjust to storytelling or does that play any kind of role in all of this?

Douwe: Programmatic is more into where and when and what frequency; it’s less about the content. And our storytelling predominantly focuses on the content of our communication, which closely relates to our media placement. So programmatic has not really impacted the story we’re telling, more when and where we telling it. And obviously, it allows us to find those people that are in our target audience. It allows us to find our specific audience better and faster than we normally do.

Drew: What are some of the pitfalls to be avoided?

Douwe: First and foremost, it’s very tempting to just focus on the storytelling. You first need to really focus on the story framework. Because our whole industry is so used to drafting a brief to develop an ad. Draft a brief; write a Tweet. But before you do the brief, you actually need to know your story’s framework. It’s like sending an improv artist on stage who doesn’t know what a story framework is.

Second, with storytelling, there is not a single linear pass to it. You need to be very agile and experimental and embrace the mistakes and the failures you have along the way and have a very experimental mindset. You need to do a lot of trial and error and go down specific pathways to figure out what’s going to work for the brand or what doesn’t.

And last but not least, we’ve learned that you also need to make sure that you recruit and cherish the few storytellers in the building who have the passion and the talent to develop story frameworks. I discovered that there are quite a few people that have that innate balance at companies like Coca-Cola. In fact, Shari Neumann, who leads all our storytelling here at Georgia-Pacific is a former Coca-Cola person.

The post Secrets of Effective Brand Storytelling appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Don Mulhern published a brilliant post in LinkedIn the other day. I thought I’d expand on his ideas.

I spend innumerable hours doing deal reviews. 95% go the same way, they focus on the product the sales person is selling, not what the customer is trying to achieve and how we can help the customer do that.

Sales people spend endless hours talking about:

• This is what they like in our product, this is what they like in the competition.
• We showed them these things in the demo, they really liked it!
• We just need to overcome these perceptions of the product, then we can win.
• If we could do these things with our product, it’s a slam dunk.
• The customer wants it in “torchlight red,” can we paint it? (OK, I made this one up, but you’d be amazed at some of the things I hear.)

Inevitably, I get impatient, I may ask something, like, “What are they buying this for?” The sales people look at me, inevitably thinking, “Haven’t you been paying attention, they want to buy my product and I have to tell them how great our product is!!!”

The fixation sales people have on selling their products blinds them to what the customer is trying to achieve. Customers aren’t buying our products just to be buying, they are buying our products to solve a problem, to address and opportunity, to achieve something they can’t otherwise do.

Inevitably, the product is just a component of what they are trying to do, but there are many other challenges they struggle with. This is where they need help and this is where sales people create the greatest value.

Customers are concerned with implementation, they are concerned with risk, they are concerned with their ability to be successful with their customers or beating their competition. They are concerned with improving quality, reducing cost, reducing cycle time. They want to drive growth and revenues, they want to drive profitability.

They want to be successful, they want some level of sanity in their otherwise insane lives, they want their bosses off their backs, they want to get a promotion or a bonus or keep their jobs. They want to get home at a reasonable hour to spend time with their families and friends. They want to free up time to do other things, some that may be more important than this specific issue.

These are the things our customers are interested in. These are the reasons our customers are buying, but buying is just a small part of what they are trying to achieve.

When salespeople lose sight of this, focusing instead on their products, they are no longer being helpful to the customer. They are no longer focusing on the issues that are most important to the customer, and which create the greatest differentiated value.

Our products are just a small part of what our customers care about. In the end, they will have several alternatives that meet their “product needs.” But what our customers really want is a supplier that understands what the customer is trying to do and is helping them achieve that. It goes far beyond the product.

B2B content marketing without visual content has become the ignored stepchild of content marketing. It lurks in the corners and doesn’t gain the limelight. Here’s the takeaway: In a content-flooded world, you won’t stand out without engaging visuals.

Do you hold back from investing in visual content for fear of complicated programs and a large investment? Fear no more! Visual content creation is easier — and more essential — than ever before.

You’ve probably heard it before — visuals are a must in the content marketing arena. It was true then, and it only increases in value over time.

Let’s review why visual content is so vital to your overall B2B content strategy, and what you can do to get in the game.

Why You Need to Leverage Visuals in Your B2B Content Marketing

Images Help People Remember Your Brand

Using well-defined styles in your visual content helps establish your brand in people’s minds.. Create images that encapsulate your company’s personalityand your brand will be more recognizable.

Add your brand’s logo to each image, and it will be an extra step that imprints your brand on the mind of your audience.

Take this example from one of my blog posts. In every piece of visual content, I include my logo — here it’s centered at the very bottom. It’s not the primary focus, but it’s there so that people will associate the piece with my brand. Small details like this can go a long way towards enhancing brand awareness.

 

Brands are creating content that informs and entertains customers with the intent to engage and eventually convert them. –Juntae Dulane

They Trigger an Emotional Response

Visuals are a powerful tool in generating the right emotions in your readers. Psychology has proven that certain colors are inherently linked to emotions within the human brain.

For example, orange evokes playful and energetic emotions, while blue creates a trustworthy and overall inviting feeling. Colors play a major role in how your audience interacts with your content.

Even the symmetry (or asymmetry) of your image can add to this emotional element. You can create feelings of chaos or order, intimacy or isolation, all within the layout of your visual graphics.

Take this example from Cisco Security. The color blue inspires trustworthiness — the exact feeling you want from your security software. And the icons inspire confidence in the brand’s technical abilities.

People Are on Content Overload

The internet is an overflowing sea of content — with more being added every nanosecond! So why do visuals help? For starters, 65% of people are visual learners, with the human brain processing images 60,000 times faster than text. I don’t know about you, but that’s the kind of power I want working for me.

The easier it is for your audience to process your information, the more they will retain, and the longer they will remain on your content.

Take this infographic from General Electric, with its statistical data and graphs. If this was made into straight textual content, it would be dry and boring. Yet, in this colorful and lively infographic, the information is easier to absorb with the key points easy to grasp.

 

If you find that words alone fail to grab your audience’s attention, create infographics that would visually appeal to them–Neal Schaffer

Social Media Demands It

Visuals are the media part of B2B social media marketing — it’s a key reason we we log on and engage. If you want your content to be sharable, visual graphics are essential. When is the last time you shared an article with no image? Or clicked on a title with no image on social media? Mostly likely, rarely to never. That’s because images are the lifeblood of social media.

If you hope to incorporate social media effectively into your content marketing (it’s a necessity in this day and age), then images are an imperative.

Adobe shows how to create killer content that gets uber results. Take their Twitter page. Within seconds, they show off their visual content skills with video, a slideshow, and images associated with every post. Their variety of visual content keeps their audience happy.

Social media is the quickest, most efficient, and most cost-effective way to communicate your message to the world –Neal Schaffer

It’s Great For SEO

Images play a humungous part in SEO best practices. Every image you use should be optimized for SEO — to do this, all you need is to use your target keyword in your image’s title, file name, and alt text. While this is not visible to site visitors, it will be visible to (and carry a lot of weight) with search engines.

Plus, every time that a visual element gets shared, it adds another backlink that improves your SEO.

 

8 Cool Tools to Add to Your Visual Content Creation Toolbox

1. Landscape

Every social network has its own dimensions for images — but doing them all by hand can be a chore. Make it easier with this handy tool from Sprout Social, which allows you to pick the dimension that looks the best for your social network.

2. Slidely

This tool makes it super easy to create an interactive multimedia slideshow. The combination of cool art effects, music and your own images produces an engaging story Plus, it syncs with your Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr account to make visual creation a breeze.

3. Canva

This is really several tools in one. It allows you to pick specific, social-media-related sizes, and add from a library of free visual and text elements to create visually engaging and compelling images. Canva also has a variety of templates for a very professional look.

4. Flixel

This cinemagraphic tool brings your ordinary photos to life — almost literally. It adds movement to key parts of your photo, which draws in the eye and makes the image pop.

5. Awesome Screenshot

Do you have an instructional post where you would like to visually walk people through the steps? This handy tool allows you to do this in minutes — take a screenshot, and then use this tool to mark it up with arrows, boxes, and text that will create a visual guide for your audience.

6. Infogr.am

Want to produce helpful infographics, but don’t know where to start? Infogr.am makes it an easy process — just choose your template, input your information (data, images, and branding), and watch the program bring your infographic to life. Once done, it provides easy-to-share formats so you can get the final product out to your audience.

7. Camtasia

Interested in adding video to your visual B2B content strategy repertoire? Have no fear. Camtasia is here. This tool is perfect for how-to and demonstration videos. It allows you to simultaneously take a video of your screen and add voice-over to bring your audience on a hands-on journey to your desktop.

8. VideoScribe

Many brands have found it useful to incorporate whiteboard animation into their video line-up. This online tool draws whiteboard-style using your own images. You can then add voice-over, as well as your own music. At the end, it will look like you hired a professional whiteboard animator to draw what this program does in a matter of minutes.

A Few Points to Keep in Mind…

• In this age of social media, visual content is an absolute necessity for any B2B business
• Visual content is an essential part of SEO best practices
• Nowadays, people are overloaded with content, and retain information better when it’s presented visually
• Colorful images are a great way to engage your readers emotionally in what they read

Now the ball is in your court. Visual creation is now in your hands — so easy that anybody can do it! Enhance your B2B content marketing with beautiful images that will make your audience go “wow.”

There are few people who know what it takes to become known, like Anthony’s guest on this episode, Mark Schaefer. Mark has spent his entire adult life consistently generating the quality content that has placed him in the spotlight in the business world. From studying under Peter Drucker to engaging with business leaders worldwide, Mark’s experience has led him to write his newest book, “Known” – an examination of how we become known and why it’s more important and powerful to be known than to be famous. Anthony and Mark have a wide-ranging conversation, all centered around the things it takes to truly become known for the value you provide, so be sure you make the time to listen.

Mark Schaefer on Becoming Known Instead of Becoming FamousClick To Tweet

How being known is different and more powerful than being famous.

A quick check just now reveals that 27,100 people are Googling the phrase, “How to become famous” every day. That tells you a lot about the culture we live in. But Mark Schaefer, Anthony’s guest on this episode of In The Arena, is convinced that being known is very, very different than being famous and that it has a great deal more power for good in the world. In this conversation, Anthony quizzes Mark about his book, “Known” and asks about the specific things that go into being known. Be advised, it’s a long game, but one well worth playing. You’re going to enjoy this conversation.

Being famous is about you. Becoming known is about your goals.

Anyone who wants to become famous is seeking glory, the spotlight, notoriety. And when you look closely you’ll see that those things all have to do with the individual. They are purely selfish. But becoming known is a step in the journey of those who are trying to make a difference, it’s a move toward accomplishing their crazy goals that can change the world. Find out how Mark Schaefer says we have to go about becoming known and why it’s the exact opposite of becoming famous by listening to this episode. In his characteristic way, Mark tells stories and gives examples so you can walk away from this conversation knowing exactly what you need to do next. Ready? Welcome to In The Arena.

Being famous is about you. Becoming known is about your goalsClick To Tweet

How important is content creation in becoming known?

In the digital world, content is everywhere – from stupid cat videos to in-depth articles outlining the newest sales strategies. With so much content available you might think that adding your voice to the noise is not going to make much difference. But here’s how it can: If you create content that is better and you do it more consistently, you’ll rise to the top – you’ll become known. Mark Schaefer highlights the importance of creating great content in this day and age and provides some tips for how you can adjust your mindset to play the long game required – and it’s all on this episode.

Consistency is the power behind becoming known through content creation.

It’s hard to keep going when you don’t see the results of what you’re doing. Mark Schaefer understands that. He’s been posting incredible, regular content for years and it wasn’t until the recent past that he began seeing the influence he was having. Why did he keep going all those years when it seemed like nothing was really working? It’s because he has the philosophy that as long as you see signs that what you’re doing MIGHT be making a difference, you should keep going. The certainty of your impact only comes through consistency, and by default, that’s a long game. You have to believe in the change you’re trying to make enough to keep going. You can hear a good deal more of Mark’s wisdom, on this episode of In The Arena.

Consistency is the power behind becoming known through content creationClick To Tweet

Outline of this great episode

• [2:00] Anthony’s introduction of his guest today, Mark Schaefer.
• [3:36] What is the new equity of influence?
• [7:53] Why being known is different than being famous.
• [12:29] How important is content creation in becoming known?
• [20:46] Anthony’s decision to create content to become known – and the results.
• [23:31] Is there any truth to the “follow your passion” mantra?
• [28:32] How narrow should a niche focus be to truly become known?
• [31:40] Human content VS non-human content.
• [36:39] Mark’s experience studying under Peter Drucker.
• [40:13] The truth behind Mark’s biggest blog post: Content Shock.

Our Sponsors:

Join Anthony for the Outbound Conference

Jeffrey Gitomer Sales Seminars – use the code “Anthony” to receive your discount.

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Resources & Links mentioned in this episode

• Mark’s website: https://www.businessesgrow.com
• Mark’s post “Content Shock” – https://www.businessesgrow.com/2014/01/06/content-shock/

The theme song “Into the Arena” is written and produced by Chris Sernel. You can find it on Soundcloud

Connect with Anthony

Website: www.TheSalesBlog.com

Youtube: www.Youtube.com/Iannarino

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/iannarino

Twitter: https://twitter.com/iannarino

Google Plus: https://plus.google.com/+SAnthonyIannarino

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/iannarino

Tweets you can use to share this episode

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The post Mark Schaefer on Becoming Known Instead of Becoming Famous – Episode #81 appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Content marketing is not about talking about yourself; it’s about creating content that delivers true value to your audience—the content they need and want. No matter who your audience is, I can guarantee that what they need and want is information that helps them learn, grow, and improve in some way.

When your brand provides that information, you’re providing an education—and that is a truly valuable service.

“Education” through content marketing can take many forms: practical (how-tos and tutorials), theoretical (deep dives into specific subjects), or brand-specific (product information and features). Most importantly, it delivers useful information in the right context, at the right time.

Unfortunately, over the last decade, we’ve seen too many marketers focus on what they want to say instead of what their audience wants to learn. This is a huge mistake; if you want to succeed in content marketing, focusing on education is crucial. It’s also not that hard. Here are five ways to create education-based content that delivers great value to your audience.

1) Prove that you feel their pain

People want help from those who know what they’re going through, who can help them navigate those issues. Therefore, the best way to make yourself attractive to a customer is to help solve their problems via content.

An added benefit: Creating this type of content not only shows your audience that you care about educating them but proves that you can educate them, positioning your brand as a helpful resource.

How do you get familiar with your clients’ pain points? Ask. Email them. Call them. Take them out to lunch, dinner, or drinks.

Whichever way you do it, use this information to fuel your content.

We’ve created audience personas with the information we’ve gleaned from our conversations with clients, which we reference during every brainstorm. This helps us ensure that each idea addresses as specific pain point. (Here’s how to make your own personas if you haven’t done it already.)

2) Let them learn from your mistakes

In addition to wanting help from people who understand their problems, your customers want to know that you have personally overcome their struggles (or personally know how to solve them).

Customers respect industry leaders who can speak authoritatively on the issues they face. Yes, “thought leadership” is a term that gets tossed around a lot, and so it has been cheapened, but the original idea behind it is to showcase your experience, share the lessons you’ve learned, and prove that you know your stuff.

Seth Godin has said, “The lessons we remember are the lessons we learn the hard way.” Even if you don’t think you are the expert, you probably still know more than your customers and thus are in a good position to educate them.

On that note, if you feel like an impostor because someone has 10 more years of experience than you do, here’s the good news: Everyone deals with this syndrome—myself included. (Here’s a great piece to help you overcome impostor syndrome.)

3) Help them get to know you

Showcasing your unique point of view is truly the only way to stand out from your competitors. No one has had the same set of experiences and life lessons you’ve had, and this is truly your best value prop.

Sure, there’s a company with more website visitors than you have. Sure, they may have more e-books than you do. And, sure, they may have more speaking gigs than you do. But what they don’t have is your exact experience or perspective. They don’t have your same personality, values, client service style, or goals.

Don’t try to be Tim Ferriss, Seth Godin, or Tony Robbins. Learn from them, but forge your own path.

The more you can showcase who you are through content and educate your audience through interaction with your brand, the more your audience will forge a more unique, personal connection with you.

This content will also attract people who have similar perspectives or philosophies, which means that audience is more likely to convert (as opposed to other methods, such as paid search or radio advertising, which reaches broader audiences).

At Column Five, we produce informative content for our clients, but we also create content to showcase our company’s values and personal passions (e.g., our People for Periods interactive infographic to help destigmatize menstruation).

4) Teach them a practical skill

Thought leadership is important, but sometimes brands get a little too esoteric, musing in long blog posts or philosophizing on a podcast. That knowledge is valuable, but if it isn’t immediately applicable to your audience’s life, it can take a backseat.

Instead, try repackaging that knowledge into smaller, shareable content your audience can put to use. Even a small tidbit via a tweet can help. Seek to educate through tutorials, how-to guides, hacks, and tips, but remember that practicality is key for this type of content.

You can also use this type of helpful microcontent to promote your larger pieces. For example, we created this infographic on how to optimize your blog for publishing to help promo an e-book on content distribution.

5) Learn together

You are an expert in your industry. You know your stuff. But you’re also eager to expand your knowledge to give your audience the best information possible at all times. Demonstrating that you are also an active student teaches your audience that you aren’t just resting on your laurels. It helps them learn new things, too.

To help educate ourselves and our audience, we conduct Q&As with industry leaders we think are doing great work and are successful in their own lanes. For example, a few members of our team were so enamored of PopSugar’s Snapchat stories, we interviewed them to find out everything about their production process and provide a few tips to our readers.

Remember: Value comes first

Expanding your reach, exploring new ideas, and fostering a learning community through content can only help your brand, as long as you’re focused on providing value. Remember the wise words of Zig Ziglar: “You can have everything in life you want if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”

To learn more about creating better content, check out our team’s top tips to make you a better content marketer and take a look at our best fixes for your biggest content marketing problems. Of course, if you need help with your content efforts, we’re always happy to chat.

The anticipation leading up to a webinar can be stressful. Logistically, there’s a lot of moving parts, from your pre-promotion to setting up the technology platform, and collaboration needed with internal and/or external thought leaders.

There’s a big spotlight on marketing to pull off a seamless event. If something goes awry, there’s very visible egg on our faces.

But in my experience, attendance can be the biggest knot. It sits in your stomach as travel into work that day. The first inquiry by leadership post-webinar will be requesting the total audience.

It’s middle school math to calculate ROI at that point. And if attendance is low, questions surface about “best use of resources,” especially if the speaker was a senior leader or had a high fee.

Yet, the value to the brand in retaining a single customer’s attention for the length of a webinar is meaningful, let alone a group, regardless of size. Compare it to your average time-on-site and the number of resources devoted to that beast.

I understand we aren’t comparing apples to apples, but my point is low webinar attendance gets a bad rap. Let’s call a spade, a spade –attendance is a shallow metric used in the determination of the effectiveness of marketing –can you pull a crowd or not?

Let me share some learnings to help lift those numbers:

Creating Habits:

A primary pitfall of webinars is in its use. It is far too common that we do one-offs, tied to a campaign or single piece of content.

We build it, and we expect people to come. But it’s hard to change individuals’ habits or invest any great length of time. The “sign-up” in itself requires it, let alone actually attending. Consider taking a cue from broadcasting –appointment listening/watching.

Using this vehicle as a reoccurring event (vs. standalone) sways constancy with an audience. Your customer can start anticipating the event, having a greater influence on their time and attention.

This also opens the possibility of it turning into a habit, gaining a user base and the probability of that increasing over time (if you are delivering good content). This is a gradual build but proven effective.

Optimal Topics and Speakers:

Using overly broad topics, especially if it’s tied to an isolated webinar, is just asking to for low attendance and potentially losing brand sentiment. The focus needs to be timely and relevant. What’s the hook for the devotion of time and does it address an immediate need?

If the topic isn’t hot, then the speaker needs to be the draw –an industry expert, whether that be internally or externally. Providing direct access to a VIP expert can be appealing, particularly if tied to a Q/A. (Note: an unbiased perspective is key in determining if the speaker has validity in the category.)

An additional risk in broad topics is having a response that the event could have been delivered in a more appropriate experience –a format accessible when needed. If this is an impression, there’s a low probability that a user(s) will attend future webinars. Plus, the overall hit to brand sentiment.

Partnering with Media:

You increase the potential of attendance by partnering with a media outlet and simplifies logistics. They can provide:

Authority: A news source has clout to leverage
Reach: Their database more is likely larger than your CRM
Credit: Industry media may have an expedited process for CE credit approval (if applicable)
Technology: Use of their webinar platform reduces marketing operation needs

If you are having low attendance and are doing an individual or small series of webinars, I’d recommend tapping into a media source. The benefits outweigh the cost.

Planning Post Communications:

When focused on live attendance, the full value of this content is undervalued. We live in an on-demand world.

The post communication strategy is equally as important as the invitation plan. It goes without saying, the replay of the webinar needs to be publicly posted.

To those who did sign-up but didn’t attend. The initial sign-up signifies interest, yet there are countless factors and priorities that could pull a user from attending live. Personalize a communication for this audience and send them the replay.

Also, consider retargeting customers who didn’t open an initiation or opened but didn’t sign-up. There are limitless considerations in either situation and the assumption that they just weren’t interested, is a fallacy. Hit them again with emails containing the replay. (Note: refrain from sending a single email to all groups.)

With the live and on-demand numbers, you have a more sound picture in determining ROI.

The low attendance of a webinar should not be the judge and jury on the effectiveness of a marketing. To retain seconds of attention can be a tall glass, let alone extended periods of time.

A webinar is a tool to accelerate brand health and provides an opportunity for lead generation or nurturing. Using these strategies can have a greater influence on your audience to lift engagements, live or on-demand.

Yet, what is infrequently mentioned and can be difficult to measure is the grade of engagements. Can an hour with 25 customers provide equal return than a minute with thousands? It’s testing and learning to find the balance in quality vs. quantity to have an optimal channel and tactical mix of marketing.

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Bank of America officially integrated Zelle, the peer-to-peer (P2P) payment feature, into its own banking app to allow users to send real-time payments, according to The Boston Globe.

Bank of America and 18 other banks have partnered with Zelle developer Early Warning to launch this P2P app, which will allow them to attract users to their mobile banking apps. And once the rest of the banks fully launch the feature in 2017, Zelle will allow them to compete with the likes of Venmo and Square Cash.

P2P payments are growing fast, which makes them a valuable engagement tool.

• Consumers are embracing mobile P2P payments. US mobile P2P volume is expected to reach $336 billion in 2021, which represents a 61% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) since the $19 billion in 2015. Banks may be trying to capture a share of this massive payment volume before likely industry leader Venmo can freeze them out — the PayPal owned P2P app processed $17.6 billion overall in  2016, with Q4 2016 marking the product’s 14th consecutive quarter of more than 100% growth.
• Adding a P2P feature could be an effective way for banks to better engage their consumers. The average user of Venmo accesses the service at least twice a week, which clearly shows that consumers are engaged. This could prove to be even more effective for banks because they can provide other services in their app, thus giving consumers more reason to stay engaged.

As banks boost adoption of their mobile offerings, they more effectively could compete with Venmo. Given that Zelle can be integrated into a bank’s mobile app, the payment feature will immediately be available to a massive user base — Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, and Wells Fargo alone count over 67 million customers as active mobile users. This number will continue increasing especially as consumers get access to more popular features like P2P payment capabilities. Banks will also take advantage of the fact that consumers trust their banks more when it comes to financial services — for context, 75% of customers trust their banks most to provide mobile wallets.

However, banks must move fast as Venmo continues to push out features that consumers seem to be embracing —  after PayPal introduced Pay With Venmo, a buy button that allows users to pay with their Venmo accounts in certain apps,  it saw that users of the feature were 30% more engaged.

Peer-to-peer (P2P) payments, defined as informal payments made from one person to another, have long been a prominent feature of the payments industry.

That’s because individuals transfer funds to each other on a regular basis, whether it's to make a recurring payment, reimburse a friend, or split a dinner bill.  

Cash and checks have historically dominated the P2P ecosystem, and they’re still a popular tool. But as smartphones become a primary computing device, top digital platforms, like Venmo and Google Wallet, have enabled customers to turn away from cash and make those payments digitally with ease. Over the next few years, though overall P2P spend will remain constant, a shift to mobile payments across the board and increased spending power from the digital-savvy younger generation will cause the mobile P2P industry to skyrocket. 

That poses a problem for firms providing these services, though. Historically, most of these players have taken on mobile P2P at a loss because it’s a low-friction way to onboard users and won’t catch on unless it’s free, or largely free, to consumers. But as it becomes more popular and starts to eat into these firms’ traditional streams of revenue, finding ways to monetize is increasingly important. That could mean moving P2P functionality into more profitable environments, leveraging existing networks of friends to encourage spending, or offering value-added services at a nominal fee.

Jaime Toplin, research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on mobile P2P payments that examines what’s driving this shift to mobile P2P and explains why companies need to find a way to capitalize on it quickly. It discusses how firms can use the tools they have to gain in the P2P space, details several cases, and evaluates which strategies might be the most effective in monetizing these platforms.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Consumers still want mobile P2P services, and they’re turning to them. Individuals pay their peers on a regular basis, and as smartphones are increasingly used as computing devices, these consumers look to such services for fast and easy ways to pay. 
• Monetizing P2P is more important than ever. Initially, P2P was a valuable onboarding tool for companies, and when it was still a small segment, taking it on at little value or a loss didn’t have major implications. But as volume grows and user bases scale fast, finding ways to monetize quickly should be a priority for firms looking to stay ahead.
• New technology could put some apps ahead of their peers. P2P continues to rely on networks, especially for informal, social transactions. But rather than having a large network, it’s becoming important for firms to understand their user bases and the networks within them. This means that chat apps, and leveraging bot and AI technology, may offer a distinct advantage.

In full, the report:

• Forecasts the growth of the P2P market, and what portion of that will come from mobile channels, through 2021.
• Explains the factors driving that growth and details why it will come from increased usage, not increased spend per user.
• Evaluates why mobile P2P isn’t profitable for companies, and details several cases of attempts to monetize.
• Assesses which of these strategies could be most successful, and what companies need to leverage to succeed in the space.
• Provides context from other markets to explain shifting trends.

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

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

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Stereotype: a standardized mental picture that is held in common by members of a group and that represents an oversimplified opinion, affective attitude or uncritical judgment. – Webster’s Dictionary

Society frowns on stereotypes, and for good reason: They may not reflect reality and they tend to violate our common understanding that all individuals are unique.

For years, however, marketing organizations have exhibited a similar kind of oversimplification with the time-honored practice of dividing markets into customer segments and using one-size-fits-all approaches in targeting them for marketing activities.

Traditional segmentation naively assumes that, say, all technology buyers in B2B companies with more than 5,000 employees act alike and can be related to in the same manner. Or that if a customer takes a certain action, the marketing response should always be the same – automatic emails to website visitors, for example.

That no longer works in today’s world. Customers engage with brands across multiple digital touch points — from the first interaction to the buying process to ongoing customer care — and they expect a more personalized experience throughout. It’s an adaptive journey and how companies conduct it has become as important as the product they sell.

Marketing automation platforms are evolving to handle these new realities, thanks to the help of embedded predictive and artificial intelligence technologies that can anticipate buyer behaviors, automate outreach and prescribe for the business whom to engage, when to engage and what to engage with.

The latest infrastructure is giving marketers a command center that helps them streamline, automate and measure marketing activities across channels, and send highly relevant customized content to the right customer or the right potential customer at just the right time.

It also can help Marketing better partner with Sales – showing the return on investment for the different marketing activities and how they all impact pipeline.

To picture the difference between today’s more advanced marketing automation platforms and the previous generations still in use at many companies, think of what it was like to use MapQuest circa 2003 compared with Waze or Google Maps now.

MapQuest was a major improvement over paper maps, giving users a more convenient, computerized way to get directions. But the technology was static: It couldn’t change on the fly if conditions changed – say, the driver made a wrong turn or an accident occurred ahead. Today’s apps, on the other hand, constantly pull in data about traffic, road conditions, etc. to automatically offer real-time, dynamic insights.

Similarly, the latest marketing automation infrastructure is able to leverage data in real time to assess, modify and optimize marketing activities so that companies can be more effective and agile in responding to and caring for customers.

When integrated with a company’s website, social media accounts, CRM and a host of other application infrastructures, marketing automation platforms can become enterprises’ de facto engagement database of record.

Ed Koch, the late mayor of New York City, once said, “Stereotypes lose their power when the world is found to be more complex than the stereotype would suggest.” This is very true of marketing today and why more intelligent marketing automation technology that delivers a more personalized experience is a must-have.

Picture this. It’s 7 a.m. on a Sunday morning and you’re fast asleep. *Beep* your mobile phone vibrates. You drag yourself to pick the phone thinking that it could be an important text or call. Instead, there’s yet another promotional message from one of the apps on your phone. However much you may like the brand, you cannot forgo those precious extra hours of sleep on a Sunday morning for that.

Now, picture this. It’s 12 p.m. Tuesday afternoon and you’re just done with an hour long meeting with the team. Sipping your coffee, you glance at your phone to see if you’ve missed any calls. A notification appears – “Winter’s almost here. Buy from our new collection of sweaters and get 20% off. Promocode: WIN20.” The Push message also includes pictures of some really nice sweaters as well. You’re elated! You’d been contemplating buying winter wear since long. Click, search, buy, and pay- are the steps that you take in the next 15 minutes before rushing to another hour-long meeting.

That’s how engaging and powerful a push notification can be. Like any other marketing channel, the relevance and timing of a push notification sent from your browser or your app decides if it can attract buyers to your app/website or just divert them away from it. According to a Forrester Research, only 2 out of 10 smartphone users in the U.S. opt to receive push notifications from all the apps on their phone, while 6 out of 10 opt for a select few. Another study by Forrester also tells us that the number one reason why smartphone owners in the U.S. opt in to push notifications is because they want to receive timely and relevant information.

However, most marketers will agree that push notifications have yet to prove their worth in terms of boosting app engagement and impacting conversions. But if done right, push notifications can be your most powerful and ROI-friendly mobile marketing channel yet.

We’ve put together these 10 common mistakes that you must avoid while sending mobile app push notifications.

1. Using Push As Email Replacement: Often, push messages are used to replicate email messages. This includes broadcast offers, transactional messages, shipping updates. Explore channels like sms, in-app messaging and emails for such communication.

Getting it right: Identify niche mobile use cases and channel them through push. Some examples include location-based offers, price drop alerts, time-sensitive offers. Think of push notifications only when you want to tell your users about something that’s useful in their NOW.

2. Bad Targeting: The fact that a user has downloaded your app is a strong sign that they are interested in engaging with your brand. Now is the time to figure out what the user really wants. Gather in-app behavior data and use this information to design user engagements that eventually result in conversions.

Getting it right: Instead of blasting generic blanket push messages at a time that’s convenient for you, look at messages that are triggered based on some action or inaction by your app users. With this, you can ensure that your marketing communication blends in well with the user’s journey to purchase. Key lifecycle trigger points that have proven to drive higher engagements with E-Commerce app users include:

• First time the app was opened. Guide users to relevant products and categories. Recommend from a mix of frequently bought and look-alike recommendations like these.

• Dropped-off from your cart. Send a quick reminder about the products waiting in their cart.
• Price drop alert to users with recent visits to/carted/wishlisted that product
• Look-alike recommendations if the user has been inactive for 5 days
• Time-sensitive discounts on a category/product that the user is interested in

3. Being Too Pushy: It is important that a user doesn’t turn off your push notifications. Study your consumer behavior using engagement data and create a positive consumer experience.

Getting it right: Linzi Breckenridge, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Vertical Response, suggests that every marketer must ask 7 simple questions before sending out Push Notifications.

4. Bad Timing: Drawing from the example earlier, getting in front of a user at a time when she is most responsive increases your chances of getting a click.

Getting it right: Consider local time zones and the time of the day. Going a step further, gather user engagement data and figure out the most active time of day for that user and send messages that blend contextually with the user’s day. Here’s how rich media push notifications can engage app users at different times during the day.

5. Static Notifications: Push notifications don’t have to be dull and unattractive anymore. Rich media push notifications can look as good as display ads. Here’s the evolution of push notifications from static text-based format sent a couple of years back to dynamic rich media push that could be sent out from your app today.

Getting it right: With multi-product carousels, you can choose to recommend multiple products within a single notification. To make your push notifications more engaging include the following elements:

• Product image
• Product name
• Price information – could be discount % or final price
• CTAs that are deep-linked with product views within your app

Here’s a classic example of a customized push notification sent from one of our client’s app.

Rich Media format for push notifications is supported both by Android and iOS. Mobile app retargeting just got a lot smarter and cost effective with rich media push notifications.

6. Bad Messages and CTAs: Use proven words and CTAs that work. Keep your text clear and concise. Remember, your user has only those few seconds, so be direct and stick to the point.

Getting it right: Many push notification platforms allow you to preview how your notifications will look. Use this feature to make sure your notifications look exciting when your users receive them.

• Pick CTAs that have worked for you in the past. BUY or SHOP – which of these has evoked more responses?
• Should you include the discount percentage or the final price in your push message? What connects better with your users? Typically these could vary for different categories. We’ve seen that shoppers from the electronics category typically engage with messages that have the final price. However, users buying luxury fashion brands are more likely to click when they see the discount percentage on the notification.

7. No Personalization: Right from the messaging, to the recommendations, and to offer and timing – everything needs to be just perfect. Hyper-personalize notifications at a user level. A study by hosting facts says that personalization can increase conversion rates up to 5.5%

Here’s how users respond to push notifications in different formats.

Getting it right: Evaluate a push notifications platform that allows you go deeper than segments and personalize messages at a user level.

• Make sure the platform has a back-end integration with your app product feed with real-time access to behavior and product data. This is important if you want to include personalized elements within your notifications such as relevant product image, updated price, stock availability etc.
• The secret sauce to getting personalization right is to make sure that data from transactions with a user is fed back into the platform in real-time and is used effectively to determine the content and timing of your next notification.

8. Too Many Messages Too Often: Receiving too many push messages can be annoying to users. Push messages are relatively lighter on your marketing budget and that might tempt you to use this channel frequently. Be sensitive to your audience while choosing the frequency at which you send out push notifications to your audience.

Getting it right: To set this right, focus on creating niche segments. Make sure that users are not included in multiple segments.

• Set frequency caps, define cool down periods and prioritization algos to make sure that your are sending highly relevant notifications and not sending them out too often.
• As a rule of thumb, do not send more than 3-5 notifications every week. Even then, make sure that the notifications have something relevant for the user.
• Understand how users would use your app in their daily lives and identify opportunities to enhance that experience using push messages.
• Another way to get your push frequency right is to segment users based on how engaged they are with your app. Set lower frequency limits for engaged users to avoid uninstall risks.

9. Missing Out on Data: It is important to know what your user likes or dislikes. Let your customers register, and allow push notifications such that you could use that information to tie up with CRM database.

Getting it right: One of the biggest mistakes of mobile app marketing is to rely on legacy solutions that were designed for emails. When you do, you risk missing out on mobile engagement opportunities. Using information about push notifications that users clicked on or ignored can provide insights into the likes and dislikes of the user. It tells you about the right time to reach out to that user and can help you understand the journey to purchase better.

10. Not Testing or Optimizing: Explore different use cases before you determine ones that work well for your business. A/B test your push messages to engage and retain more app users.

Getting it right:

• You can start by creating 2 specific groups of users. One based on demographics and the second one based on in-app behavior and targeting them with different messages. This will help you understand personalization preferences for each of your app users.
• Next find out the best time to engage with your mobile audience. Again, run two sets of targeting campaigns. Time one set of notifications at an optimum local time for the user. The second set of notifications must be triggered upon an action by the user. This will tell you when your users are most responsive and are interested to engage with your brand.

I hope this article has helped you with some quick tips and ready-to-implement ideas to make mobile app push notifications more engaging. Use push notifications effectively and give your brand a head-start in 2017.

You know that feeling you get when you receive a great gift? One that’s been specially picked out for you by someone who really understands you? You can tell the giver understands what you like, they know what you want, and most importantly, they know what you don’t want.

There’s something that feels really good about opening a gift that’s been tailored to you. Especially when we’re surrounded by so much stuff in our lives, a gift that feels personal to us stands out so much more.

It’s relevant. And it’s this sense of relevance that makes it special.

Relevance matters, to gifts, and to marketing

Gift-giving and marketing have a lot in common. How? Well, just like a great gift, great marketing requires us to know a lot about our customer ahead of time.

Not-so-great gifts (the ones you have to fake a smile for) demonstrate that someone knows, unfortunately, nothing about us. The same goes for poor marketing – it’s obvious when a company doesn’t understand its customers.

Marketing in a world of “more”

In a recent webinar with Evergage, I discussed the rise of complexity in today’s B2B marketing environment:

• We’ve got more buyers to deal with (5-7 on average) [CEB]
• We own more of the purchase journey (50-90%) [Various analysts, Forrester, Gartner, IDC, etc.]
• We have more tech to choose from (4,000 vendors) [CabinetM]
• Buyers spend more time in the sales cycle (24% increase) [SiriusDecisions]
• We are using more channels to reach buyers
• Buyers come to us more informed
• More companies are increasing marketing budgets in 2017 [Gartner]
• There is more accountability for marketers than ever before
• This leads to more job insecurity

Phew.

And yet, in this world of more, we’re still falling short on a fundamental part of breaking through the noise: understanding our buyers.

60% of B2B organizations admit to not understanding buyers – SiriusDecisions

How can we expect our demand gen emails to break through the clutter of 88+ other emails received by our prospects in one day, if we don’t know what they really care about, or how best to address their specific problems?

A lack of solid customer insights contributes to the poor results we’re seeing, including:

• Half of business buyers think the content they get from marketing is useless [Forrester]
• Only 17% of enterprise organizations think their demand generation is very effective [ANNUITAS]
• On average, only 3-5% of marketing qualified leads convert (a 95-98% failure rate) [Forrester]

We must do better. A solid foundation of customer insights is the place to start – if your demand generation efforts are failing, this is likely one culprit.

Watch the on-demand webinar for in-depth details on what customer insights you need to find.

ABM brings relevance to high-value accounts

Once customer insights are developed, one tactic being used to incorporate relevance into B2B marketing is Account Based Marketing (ABM).

We’ve hit a kind of plateau with demand generation efforts, historically focused on the individual buyer or lead (think of terms MQL, SAL, SQL, and more).

Thanks to recent energy infused into the market by marketing technology tools, ABM is a hot topic that is causing many B2B marketers to re-evaluate how they approach high-value accounts.

While organizations like the ITSMA have been touting the benefits of ABM for years (saying it delivers the highest ROI of any B2B marketing tactic), more marketers are putting ABM into practice today than ever before.

This bodes well for the future of our profession, as ABM is essentially relevance in action. The reason it works is because it encourages marketing and sales teams to create highly relevant experiences for individual accounts, focusing your limited resources towards the biggest accounts that are most likely to buy.

Watch the full on-demand webinar for more detail about ABM.

Personalization continues the conversation

Companies are executing ABM using the tenets of personalization, making their websites more relevant to specific accounts is by creating more personalized, account-based site experiences.

After investing the time and budget to drive a visitor from one of your target accounts to your site, you don’t want them to bounce before you can explain your solution’s value to him and his company. Once you get their attention, what do you want them to do?

Reverse IP lookup technology or campaign source tracking can deliver personalized experiences to accounts, changing the content and calls-to-action based on the source data. This helps capture the visitor’s attention and drive them to delve into the content on your site.

Let’s say a visitor from a key account in the brokerage firm industry lands on your homepage. Imagine if the hero image, headline and featured content was customized to them?

This is one way of carrying the conversation through by creating a relevant experience for every visitor. What’s more, by tracking in-depth behavioral data aggregated by account, marketing can help sales teams tailor their conversations when approaching target accounts.

What makes us human makes us great marketers

All the buzz around personalization technology isn’t surprising when you think about the fundamentals of great marketing. When we’re able to understand buyers fully, whether an individual or a target account, we now have the technology in our toolkit to bring the promise of relevance to life.

Be sure to catch the full, 60-minute webinar on-demand, and learn how demand generation professionals are harnessing the power of relevance to turn prospects into engaged buyers.

What will happen to sales professionals once robots can “Sell me this pen” a la Leonardo DiCaprio in the Wolf of Wall Street?

The rise of artificial intelligence and human-like chatbots are once again threatening poor-old sales professionals who have had to worry about their job security for over a century. That’s right, exactly 100 years ago, in 1916, the New York Times predicted the death of door-to-door salesmen in an article titled, “Are salesmen needless?”

Fears over technology stealing sales jobs then took place following the advent of both the phone and Internet. Then, Forrester Research predicted that one million B2B salespeople will become obsolete by 2020, lost to eCommerce.

While the predictions were dire and the fears were rational, the indisputable fact is that the sales industry has always persevered and will always play an enormous role in a free market economy. However, the sales industry is changing and it is critical for business leaders to marry humans with robots.

As the CEO of Peak Sales Recruiting, we are seeing world-class companies use artificial intelligence and it is a game-changer. Not in 5 or 10 years, but mean right now.

There are limits to human judgement but an over-reliance on intelligent machines can also produce blind spots. In 2017, a half-man, half-machine approach will lead you to the promise land.

Here are 4 ways AI can help you achieve record sales revenue today:

1. ‘Hire’ AI Powered Sales Assistants

There is no medal for wasting hours on cold calls or bad leads and it certainly does not bolster your commission or company profits. AI sales assistants, such as ‘LISA’ (Learning Intelligent Sales Agent) and Conversica can alleviate this unproductive and wasted time. Robots can automatically contact, engage and follow up with leads using natural conversation. The machine extracts key information such as best times to call and then hands it off to a human to close the deal. It is critical to mesh machines with humans since there are still messages that confuse the AI. A half-man and half-machine approach is needed in 2017.

2. Make Robots do the “TPS Reports“

As with all comedy, the movie Office Space was so funny because it was so true. Writing reports at work is brutal and every minute spent on administrative work is a minute not closing sales. The Associated Press expanded its quarterly earnings reporting from approximately 300 stories to 4,400 with the help of AI-powered software robots. The use of this technology allowed reporters to focus on more investigative and thorough reporting. By giving the intelligent machines the grunt work of scheduling and paperwork, you will free your reps up to do what they do best, make money for the company.

3. Use AI to Recruit a ‘Next Gen’ Sales Team

An Accenture study found that 94 percent of talent executives report that they’ve successfully used big data to “moderately or extensively” identify new candidate sources. However, while predictive analytics, algorithms and keyword searches can help recruiters avoid going through hundreds of unqualified resumes by hand, they can create blind spots that hinder a recruiter’s ability to identify great candidates. For example, a robot can’t determine how two people will get along personality wise. It is undeniable how much technology is streamlining the recruiting process but at the same time there is a chasm that current technology is unable to fill. Using AI to complement humans will lead to maximum sales.

4. Do Not Simply Hoard Your Big Data

According to IBM, 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created every day but 90 percent of all data is never analyzed or utilized in business decisions. As much as 60 percent of this data begins to lose value within milliseconds of being generated. The point is that this is not simply an arms race for what company can gather the most data, rather what company can best use that data to make more intelligent hiring decisions. It is therefore critical to invest in data analysts and you can start by watching big players in the market such as Amazon, Salesforce, Google, Microsoft, IBM and Facebook.

The bottom line is that technology will enhance and improve the sales process, but it will not replace the need for salespeople. Salespeople that work in tandem with robots will win more business and service clients better.

The post 4 Ways Artificial Intelligence Will Lead to Record Sales Revenue in 2017 appeared first on OpenView Labs.

If you’re in the boardroom these days, you know that marketing is often measured on one key metric – what is the contribution of marketing to the top- and bottom-line of the business?

The growing revenue focus and increased accountability on metrics has marketing organizations everywhere looking for the best insights to feed into their campaigns.

In the past few years, predictive analytics has emerged as a top contender that addresses these needs by enabling better market entry and budget allocation decisions for marketers. But, how do you evaluate vendors using key performance metrics, project future success based on tangible ROI, and build an ironclad business case with realistic budget allocation?

We’re here to help you select key performance metrics to evaluate your success with predictive and effectively calculate predictive ROI for your business.

Selecting monetary metrics that matter

Marketers that are putting together a business case for their internal stakeholders need to start by looking at the right performance metrics that are impacted by predictive. An integral part of this process is to select metrics and an evaluation process prior to actually evaluating predictive vendors.

Start by selecting a quantifiable and monetary success metric that will be the most compelling for internal stakeholders. For example, prioritizing based on top- and bottom-line metrics or even customer metrics such as customer lifetime value and customer satisfaction are great measures of success.

The reality is that some predictive vendors can offer a wide range of applications, therefore the number of metrics you can impact increases. Based on your predictive use case and performance metrics, the chart below will help you determine the following about each metric…

• Will predictive impact Campaign Performance, Top-line Revenue or Bottom-line Revenue?
• How directly and quickly does predictive impact this metric (Leading or Lagging)?
• Upon adoption, how long before I can expect to see this metric impacted (Timeframe)?
• How does the application of predictive specifically impact each metric?

Don’t try to boil the ocean. It’s important to only select 1-3 target metrics that you’d like to focus on going into a vendor evaluation and long-term relationship. Over time you will expand to more performance metrics.

Now that you’ve selected your metrics, it’s time to show how predictive will result in real return…aka more revenue!

Running a predictive ROI calculator

The mission of predictive is to deliver maximum value to every customer by leveraging the power of the advanced analytics, quality datasets, and expert services & success account teams. With more than 16,000 downloads of this Forrester report, you may already know that 83% of marketing VPs with predictive said they have experienced considerable business impact. But how does that impact translate to dollars?

There are five levers in a predictive ROI formula:

1. Improving Conversion Rates: Improved conversion rates in either lead or opportunity stages increases ROI
2. Higher Win Rates: Increase in conversion rates of closed won deals – primarily influenced by company-fit and intent
3. Improving Sales Efficiency: Higher sales lead capacity and connect rates result in additional opportunities and more increased number of at bats – influenced by less time prospecting and improved data quality
4. Decreasing Cost of Acquisition: Higher conversions and rep productivity spread costs over a higher number of customers, lowering CAC ratios
5. Increasing TAM: Expand existing TAM by sourcing net-new prospects and reaching them via new channels

What are the most common levers? Conversions, efficiency, and net-new lead volume (TAM). These are the most common ones I’ve encountered over three years and hundreds of evaluations at Radius when working with customers new to predictive.

Using several buyer-provided metrics and industry benchmarks, a vendor can help you calculate the ROI on an annual contract amount by projecting the expected return rate over time. Even with modest lift and gains, a customer can realize positive ROI in the first year. And when running a ROI model, modesty is key. We always recommend buyers work with their vendors to run models using a “base case” – an easily obtainable lift from the current benchmark. There are no silver bullets in technology or tactics; using a base case to demonstrate improvement – especially when in reference to revenue forecasts – will ensure you, the vendor, and the other stakeholder(s) set realistic expectations from the get go. The upside for you – the champion of the new solution – is that everyone is happy when you and your new vendor outperform the base case.

Putting it in practice – Predictive ROI example

Let’s look at one simple example where a company is expecting to see their lead-to-opportunity conversion rate increase by 1% each year. Assuming their 20% opportunity-to-close rate stays the same and their funnel size (number of new leads) stays the same, what is the top-line revenue impact?

It’s a difference of $166,440 in the first year alone.

Again, these numbers are conservative. It is not uncommon where we see enterprise companies revenue results well into seven or eight figures.

Help us to help you

The days of spray-and-pray marketing are long gone and with it the frivolous approach of adopting new marketing technologies. Forward-thinking marketers are measured on tangible costs and revenue – measuring their efforts based on ROI and overall business impact.

By partnering closely with your AE and customer success team, developing out a realistic yet exciting ROI analysis will not only set you up for successful adoption but also enable you to easily sell predictive internally.

If you’re taking a comprehensive look at predictive and think it would help your business grow market share and unlock revenue potential, it’s imperative to adopt an analytical approach in your evaluation process. Use this framework to identify key performance metrics, measure predictive ROI, and build a solid business case that ensures long-term success from this marketing intelligence upgrade.

If you’re interested in receiving a custom ROI analysis, feel free to reach out to me directly at john.hurley@radius.com

This article was adapted from the Predictive Evaluation Series. Download all three playbooks in the series to effectively select the right vendor, sell predictive internally, and build the business case.