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Federal Finance Minister Bill Morneau and his advisory council chair, Dominic Barton, at a press conference in October 2016. (Adrian Wyld/CP)

Tens of millions of Americans and Britons have been overcome by a reflexive loathing of anyone with a fancy degree and a frequent-flyer card. So far, most Canadians appear to have avoided this affliction. We applauded Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for (mostly) stacking his cabinet with talent rather than party hacks. And we seem open to the suggestions of Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s Advisory Council on Economic Growth, an assembly that would face persecution in the two biggest Anglo-Saxon economies for its belief in expertise.

Canada shouldn't throw Mexico under the bus to placate Donald Trump

Morneau’s group of extraordinary men (six) and women (six), led by Dominic Barton, the head of global consultancy McKinsey & Co., appears destined to receive a certain amount of criticism. There is little talk of tax cuts and balanced budgets, items which form the economic lodestar of the Official Opposition; think tanks such as the Fraser Institute, the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, the Atlantic Provinces Economic Council; and almost everyone who writes a column for the Financial Post, including former finance minister Joe Oliver.

Instead, the growth council, which released its “second wave” of recommendations Council on February 6, so far has encountered few problems that it thinks can’t be fixed by a little dirigisme: a new agency, harder work by an existing one, or hundreds of millions of dollars in federal cash. In October, the group proposed an agency that would chase international investors; a month later, Morneau announced plans for the Invest in Canada Hub. The council now has some more hubs for the Trudeau government’s consideration. It says Canada should create a “FutureSkills Lab” to help pay for training programs. The latest batch of recommendations also includes a fund of about $100 million to help promising smaller companies expand, and a suggestion that the federal government use its $18-billion procurement budget to favour young companies that need an anchor client. In what might be its most ambitious idea, the Barton panel says Canada should organize its economic policy around becoming a global trading hub bridging Asia and Europe.

There is much to discuss, but let’s stick with this idea of creating a Singapore of the North. It is a timely recommendation because it comes as Ottawa and those who write about it devote considerable thought to trade in the age of Trump. This unfortunate period may last no longer than four years, but there still are those who would counsel Trudeau to dump Mexico and other allies if that is what is required to appease U.S. President Donald Trump. I have argued that this would be a terrible idea. So does the Advisory Council on Economic Growth, which, besides Barton, includes Elyse Allan, head of General Electric’s Canadian unit; investment banker Kenneth Courtis; and Cenovus Energy chief executive Brian Ferguson. The council is wary of the protectionist mood taking hold in major economies, and advises the Trudeau government to “nurture” the country’s trading relationships in North America.

But there is no talk of narrowing Canada’s world view to one country. The council urges the government to pursue more trade with Mexico, while at the same time pivoting to Asia, which is home to the world’s fastest-growing economies. Canada’s satisfaction with having easy access to the U.S. has caused it to miss out on at least of couple of decades of rapid growth in Asia and other parts of the developing world. According to the C.D. Howe Institute, Canada’s smattering of free-trade agreements give it preferential access to countries with a combined gross domestic product of about (US) $20 trillion. That’s good enough for only 18th in a table led by Chile, Peru and Costa Rica. (Rivals such as South Korea, Mexico, Singapore and Australia all rank higher.) Canada might be a trading nation, but we are mediocre traders: in its report on trade, the growth council said the majority of the country’s smaller enterprises don’t trade at all. Many such companies, “simply don’t know what they must do to take their business overseas,” the Barton panel said.

Canada shouldn't throw Mexico under the bus to placate Donald Trump

The notion of becoming a trading hub isn’t novel: Brexiteers talk about creating an Anglo-Saxon Singapore perched on the edge of the European Union. The growth council reckons Canada would be better placed to play such a role, given its nearly completed free-trade agreement with the EU; ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific oceans; a multi-ethnic entrepreneurial class; and preferential access to the world’s largest economy (Trump willing, of course). The growth council would build on these advantages by upgrading ports, border points and other transit links to improve connectivity. (Canada currently ranks only 12th on the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index, lower than the U.S.) It also would take smaller companies by the hand and coach them on doing business in places where English isn’t the first language and the rule of law isn’t always paramount.

And the council would make Asia, not the U.S., the focus of the Trudeau government’s trade policy. To help explain why, I updated one of my favourite charts to reflect new export data released by Statistics Canada on February 7:

That’s an index of growth in merchandise exports to a set of key markets based on a complete set of figures for 2016. The growth council recommends sticking with the Trans-Pacific Partnership even though Trump’s America has dropped out. But given the weak odds of a broader regional arrangement working, Barton and his fellow advisers recommend targeting the three big Asian economies for preferential trade deals: China, Japan, and India. Reaching beneficial terms with any of those countries will be difficult. Trudeau already has said that he wants to do a deal with China, but Canada will be playing catch up; Australia, for example, completed a free-trade agreement with China in 2015. India is a stubborn negotiator (Canada and India have been talking about preferential access since 2010), while Canada and Japan produce many of the same goods and services.

Still, Trudeau must try. The election of Trump is a reminder of the dangers of relying on a small number of trade partners. Canada’s exports to Asia and other emerging markets are growing smartly, but the surge comes from a low base. A defensive trade strategy focused on Trump will at best preserve the mediocre growth we have now. Increased wealth will require going farther afield.

Canada needs a free trade deal with China, says Teck Resources CEO

MORE ABOUT THE ECONOMY & INTERNATIONAL TRADE:

• Canada shouldn’t throw Mexico under the bus to placate Donald Trump
• Trump’s guiding rule is “America First.” Canada won’t be an exception
• Canada needs a free trade deal with China, says Teck Resources CEO
• This is exactly how many American jobs depend on Canada–U.S. trade
• Even in the age of Trump, there are U.S. trade opportunities for Canada
• To grow Canada’s exports, we have to look past the U.S. market
• How globalization is changing the game for central banks
• What’s worrying Canadian CEOs now (and what should worry them more)
• Brexit has awakened dangerous forces in the world economy
• Why are Canadians turning their backs on free trade?
• Why are Canadian companies so afraid to go global?

The post How Canada could become the missing link between Europe and Asia appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The beating heart of any business is a reliable and continuous stream of sales. And artificial intelligence is already having a dramatic effect on the bottom line of businesses around the world.

Without a doubt, one of the most effective — and proven — ways to drive sales is to consistently present your prospects and customers with recommendations that are precisely personalized for them.

A task that A.I. is uniquely equipped to excel at.

According to a 2015 study across 1.5 billion ecommerce shopping sessions and 20 different types of recommendations, 11.5% of total revenue was directly attributed to those personalized recommendations.

In fact, A.I.-powered recommendation engines have propelled industry giants like Amazon, Netflix and SoundCloud to the top of their class.

So let’s dive into what it takes to build one of these recommendation engines — for your business.

This guide will step you through configuring an application (originally developed by Martin Kearn of Microsoft) that uses a prediction API to intelligently recommend products — books, specifically.

Looking for an on ramp?

This is a how-to guide intended for developers or tech-savvy business leaders looking for a proven entry point into A.I.-powered business systems.

The End Result

When we’re done, you’ll have a web application that displays all the item-to-item recommendations and frequently bought together recommendations for a given book.

A simple example that highlights two of the most powerful recommendation types.

How can you apply these recommendations to your products and services?

• What You’ll Need
• Step 1: Create the Recommendations API Instance
• Step 2: Upload the Training Data
• Step 3: Create the ‘Item-to-Item Recommendations’ Build
• Step 4: Create the ‘Frequently Bought With’ Build
• Step 5: Launch it!

And without further ado…

What You’ll Need

Before we create the Azure services and model, let’s get the initial requirements knocked out.

Download the source repository.

To start, let’s pull down the source files. (You’ll need a git client installed on your computer for this step.)

Move to the directory you want to use for this demo and run the following commands in a terminal…

# Download source repository
git clone https://github.com/10xNation/microsoft-recommendation-engine.git
cd microsoft-recommendation-engine

The repository includes sample training data and a simple C# application to demo the Recommendations API (and a PHP counterpart).

Create an Azure account.

Go to the Azure home page (Azure is Microsoft’s cloud services platform).

If you don’t already have an Azure account, go ahead and create one by clicking on the “Free Account” button and completing the registration process.

And let’s start spinning up the service.

Step 1: Create the Recommendations API Instance

Go to the Azure Dashboard and sign in with your Azure account.

Click on the “+ New” button.

Then select the “Intelligence + analytics” and “Cognitive Services APIs” options.

Note: This will enable all of the Cognitive Services APIs — Text Analytics, Computer Vision, etc. But for the purposes of this demo, we’re going to stick with the Recommendations API.

On the Cognitive Services API Create page, enter an “Account name” — select a “Subscription,” “API type,” “Location,” and “Pricing tier,” — then create or select a “Resource group.”

• For “API type,” be sure to select “Recommendations API”
• On “Pricing tier,” all we need is the “Free” tier for this demo

Once everything is filled out, hit “Create.”

And after a few minutes, the new subscription will show up on your dashboard. Click it.

Get the subscription key.

That should take you to the Overview tab for your new service.

Click on the “Keys” tab and copy the first key — we’ll need it in the next step.

And now your Recommendations API instance is ready to go, so let’s move on to the training data.

Step 2: Upload the Training Data

Go to the Recommendations API Dashboard.

And sign in with the Cognitive Services key you copied above.

Once you’re logged in, enter a name for your project. e.g. Books Then hit the “Add Project” button

When the new project is ready, you should see a place to upload a catalog file and usage files.

We’ll start by uploading the catalog file (book_catalog.csv), which is in the data directory of the source code you downloaded in What You’ll Need.

Our catalog for this demo is a list of books and their respective details. If you’d like to preview what’s in the catalog, here’s a sample spreadsheet of it.

Once your catalog file is uploaded and processed, it’s time to upload the usage data (books_usage.csv), which is also in the data directory.

In this particular case, the usage data is basically a list of books sales — listing which books were purchased together. If you’d like to preview what’s in the usage data, here’s a sample spreadsheet of it.

Get the model identifier.

We’re going to need the Model ID, so copy it from the model details page.

And that’s it for the training data, so let’s start creating targeted builds.

Step 3: Create the ‘Item-to-Item Recommendations’ Build

The first build we’ll create is for related book recommendations.

More specifically, we’re creating an item-to-item recommendations (I2I) build. Which, given an item or a list of items, it will predict other items that are likely to be of high interest to customers that have interacted with the original set of items.

Click on the “New Build” button to create the build.

This will bring up a settings modal.

And for this build select “Recommendation” for the Build Type and then enter a quick description.

Get the build identifier.

We’re going to need the Build ID for this build, so copy it from the dashboard when ready.

That’s it for this build.

Step 4: Create the ‘Frequently Bought With’ Build

The next build we’ll create is for books that are frequently purchased with another book.

A frequently-bought-together (fbt) build counts the number of times two or three different products are purchased together, and then sorts the sets based on similarity.

Click on “New Build.”

This will bring up another settings modal.

And for this build select “FBT” for the Build Type and then enter a quick description.

Get the build identifier.

We’re going to need the Build ID for this build as well, so copy it from the dashboard when ready.

That’s it for this build as well, so let’s fire up the app.

Step 5: Launch it!

Open up the application in Visual Studio — it’s in the ms directory of the source code you downloaded in What You’ll Need.

Then open up the appsettings.json file and enter your respective details:

• RecommendationsApiBaseUrl — Make sure the correct Endpoint is listed for your chosen API location from step #1 (it’s listed on the Overview tab)
• RecommendationsApiKey — Enter the Cognitive Services API key you copied in step #1
• RecommendationsApiModelId — Enter the Model ID you copied in step #2
• RecommendationsApiITIBuildId — Enter the Build ID you copied in step #3
• RecommendationsApiFBTBuildId — Enter the Build ID you copied in step #4

And then launch the application in IIS Express or your preferred development web server — it may take a few minutes to spin up and display the web page.

Congratulations — you are a recommendations pro!

Click on a book to see the recommendations. Keep in mind this is all sample data — so no guarantees on the relevancy of recommendations.

Play around with the app and API. Have fun!

What’s Next

Now, what will you do will this new tool?

Will you build a new product, enhance an existing one — or startup a completely new business? The sky’s the limit.

You can dig deeper into the Recommendation API — including additional tutorials — in the developer documentation.

Enjoy!

Paralysis by analysis. I’ve totally been there, so many times.

Choosing a place to eat, choosing a new computer, or even choosing the best social media marketing tool.

When it comes to picking a tool for your business, there are just so many great options out there, so many wonderful, time-saving features, it’s a tall task to know exactly what’s right for you.

The tool you choose is often a key ingredient when it comes to hitting your social media marketing goals, because it can help you drive traffic and engagement, as well as measure how you’re doing.

Each tool has its strengths and there’s no single perfect tool for everyone. So how do you figure out which one’s going to be the best fit for you?

How do you find the best social media tool for your business?

If you’re anything like me, your first instinct is likely to start researching right away! Over time – and after making lots of mistakes along the way – I’ve come to realize there’s another approach that can be much less stressful – and more effective.

Rather than jumping straight into research – which often provides an overwhelming number of options to choose from – it can be helpful to start by getting clarity on your own priorities and goals first. To reflect on the needs of your team and what’s most important to you.

From there you’ll have a solid set of criteria to measure your options against once you begin researching, evaluating options, and comparing features.

To help you make an informed decision and find the tool that’s the best fit for you, I’d love to share a few ideas and questions that may be helpful to consider.

3 questions to help you define your social media goals

The challenge with diving straight into research and comparison shopping is that it’s easy to lose sight of why you started looking for a social media tool in the first place.

Here are a few important questions to answer up front:

1. What are you looking to accomplish with your social media marketing efforts?

What are your goals? Do you want to increase brand awareness? Drive traffic to your site? Generate leads, or drive sales directly from your content?

What results are you hoping to get from the time and effort your spend on social media?

All social media tools excel at certain things. And if you’re not sure what your goals are and what you want to accomplish, it may be a bit challenging to find the right tool for the job.

2. What prompted you to start looking for a new tool?

You likely had a not-so-great experience with your existing tool or workflow, and it inspired you to start looking for alternatives. What was that experience? Was there something that frustrated you? Something you wanted to do that you couldn’t?

If you want to end up with the best tool for your team, identifying the core issues that caused you to start looking for a new tool in the first place is a key step in the process.

The goal here is to help you find the right product that will address those issues and allow you to do the things you weren’t previously able to do – no matter which tool that happens to be.

We’ll go into more detail on this in a bit.

3. What experience do you want your social team to have with the tool?

Your team is going to spend quite a bit of time using this product.

And as the public face of your brand, you want to make sure they have the right tool.

Finding one that’s intuitive, fun, and easy-to-use will help them save time on unnecessary tasks, so they can spend more time creating amazing content!

What are your “must-have” features?

3 quick steps to understanding which features you need (and which ones you don’t)

Whatever tool you end up choosing, it should help you achieve and goals you outlined in the previous sections.

Once you’ve gotten clarity on what you’re looking to accomplish on social and what you need from a tool, you’ll have a solid foundation to measure your options against once you start comparing tools.

Now, the next step is to determine which features you absolutely need in a social media tool – and which ones would just be nice to have.

But how can you tell? Here’s one way to look at it:

• “Must-have” features – if the tool doesn’t allow us to do X, then we won’t be able to execute on our social media marketing strategy and hit our goals.
• “Nice-to-have” features – if the tool does X, we may be able to use that in our strategy at some point.

If you’re not entirely sure what your “must-have” features are yet, here’s a quick exercise to help you distinguish between them:

Step 1: Write down the 25 most important social media features that you think you might need

What are all the tasks you do on a day-to-day basis? What activities do you do every few weeks or months? What sorts of capabilities do you need to have?

(You don’t have to come up with exactly 25, just try to write down as many as you can think of!)

Here are some important considerations to help you brainstorm:

• What caused you to start searching for a new tool? – Like I mentioned previously, there was likely something you wanted to do but weren’t able to. What was that?
• Social networks – Which social networks do you need to be able to share to?
• Scheduling posts – Do you need to be able to schedule your posts in advance?
• Custom posting times – How should scheduling work? Do you need to choose your own custom posting times?
• Scheduling tool vs. “all-in-one” platform – Are you looking for an awesome scheduling tool, or are you looking for an “all-in-one” social media management platform?
• Analytics – Do you need analytics? Which metrics do you need to track? How in-depth do your reports need to be?
• Paid social campaigns – Do you need the ability to manage paid social campaigns? (FB ads, Twitter ads, etc)
• Engagement – Do you need to be able to pull in, interact with, and respond to incoming social conversations?
• Social listening – Do you need social listening/brand monitoring capabilities?
• Team collaboration tools – Will you need to be able to add team members, review posts, and manage your team’s workflow?
• UTMs – Do you need the ability to set UTM parameters on a per channel basis? or a per post basis?
• Integrations – Are there any other tools you’d need to integrate with?

Step 2: Review the list and circle your top 5 features

Now that you’ve written down all the things you think you might need in a tool, review your list and circle your top 5.

As you make your way through the list, ask yourself: What are the top 5 most important activities? What are the capabilities I absolutely cannot do without? What’s absolutely essential?

(Again, you can be flexible with how many items you circle. I recommend keeping this list as short as possible though! If everything’s a priority, then nothing’s a priority )

Note: If you’ve made it this far, you’ll get the most value out of this exercise if you pause right now and go do the first two steps before moving on to Step 3.

Step 3: Use these two lists to evaluate potential tools

At this point you have two lists. The 5 items you circled are your “must-have’s” and the other 20 are your “nice-to-have’s.”

As you begin to evaluate tools in the next section, you can use your “must-have” list as the criteria for eliminating tools that aren’t going to be the right fit for you.

This will save you a ton of time and help you narrow down your options to a shortlist of potential tools.

Do some research to find the best options

Plus: some tips, ideas, and resources to help you save time

Now that you’re starting to get more and more clarity on what your priorities are, now’s the perfect time to start research your options and comparing tools.

To help you save time and get off on the right foot, here are a few ideas to get you started:

6 great places to research social media tools

If you want to find the best social media tools, here are a few resources I’d recommend using and the keywords that are likely to give you the most relevant answers:

• Google – here are some keywords to check out: best social media tools, best social media marketing tools, and best social media management tools
• YouTube – a search for these keywords will turn up some great video reviews: best social media marketing tools, best social media management tools, and social media tools for business
• Product Hunt – try a keyword search for ‘social media’, and check out our social media tools collection
• AlternativeTo – you’ll find a nice selection of options by checking out alternative’s to Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social
• Capterra – you can find reviews for a ton of social media marketing products
• Quora – read through Q&A’s in the ‘social media marketing tools’ section of Quora

5 unbiased articles that review social media tools

The site’s in the previous section will give you a lot of content to check out.

After spending a few hours sifting through all of it, here are the 5 most useful links I found from marketers and communities I admire:

• 5 Social Media Management Tools to Save Time by Social Media Examiner
• 17 Tools That’ll Take Your Social Media Marketing Results to The Next Level by Neil Patel
• The 17 Best Social Media Management Tools by Jeff Bullas
• The 39 Social Media Tools I’ll Use Today by Jay Baer
• How do you manage all of your social networks? on Inbound.org

4 of my personal favorite social media tools

I may be a bit biased here, but in case it might be useful, here are my 4 favorite tools:

• Buffer – Great for scheduling, publishing and analyzing your content with ease
• Hootsuite – Fantastic as an “all-in-one” social media solution
• Sprout Social – Rocks for monitoring all of your social media efforts, both content and engagement
• Edgar – Excels at recycling your best content automatically

If possible, I’d also recommend reaching out to any friends or colleagues who might be able to recommend their favorite tools and why they love them.

Create your shortlist of social media tools

Now it’s time to go one step further and create your short list of tools to try out.

As you evaluate the tools you come across in your research, you can exclude any products that don’t offer the “must-have” features you discovered earlier.

And as you compare products, begin to narrow down to your top 3-5 options and rank them. This is going to be your shortlist of tools to try out next.

Keep in mind: The features on your “nice-to-have” list shouldn’t get attention until you’ve found an option that satisfies all your “must-have’s.”

A social media tool that offers only the features you absolutely need is likely going to be much more effective than any option that doesn’t have the essentials but does provide you with a bunch of “nice-to-have” features.

Put together an evaluation team

Now that you have your shortlist of 3-5 tools, the next step is to put together a team to test and evaluate them, one tool at a time.

Note: If you’re just getting started on social media, or if you work at a smaller company like ours, then it may be just you on the evaluation team (and I’d recommend skipping to the next section, as this might not be as relevant for you ).

If you’re part of a larger team, it’s important to include people with a variety of roles and responsibilities. Basically anyone who will need to use the tool.

Why is this important? Because, for example, your team lead will likely have different goals from the product than a junior-level marketer.

The team lead is more likely to be concerned about analytics/reporting and team workflow features, whereas someone a bit more junior may care more about ease of publishing or quickly getting that data to their manager.

Getting feedback and opinions from a diverse set of users will help you tell which tool really is the best fit for your team. Here’s an ideal combination:

• 1 junior level social media marketer
• 1-3 social media power users
• 1 manager or team lead

And if you can, try to get everyone on the evaluation team to trial the same tool at the same time, rather than having everyone test a different tool. That way everyone is on the same page and has the same context when evaluating whether or not the tool is a good fit.

Test drive the tools on your shortlist

At this point, the next step is to start testing out the tools on your shortlist.

Like I mentioned previously, I recommend testing one tool at a time, so you don’t spread your time an attention too thin – and so your evaluation team is always on the same page.

Start a free trial for the top choice on your shortlist

So, the next step is to choose your #1 top choice and start a free trial.

Note: Most tools offer a free trial of between 2-4 weeks, which should likely be enough time to try it out and see how it works.

If you’ve put together an evaluation team, then invite each member to create an account. If not, just create your own account and get started!

I recommend setting aside time for two things:

1. Using the product – This might seem obvious, but with everything else on your plate it can be easy to push this to the side. I’ve done this more times than I care to admit! Make time to explore the product and see if it’s going to be a good fit your workflow and help you accomplish your social media strategy.
2. Reflecting on your experience – As you use the product, take some time to reflect on you and your team’s experience: what do you like, what do you dislike, and does it feel like a good fit? You can do this in a meeting or asynchronously in a shared document, whichever makes the most sense for your team.

And as you go through the evaluation process, here are some important factors to consider:

9 things to consider when evaluating a social media tool

1. User experience

You’re likely to be using this tool regularly, maybe even daily. So it feels super important to find a tool that gives you or your team a great experience.

The best tools tend to be intuitive and easy to use. And if you find you or your team are getting lost or struggling without training you could lose a lot of time, energy, and momentum.

Personally, I love tools that are clear, simple, and don’t need a ton of training.

2. Analytics & reporting

When you think about your team’s overall social media goals, what are the key metrics you’ll need to track and report on? Will this tool help you measure those?

If you need extremely detailed reports on a consistent basis, some tools have more advanced reporting capabilities and may be a great fit. For many companies, however, being able to measure the engagement they’re getting with each individual post – and tracking their account growth over time – is more than enough.

How in-depth do your reports need to be? The best tool will be the one that helps you answer your questions quickly and make the best decisions.

3. Team collaboration tools

Will you be inviting team members to collaborate with this tool? Some tools make it super easy to manage your team.

The best ones allow you to easily:

• Add team members
• Decide which social media accounts each person has access to
• Set permission levels
• And review posts before publishing

It’s important to make sure the tool you choose gives you the capabilities you need as a manager/team lead!

4. Customer support

At some point you or someone on your team is likely going to have a question or need help.

When that time comes, will you have access to customer support? And if so, how good is it – both in terms of speed and quality?

The best companies don’t just provide you with software. They’re also there to:

• Help out when you need it
• Advise you on the best social media practices
• And help you be successful and accomplish your goals using their product

Which leads us to another important consideration…

5. Training

On top of customer support, it might also be worth exploring what other options the company provides you – in terms of training, education, customer success managers, etc.

These resources can be a great tipping point in the decision process.

How will you train yourself or your team on the new tool?

Some companies provide in-depth tutorials to help you make the switch and get started on the right foot. And with many of the more popular tools, there are tons of 3rd party educational resources that can help you get the most out of it.

What sort of training do you think you’ll need? And are those kinds of resources available?

6. Security

Another thing to consider is: How secure is the tool? And what security features does it provide?

For example, are you able to set up two-step login? Can you invite team members to post to your company’s social profiles without giving out login credentials?

Take the time to make sure your tool is secure, because publishing to social profiles is extremely important for brands and you don’t want anyone who shouldn’t post being able to!

7. Integrations

Sometimes you need to pass data between tools, or you might want to automate some of your social media activities.

Do you need to integrate your social media tool with any other products? And does this tool have the integrations you need?

If not, can you use tools like Zapier or IFTTT to create your own? Or put together your own home-brewed integration?

If you absolutely need a specific integration that isn’t available, this could be a deal-breaker.

8. Pricing

There are a few things to consider when it comes to pricing.

First, check the availability of free features, and at what price the more advanced features become “pay-only.”

For example, on our free plan here at Buffer you can measure a few social engagement metrics for each post – such as retweets, likes, mentions, and potential reach.

But rich analytics, charts, and tables – to help you gain a deeper understanding of your performance on social – are part of our business plan, starting at $99 per month. Do those pay-only features fall into your “must-have” list. And is it worth the cost?

Second, would you prefer an all-inclusive cost, even if you’re paying for features you don’t need? Or would you rather pay only for the features, social accounts, and team members you need?

Third, are you okay with signing an annual contract or would you prefer to pay month-to-month? Each company will have a slightly different offering here.

9. Scale

Your social media presence is likely going to grow over time – how does adding more team members, accounts, or social media updates affect pricing?

For example, some tools charge on a per user per month basis, and other tools charge flat monthly fees.

Depending on where you see your company and team headed, will this tool support you as you grow?

Ready to switch?

Getting ready for a new social media tool

You may have to try out a few products on your shortlist before you find a great fit!

Once you decide on the right tool, sit down with your team, or whoever is involved and will be affected by the change, and write down a transition plan.

Here are a few questions to reflect on:

• How will you train your team to use the new tool?
• Would it be beneficial to update any of your existing workflows?
• Do you need to set up any integrations?

Switching to a new tool is a huge investment in your social media marketing strategy.

If you choose a tool that works really well for you and your team, it can save you a ton of time and energy – and help you make meaningful progress towards your goals.

That’s why it’s so important to take the time to get clarity on what’s your goals are and why you’re looking for a new tool, before you start doing research and comparing feature lists. So you can make the best, most informed decision for your team!

Over to you

Thanks so much for reading. I hope you took away a few ideas to help find the right option for you.

I’d also love to know which social media tool you ended up choosing (even – especially! – if it’s not Buffer ).

What made it a great fit for your team?

Was there anything useful that you’ve thought of that I didn’t mention?

I’d love to keep the conversation going in the comments below. If you know someone who could use this, feel free to pass it along. And if you use it yourself, let me know how it goes!

If you were working in the health or social services, or in the nuclear, aerospace, oil, rail and military industries, you would be well aware of the need to perform risk assessments on a regular basis wherever there was a serious threat of a hazardous situation.

In fact, if you happened to be in a management or executive position in those environments, you might well have a legal responsibility to ensure that the necessary risk assessments were performed to the appropriate professional standard.

Some may regard these risk assessments as burdensome, and a few might hanker after a simpler, less bureaucratic climate. But there’s no doubt that risk assessments have saved many lives, and will continue to do so. Which might lead us to consider whether risk assessments could save sales deals, as well…

You can imagine the response from some of the more traditional sales people: having to do a risk assessment would be yet another unnecessarily bureaucratic, burdensome process, another management-driven “hoop to have to jump through”. But they would be wrong.

Unless your experience is very different from mine, you can probably look back on deals that sales people assured you were “in the bag” – and yet they escaped (or the bag disappeared). You can probably look back on deals that went quiet, and being assured that there was nothing to worry about. And yet there was.

EVERY OPPORTUNITY HAS SOME ELEMENT OF RISK

Every sales opportunity – no matter how cast-iron – has its share of risks, and most deals have many more risk factors than are usually acknowledged. Sales people tend to be predisposed to listen to good news, and to avoid seeking out bad news for fear of what they might discover.

This is why thoughtfully designed checklists have become such an important element of the modern sales process – they force sales people to assess factors that have been proven to impact their chances of sales success. They make it harder to miss the obvious. As Atul Gawande points out in The Checklist Manifesto, they serve to systematically eliminate errors of ignorance and ineptitude.

And that’s precisely why I’ve been working with a growing number of clients to create opportunity risk assessment checklists that ensure that they uncover and pray proper attention to a range of well-proven risk factors that they cannot afford to ignore or sweep under the carpet.

I’ve learned that these risk assessments are most effective when jointly conducted between the sales person and their manager – and if there has been significant pre-sales involvement it’s often invaluable to have their perspective as well.

DO YOU RECOGNISE ANY OF THESE RISK FACTORS?

It’s possible that you’ll have a few risk factors that are specific to your environment, but if you’re in a complex B2B sales environment, the following risk factors tend to be universal:

• Projected close date has changed more than once: when opportunities get their close dates pushed on a regular basis, it’s often an indicator that all is not well with the deal
• Projected close date is unrealistic: if the proposed close date is significantly shorter than the average actual close date from the current pipeline stage, it’s often a sign of wishful thinking
• Opportunity value has changed significantly: substantial or regular changes in the deal value may indicate a change in the buyer’s circumstances or process that may not have been fully taken into account
• Economic justification is weak: If there is no compelling case for change, or a clear return on investment, or if these exist but have not been explicitly agreed by the prospect, the deal is at risk
• Progress has stalled: if the opportunity has remained “stuck in stage” for longer than average winning opportunities, this often a significant risk factor
• Activity levels have declined: if the amount of recorded activity (and in particular the number of substantive interactions with the prospect), the opportunity is at risk
• Any element of the decision process, team, criteria or timetable is unclear: if there is any uncertainty about how and why the prospect will make their buying decision, the deal is at risk
• Lack of engagement with decision team: if there has been little or no substantive engagement with the decision-making team, the opportunity is at risk
• Over-reliance on an unproven champion: if you are relying on a single individual to make the case internally, and in particular if they do not have a track record of being able to mobilise their colleagues, the deal is at risk
• Recent change in circumstance: if there has been a recent change in the decision team, sponsor, criteria or any other significant factor, the opportunity is at risk
• Failure to align with corporate priorities: if the opportunity cannot be clearly and obviously associated with a current high-priority organisational initiative, the deal is at risk
• Opportunity has unusual characteristics: if the opportunity has any unusual characteristics – for example, being significantly larger than the average sale, or into a sector where you have few references, the deal is at risk
• Missing steps in the process: if the sales person has failed to complete key steps in your defined sales process, the deal is at risk. If you don’t have a defined sales process, all opportunities are at risk.
• Any other issue you are aware of but have not confronted: if there are any other issues the sales person has become aware of, but have not confronted or resolved with the prospect, the opportunity is at risk

And that is only a partial list of the most common factors. If any of the above risk factors are present, or if any of the risk factors are unknown, you must determine what action is required to mitigate the identified risk, and put that action plan into place.

Sweeping the issue under the carpet, or failing to ask the tough questions, is a recipe for disappointment and failure. You can do better than that. A little healthy paranoia is much more useful than a large dose of complacency.

These opportunity risk assessments are a core element of our Value Selling System. I’d be very interested in your comments: have I missed any other common risk factors? And after considering this list, how many of the opportunities that are currently being forecasted might be at risk?

I live near an outlet mall, and while I don’t spend much time there, I’ve noticed some changes. First, there’s a lot less traffic trying to squeeze into what used to be a full parking lot. In the stores, the aisles aren’t as packed as I remember – and the lines seem to be shorter. The act of shopping feels different. Something has changed.

Should I be surprised or concerned about this? What’s changed?

Mobile.

The mobile device has, and is, transforming the retail shopping experience beyond recognition – a profound shift that should serve as a wake-up call to mobile marketers in 2017. More shoppers are now searching, comparing and buying online or from their smartphones, instead of traipsing through malls. Amazon, Wayfair, QVC, Overstock.com and other online retailers have turned the concept of shopping into an instant-access service, thanks to mobile data, personalization, day-of delivery perks, user-friendly apps and, soon, the wider adoption of voice-assisted digital shopping.

These industry-disrupting forces are also putting marketers, especially those in the retail sector, on notice to better understand and anticipate the needs of today’s shoppers – or risk becoming another casualty in the retail sector’s transformation. Some of these include:

• The Sports Authority, which closed all its stores in 2016
• The Limited, which followed in early 2017 with more closures
• Other big-name retailers, including Sears, Kmart, Nordstrom, Lowe’s, JCPenney, CVS and others, which have announced cutbacks and store closings to take place in 2017
• Macy’s, which is cutting 10,000 jobs, while Amazon.com is adding 10 times that by 2018

Welcome to the New Retail Economy

This transformation of the shopping experience is what I describe as the arrival of the “on-demand mobile retail economy.” And in this new economy, mobile marketers must understand shoppers’ habits and behaviors wherever they are, and they must cater to their customers’ activities and needs in the mobile environment– especially as they move from device to device, from home to work to leisure to home and back again.

Just as smartphones are transforming the retail economy, they have also become indispensable, 24/7 tools across every component of consumers’ daily lives. A recent Expedia/Egencia global survey found that 60% of travelers never fully “unplug” from their smartphones – not even while on vacation.

In 2017’s On-Demand Mobile Retail Economy, Data is the Key

Mobile and retail marketers need to be in sync with their customers, too – both on their phones and in their lives. Using all of the data that can be collected from the mobile environment, marketers must leverage all of the channels available to them – apps, email and mobile messaging, to name a few – to connect with consumers’ “moment of opportunity” activities – when they open an app, walk into a store, browse for a new product, place or remove an item from the online shopping cart, buy the same brand of moisturizer they purchased online last month.

Mobile data connected to these various activities can provide telling insights on how to create more compelling email campaigns, improve in-app messages, or inform entirely new digital marketing initiatives. Data is the critical ingredient that ties together the various elements of the new retail shopping experience to produce meaningful consumer insights.

Indeed, mobile marketers who fully understand and embrace this mobile-influenced, data-driven transformation of the retail environment will be most likely to succeed. They’ll emerge as the mobile equivalent of the full parking lot, crowded stores and busy checkout lines.

Find more solutions to the new retail challenge in our “Delivering Mobile Success in eRetail” showcase.

As the new year momentum continues, it can be beneficial to review the core values of your business to see what you can amend and improve upon. Redefining your business core values to make them significant and actually mean something to your staff, partners, and customers can play a monumental role in the way your company is seen and how others relate to your brand.

A source for Harvard Business Review, who has helped companies refine their corporate values for over one decade, states that bland or meaningless values can damage the credibility of the company and alienate employees. To prevent this, revisit your current core values, find room for improvement, and take the following steps to redefine them.

Review Your Current Core Values

To start, re-familiarize yourself with the current corporate values you have established. Are they still relevant, achievable, and actually being implemented? For example, if one of the values is transparency, do your firm’s daily operations reflect that goal? Does information freely flow from top to bottom and in reverse? Are you open and honest with your investors, business partners, and clients about any issues, roadblocks or failures?

Remove any core values that are no longer important to your brand, don’t say anything about your corporate identity, or are simply impossible to achieve.

Survey Your Team

An organization is made up of the team members employed there; therefore, it can be beneficial to survey your employees to find out what their personal values are. If you able to align the personal beliefs and values of your staff with your business values, you can create a better corporate culture and overall working experience for your team.

Send out an email or online survey and ask employees to write down three to five personal values that matter to them. Review these answers and narrow down the top five to 10 choices based on popularity, significance, and relevance to your brand.

For example, if the majority of your staff value sustainability and the green movement, you may consider adding an eco-friendly component to your company’s philanthropic efforts. This can increase employee loyalty by supporting a cause that is important to them, and also start to promote your brand image with a new and important initiative.

Implement the Newly Established Core Values

Once you remove outdated and irrelevant values, and have worked with your staff to come up with meaningful new principles, you must create a plan to implement them. Core values must be ingrained in every decision and practice of the organization because they are the foundation of the brand’s identity.

If you added honest communication as a core value, for example, consider investing in training that would improve the communication skills of your managers and other staff members. Teaching them to better read nonverbal cues, actively listen, and understand difference in multicultural communication can lead to a more productive work environment.

Redefining your core corporate values can unite you with your clientele, partners, and employees by exposing the main principles that define your company and creating common goals for all staff to follow. Revisit your business’ core values while you’re still riding the momentum of New Year’s Resolutions and betterment initiatives!

Every couple of weeks, an author sends me a note to ask if they can send me their book. I love books, and I love reading (which are not the same thing), but I have slowed my reading now, deciding that going deep is better right now. I am a book a month, not a book a week. Not that it matters.

The authors that write me notes don’t really want me to read their books. What they really want is for me to promote their book on this blog, my YouTube channel, or the podcast. There are generally two problems here.

First, it is very hard to promote someone’s book when they haven’t done the work to build their own platform. If you haven’t built a following by writing a blog, building a network on LinkedIn, developed a following on Twitter and Instagram, and built a mailing list, then it is going to be very difficult to promote and sell your book—even with help from people with bigger audiences.

This strategy is exactly backward. Instead of writing a book, you should write blog posts and publish on LinkedIn and Medium and other platforms that allow you to build your audience. A book used to be what you used to build a platform. Now you write the book so you can provide it to your existing platform.

Second, this strategy is exactly backward in another way, and that is “the ask.” One of the primary ways community works is that you create value before trying to claim any. The best way to ask people to help you promote your thing is to first ask them to promote their thing. You pay it forward, making deposits in the relationship account in excess of your ask.

Make deposits and make it easy for someone to say “yes.”

The post Deposits Before Withdrawals appeared first on The Sales Blog.

Key lessons from the Strategy and Innovation World Forum

Robert Jones, our research analyst and I headed off to London last week to go to the Strategy and Innovation World Forum, set up by World Forum Disrupt.  The Innovation Directors were attending in force, and with talks from the global heads of innovation from Santander, BT, UNICEF, Vodaphone and other world leading businesses there were plenty of interesting lessons to be gleaned.

With over 32 different speakers over the two days of the forum, it would be a bit of an information overload, if I tried to convey everything that was discussed at the event. But it did offer some great insights into the cutting edge of innovation strategy, so I've tried to distil the top 8 talks into just a few bite-sized takeaways that you can learn from and implement when developing your own innovation strategy.

Setting Strategies for uncertain times - Bertrand Hassani - Global Head of Innovation - Santander

This was my favorite of all the talks, combining great theoretical knowledge with actionable and practical advice, that's our style at Smart Insights.

Bertrand emphasized the fact that all brands, no matter their size, must be willing to take risks and to fail. Boiling down his key insights, he advises us that:

• You must test fast, fail fast and reiterate. No one gets it right first time.
• You should value of lessons taken from failure as much as you value the lessons taken from success.
• You should utilize data analytics as much as possible, as decisions based on data are far more likely to be right than those which are based on the highest paid person's opinion.
• Larger businesses should create innovation hubs, utilising university campuses or creating small teams based in technology hubs like silicon valley.

How Innovation has become conformity in disguise - Shannon Riley - Director of Strategy and Operations - News UK

I loved this talk because it challenges that self-congratulatory atmosphere of corporate buzzwords that so often develops around strategy and innovation events. Shannon made the point that if you are innovating in the same way as everyone else, you aren't innovating. Innovation is defined by being different. The key lessons she imparted were:

• Don't hop on bandwagons and try to be part of every new trend
• Data is never perfect or complete, you can't always rely on data to make decisions- look how wrong pollsters consistently call elections/referendums!
• Competitive advantage is gained by doing something different from the competition. You can't get this by copying competitors, you have to strike out and do something genuinely novel.
•  Successful innovators go against the direction of travel of the rest of the population. If everyone is patting you on the back and saying it's a great idea, it probably isn't actually innovative.

Everyone in your office knows your password - Sam Tatam - Director of Behavioral Strategy

This talk's title is misleading, it wasn't about security, but about behavioral science. Sam started off by making the point that in the name of security many offices force employees to change their password every month. Because most employees can't be doing with the hassle of remembering a new password every month, they just change their password to 'Febuary2017' or whatever the name of the month is. His study found these passwords accounted for about one-quarter of the passwords in the office, meaning a large chunk of the office all had the same password! The irony is this terribly insecure system was brought about by a rule designed to increase security. This teaches us something about how we should be putting humans at the forefront of how we design customer experiences, and how it's critical to properly understand behavioral psychology if you want to build an effective user experience. He gave us five key principles of behavioral science which marketers can use to make their messaging more effective.

• Easy - Make what you want people to do easy. People are like water, the always follow the route of least resistance.
• Attractive - Make what you want people to do stand out. Use bright colors, big buttons etc.
• Social -  People like to see other people doing something before they do it themselves. People tend to want to do what is popular. Make it clear that many other people are doing what you want your users to do.
• Time - People often behave on impulse, it's therefore important to be there at the right time. Showing that an offer will soon expire is extreemly effective at getting people to use it.
• Loss Aversion - People are twice as motivated to avoid a loss as they are to achieve a gain.

Digital Disruption and Transformation - Kevin Mansfield - Head of Product and Innovation at the Racing Post.

We talk about digital transformation a lot at SmartInsights, and Kevin provided some great insights from the 'coalface' so to speak, telling us what he'd learned from the process of transforming a very 'traditional' business into one with a digital-first approach. Here are the key lessons Kevin had for those looking to embark on digital transformation:

• Digital Transformation depends on 4 key behaviours: Customer focus, collaboration, leadership, and data-driven decisions.
• Before you start the process of trying to digitally transform, conduct research to understand your customers wants and needs, so you can align the whole process with what the customer wants.
• Establish a multi-disciplinary 'product council' from across the business, responsible for the product strategy. This will break down siols and mean all aspects of the business have an input.
• Use concept discovery to test very simple prototypes with customers to see if they engage with them. – Rapidly prototype over a 5 day process with 3 customer days and 2 iteration days. Customer days test the product and iteration days change how the prototype works

The future of customer engagement - Saul Betmead - Chief Strategy Officer of Young & Rubicam.

Saul's talk focused on branding and how customers see brands in a rapidly changing environment. It turns most brands are seeing their value erode, but a select few tech-super brands like AirBnB, Google etc. are seeing their value soar. The key points he imparted were:

• A brand survey with over 1 million respondents found 66% of brands to be stagnant or in decline.
• Most people wouldn't care if 74% of brands disappeared - it's only a tiny minority of brands that matter.
• Consumer expectations are rising across categories. Consumer's do not base their expectations on your competitors, they base them on digital leaders like Amazon, Netflix etc.
• Testing multiple ideas and back the ones that work is the only way to work when the fast changing climate means it is impossible to know what will be successful and what won't.
• The most successful brands combine being purposeful, inventive and sociable.

Letting the story drive technology - John Vary - Manager of Innovation and John Lewis.

John's pithy and interesting talk didn't mince words and didn't use industry buzzwords. He kept it simple and imparted the following important lessons:

• Use a small team in a skunkworks, and keep it separate from day to day objectives to keep it innovative.
• Design the technology in-house rather than use agencies so you develop your internal expertise.
• Trust each other and don't focus on narrow KPIs.

How natural interfaces will re-define social in 2017 - Tom Ollerton - Director of Innovation at We Are Social

Tom's talk was really interesting because We Are Social are at the cutting edge of some of the latest development we are seeing in the social marketing space. One interesting tidbit to some out of his talk was the fact that 'Dom the Pizza bot', the Bot which orders pizza for you through Facebook Messanger doesn't actually use any AI at all. Although many news outlets picked up on the bot as an example of AI in marketing, it's actually just based on a spreadsheet of set responses their team spent a day putting together! Tom stressed the emerging importance of spoken interfaces like Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, and Google Now. He made the point that:

• Natural spoken interfaces will become the most popular way of interacting with many of our devices because they offer the least friction.
• Because of the rising popularity of spoken interfaces brands will increasingly need to develop digital personalities. Will your brand be funny, sassy, or serious?

The real path to integrated innovation - Grace Letley - Director of Strategy at Vizeum

Grace's talk was about how innovation often comes from unexpected places, and the value of different viewpoints. She made a couple of really valuable points to bear in mind when putting together innovation teams:

• Diversity is valuable for creating different perspectives. Innovation happens when different ideas meet. If everyone agrees with each other there is no point working together.
• Teams should be given permission to not ask for permission. They have to be able to go where their curiosity takes them.

Download Expert Business Level Resource – Marketing technology and media innovation guide 2017

The guide outlines 6 of the most important new technologies marketers should consider when planning for future investment in customer-facing marketing experiences and communications to encourage brand engagement and purchase.

Access the Marketing technology and media innovation guide 2017

What do you envision for the future of content from a marketing perspective, and how do marketing teams need to evolve to prepare?

The CMI editorial team recently put this question to the pros who will present at the Intelligent Content Conference March 28–30 in Las Vegas. The answers fall loosely into seven groups:

• Build your online communities
• Reassess your processes and deliverables
• Transcend individual departments
• Make content relevant to each consumer
• Get friendlier with technology
• Prioritize quality even more
• Base your strategies on your strengths

Build your online communities

Design your content marketing strategy to produce “network effects.” The connection that your customers develop with one another – the value exchange you foster and curate between them – matters more than the direct value of the content you create.

Victor Gao, vice president of digital and managing director, Arrow Media Group | @wvictorgao

Design your #contentmarketing strategy to produce “network effects,” says @wvictorgao. #intelcontent
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As the global workforce becomes younger, online engagement must grow even more. The new decision makers want to co-create products and content. They want to feel connected to the brands they select and build relationships with peers that have the same loyalties. A collaborative community platform is critical to reach this demographic – these people will become our biggest advocates.

Take a hard look at your online community platform. How easy is it for members and visitors to leave feedback? To suggest ideas? To submit content? Do you reward people for participating?

Online communities are more than support forums. A robust community with a rich content library, diverse contributor population from across your enterprise, and active engagement programs will turn visitors into members – and keep them coming back for more.

Laurel Nicholes, director of technical communication services, F5 Networks | @laurelnicholes

A community w/ a rich #content library & active engagement will turn visitors into members. @laurelnicholes
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For many companies, interaction and collaboration are becoming more valuable than product. Our marketing engines need to find ways to match this shift.

Specifically, prioritize using content to convert people – especially influencers and prospective partners – to conversing with us, not necessarily to purchasing from us. While conversations don’t provide immediately measurable ROI, they build the framework and potential for positive business growth.

In other words, invest your time in building a community that helps you deliver on your business goals.

Vishal Khanna, director of marketing and communications, HealthPrize Technologies | @bediscontent

Invest time in building a community that helps deliver on business goals, says @bediscontent. #intelcontent
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Reassess your processes and deliverables

Tomorrow’s most successful organizations will be those that incorporate content marketing into Agile marketing teams. If you want to move your company in this direction, prepare to overcome barriers so that you can invoke the political will required to change the workflows, hiring practices, and training approaches to align with Agile methods. And be patient. It takes a while, especially for larger companies, to close the gap between Agile theory and practice.

Carlos Abler, jedi: content marketing strategy, 3M | @carlos_abler

Orgs that incorporate #contentmarketing into #Agile marketing teams will be most successful. @carlos_abler
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In the past, content was created to serve marketing campaigns; it was usually created after the campaign concept had been defined. Forward-thinking companies start with content strategy.

Yael Kochman, head of content and inbound marketing, Mapp | @yaelkochman

Forward-thinking companies start with #contentstrategy, says @yaelkochman. #intelcontent
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Text will never lose its potential value, but marketers must evolve from publishing mainly text to producing more and more video. This isn’t news – you’ve heard it before – but are you doing it?

Erik Hartman, owner, Erik Hartman Communicatie | @erikmhartman

Marketers must evolve from publishing mainly text to producing more & more #video, says @erikmhartman.
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Transcend individual departments

The best marketers rally a team of content producers within marketing and beyond – including the sales team, the customer-success team, influencers, and customers – to develop and amplify content that helps people solve problems they care about.

Peg Miller, co-founder, B2B Marketing Academy | @pegmiller

The best marketers rally a team to develop & amplify #content that helps people solve problems. @pegmiller
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Marketing is sitting on a goldmine: all that content typically treated as post-sale documentation. Your opportunity, should you choose to accept it, is to unify your company’s content strategy across the buyer’s journey, from discovery to support.

To accomplish this, marketing must partner with the folks who create support content, like product documentation and training material. Consider putting in place a content product manager: a senior content strategist steeped in user research, experience design, product management, instructional content design and development, content analytics, and growth hacking. Look for someone who understands the content experience related to product use as well as the way content fits into the go-to-market strategy.

Andrea Ames, enterprise content experience strategist, IBM | @aames

Unify your company’s #contentstrategy across the buyer’s journey, from discovery to support. @aames
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Marketing needs to lead a culture of content that transcends individual functions of the business. To do this, we need to communicate what we know about our customers and the market potential throughout the business so that everyone involved in planning, creating, distributing, managing, and measuring content can align their efforts on common insights and goals.

Jake Athey, director of marketing, Widen | @jakeathey

#Marketing needs to lead a culture of content that transcends individual functions, says @jakeathey.
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We must move toward intent-based marketing and content creation – really understand the intention of our audiences. To accomplish this, marketers have to work more closely with sales, support, customer success, and other teams across the company.

Erin Robbins, president, GinzaMetrics | @texasgirlerin

We must move toward intent-based #marketing & #content creation, says @texasgirlerin. #intelcontent
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Make content relevant to each consumer

Our systems need to personalize and contextualize content dynamically – that is, each time it’s delivered. We need to speak to each customer or potential customer in a way that motivates him or her in a certain time and place, on whatever device he or she is using.

Ben Cornelius, chief of staff and head of business, global content and globalization, PayPal

Tomorrow’s marketers need to make good on two promises: personalization and omnichannel. Every year, the public becomes less tolerant of irrelevant messages. People want what they want, when and where they want it. It’s that simple.

Of course, simple for the consumer often means challenging for the supplier. We must eventually have the ability to create customized (adapted) deliverables using individual, personal user histories in any format or channel. The first step is to build a focused list of the people you want to serve and the things you’re good at serving them. Scrap the rest, and make your core assets adaptable and awesome.

Noz Urbina, founder and chief content strategist, Urbina Consulting | @nozurbina

Tomorrow’s marketers need to make good on two promises: personalization & omnichannel, says @nozurbina.
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Get friendlier with technology

The future of marketing looks a lot like the past of marketing – with added help from robots. Robots increasingly broker who sees what content and how. They are our friends if we give them the attention and nurturing they need so that they can help us.

Want to prepare?

1. Choose a focus. Don’t try to be all things to all people in all channels.
2. Structure your content for use across channels and for personalization and marketing automation. Artificial intelligence will make message targeting and delivery easier over time, but content has to be ready with structure, metadata, and schema in order to play well with the robots.
3. Build strong alliances with IT, and build strong budgets for technology. Marketing’s relationship with technology will only deepen.

Cruce Saunders, principal, Simple [A] | @mrcruce

Marketing’s relationship with technology will only deepen, says @mrcruce. #intelcontent
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Marketers are learning more about what to measure, how to capture those metrics, and how to report these to your leadership teams. Creative teams, technical teams, and analytics teams need to collaborate more than ever.

Buddy Scalera, senior director of content strategy, The Medicines Company | @buddyscalera

Creative, technical, & analytics teams need to collaborate more than ever. @buddyscalera #intelcontent
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One word: Cognitive. Marketing teams need to learn how to mine user data from search, social, and web analytics to serve more relevant content to their target audiences programmatically. That means using tools like the Alchemy API to find patterns in content of interest to the audience and to develop models that serve audience needs from those patterns.

James Mathewson, distinguished technical marketer, search, IBM | @james_mathewson

Mine data from search, social, & web analytics to serve more relevant content, says @james_mathewson.
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Prioritize quality even more

We all know that effective marketing and excellent customer experience require great content, but “great” is easier said than done. Marketing teams may spend months defining buyer personas and then struggle to write for a CIO versus a CMO. Also, with content coming from so many sources – marketing, product teams, external agencies, content marketing platforms – it’s challenging to ensure high-quality, on-brand, on-persona content.

It’s time for marketing organizations to prioritize their content operations by embracing the three pillars of content effectiveness: goals, guidance, and governance. Goals ensure that content meets established standards related to style, terminology, and tone of voice. Guidance gives writers nuanced feedback based on those goals. And governance ensures that writers understand content issues and how to fix them.

Dr. Andrew Bredenkamp, founder and CEO, Acrolinx| @abredenkamp

Marketing orgs need to prioritize content ops by embracing goals, guidance, & governance. @abredenkamp
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Marketers have overinvested in producing and advertising their content while underinvesting in what happens after someone clicks through to it. We must turn those moments of attention into engagement, ideally increasing the velocity with which people move through your sales pipeline.

How do you achieve this? Not by producing more content; SiriusDecisions estimated several years ago that 60 to 70% of B2B content “sits unused.” Rather, pinpoint the content that your visitors find useful and steer more people to it.

Nick Edouard, president and chief product officer, LookBookHQ | @nickedouard

Pinpoint the content that your visitors find useful & steer more people to it, says @nickedouard.
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As more and more niches approach content saturation, outstanding content creators and teams will be in ever-higher demand. Great content is a crucial brand differentiator, so marketing teams need to foster creativity AND run at top speed. That might mean recruiting and budgeting to build your content dream team or finding a freelance network you can rely on. Whatever your ideal team structure is, put it in place and get out of the way so they can start creating the content that will become your competitive advantage.

Andrea Fryrear, founder & chief content officer, Fox Content | @andreafryrear

Whatever your ideal team structure is, put it in place & get out of the way, says @andreafryrear.
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Base your strategies on your strengths

The opportunities for marketing teams lie not in adopting any particular technology or approach but in designing strategies attuned to their specific aptitudes and competitive opportunities.

For example, long-form content can be remarkably successful – but not for everyone and not for every message. Similarly, structured content can be a game-changer, but organizations need to choose carefully from its rich menu of methods and tools to benefit – and, indeed, to avoid being worse off than before they adopted it.

In the last few years, the general maturity of content production has increased, so more companies are turning out higher quality content more consistently than ever. In this competitive environment, jumping on the next tech bandwagon won’t be enough. The challenge for marketing teams is to gain knowledge and exercise judgment as to which architectures and approaches best suit their own strengths and strategic plans.

Joe Pairman, consulting practice lead, Mekon | @joepairman

Think before you jump on the next marketing-tech bandwagon, says @joepairman. #intelcontent
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Conclusion

This article is part of our three-part series that shares insights from ICC speakers. Here are the other two articles:

• Content Technologies: How to Realize the Promises and Avoid the Pitfalls
• Want to Scale Up Your Content Operations? 4 Things to Think Big About [Infographic]

How about you? What do you envision for the future of content from a marketing perspective, and how do marketing teams need to evolve to prepare? Do you agree with what you’ve read? What’s missing? Let your insights fly in a comment. Let’s create our future together.

To hear these pros – in person – share their expertise on content strategy for marketers, register for the Intelligent Content Conference today. Use code BLOG100 to save $100 on the main event and all-access passes.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How Marketing Must Evolve: 19 Leaders Peer Into Content’s Future appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

I’m tempted to paraphrase the old Carly Simon song, You’re So Vain. Too often we think our customers’ buying cycles are about us, at least a choice between us and our competitors.

We may be very customer focused in our sales process, trying to understand and align ourselves with the customer buying process. But still, our strategies tend to focus on a singular part of the customer buying cycle, “What does it take to select us?”

As a consequence, everything we do, probably everything our competitors do is singularly focused on that one decision.

But looking at it from a customer’s view, it’s probably very different.

First, our customers aren’t involved in buying just to buy. Buying is one component of their overall problem solving process. Usually our customers are trying to solve a problem within their operations, or to address an opportunity. Selecting a “solution,” is just part of their process. They have to look at things like business process re-engineering, implementation, training, change management process, and many other things that impact their ability to solve the problem. Yet our focus is, inevitably, on just our part of the problem they are trying to solve.

Second, we may not be the only purchasing decision they are making, or even the most important of those purchasing decisions. Think of an Apple engineer (or substitute your favorite brand of smartphone) designing a new iPhone. They are involved in complex design process, involving potentially hundreds of components. That engineering team is making buying decisions for all those components. Sometimes those buying decisions involve tradeoffs between different components. So while we may be focused on our semiconductor, the engineering team is trading off the spend on semiconductors with other components. We seldom pay attention to this complex set of buying activities, focusing only on the decision for our product.

Recently, I worked with a team selling an electronic component that was part of a new smartphone. Had the team focused on just that part of the project and their direct competition, they would have surely lost–their best pricing was about 50% more than the competition–partly because their product had much more capability than the competitors. Instead they looked at the collective set of parts the customer had to consider for this smartphone. They realized their product eliminated the need for two other components in the design. Taken collectively, the cost of their solution was cheaper than the cost of their competition and the cheapest alternatives for the two other products. Additionally, the simpler design improved maneuverability and reliability. As a result, they presented the customer with a far superior and far less costly solution than if they had just competed head to head with the competition.

Even in other sales situations, the customer is seldom just making one buying decision. Take a complex IT systems, there may be the software (premise or cloud), there may be an implementation provider, a business process engineering provider, vendors to host the application (in the case of private cloud), ancillary software products to extend the capabilities of the software system (we may, in fact, be one of those ancillary products). Recently, for example, I worked with a systems integration company that “won” the implementation contract for a new software system–but only if that software system was selected by the customer. Instead, the customer selected another software system, one which my client couldn’t support. So while they “won” the decision, the PO was placed with another supplier they had not competed against.

We disadvantage ourselves, both in our sales strategy and in maximizing our ability to create and deliver value when we focus on the customer decision about our products/services. The work of the customer is always more than just this decision. They struggle not only in that decision, but also in the broader set of decisions they are making to achieve their goals.

As much as we would like the decision to be about us, it seldom is.

Are you looking at what the customer is trying to achieve, beyond selecting a product? Are you helping them with their whole process, maximizing the value you create?

I’m glad I get to do business in the connected economy rather than times past such as the industrial age. You can make your ideas happen so quickly without a ton of gatekeepers that had to give you access and permission to create, distribute or sell something.

If you want to put a book out, you can do it by getting to work and publishing on Amazon.

If you want to launch a business, you can put an idea out there by getting a new customer and refining your product.

The hard part is about how you approach testing your ideas. There’s such a temptation to be narcistic and think about what you want. The idea has to start with your own assumptions, creativity and zeal.

However, whether people want to pay for your idea or value what you are selling is entirely up to them. And it’s hard to break through the noise when everyone has access to any goods, content or information from their iPhone. You are competing for attention as well as quality presented by every major brand out there.

I don’t like to assume anything. At the end of the day, people want what they want and it’s our job in business and selling to figure out what resonates.

I like to come up with ideas all the time. That creative process is critical. Furthermore, what is valuable today becomes old news and stale in a short time. So that idea machine has to be continually running.

I think the critical part is dialing in on what people want and one of the best ways to approach making money is to watch people’s faces closely. That’s right, look for their reactions. When you have something you are presenting the world, the ultimate question is not the intrinsic value you believe exists in your idea, product or service. It’s the value perception and reaction your customer carries in their mind.

There are 3 outcomes when you risk presenting your idea:

1. Your customer perceives immense value.
2. Your customer is indifferent and does not perceive value.
3. You are close, but something is missing.

The first reaction is the home run. You can expand and repeat. Great job.

The second means you have to pivot. People vote with their wallets. Either the idea is majorly flawed and you have no hope. Or your idea needs refinement, thus number 3. More work and engagement is required to see what is missing. It’s an exercise in filling in the gaps.

This is why you have to watch people’s faces. See how they react. Probe and find out where you need to tweak or whether you need to abandon the idea altogether to put your energy into a better concept.

If you miss the reaction and refinement then you lose opportunity to delight, connect and make money. You don’t get to be the judge. The customer is the judge and is incapable of being wrong when it comes to determining value.

Unfortunately, many entrepreneurs get too married to their idea and miss that value perception is the key thing that matters.

You can affect your own revenue and loyalty by taking heed and watching people’s faces closely. See what they truly value and keep coming back with positioning, framing and enhancements to your offering.

How are people perceiving your value? How can you increase it 100%?

When Jared walked into a meeting to discuss a new marketing approach for a product, the conversation didn’t play out well. Five minutes into the dialogue, the product manager, Françoise, started interrupting him with questions he was planning to address later in the pitch. As the conversation ran off the rails, Jared struggled to keep a calm demeanor, while Françoise multitasked; Jared watched in frustration as she sent at least five text messages during their altercation. Jared left the meeting feeling belittled and demoralized. Françoise left feeling frazzled and irritated — she didn’t have time to sit through a poorly thought out presentation. There was too much other work to get done!

All of us have experienced communication meltdowns similar to Jared’s. Maybe you were Jared or Françoise in the scenario. By the time you walked away from the conversation, you could have cut the tension with a knife. And your agenda didn’t play out the way you were hoping. You ended up carrying the conversation with you. It weighed heavily on your mind, adding more stress to your workload. For people like Jared and Françoise, it can take a lot more time and effort to recover from a breakdown in communication than to avoid one in the first place.

Our review of research and company examples suggests there are three things you can do to avoid communication breakdowns like this.

Be Present (Really)

Whether we’re walking into a meeting, drafting an important proposal, or sitting down face-to-face with a colleague, our attention can easily be hijacked, especially when our mind wanders 50% of the time, as research suggests. Add in the dozens of emails, texts, calls, and instant messages we receive every hour, and staying focused just gets that much harder. Once we’re interrupted, it takes effort and time to refocus. Multitasking, especially with digital media, can have an adverse effect on our mental capacity and affect our productivity, as one Stanford study indicates.

Given our busy schedules and the many messages and emails, sometimes we are not present with the people in front of us. We’re thinking about something that happened earlier or an article we just read or a phone conversation we just had. Our mind is elsewhere. The more we can bring our wandering mind to the present, the easier and more natural it becomes to connect, listen, and be open and authentic.

To help stay present in a meeting or conversation, turn away from your computer and put your phone into airplane mode. Even better, leave your phone at your desk. The mere presence of a phone at a meeting can make people feel less connected, damaging your ability to communicate successfully.

If you have a moment or two before the meeting, rather than trying to send a few additional emails, meditate or do some calming breathing exercises. Empty your mind so you can be fully present, attentive, and skillful. Even if you have only a second before answering a ringing phone or walking into a conference room, pause and take one deep breath. Maybe even remember to smile.

Listen More

This wisdom has been around for a long time: “We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.” The quote is attributed to Zeno of Citium, a Hellenistic thinker. Be genuinely curious and interested in what is being said, even if initially you’re not. Pay attention to cues: Does the person spend a lot of time on a particular point? Does she get more animated at specific junctures and less at others? Listening more and with curiosity not only helps you to better connect and understand what is being said, but also provides valuable input on how you may frame your response and navigate the conversation. It can help you tune into the topics your colleague is passionate about. Getting to know them will help you see their perspective and come to an agreement that meets everyone’s needs. From this place of actively listening, your conversation will move forward more constructively.

This type of conversation might actually teach you something as well. Henry Elkus, CEO of Helena, created space to hear feedback from everyone in his company, even interns. Thanks to this openness, one of his interns helped dramatically improve the direction his organization would take. “The intern saved me and the rest of our team the wasted time and energy we might have spent continuing down a suboptimal path,” Elkus said.

Be Open

Communication involves the exchange of viewpoints, sometimes opposing positions. Unless you open your mind to another’s perspective, common ground can be tough to find. And finding common ground requires us to listen in order to really consider someone’s position.

Being open-minded at times may require you to be open to being proven wrong. Elkus created a company culture in which debate is openly valued and encouraged; in this culture, feedback doesn’t just trickle from top to bottom, but also from the bottom up. Though this type of culture is challenging for him as the leader, it has proven tremendously beneficial: “A culture where even the interns can feel free to opine against you means opening yourself up to being proven wrong, often publicly. Indeed, this exact situation has happened to me, more than once! But an intern challenging me so directly — and being right — has immense value. As a CEO, I was warned that this model would threaten my own power inside the organization. In fact, I was uncomfortable, and I was heavily challenged. But the discomfort was worth it. The collective feedback approach was crucial to improving our strategy. And because every employee could feel some ownership in creating our plan, they were far more motivated to execute it.”

As someone is speaking, notice: Are you already thinking about your rebuttal? Are you responding with a “yes,” followed by an immediate “but”? Or have you already interrupted? Be open to another person’s perspective. If you’re worried about not having the perfect reply, you can always say, “I haven’t thought about it that way before. Can you give me a day or so to think it over?” To our knowledge, no one has ever complained about someone listening to what they’ve said and taking a little extra time to thoughtfully analyze and respond to it.

Over time, listening openly and attentively to others helps to cultivate trust. Reflect on your experiences: The more connected you feel to someone, the more you tend to trust that person, and the easier it becomes to talk. This contributes to a sense of psychological safety, which according to a Google study is the key to successful teams. The ability to take risks and speak up can be the difference between thwarting a mistake or learning from one. In the end, everyone benefits.

What makes a great sales trainer?

This was the subject of my previous post, found here. In it, I discussed a number of traits that I consider table stakes for great sales trainers.

So, now the question becomes: How can sales training facilitators up their game?

To go above and beyond the basic requirements — to really stand out as an exceptional facilitator — it’s important to stay tuned to what is happening in your fields of play (sales and learning and development) and integrate that knowledge appropriately to remain credible and relevant. From a skills perspective, it is important to continue your professional growth with a focus on mastering your content so you are modeling it effectively. Listening skills and effective coaching skills are critical to a trainer’s ability to create and illuminate lightbulbs, or “aha” moments. Executing in-the-moment coaching to provide specific, accurate feedback that will equip and inspire learners to apply classroom learning in the real world is a nuanced, next-level, and important skill set.

Here are a few suggestions:

1. Keep up to date on selling trends

It’s important to understand the changing trends in your selling space, whether that’s business-to-business or business-to-consumer sales. Talk to sales professionals, both inside and outside the company. Read the experts in the field. Search for the latest reports and studies by industry consultants.

2. Seek out information on training trends

Stay connected to what’s happening in the field of training. Network with industry colleagues. Follow the social media feeds of thought leaders, and subscribe to their blogs. Go to conferences and make personal connections. Explore hot topics in the field, such as neuroscience, learning research, blended learning, how to meet learners where they are, and the needs of future and multigenerational learners.

3. Build credibility through field experience

Look for opportunities to accompany sales professionals in the field so you can see firsthand the challenges they are facing. Real, in-the-trenches field experience raises credibility in the classroom and builds the confidence of a training facilitator.

4. Define the next level

What is your next-level goal as a trainer? Professional development is personal. It could be about fine-tuning your craft and honing your skills to become more accomplished. It could be about broadening your area of expertise. It helps to set a target by defining what next-level skills look like, visualizing success, and then working to make it happen. Once you have a target, look for resources to support you, including coursework, new certifications, or speaking engagements at industry conferences.

5. Create and illuminate lightbulb moments

Hone your questioning and listening skills, and focus on recognizing, creating, and maximizing aha moments for learners. Doing so benefits everyone in the room. Look for opportunities to make connections and linkages to learning modules. As tempting as it may be to give answers to training participants, learn to ask more than tell. It could be as basic as answering a question with your own question to encourage more probing of the content being addressed. Or, it could involve asking open-ended checking questions before transitioning to new topics.

6. Model essential skills

Incorporate essential questioning, listening, and other critical skills into your training behavior in the classroom. By modeling these skills yourself, you demonstrate how having a higher level of these skills can help sales professionals differentiate themselves and provide greater value to their customers.

7. Hone coaching skills

The ability to observe training participants practicing a skill and then stopping and redirecting to make course corrections helps them achieve a kind of “muscle memory” in the new skill. Sales training facilitators must be skilled in providing specific, accurate feedback that helps learners improve their ability to apply what was learned. This — moving a learner from knowledge to skill application — is what separates good facilitators from great ones. The objective of every training session is to support the learner through some level of change in the real world that results in the desired business outcome.

For sales trainers to up their game takes a desire for continual improvement and a commitment to lifelong learning. The outcome is a powerful one: a highly skilled facilitator who is learner-focused and delivers a tailored, challenging, and inspiring learning experience that results in improved performance and results.

Learn more about Richardson’s world class sales trainers by contacting us at info@richardson.com or 215-940-9255.

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We build and maintain a portfolio of high quality sales skills assessment tools, building block sales training modules, and the tools and systems to create a sustained and continuous learning experience.

The post Seven Ways Sales Trainers Can Up Their Game appeared first on Richardson Sales Training and Enablement Blog.

Having attended somewhere between 500 and 1,000 conferences, one of my favorite reasons to go to them is to hear the kinds of questions people have, and then see how some of the best speakers address them. For the Sysomos Summit in late February, let’s get a head start. Here are questions for ten speakers who will be joining us in Raleigh:

1) Melissa Parrish, Vice President and Research Director, Forrester

“Digital transformation” is a term that’s surfacing far more lately (perhaps thanks to Forrester), and a lot of agencies and consultancies are adopting it. What exactly is being transformed now, and how often is social marketing playing a significant role in that transformation? When is “digital transformation” something real, as opposed to serving as a synonym for something like “innovation” which became so overused?

2) Vanessa Sain-Dieguez, Senior Director, HR Digital Strategy, Hilton Worldwide

On LinkedIn, you call yourself “a corporate intrapreneur” working on “building high performing teams that… aren’t afraid of failure.” What are some of the bigger risks you and your team have taken when you weren’t sure what the outcome would be? How do you get buy-in when you’re running a pilot and can’t tell at the start how it will work out?

3) Jason Falls, Strategy Advisor, Conversation Research Institute

What are the best product innovations you’ve come across that have been influenced by social intelligence? Are certain industries particularly adept at using such analytics for research and development?

4) Lauren Harper, Senior Manager, B2B Content and Social, Pandora

How does B2B content marketing differ from B2C content marketing? What’s one thing B2B marketers can learn from B2C marketers when it comes to social media, and what can B2C marketers learn from B2B marketers?

5) Peter Heffring, CEO, Sysomos

How often do you come across businesses using any kind of social data in their customer lifetime value metrics? What kinds of marketers are best equipped to factor CLV into the equation?

6) Leigh Willis, Behavioral Scientist, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

How closely do epidemiologists at the CDC monitor social media patterns? What kinds of health-related behaviors can you best predict by monitoring online conversations? With recent outbreaks the past few years such as Zika and Ebola, did monitoring social media help in any way?

7) Kunal Merchant, Audience Insights Partnerships, Facebook

Nearly a decade ago, you grew the DesiHits community into one of the most popular entertainment brands on Facebook at the time. As someone who works at Facebook now, what is it that you learned from working on DesiHits that remains relevant for marketers today?

8) Charlie Oliver, Founder, Served Fresh Media

How bullish are you on live video for brands? Is this going to be a mainstay for brands in the coming year, or is this rush of interest bound to fizzle?

9) Matthew Rednor, CEO, Decoded Advertising

Your agency just won Best in Show at the 2017 Digiday Video Awards for the “Dull Life” digital video series you produced for Dollar Shave Club. You created some of the dullest long-form videos imaginable, like one of a snail crossing a road. What made you think that this would be successful, and what did you learn from doing this work that you will take with you for other campaigns?

10) Sharon MacGregor, Instructor, Sunrise Yoga

For someone who likes the idea of yoga but isn’t all that flexible and doesn’t like waking up anywhere close to sunrise, are there any health benefits to stretching a bit during an 11am doughnut break?

Those are just some of the questions we hope to address at the Sysomos Summit. Want answers? Register now, and we’ll see you there.

Use these landing page creation and testing tools to optimise the conversion rates of your landing pages

Lead generation is a key goal of digital marketing in many sectors. By testing landing page layout, headlines and copy you can increase lead volume and thus potentially sales using cost-effective techniques. By hosting test pages on the servers of suppliers you should be able to bypass the need for agency or IT department involvement to get test up-and-running rapidly. The tools listed in this post will help you design and test pages which improve the conversion rate to lead. SmartInsights has no relationship with any of these tools, we just want to help readers looking to utilise landing page testing tools by pointing them to quality providers.

Key things to consider before purchasing and using these tools:

• Ease of use of setting up tests
• Integration with CRM systems you use or plan to use
• Quality of templates which can be amended - layout, field-level data collection options and style needs to be suitable for scale of business and sector. Today most are mobile-responsive.
• Account management for use by multiple users in agencies and larger organisations

Below are five tools we recommend for creating and testing landing pages.

Unbounce

Unbounce offers creation and testing of landing pages for B2B and B2C markets. We recommend this tool based on its ease of use, range of integration and account management and administration features suitable for use in agencies and large organisations.

Key features:

• Dynamic text replacement (e.g. to increase relevance of headlines for PPC ads)
• WordPress, HubSpot, Marketo, Infusionsoft, Mailchimp integrations
• Multi-user and client management for agencies and large organisations

What makes it Stand out?

It is an established service with 200+ page templates plus integration with leading CRM services.

LeadPages

LeadPages is for testing hosted landing pages to increase leads. It is another fully featured tool which is competitively priced (with an unlimited number of landing pages or views), but without a monthly pricing option at the time of review (quarterly, annual or 2-year billing options).

Key features:

• 70+ different landing page templats
• HubSpot, Market and Salesforce integration in top plan.
• WordPress integration in all.
• 5 sub-accounts in the top plan

What makes it Stand out?

It is an established service with 200+ page templates plus integration with leading CRM services.

Costs and features more suited for information marketers in smaller businesses. Positioned as ‘With our simple templates, you can create opt-in pages that instantly send your subscribers free content bribes (or “lead magnets”)’

Instapage

Another tool for testing landing pages, it is a solid alternative to Unbounce suitable for mid to large organisations, but with fewer CRM integrations.

Key features:

• Range of page types
• 100+ mobile responsive templates
• Salesforce and Infusionsoft CRM integration.
• WordPress and extensive email system integrations

What makes it Stand out?

Speed of page setup. Clickthrough pages which are designed as an introductory funnel between the product or service you are trying to sell and a conversion. Specific web page and thank you page features.

Ion Interactive

Ion Interactive lets you build and test content marketing campaigns for lead generation more efficiently. This service started with a similar positioning to the other tools in this category, but now focuses on it’s interactive content marketing capabilities. However, it can still perform tests and optimisations. It is a premium service supporting marketing of a wider range of assets for larger enterprises.

Key features:

• Landing page optimisation
• Pages can include these interactive content assets quizzes, assessments, calculators, configurators, solution builders, interactive white papers and interactive infographics
• CRM integrations with HubSpot, Marketo, Oracle, Salesforce and Demandbase

What makes it Stand out?

This tool is based on developing a content marketing program rather than testing individual pages, which makes it very different to many of the other tools listed here.

Optimizely

Optimizely is for creating sophisticated tests beyond landing pages across multiple audience types. Capability to change page elements using visual editor not possible in most other services in this category. It may be surprising that we have rated this as fifth in the category. If we had rated it a few years ago, it would certainly been higher. But as its enterprise capabilities have grown, so has the cost meaning that it is relatively costly for medium to large businesses and the other options are more realistic for smaller businesses.

Key features:

• Visual editor enables testing of page elements without coding
• Test experiment variations to visitors and users by ad campaign, geography, cookies, or a variety of other dimensions.
• iOS and Android app A/B and multivariate testing
• Separate personalisation option

What makes it Stand out?

A suite of tools that is more sophisticated than most others in the category. The ability to change page elements without coding is valuable for many other page template types on a sites.

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Lately, there has been a lot of talk about influencer marketing. Many are calling influencer marketing one of the biggest marketing trends of 2017.

Currently, influencer marketing is typically available only to those with huge budgets to blow. As a result, small business owners are often left assuming they cannot afford the marketing trends they read about online.

Despite there being a lot of coverage around micro-influencers (who cost far less than standard influencers), there have not been many resources explaining how those with smaller budgets can utilize influencers effectively.

In this article, I wanted to do just that. Let’s dive in…

Utilize Micro-influencers, Preferably on Instagram

Markerly, an influencer marketing platform, conducted a study examining over 2 million social media influencers. They found the engagement rate of micro-influencers to be 2X higher than those with 10k to 100k followers, and 4X higher than those with 100k+ followers. In short, even if you don’t have the budget to run expensive influencer campaigns or have Beyonce shout out your shoe company, you’re still in luck thanks to micro-influencers.

To identify and connect with influencers in your industry or city, use tools like Klear, which lists out relevant influencers based on a variety of criteria, and see if you two can work together. If that does not work for you, you can never go wrong with a Google search.

Get Liberal with your Definition of “Influencer”

The definition of an influencer is anyone who influences a member of their audience to take an action. If you are unable, why not get a little creative here? Here’s an example: Shameless confession: I’ve spent some time as an Uber driver. The amount of times I received the question, “Where is a good spot to eat around here?” or “Which clubs are worth going to?” is outrageously high.

If you’re the owner of a cafe, bar, restaurant or a similar business, consider hosting a night/day where Uber & Lyft drivers get 25% off. Then, befriend those who show up and let them know you’ll compensate them (either with money or freebies) for every x amount of people they bring into your business. To track this, have their passengers say “Rachel, the Lyft driver, told me about you.” etc.

Begin thinking creatively on how to reach audiences and potential clients where they’re already at. Once this “clicks”, the possibilities are endless when it comes to generating awareness for your business.

Pay with Your Resources

You don’t always have to pay them with money. Leverage the resources available to you, even if they aren’t monetary. If you are a local bar, why not give the influencer a free round of drinks for her and her friends? If you are a clothing brand, why not a couple free t-shirts?

Of course, many influencers do require monetary compensation, as they should for their hard work, but there are always exceptions who may be willing to accept other forms of incentives.

Become a Student of the Game

What I mean by this is for you to make relationships while influencers are still on the come-up.

If you are the owner of a local gym, then follow influencers in your area who document their own fitness journeys. If you come across an influencer who has a small following at the moment, but is gaining a lot of momentum and traction, reach out to them. Let them know you are a fan of their work and you’d like to meet up sometime. This may lead to a fruitful partnership.

Make the Process Seamless for the Influencer

For the most part, influencers are very busy. For large influencers, their personal brand is their business, so they are constantly working to build it up. Smaller influencers, more than likely, have a 9–5 on top of their blog or YouTube channel, which makes them extremely busy as well.

Be cognizant of this by making the process as seamless as possible for the influencer. If you are a small nightclub holding an event, create Snapchat Geofilters yourself (or hire someone on Fiverr to do it for you) and encourage the influencer to use the filter throughout the night upon arrival. If you own a restaurant, be sure to have an idea of what you’d like the influencer to cover in their post specifically before they arrive on site.

Have the location of your business already created on Facebook so the influencer can tag it in her/his Instagram & Facebook posts.

Have Realistic and Actionable Goals

Here’s the deal: For the most part (and I’m talking about the 85–90% part), influencers are best at driving awareness.  I hate to burst your bubble, but better to do it now than finding out after you invest time, money, and resources into influencer marketing.

Sure, you might receive some conversions. Hell, maybe even a sizable amount of conversions. But thinking you will receive $500 worth of product sales by spending $250 on influencer marketing is just not realistic. Sometimes it happens, and we can call those instances “unicorns”.

However, the true value in influencer marketing is worth much more than what you will pay them. The awareness you receive is more than worth the cost. Conversions are a bonus.  Have an awareness goal that is realistic. If the influencer who’s posting for you typically receives 4,000 Instagram Likes on her photos, make your goal 4,500 Likes.

In this regard, begin to think of influencer marketing like a billboard on a highway where only your potential customers drove on.

If You Can’t Reel ’em in, Then Make ‘em Yourself!

If nothing else is working for you, use social media monitoring tools to see who’s talking about your brand or your industry. Then, if those people are receiving a fair amount of engagement and have a sizable amount of followers, treat them as if they were an influencer!

Use social monitoring tools like Sprout Social, Respond by Buffer (Twitter only), or Hootsuite to see who is talking about your brand or topics similar to your brand. Or, if you wanna keep it simple, just search for hashtags and keywords in the social platforms directly.

Reach out to them and use the compensation model laid out above to use as leverage. Occasionally, “average people” can reach your target audience just as well as micro-influencers can.

While it is true influencer marketing can be expensive, there are an immense amount of opportunities available to everyone with a little creativity and an open mind.

If you would like to learn more about how to leverage micro-influencers on Instagram, read this terrific article here on Stories by Buffer written by Shane Barker & if you would like weekly social media updates, consider subscribing to the Arctiphi newsletter.

The post Influencer Marketing on a Budget: New Tactics for 2017 appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

        

We need to talk about needs assessment. Before we can talk about the all-new, buyer-driven, field-tested and proven-to-advance-the-sale dialogic needs assessment, we have to start with a few basics.  

Quality needs assessment (needs analysis, discovery, customer probe... whatever you call it in your sales process) is sorely lacking in most sales organizations.

“The purpose of any business is to create and keep a customer”—Theodore Levitt

Customer-Centric Businesses Will Win

Customer centricity started in the 60s with direct marketing. Since then, the omnipresence of the Internet has increased opportunities for companies and customers to interact. Customers became more connected and empowered and their expectations rose. At the same time, they turned into the main force driving the success (and failure) of businesses.

For instance, it’s now easy for prospects to learn about your products from their peers. Online reviews, LinkedIn discussions and tweets are all at their fingertips.

As a result, organizations that have a laser-like focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences will be tomorrow’s winners. They will align their operations with market needs so they can build products and offer services customers love, deliver them with ease and provide seamless support. In doing so, they will build enduring relationships.

Businesses Struggle to Deliver

Despite all the talk about putting customers first, a Gallup report revealed 71% of B2B are either indifferent towards their vendors or actively disengaged. Translation? The vast majority of B2B companies’ customers could easily stray from the fold at any moment, which suggests that many have not fully realized the goal of customer centricity.

While it’s easy to say “We want to be customer-centric,” it’s harder to realize the vision. How do you make it happen?

How to Build Your Understanding of Customers

Making customers the center of your universe and how you sell to them starts with talking to them to gain a better understanding of their needs, desires and expectations. There are a few ways to gather data to help in building your customer knowledge. These include:

• Buyer Personas

  First, you need to develop buyer personas. While B2B buyer persona research touches on demographics, or more precisely, firmographics, it needs to go further. What’s most important is to understand the problems customers face and how they go about solving them. What is the buying process? Who do they talk to and what information do they seek out? Within their organization, who are the influencers and decision makers? What do they consider when making the final buying decision?

  Buyer personas are not a once and done thing. Markets change. Technologies change. How people buy changes. And there’s always more to learn. So make buyer persona research part of your ongoing feedback system, just like customer satisfaction studies. This will enable you to learn continuously, create rich profiles and be on the forefront of market changes.

• Win/Loss Analyses

  Another good source of data is win/loss sales analyses. Look through your database to find customers you recently lost and prospects who either decided not to buy or defected to the competition. Also, find some deals you’ve just landed. Interview them to discover why they came aboard or chose another direction.

  Don’t cut corners and rely on salespeople for this information. When they’re focused on winning a sale, it’s easy for them to lose sight of potential flaws in the sales process. You need to understand what blocked a sale and the ingredients that moved another across the finish line.

  To gain such insights, you need an external researcher to interview your customers and prospects. They’re more likely to put your customers at ease than a professional they dealt with in the buying process. Also, because they don’t have an emotional investment in the sale, they’re more inclined to ask the right questions and extract the real story.

• Marketing and Sales Technology

  Top off qualitative research with insights about customers from your CRM and marketing automation technology.

This research and data mining effort will inform you about what customers value most, where you excel and what you need to improve. You’re likely to discover that buyers expect to have a partnership with you as their vendor. They value business partners who work with them in a consultative way, helping them to solve their problems. That means being involved from the beginning, before they’ve even fully defined their issue and helping them to structure a solution. It also means staying with them once they become a customer and remaining vested in their success.

Use your findings to develop a customer-centric strategy that enables you to move on a path to continuous improvement, deepen your relationships and consistently raise the quality of your customers’ experiences.

We’ve come from a world where our audience was addressable through a mass effort, rather than the precise pinpointed effort that we need today. The most challenging complexity that modern B-to-B marketers face is creating “individualism” within a mass-media framework. To speak to individuals, marketers require a model that directly addresses customer needs, wants and desires.

We have evolved from specific episodic programs that had a beginning, middle and end to continuous, seamless customer experiences developed to encompass the entire customer lifecycle. Moving from complex siloes of channel-specific marketing, we are challenged with simplifying messages to resonate with audiences through omni-channel branded experiences. No longer a one-way affair, with the advent and proliferation of social media, two-, three-, four- and more way communications are now the norm.

Our old processes were slow and methodical, with feedback coming back to us at a snail’s pace. Today we’re in the throes of real-time marketing, data collection, data analysis, marketing dashboards, and instant and automatic multivariate testing that allow us to optimize on the fly to continuously improve and streamline programs.

Recently, with the advent of technology-powered automated programmatic real-time buying, we have been able to break away from human-driven media buying, where limitations such as negotiations and time constraints have disappeared.

THE B-to-B MARKETER AND THE NEW GROUP DYNAMIC

In the face of all these changes, one incorrect perception for B-to-B marketers is that, when marketing products to business clients, they are marketing to a single decision maker. A recent study from the CEB and Motista confirms that, in almost every case of a complex enterprise sale, there are 5.4 decision makers on average involved in a group decision. TechTarget puts the number of people in a group decision team at seven. Everyone on your sales team knows that groups make buying decisions.

SiriusDecisions came to the same conclusion as we did. They unveiled a new B-to-B Buying Decision Process Framework at their May 2015 Sirius Summit in Nashville, Tennessee. SiriusDecisions outlined three types of buying scenarios: Groups buying by committee (six to 10 people in the buying group), groups buying by consensus (three to five people involved in the buying group) and independent buyers (one to two people in the buying group). They’ve determined that those buying independently are usually involved in deals for less than $50K. They detail the deal size for consensus buying at a range of $50K to $500K, and likewise call out the committee buying range at $500K to millions of dollars.

With all the complexities of marketing to the Modern Empowered Buyer, the impact on Modern Marketers is significant, causing marketers to rethink, relearn, retool and reconsider how and what their go-to-market strategy will be.

Standing out from the crowd is never easy, especially when you’re trying to differentiate your email from the tens or hundreds of other unread ones in your prospect’s inbox.

One of the most effective ways to catch their attention? Create a sense of intrigue. The buyer will satisfy their curiosity by clicking on your email.

Assuming you’ve written a personalized, relevant message, you’ll likely earn their response.

For more tips on email prospecting, check out the Get Sh*t Done Show -- a video series by salespeople, for salespeople.

To discover the best ways to create intrigue, I looked through every sales email I’ve opened in the past few months. Here are four common strategies.

1) Make It Personal

At the end of the day, nothing sparks curiosity like a personal touch. As Dale Carnegie once said, “A person’s name, to that person, is the sweetest, most important sound in any language.”

In other words, your prospect will respond to personalized content.

That doesn’t mean simply inserting their name and/or their company’s name into the subject line. Most buyers have seen this trick again and again, and it’s lost its impact.

I define “personalized” as unique to that individual. Any subject line that you could use for two or more different prospects isn’t personalized.

Mention someone’s latest blog post, a detail from their LinkedIn profile, an event they recently attended, a statistic from their organization -- any piece of information that’s both relevant to your product and distinct to the prospect.

Here are several examples:

• “Impressed to learn 46% of your engineers are self-taught”
• “How did your Partner Field Day go?”
• “counterpoint to your ‘radical candor’ article”
• “Saw you won a Charlie award”
• “Did you make it to Tim Urban’s INBOUND talk?”

2) Create Suspense

TV producers are masters at creating suspense. They present a tense or shocking moment, raise your desire to know what happens next to peak levels -- then cut to a commercial break. And they do this three to seven times per episode.

Luckily, salespeople only have to pull off this feat once. Do so by revealing some information, but not everything your prospect would want to know.

For instance, you might write, “Analyzed your company’s two-year hiring trends -- surprising results”.

Who wouldn’t be compelled to open the email and discover what was unique about their organization’s hiring trends?

Here are five more examples:

• “Liked your [topic] blog post … But something was missing” (In your email, suggest a tip, additional point, or idea for a follow-up post.)
• “This isn’t your typical sales email” (Make sure the contents lives up to this promise.)
• “If I could change one thing about [prospect’s company] … ” (Deliver a relevant insight or piece of advice.)
• “We have X things in common” (This one is ideal for prospects with whom you have multiple commonalities. Quickly list those commonalities in your email: “We both went to [school], have boisterous puppies, and require water for survival.”)
• “In five years, I think [company] … ” (Tie this into your intro. If you see an opportunity the prospect’s company isn’t capitalizing on or an area where they’re struggling, portray what the future will look like without a change.)

3) Call Out a Specific Challenge

Customers don’t want to buy products -- they want to solve their problems. To arouse a prospect’s interest, highlight an issue they’re currently dealing with. Anticipate their business pain before you’ve spoken directly to them by comparing their organization to similar ones you’ve sold to. What pain points do those companies typically deal with?

For example, maybe four of the five manufacturing firms that have purchased your product struggle with workforce shortages.

With that in mind, you might use this subject line for a prospect at a manufacturing firm: “Hiring and retention issues at [company]?”

Perhaps your marketing automation software indicates the prospect has visited the same blog post on your website multiple times or downloaded an ebook. There’s a strong chance they’re focused on the topic of that piece of content. A good subject line would be, “Idea for solving [company’s] workforce shortage.”

Social media is also a great resource. Prospects will frequently post questions related to a challenge, strategic announcements and updates, and other potentially valuable tidbits.

An example subject line: “Re: the talent shortage ebook you shared”.

4) Don’t Repeat Your Subject Line

People typically use three details to decide whether to open a message. First, they look at the sender. Is the name familiar?

Next, they read the subject line. Finally, they look at the first few words of the email.

As a salesperson, your name -- maybe even your company -- will be foreign to prospects. That means you’re solely relying on the subject line and opening sentence.

If you simply repeat the subject line, you’ll waste valuable space. Instead, use your intro to build on it.

Here’s a before-and-after example to illustrate:

Subject line: “Is [prospect’s company] struggling with [relevant challenge]?”

Preview text: “Hi [prospect name], Is [prospect’s company] having issues with X?”

Subject line: “Issues with X at [prospect’s company]”

Preview text: “Hi [prospect name], 76% of businesses in your space are dealing with … ”

The latter makes the buyer eager to learn more. It also communicates more information in the same amount of space, which is critical when you’re dealing with limited attention spans.

Buyers are busier than ever, which is why many salespeople say prospecting is their biggest challenge. Use these four techniques to break through the noise and get your prospects’ attention.

Big data, big insights?

61% of companies state that Big Data is driving revenue because it is able to deliver deep insights into customer behavior. For most businesses, this means gaining a 360° of their customers, by analyzing and integrating existing data.

Well, not always. Big data doesn’t always equate to big insights, but, increasingly, we see big data driving action. And, big data-driven problems.

Currently, you’ll find debates all over websites and social media — some arguing that big data is causing big problems, not the least of which is perceived manipulation of consumers by using psychometrics against them. Others see big data ushering in and era where businesses have the analytics they need to optimize their returns on investment (ROI).

Big data, big insights

I recently wrote a post defending big data, so you know what side of the debate I’m gonna take. Data is never the problem, in my opinion, it’s the way you use big data that causes big problems.

Here are the major problems cited related to big data that we’ll discuss today:

• Manipulation of consumers
• Violating the privacy of consumers
• Overwhelming volume, velocity, and variation
• Poor decisions

Let’s chat about these problems and how to fix them.

Manipulation of consumers

This week, the social world was in an uproar over allegations that the Trump campaign used psychological profiles of INDIVIDUAL users to target messaging — if you missed the discussion, here’s the link to a great article summarizing how using psychographics changed (?) the election outcome.

Now, let’s take this discussion out of the political arena and into the business world. Does using psychological profiles to craft individualized messages to prospective buyers violate some ethical compact?

We had this discussion in my digital marketing class yesterday and students seemed split on this question.

First, let’s understand that using psychographics (likes, values, attitudes, etc) isn’t a new thing — it’s been around for a while. What’s changed is the amount of information we have because social media records every interaction — like, post, share, etc. The article above makes the point that, with just a few of these, you can categorize the personality of users. More information and you can determine more detailed psychological traits, like view of authoritarians. Again, useful information.

In fact, if you’ve ever bought Facebook ads, you’re using one of the same databases used by the Trump team.

One-on-one marketing also isn’t new. With technological advances, we can reach increasingly smaller groups with individualized messaging. And, that’s valuable, according the HBR.

Practiced correctly, one-to-one marketing can increase the value of your customer base. The idea is simple: one-to-one marketing (also called relationship marketing or customer-relationship management) means being willing and able to change your behavior toward an individual customer based on what the customer tells you and what else you know about that customer.

One-on-one marketing is just an extension of segmentation and this article highlights how using personality segmentation aids marketing efforts. It reflects that not all consumers want the same thing from products, so helping them see factors they value in your products improves market performance.

The ethical problem arises with the messages you send. If they are untruthful or misrepresent the true impact of you product, then it’s unethical regardless of whether you used psychometric evaluations to get you there. For instance, if you know a consumer is particularly interested in sustainability, it’s perfectly fine to send them messaging promoting your record on sustainability. It’s not ok to lie when you’re not, in fact, sustainability driven, or to highlight one positive action among a host of negative actions.

Consumer privacy

For the most part, marketers aren’t hacking into sources of information, but accumulating mountains of publicly available information. The problem occurs when these sources indiscriminately sell PII (personally identifiable information). Here’s a partial list of where this data comes from:

1. Government sources such as DMV and property records
2. Educational institutions — such as schools
3. Biometric devices and other smart devices, such as fitbits, Nest
4. Smartphones
5. Social networks
6. Credit card transactions
7. Gmail and other online sources, including browsers

The breach of ethics occurs when this information is obtained fraudulently by companies who aren’t vetted by the provider of the information or are using it for a purpose different from the one stated when obtaining the information.

As a consumer, there’s little you can do to protect your privacy other than appeal to congress for new laws. You can attempt to stay “off the grid” but you’ll have limited success. That said, you should still close your social profiles to only connections, use search engines like Duck Duck Go that don’t share information, and avoid devices that share PII internally or with other companies.

Good luck!

Overwhelming volume, velocity, and variation

This is almost the definition of big data, so using big data, big insights is challenging. A few years ago, businesses dealt with the 3V’s of big data by data mining to detect insights. Unfortunately, data mining turns up too many spurious correlations to be of much use.

Courtesy of Information Management

Visualizations, like the one on the right, are much better tools for dealing with big data and don’t rely so much on spurious correlations. And, here’s a list of some of the best tools for data visualization.

People just can’t evaluate numbers well. That’s why creating an image that depicts the data is so valuable. Here are some other great data visualizations.

Image courtesy of Data Mentors

Color really helps a lot in helping generate big data, big insights, especially when you use colors that have an inherent meaning like red for bad, green for good, or to draw attention to the most important features of a graphical design.

Poor decisions

Big data, big insights doesn’t always happen. Sometimes marketers make poor decisions despite using big data to guide the decisions.

Sometimes, data isn’t able to predict something because your assumptions of the attitudes and behaviors underlying the data are wrong. For instance, Google thought it could predict flu outbreaks by mapping searches for terms related to the flu. They were wrong. Likely, what they were mapping was more a function of neuroticism than actual flu outbreaks.

Sometimes, you make poor decisions because you don’t have the right data or a complete set of variables to predict the most appropriate course of action.

So your brand or business is on social media – but have you figured out why or what you want to get out of it? Setting goals is a great way to stay on track and give you direction when creating content and posting on your social channels. In this post I’ll show you 3 common and simple social media goals you can set for your business, and how you can keep track of your success with them.

Buffer recently released the results of their State of Social 2016 survey, and the chart above outlines the top the reasons business use social media. I’ve outlined the 3 simple social media goals you can set for your business based on why most brands get on social media in the first place.

1. Increase Brand Awareness

Increasing Brand awareness is the top reason businesses use social media according to Buffer’s State of Social 2016 survey. This makes sense because most businesses want to get on social media to reach new consumers, keep current consumers engaged and informed about their brand, as well as bring in more sales. But how do you keep track of this social media goal?

Here are some metrics to track to give you insight into your social media brand awareness:

• Followers – This is not the most important metric (I emphasize quality over quantity) but acquiring followers that are genuinely interested in your brand is one way to know that more people are learning about you. Pay attention to your follower numbers, and any large increases.
• Reach – Reach describes how many people see your posts. The more reach, the better. Once you identify which posts are reaching the most people, try to replicate these posts to continue getting good reach.
• Mentions, Shares or Retweets – The more people are talking and mentioning your brand, retweeting or sharing your posts, the more eyes you are potentially reaching through their networks. Again, pay attention to the posts your audience is sharing the most and create more content based on these subjects.

How to track it:

Most social media networks now have metrics built in. Get familiar with each social network and their respective analytics dashboards. You’ll be able to see how posts perform individually, as well as get an idea of how your account is doing as a whole. Third party tools can be really useful for gathering insights as well. Aside from both checking out built in metrics and using third party tools, I keep an excel where every month we take note of key statistics like follower numbers for each network my clients are on. Having a running document makes it easy to look back and spot patterns that correlate with the activities on the account.

2. Increasing Engagement

Increasing engagement is a very important goal for me as a social media marketer – and possibly the most important social media goal. What is the point of putting all this work into your social media presence if your audience wants nothing to do with you? Engagement is also a great metric for tracking whether or not your social media activity is attracting the right kind of followers.

How to track it:

• Traffic to Your Website: Traffic is driven to your site from social media is a good way to measure engagement. This means that when you post a link, people are interested and are actually going to check out the content, service, or product you’re promoting. Use Google analytics and pay attention to which networks are driving traffic, bounce rates (to see if people from social media are actually reading through your content).
• Likes, Comments, Shares: The simplest way to track engagement is to take a look at how many people are directly interacting with your posts.
• Clicks: Use a URL shortener like Bit.ly to keep track of link clicks. Some networks will have this metrics included in their analytics dashboard.

3. Generating New Leads

Social media can be great for generating leads and building email lists. Generating leads (or increasing social media leads) can be a good social media goal for businesses that sell products or services. The more leads and prospects the more chances you have to make money! Same for your email list – the bigger the list, the bigger the possibility of converting them into buyers.

How to track it:

• Downloads: Take a look at how many downloads your gated content has. Your new goal can be to increase downloads by a certain percentage or number.
• Information: How many email addresses have you been able to collect? Set a benchmark and then make it a goal to beat it!
• Participation: How many people took part in your latest contest? How many answered your last question? Make it a point to try to get your followers involved with your brand.

Setting goals may be one of the most overlooked parts of social media strategy. Having something to work towards will not only help you step up your social media game, but can help coming up with and creating content a little easer. After reading this post, what social media goals will you set for your brand or business?

This article was originally published here.

Recently sign up for a gym membership as part of a lofty new year’s resolution? Me too. Well, just a little more than a month into 2017, I’ve already failed in my attempt to work out a few days each week. That said, I was wholly willing (and even excited) to sign up for a new gym membership despite past failed attempts to get my money’s worth from the local Boston Sports Club. And (thankfully) it’s not just me. An article published last year by the New York Times reports that every January many Americans sign up for the gym but hardly visit in the months following.

The article goes on to cite supporting research from economists Stefano DellaVigna and Ulrike Malmendier who studied usage patterns at three Boston gyms. The economists found that on average new members paid over $70 per month for their membership, but used the gym only 4.3 times over the course of each month (which amounts to $17 per use). They concluded that most customers would have been better off paying per use, which on average costs only $10 per visit. Doing so would have saved these consumers $600. Despite this simple math, we continue to pay a flat rate (rather than per visit) for a service we may or may not ultimately end up using.

And this paradox isn’t specific to gym memberships; I see it time and again in subscription businesses. Notable examples include the Uber Plus program, an Amazon Prime-like subscription offering unlimited UberPool rides in select cities; Apple’s iPhone Upgrade Program, which is essentially an iPhone subscription; and graze, a subscription snacking service.

Whether or not consumers get their money’s worth from these unlimited services remains to be seen. But the fact of the matter stands that we gain some sort of intrinsic value from an unlimited membership. That’s primarily because a flat monthly or yearly rate:

1. Removes barriers to usage: We do use something more when we have a flat rate compared to when we pay by the use. For instance, in 1996 AOL replaced its metered dial-up pricing where you paid by the hour with a simple flat rate. AOL found that the amount of time their customers spent online nearly tripled as customers got used to the internet being “always on”. Part of why we pay extra, then, is to motivate ourselves to start going to the gym more than we currently do.

2. Overestimation: While we do end up using a flat rate more than pay-per-use, we start with inflated expectations and don’t ultimately use it as much as we think we will. DellaVigna and Malmendier, for instance, found that gym goers anticipated that they would work out an average of 9.5 times per month, but only went 4.3 times. (But, hey, 4.3 times is a whole lot better than 0 trips to the gym!).

3. Insurance: With a flat rate, we have peace of mind that our budget won’t skyrocket during months of high usage. This is doubly critical in the Enterprise space where Finance and Procurement start getting involved in a purchase decision.

4. Taxi-meter effect: We actively feel discomfort when we have to link each and every use to an increased price and then mentally justify whether it was worth it.

5. Convenience: We just don’t want to be bothered with paying each and every time.

6. Community: Paying for a membership makes us feel part of a group or community (we belong to our gym), whether or not we use it as much as we want to. The Guardian has smartly embraced this benefit with their Guardian Members program, which is a subscription service for their readers to support their journalism, attend live events and get invited to behind-the-scenes functions.

SaaS businesses can apply these same insights to deliver a better customer experience while also increasing revenue. Here are three ways how.

1. Introduce unlimited (Enterprise) plans for high usage customers: At a certain point, a large Enterprise customer doesn’t want to have to worry about tracking their usage and have their monthly bill fluctuate up and down. Many buyers would prefer to lock in a flat rate unlimited plan, even if it comes at a premium to the price that they would pay given their typical usage. You can use these flat rate plans either as a fence to upsell customers to a higher tier package, a tool to charge more to customers whose usage has flat-lined, or as an incentive to get customers to commit to longer-term contracts. SurveyMonkey, as an example, smartly uses unlimited usage as a means of fencing between their Basic (100 responses), Select (1,000 responses) and Gold (unlimited responses) packages.

2. Test a three-part tariff: As Tomasz Tunguz points out, a three-part tariff balances some of the benefits of linear, usage-based pricing without the drawback of stunting usage. Rather than charging for each unit of usage, in a three-part tariff you would have a base platform fee (which includes a set amount of usage) plus a separate fee for additional usage. HubSpot smartly employs this structure in their pricing with a fixed monthly fee and an additional usage fee for more marketing contacts. Their three packages include different pre-set amounts of usage (100 contacts; 1,000 contacts; 10,000 contacts) as well as different overage fees ($100/mo., $50/mo., and $10/mo. per 1k extra contacts) as a way to steer customers into the best-fit package.

3. Sell overage protection: Many developer tools, such as Logz.io in the log analytics space, incorporate daily usage volume into their pricing structures. However, for some customers, usage will fluctuate significantly from day to day or from month to month, which could lead to pesky overages. To solve that customer problem, Logz.io offers overage protection as a feature in their paid plans.

For companies still charging by use, I hope you’ll think about creative ways to introduce membership and flat rates into your offerings. These models could not only help you make more money, but might actually make your customers happier. What’s not to like about that?

The post What SaaS Companies Can Learn from Gym Membership Pricing appeared first on OpenView Labs.

We have all had prospective clients that have slipped away when we thought they were ready to commit to a working relationship. After many sleepless nights it’s often still not clear what happened to make them change their minds. It is easy to take their decision personally because we all know that in the professional services industry, it is the quality of relationships that leads to business development. The question we all ask ourselves: “Is it me or my approach that wrecked the deal?”

One thing is clear, you don’t want it to happen again, as good prospective clients don’t appear every day. Here are five reasons why you might be having trouble guiding prospective clients to “Yes.”

#1: You are trying too hard to win their business

People sense anxiety quickly. If you get ahead of yourself and are too focused on getting them to become clients as quickly as possible, your behaviour will become unnatural and you will lose the rhythm of communication that two people on equal footing share. For example, are you over-communicating by reaching out to them with information by email or phone daily, or more? Do you send them personal gifts such as tickets or restaurant vouchers to make them like you more? All you need to say (once) is that you value the opportunity to do business with them and invite them to contact you if they have any more questions about your services.

Pressure, however slight, is a sales tactic that backfires more often not.

#2: You are intimidating prospective clients

The smartest person in the room was often once thought to be the most accomplished, the one who dropped the most names, earned the most professional accreditations and always got the last word. Even more annoying, he or she was expert at topping any story they heard.

Today, that person is the one with most highly developed Emotional Intelligence (EQ). Listening skills are usually first on the coveted EQ list.

A comfortable balance of power is essential in any relationship between a client and a service provider. No client wants to feel inadequate in the eyes of colleagues or a service provider in conversation or during a meeting. It is important to give your prospective client credit where credit is due and focus on their accomplishments and goals before you weigh in with your opinions and knowledge. You may be trying to wow them with your knowledge but too much expertise will send them to the exits. Respect their need to take the spotlight as a client and partner in the relationship and don’t share solutions before the relationship begins.

#3: Your attention to detail is lacking

Being punctual, returning emails and phone calls in a timely fashion, dressing appropriately and staying on top of even the most mundane administrative task will impress prospective clients. They will be impressed by your attention to detail, which shows your respect for them and the business relationship that awaits.

Prospective clients are watching for clues that will give them an idea of what you will be like to work with, how effective you will be and how deeply you will take their goals into account. If you slip up in any of these areas repeatedly, they will lose interest quickly.

#4: You criticize the competition

When you are critical of a prospective client’s competitors, you may think you are showing your loyalty and commitment to your prospective client. Wrong. You are simply coming across as negative, mean-spirited, unprofessional, and a bit of a loose cannon. What is stopping you from bad-mouthing your prospective client to their competitors? This can be particularly dangerous to your reputation if you voice your dark opinions in an e-mail that may end up anywhere.

By all means, share insights into a competitor’s service offerings and demonstrate your knowledge of the industry, but do so in an objective non-judgmental way. Take the highroad and be positive about your prospect’s chances for success in a competitive arena but don’t slam the competition in the process. You want to create positive energy and speaking ill of someone only stirs negative emotions in your audience.

#5: You complain too much

Complaining is one of the fastest ways to dampen a person’s interest in working with you. Sharing and transparency certainly have their place in forming collaborative and deep relationships, but put your issues aside and make it all about your prospective client.

Careful about swinging the opposite way and being too overly enthusiastic about things, but use careful transparency with limited “need-to-know” information to get your point across. Don’t dismiss a prospect’s efforts to learn your opinions on things or ask about you or family. Completely avoid the temptation to burden them with too much negative information and keep it upbeat.

A version of this article was posted on www.evanthompsonandassociates.com.

Would you like to generate more profitable leads on LinkedIn? Wondering how LinkedIn Sales Navigator can help? Improvements to Sales Navigator give marketers an edge in lead generation, business development, and brand awareness on LinkedIn. In this article, you’ll discover how to use LinkedIn Sales Navigator to build your business. #1: Import Your Leads to Sales [...]

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- Your Guide to the Social Media Jungle

Remember that great client who bought your product six months ago? Or the customer who gave you tons of referrals last year? If you’re like most salespeople, then you have many existing clients like these whom you’ve lost touch with over the past several months -- or even years.

Many salespeople focus all their energy on lead generation and end up overlooking one of their most valuable assets: Existing customers. But reconnecting with clients after months have gone by isn’t always easy. It can feel awkward and uncomfortable, which is why so many salespeople fail to re-engage them.

If you can learn to actively re-engage your existing clients on a regular basis, you’ll stand out from the competition -- and find way more business in the process. Implement these eight simple tricks to re-engage your existing clients and turbocharge your sales this year.

How to Re-Engage Existing Clients for More Business

1) Send them a valuable note in the mail.

Your customers are inundated with sales phone calls and emails all day long. That’s why an old-fashioned letter in the mail packs a big punch when it comes to re-engaging them. Write each of your existing clients a short note, accompanied by something valuable: An article they’d be interested in, a newsletter about their industry, or some other item that conveys useful knowledge. Be sure to handwrite the address on the envelope and the note inside to make it as personal as possible. This simple act will strengthen your relationships and give customers a reason to think about you in a positive way.

For more tips like this, watch the video below:

2) Reach out with a “happy birthday.”

Spend some time researching your clients on Google and Facebook to find out their birthdates. Enter each date in your calendar or CRM so you’ll automatically be reminded every year when their birthdays roll around. It’s never been easier to discover someone’s birthday, but the vast majority of salespeople don’t say “happy birthday” to their clients. Stand out from the crowd by sending your clients a birthday email -- or, better yet, send them a physical birthday card in the mail every year.

3) Ask for introductions to new clients.

This trick has two powerful benefits for you: You’ll reconnect with existing customers while simultaneously getting leads for new business. Give your clients a call and ask if they’d be willing to introduce you to some people in their world who might benefit from your product or service. A conversation like this is a powerful way to re-engage customers you haven’t spoken to in a while and remind them of the benefits of working with you. If you’re persistent with this approach, you’ll also generate new leads.

4) Regularly request customer feedback.

To make your clients feel valued, understood, and important, ask them for feedback. One of the biggest mistakes salespeople make is not regularly requesting feedback from clients -- on everything from their products and services to the current state of the industry. Your clients will love being asked for their opinions, and you’ll also learn a great deal from their responses. Create a scheduled plan for sending emails and surveys to request feedback from your existing client base every few months.

5) Host a client event twice a year.

Everyone loves being invited to exclusive events, and your existing customers are no exception. Hosting client events is a powerful way to compel your existing customers to reconnect with you face-to-face. Rent out a room at a local hotel or restaurant and plan to share some exciting new industry insights. If you host a private event like this twice a year, you’ll ensure you don’t lose touch with your top clients for more than six months at a time.

6) Invite them out for a bite to eat.

Be the type of salesperson who treats your existing clients to breakfast or lunch. This vastly underutilized strategy is an easy way to strengthen your bond with customers. Meet your clients near where they work during the week, and use a quick meal as an opportunity to find out what’s new in their world and remain top-of-mind.

7) Call them with a clear purpose.

When you pick up the phone to re-engage your existing clients, make sure you have a reason to do so. Just saying “hi” or “I’m checking in to see what’s going on” is a surefire way to annoy your customers and make them start screening your calls. Instead, have a clear purpose in mind when you call. Maybe you want to tell them about your company’s newest offering, or let them know about a special deal that’s going on this week. Whatever it is, it must be valuable enough to warrant a phone call during their busy day.

8) Send them your favorite business book.

What’s the best business book you’ve read in recent years? It’s time to put together packages for your existing clients. Include a personalized, handwritten note to each, explaining why you loved the book and think they would enjoy it too. Very few salespeople reach out to their customers in this way -- you’ll immediately set yourself apart. And your clients will think of you every time they see the book sitting on the shelf in their office.

Which of these eight powerful tricks to re-engage existing clients will you use to drum up more business? Share below in the comments. For even more advice like this, check out this free 9-Day Sales Intensive to transform your selling results.

So many blogs and articles speak on best practices for how to capture leads and convert leads, but I sometimes find it difficult to find the posts that point out more negative bad habits for losing leads.

We all have ‘em, these bad habits, and we need to face them.

Think about it in terms of dating (aka going out, aka courting, aka wooing, aka, sometimes, these days simply just “hanging”). The world of dating is a minefield! Alright, fine, a bit extreme – but it got your attention. Rule #1: GET. THEIR. ATTENTION.

This post is going a little off the rails. Sorry. Back on subject!

Attracting and converting leads has much in common with the standard practice of dating. Specifically modern dating where the minorest of missteps can bring up a dead end real quick. Sometimes these bad habits are tiny overlooked things that pop up in campaign after campaign, producing a negative impact.

“Why doesn’t she respond to my text of ‘hey’ at 10pm?” Well, this bad dating habit is easy to fix. Don’t text “hey.” Hay, as so many of us know, is for horses.

But let’s flip this with a marketing lense. Excluding the bad practice of sending “hey,” what is the time of day you’re sending scheduled emails? 9am? You might think, “That’s perfect – top of their inbox right when they get in.”

Well, it’s possible, but more likely the inbox will have a bunch of unread emails that have greater priority than a marketing email. Then your email gets lost in the shuffle. Woe.

To continue on this dating-marketing analogy, let’s look at some more connections to help marketers identify potential lead-relationship-building stumbles.

We’ll start with a dating bad habit, then follow with its marketing counterpoint.

1. A Cold First Impression

You just captured a lead. What’s the next communication they’ll receive from you? Will it be a warm follow-up thanking them for engaging with your content? Or will it be a colder sales email, asking something of them immediately? Or will there be no email at all.

The sounder practice would be the warm welcome. Think about how your follow up content greets a new lead. A strong nurture stream looks to further engage the lead’s interest and build a relationship. Offering a relevant piece of content to them as a “gift” is a good angle. Or even simply saying “Thanks” and “Welcome” help to slow the marketing roll so new leads aren’t turned off.

2. Too Much Texting

This one is twofold. First has to do with your marketing copy. Take a good hard look at your recently produced content – how much copy is there? Paragraphs? Pages?

B2B marketers have a tendency to overwrite messaging. It’s a really tough temptation to resist. The thought “Oh, but we should also mention this!” always comes in. But, increasingly, audiences want simpler messaging with memorable, but less, copy.

The less copy is especially true of emails and mobile experiences where skimming is rampant. For emails, try testing some very sparse design and copy against the fuller ones. See how they do.

Secondly, how many emails are you sending? Really look at your nurture streams to see when you’re hitting your contacts too often. Email fatigue is a real thing, and when someone is inundated, they get annoyed.

The less you can send, the more intrigue you can produce.

3. Bad Listening

When a lead converts on a specific piece of content, is the subject of that content linked to the follow up action? Understanding your audience personas and setting up appropriate nurture streams is more and more expected.

Also – are you using personalization in your follow up content? Using tokens and smart text in emails and subject lines, is how you connect more directly with each lead. The more you can customize content for each individual, the more they are going to feel listened to.

Your leads are engaged and ready to learn more! You’re providing the right amount of love and attention, but make sure to keep your content life diverse and exciting so your leads keep interacting.

Our webinar, Interactive Content Types For Everyone To Love can give you some great ideas for what to try with your audience next!

If you’re coming on too strong or not giving them the content they need your leads may be losing interest. Interactive content is a great way to engage your leads and spice up their marketing life.

Watch our webinar: Interactive Content Types For Everyone To Love and get some inspiration on what content type is right for you and your audience!

4. Calling Too Much (or Even Calling at All)

Okay this one is more sales focused: cold calling. Do you like getting sales calls? Probably not.

Cutting out sales calls is usually not an option, however, calling as soon as a new lead is converted is both an annoying and creepy way to connect with them.

I’ve heard stories of people getting calls minutes after filling out a contact form. Just slow it down. Get to know the lead a little more.

Employing interactive elements throughout the content allows for more insights to be gathered so when sales does make the call, they at least have a conversation starting point other than just “saw you downloaded an ebook.”

5. Hogging the Conversation

Speaking of interactive content, how much are you allowing your leads to share with you? Is your content just talking at them, offering a 30-page white paper, or are you encouraging participation with alternative formats like assessments, calculators, or quizzes?

Sometimes just enabling your audience to better converse with your content opens up a whole new level of lead data and follow up options.

Buyers are getting very used to giving feedback through product reviews and social media communities. Denying them of doing that with your brand slows the relationship building process.

6. Too Much Too Soon

Sometimes you have to know when to hold back. Should I really bring up the idea of a weekend camping trip for the second date? Maybe pump the brakes.

And, right on cue, this is where our blog ends on a cliff hanger. Sure, we have plenty more to discuss on the theme of How to Lose a Lead in 10 Days, and it’s not just four more bad-habit items.

Remember, Kate Hudson’s character attempted way more than 10 bad dating actions to try and repel Matthew Mcconaughey, and we, too, have much more to discuss about bad marketing habits.

So we invite you to our webinar, How to Lose a Lead in 10 Days, to talk it all out!

If you’re creating content without images, you’re missing a huge opportunity to increase engagement, reach a wider audience, and maximize conversions. We’re visual people, inherently drawn to content that contains rich, attractive images. Adding images to an online article can nearly double its views, and 67 percent of consumers say images are more important than product descriptions when making a purchase decision.

Of course, just throwing any image into your content won’t catapult it to the top of the search results. Images need to be carefully selected and high quality and they need to add true value to your content. They should be visually appealing, relevant, and appropriate for your company and the marketing channel. The following guide will help you choose the right image for your next project.

We’re visual people, inherently drawn to content that contains rich, attractive images.
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How Do You Choose the Right Images?

When picking an image for your blog or online marketing effort, consider these three critical factors:

• Does it convey your message? Any image you use should contribute to a reader’s understanding of your message. While click-bait companies may have some success using an unrelated image for their web ads, using an image that fits your content will result in better leads and greater engagement.
• Does it fit your brand? Everything you put out in the world should work to enhance your brand. Images that include your company’s name or link to your site tell a story about your company. If you sell fitness products, for example, your images should convey motion and strength. If you’re in finance, they should speak to success and financial security. 
• Is it engaging? A drab, boring image won’t engage your readers. Stick with vibrant, crisp images. Unless there’s a compelling, brand-related reason to do otherwise, use bright, colorful images because color has been proven to increase readership and sales by 80 percent.

Once you’ve found images that are the right fit for your project, do a little research before making any final decision. Make sure:

• None of your competitors is using the same image. If you’re using stock photography, there’s a good chance your competition is too. Don’t wind up looking like the copycat.
• None of your competitors is using a similar image. There’s always going to be some similarities within an industry, but your images should speak to what makes your company different. Unless you sell boats, there’s no reason you and your closest rival should both be running ads featuring men on boats. Find something more original that consumers can relate directly to you.
• The colors fit your brand. Branding is important, and research shows that colors help differentiate brands from their competitors.

Where Do You Find Images?

When adding images to your content, you have two choices: create your own or use stock images. Using original photography or a custom design can set you apart from your stock-photo-only rivals and help build a stronger brand. When it comes to product marketing, in many cases original photos are a must because consumers want to see images of the products they’re buying.

But creating original images can be time-consuming and expensive, so most companies rely on a mix of original images and stock photography. For instance, if you’re running a weekly blog, getting several original images for each post might not be in your budget, and in many cases stock photography will work just as well.

Plenty of websites offer free and low-cost images for your online marketing and blogging efforts. The key is to find a resource with images that speak to your company’s aesthetic and fit within your budget. Some of the most popular image sites include:

• Pixabay: Pixabay offers over 780,000 free images, which you can download in a variety of sizes depending on your needs.
• Stock Free Images: Another free site, this one offers over a million photos and illustrations, all royalty-free.
• Shutterstock: Shutterstock requires a subscription, but its quality is generally better, and you get access to over 100 million pieces of content, including photos, illustrations, and icons.
• Google and Bing: While you can’t use just any image you find online, both major search engines allow you to filter image search results by usage rights so that you can search for Creative Commons or public domain images.

There are many, many more quality photo sites out there, ranging from free, like Pexels, to paid-subscription sites, like iStock and Getty Images. Regardless of what source you use, make sure to review each photo’s usage rights (in most cases, royalty-free photography is going to be your best choice as you don’t have to pay ongoing usage fees), and include attributes whenever they’re required.

How Many Images Should You Use?

There’s no magic number for how many images you should include for a particular project, but chances are you can use more than you think. Including plenty of relevant images:

• Breaks up the text for improved readability.
• Can increase your SEO.
• Provides more options for social media shares and engagement.

Of course, don’t just grab every free photo on iStock and add it to your page. Each image you add needs to serve a purpose, to enrich your reader’s experience with your content or to provide information that can’t be conveyed through words alone.

For example, if you’re presenting the advantages of your latest marketing automation software platform, using actual screenshots will allow consumers to visualize your product and better evaluate its usefulness for their business. A stock image of someone using a smartphone can help convey the convenience of your app integration. But a generic photo of an agent on the telephone won’t set your product apart from every other B2B product on the market, so leave that one out.

Of course, you can always have too much of a good thing. If there are more pictures than text, you’re not giving your readers enough information to work with. Too many images can also increase load time for your page, which can drive users away. According to this Kissmetrics infographic, if your page takes more than three seconds to load, you could lose 40 percent of your readers.

What Size and Quality Images Should You Use?

The size and quality you use will depend on your medium.

For blogs, it’s best to use images that will at least cover the full width of your publishing screen. Keep in mind that doesn’t mean they have to stretch the full width of your monitor because most monitors are much wider than the reading area for a typical blog.

For websites and social media, ePHOTOzine recommends your images be at least 72 pixels per inch, and a picture size of at least 800 x 1,000 pixels, but for exact results check your content management system to see the exact pixel count for your site’s reading window, and make that your minimum image width. It’s okay to go over that size since most tools will condense the picture to fit, but excessively large images will take longer to load.

In some cases, you may want to use smaller images. That’s fine, so long as you set a specific pixel width and reduce all images in the post to that same size. Consistency is important; otherwise, your blog will look sloppy and unprofessional. For the one-off smaller image, use right- or left-align, and wrap the text around it.

For banner ads, your image should be wide enough to cover the entire top of the screen, without being stretched, while a sidebar ad will be much smaller. The key is to make sure your images never have to be stretched or distorted. If you’re designing marketing copy for a web ad, it’s best to know the exact size of the area you have to work with.

Do Image Names Matter?

Yes! Specific image names will help drive quality leads to your content. Searching for the phrase “Business Phone Solutions” on Google Images will give you pages and pages of images from websites that either sell, review, or report on business telephony solutions. Searching for “IMG11012016” gives you an entirely random mix of pictures. Plus, how many of your target readers would search for “IMG11012016” anyway?

Here are a couple of tips for naming your images:

Give all your images a name that fits your article, and be specific. Use names that summarize both the image and its usage within the context of your post. “Cute Cat” may perfectly express your image, but “Cute Cat Eating Healthy Pet Food” is more likely to put your image in the top spot of search results from consumers looking for healthy pet food alternative. Proper image names will help interested consumers find your business.

When naming images, don’t forget to add alt attribute values. This is the text that will appear in place of the image if for any reason a visitor’s browser is unable to load the picture. It’s tempting just to use the image name here, but you want this to be useful to your reader, and offer some extra SEO benefits.

Make sure your alt attribute values make sense in context. Keep in mind that the text you enter will flow directly into the rest of your content (because there won’t be a picture to break it up). For instance, if your adding alt attributes to a graph, make it a summary of the data. If you’re adding it to a product image, describe it in a way that conveys the same message you would expect readers to take away from the image itself: “Your sales rep will save time with Customer Manager Pro.”

Even the greatest images won’t save bad content, but quality, relevant images can increase traffic, improve engagement, increase conversions, and improve the overall experience for your audience and consumers.

There’s a reason we start our children off with pictures books: great images bring stories to life. In the end, that’s all content is—stories. And the right images will help your audience better appreciate the story you have to tell.

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The impact of Growth Hacking on startups has been immense, accelerating the growth of the most successful startups such as Airbnb and Uber. The Growth Hacker has become a crucial role within startups. Growth Hackers are in high demand; especially those that know what they’re doing.

As its role in startups has evolved, the meaning and practice of Growth Hacking has evolved to a predominant focus on User Acquisition strategies. It’s a very important focus area.

But what if I was to tell you there is actually a much more crucial focus area out there? This focus area is called Funnel Hacking.

So, what’s the difference between Growth Hacking and Funnel Hacking, you ask?

Surely, Funnel Hacking is just about building a sales funnel, you say. No, it’s not. Funnel Hacking is a methodology I have designed to solve a number of problems I’ve seen in the way startups operate.

So, before I explain Funnel Hacking to you, let’s go through some of these issues that prevail in startups these days.

Startup Problem #1: The Bottleneck

There is one role in a startup that is constantly a bottleneck for forward movement. That’s the role of the software developer. Not because they are bad at their job, but because they have way too much to do. There’s always a huge backlog of work to do for the developer.

So, any new task that comes up needs to be reviewed in light of this backlog and prioritized accordingly.

This made me realize an opportunity: how can we reduce the tasks that fall into the developer’s domain? What are the types of tasks a developer is doing that perhaps should not really be in their purview?

Let’s get back to that in a bit.

Startup Problem #2: The SaaS tool Minefield

How many SaaS tools has your company signed up for? Intercom, MixPanel, Salesforce, Mailchimp: the list can go on and on.

And how much are you spending on them?

Now, tell me how many of these tools are you truly getting value from? Are you paying for 100% but really only using 20% of the features? More importantly, did you actually choose the right tool for your business? How would you know?

There are so many tools out there in each space that it’s impossible to spend enough time to test out and review all of these tools, so often you just choose what your buddy is using in his company.

But how many of these tools has he bothered to try out? Are his company’s needs similar to yours? And what about the types of tools that you don’t even know about, and could solve a need that you’re currently building software to solve?

The reality is there’s not enough time in the day to do a thorough analysis and match up between your needs and what is in the marketplace, and to do everything else that is demanded by your startup.

So the opportunity here is: who can help you to figure out the best tools to implement for your needs?

Startup Problem #3: The Business Logic Engulfment

Back when I was designing and building software for corporates who had plenty of time and money to throw at this, we spent time identifying all the business rules that applied to the software we were building in advance of starting to code.

And then, we might even find ways to set those business rules up so they were editable by the business people, perhaps through a business rule management system or by setting up a configuration module to manage a set of values and rules, so that the business could change these rules at will.

Fast forward to today.

In our efforts to move fast for our startups, we’ve reverted back to engulfing our business logic into code. The irony is, that in doing so we are actually slowing down the velocity of our startup because once again, we are relying on the developer to make any changes to our business rules.

So how can we put this business logic back in the hands of our business people so they can make changes to them, using modern methods?

Startup Problem #4: The Cohesion Vacuum

In previous roles as a Business Analyst, Process Engineer and Integration Analyst, I would draw up process flow diagrams that would show the flow of a business process from a trigger in one system and how that data was meant to flow through other systems, what was required to be instrumented in each system and what data was required.

Nowadays, as we leverage various different fit-for-purpose tools in addition to our custom software, we neglect to go through this process and arrive at a big picture flow for our systems, end-to-end. In the absence of this key task, and in our scarcity of time and resources, we let things fall through the cracks, assuming that someone, or something has it covered.

It usually is not.

Lost customers, lost revenue, and missed opportunities are all consequences of not creating an end-to-end process view of a customer’s journey.

So how do ensure we get good coverage and analysis of a Customer’s journey from end to end?

Startup Problem #5: The Chicken and Egg Dilemma

Many new startups train their focus in their early days on Customer Discovery – where the world learns about your product. They often spend a considerable amount of their hard-raised money on acquiring eyeballs for their startup.

But it’s often the next steps of the customer journey where they fail to invest a good proportion of their attention (and funds): converting the customer, and retaining the customer. Without focus on these key steps, a startup’s Customer Acquisition Cost will soar through the roof.

But in order to figure out what works to convert your customers, you need to acquire some users.

And this is the dilemma that startups with limited resources are faced with – focus on attracting users or focus on converting them.

Startup Problem #6: Untapped Free Revenue

There’s another area of focus that is neglected by many startups, and that is seeking ways to increase revenue from existing customers.

The acquisition cost for this additional revenue is nil, so it’s essentially free money – all a startup needs to do is present the offer to their users.

Increasing Lifetime Value should be a key priority for every startup.

So why, you ask, don’t startups focus on doing this more? Well, partly the answer goes back to Startup Problem #1: The Bottleneck.

However, if we could enable our business-focused team members to act on this, without having to rely on a developer, I’m pretty confident they would spend more of their time on this goal of getting more revenue from existing customers.

Startup Problem #7: The Missing Role in your Startup

Have you ever felt like there was a disconnect in your Startup between your CTO, Product Manager, Customer Success team and Marketing team? Each of these roles has a specific focus and whilst everyone is putting out fires and moving fast, there is often a lack of consideration for how everyone can work together seamlessly.

Moreover, your Customer Success person sees problems that the customer is experiencing, but isn’t empowered to stop those problems from recurring. Your Product Manager is struggling to capture information in the right way to know if new features or other experiments are effective in achieving goals.

Your Marketing Person would like to send emails to a certain segment of customers but hasn’t got the data to support that segmentation, and doesn’t know how to acquire that data without bothering the developer, who is over-allocated.

Enter the role of the Funnel Hacker.

A Funnel Hacker has a goal that is very different from all of these roles. A Funnel Hacker’s primary focus is to implement the underlying infrastructure to enable each of these roles to do their job better.

To empower non-technical team members to experiment and iterate without developer involvement.

This may sound like it’s too good to be true, but with a little bit of up front effort, you can change the entire way you startup operates, and enable it to move faster.

What is Funnel Hacking?

While Growth Hacking is focused on bringing as many eyeballs to your site as possible, Funnel Hacking wants to make the most of the eyeballs that come your way and convert as many of them as possible, and then once converted, extract as much value as possible.

This may not sound all that new to you.

What is new is exactly how Funnel Hacking does so. And it all comes down to this:

The one underlying principle of Funnel Hacking is empowering your non-technical team members to move fast and iterate without developer involvement.

In so doing, your team members feel unencumbered when experimenting and iterating on their funnel initiatives.

This is extremely powerful.

Startup Problem #1: The Bottleneck is one issue that everyone I talk with, from startups to corporates, connects with.

I have never met anyone that said to me that their developer is sitting around trying to figure out what work to do because they have nothing on their plate.

How many times have you come up with an idea you want to implement and then the second thought you have is that you don’t have the developer resources to implement it?

I’m guessing you’ve lost count. I know I have.

And that’s where the Funnel Hacker’s toolkit comes in. It removes business logic from code and puts it back in the hands of the people that make decisions about it – so they can make changes to it without writing code, without deploying a software release (solving Startup Problem #3: The Business Logic Encapsulation).

All it requires is access to the right tool(s) in the Funnel Hacker’s toolkit.

The Funnel Hacker’s Toolkit

1. The Customer Funnel

With Funnel Hacking, we have an 8-stage funnel that applies to almost any business. Its power is that it provides a framework and a common vocabulary for discussing what needs to be done.

Every stage of this funnel has a goal and a set of tools and practices associated with it.

In Growth Hacking, the majority of focus is on the Discover stage of the Funnel – getting users to discover your product. In Funnel Hacking, most of the focus is on the subsequent 7 stages.

The common pitfall that many startups fall into is focusing primarily on this Discovery phase.

They drive a whole slew traffic to their site through various Growth Hacking tactics, and then they lose most of their leads in the next 4 stages of the funnel (Familiarity, Trial, Support, Purchase).

This has the impact of driving up their Customer Acquisition Cost (aka CAC) which doesn’t look good to their bottom line or to their prospective investors.

Then once they’ve successfully acquired a customer, they forget to maximize their revenue from this customer, that has already demonstrated purchase intent.

So in the final 3 stages of the Customer Funnel (Upsell, Retain, Refer), they miss out on their opportunity to maximize customer value. This restricts the potential of their Customer Lifetime Value (LTV).

A good Funnel Hacker keeps up to speed with the best of breed tools out in the marketplace and understands the strengths and weaknesses of each (solving Startup Problem #2: The SaaS tool Minefield).

2. Fit for Purpose Tools

The key to Funnel Hacking is being able to choose the best and most suitable tools for your business and connect them together in a smart way, such that you can pass information between them about each user of your platform, whilst retaining the best of breed tool for each capability.

The less attractive alternative is to choose one of those monolith applications that claim to do everything but don’t do anything very well.

So, how do we do that at Funnel Ventures?

We use an integration product called Segment. It enables us to pass information between all of our favorite tools so we don’t have to compromise on quality, in favor of integration. So your next question will likely be, “But what about all those cool tools that don’t integrate with Segment?”

We have an answer to that as well. We’ve built a custom Zapier app that allows us to connect any Zapier-enabled tool to Segment. Check it out here, and request an invitation to our private Zapier app.

3. Playbooks

Growth Hackers have “growth hacks”, Funnel Hackers have “playbooks”. While a growth hack’s effectiveness is often short-lived, a playbook’s lifetime is unbound and less susceptible to the changing tides.

A playbook is a way to document a process to achieve an outcome for one or more stages in the Customer Funnel. A playbook will show the end-to-end process and how each of the tools interact with each other (solving Startup Problem #4: The Cohesion Vacuum).

You can find our publicly available playbooks here to get an idea.

All playbooks are triggered by a specific event. This triggering event is most likely sourced by an event coming out of your platform, but it may also be sourced from one of your key tools, like your billing system or NPS tool.

Example playbook diagram sourced from the Funnel Ventures Blog

A Funnel Hacker must identify all the events and data to be sent from the startup’s platform.

It takes a certain amount of understanding of the current and future goals of each startup to construct these events in the most optimal way, so that they work for now but also for the future, when your product, marketing and success team members want to implement an initiative to achieve their goals, without developer intervention.

This article from Amplitude provides some good insights into how to construct them best for analytics purposes.

Of course, there are several end systems that will receive these events and profile data, so a good Funnel Hacker will factor in the needs of all of the receiving systems in designing the data taxonomy.

4. Single View of a Customer

The concept of being able to collate everything about a customer into a cohesive view is not new. It’s been a goal for many years, if not decades.

But it has always seemed somewhat out of reach, especially to startups that are relatively cash strapped.

Now that we can integrate our systems via integration tools like Segment and Zapier, this goal is no longer out of reach.

There are several tools you could use to create this single view of a customer. The image below is extracted from one of my favorite tools, Drip, and represents all the events that have been applied to a customer:

By collating all of a customer’s actions and their profile data into a tool like this, we’re now able to build highly personalized flows that can achieve any number of the goals in our customer funnel including the following: convert a customer during trial, upsell an existing customer, re-engage and retain a customer, ask a customer for a referral.

Wrapping Up

So that’s an introduction to Funnel Hacking. If you’re wondering how all of these Startup Problems identified here are addressed by the Funnel Hacker’s toolkit, here’s a matrix that sums it all up: