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You might assume if you challenge your prospects, they’ll hang up and never speak to you again.

But if you do it right, you’ll get the opposite reaction: Prospects become more engaged, invested, and ultimately, eager to buy.

Successfully changing the buyer’s mindset earns you authority and credibility. You also prove you’re committed to the buyer’s success, as you are clearly willing to risk short-term goodwill to help them.

Follow these five guidelines to challenge your prospects without sounding hostile.

1) Pick Your Battles

It’s not worth challenging your prospect on every issue. If you frequently correct or contradict them, they’ll stop listening.

If, on the other hand, you challenge them infrequently, the buyer will think, “Hmm, this is probably important -- I should take this seriously.”

Use this three-part decision framework as your guide.

1. Is questioning or disagreeing with them ultimately in their best interests, either because they’re operating under false assumptions or missing crucial information?
2. Do I have proof to back up my statements?
3. Is this pertinent to the deal?

Don’t challenge your prospect unless you answer “yes” to all three questions.

2) Build Rapport First

Gaining your prospect’s respect makes them more receptive to being challenged. If you tell the buyer she’s wrong two seconds into your first call, she’ll be taken aback, if not outright annoyed. But if you first earn her trust and put her at ease, she’ll listen with an open mind.

Build rapport both virtually and over the phone or in person. Interact with buyers on social media before you reach out and include references to commonalities or mutual contacts in your emails.

Once you’re talking to a prospect, strengthen your connection by discussing shared interests, asking questions about their professional projects, and sharing details about your own life when appropriate.

3) Preface Your Challenging Statement

To sound less combative, lead in to your challenge. Doing so gives prospects warning you’re about to contradict them and shows respect for their beliefs (even if you think those beliefs are wrong).

Here’s an example:

Before: “Actually, the system you’re currently using will be out-of-date in 10 months.”

After: “I’d like to offer a different opinion. According to my firm’s projections, the system you’re currently using will be out-of-date in 10 months.”

Other potential qualifying statements include:

• “I’d like to politely disagree … ”
• “I see where you’re coming from, and … ”
• “It may surprise you to learn … ”
• “I have a different perspective … ”
• “I used to [think/feel/believe] that as well, until I learned X … ”
• “I have some interesting data that suggests otherwise … ”

4) Ask for Permission

Are you nervous your prospect will react negatively if you dive straight into challenging them? Ask for permission first. Giving you the go-ahead reestablishes some of their authority, which makes them less sensitive to hearing they’re wrong.

Ask, “Are you open to hearing a different perspective?” or “Can I share a differing opinion with you?”

When you want to be bolder, say, “I think I can change your mind. Will you let me try?”

Databox CEO and former HubSpot VP of Sales Pete Caputa recommends following this sample dialogue:

Rep: “There’s something I think you should know in order to make the best decision possible. But I’m worried you won’t like hearing it.”

Prospect: “What is it?”

Rep: “Will you keep an open mind?”

Prospect: “Yes.”

Rep: “[Challenging statement.]”

5) End With “WIIFM”

“WIIFM” stands for “What’s In It For Me.” After you’ve challenged the buyer, explain why knowing this information benefits them.

For example, if you’ve just told them they won’t hit their year-end objective with their current strategy, follow up with, “Fortunately, if you make adjustments by the end of this month, you’ll be able to make your goal -- with room to spare.”

Or perhaps you’re disagreeing with the buyer’s opinion of your product. You could say, “You’re not the only person I’ve talked to who has called our interface hard to navigate. Good news: We surveyed 5,000 random end users in January, and 96% said the product was ‘easy’ or ‘extremely easy’ to use. Your IT team will be able to get up and running in four days or less.”

Stick to these guardrails, and correcting prospects will be far less risky. In fact, it will likely help you win their business.

The world of sales is constantly evolving — with new technologies and sales tactics emerging to help salespeople close more deals. Long gone are the days of cold calling, trade shows, and outdated methods.

Today, the best salesperson embraces marketing and a growth mindset. If you’re ready to level up your sales strategy, read through the top 20 sales tactics that will help you find and close more deals this year.

• What are sales tactics?
• Sales Tactics that Work

20 Sales Tactics That Work

Every team will develop its own unique sales strategy. However, these sales tactics offer a great starting point. Begin exploring below.

1. Adopt warm calling.

If you’re still cold-calling prospects and think it’s a great way to generate new opportunities, it’s time to revamp your strategy. Cold calling is difficult and negatively impacts your brand and potential success. It's also not nearly as effective as inbound selling.

Warm calling is preferable over cold calling. With warm calling, you connect with prospects who have already shown some level of interest or familiarity with your company or product. You’re less likely to confront unwilling prospects.

Warm calling typically involves contacting leads who have interacted with your company in some way, such as filling out a form, visiting the website, or attending an event. This makes it easier to establish a connection with the prospect, as they are more likely to be receptive to the sales message.

Of course, you still need to do call prospecting. Research to offer up a compelling reason for your initial call, work inbound leads that want to talk to you, and provide helpful insights to potential prospects on social media before engaging.

2. Utilize inside sales.

Back in the 1990s, inside sales was a stepping stone, not a career. In today’s world, actually meeting face-to-face is a nice to have, not a requirement. Inside sales, or remote selling, offers a more efficient and scalable process.

In the past, even early-stage sales calls were done in person. Meeting in person was not only expensive, but it was also a time sink. A simple 45-minute meeting became a three-hour ordeal — and all this just to start a relationship and conduct a basic needs analysis.

You had to dress formally, print out directions (remember, this was before smartphones), travel to the prospect’s office, wait in the parking lot, make small talk with the receptionist, and then make more small talk with your prospect before you could get down to business.

In-person meetings are often inefficient. Leverage inside sales to start relationships and for most transactions. Face-to-face meetings can be reserved for high-value prospects.

3. Be realistic about what your product can do.

You may feel tempted to paint your product as the solution to every problem your client faces. However, overselling the product can lead to challenges down the line. If your prospect’s expectations are not met, you may face high churn and dissatisfied customers.

So remember, don’t oversell. If you’re dealing with a 28- or 56-day sales cycle, you’ll be speaking with your prospects frequently. You can’t lie, and you need to sweat the details.

Be realistic about what your product can do and where your solution will alleviate customer pain. You’ll be more likely to garner repeat business.

4. Talk about your competitors.

Today, technology is homogeneous. Many companies offer similar software solutions, giving customers a wide range of options to choose from.

Be sure to discuss what makes your team different from competitors. The real differentiators are culture, company, and your ability to solve problems. Don’t be afraid to leverage the unique values that set your team apart.

Remember, your product demonstration is an end-all, be-all — everything you do before and after matters.

5. Personalize your solutions.

Today, 62% of consumers expect personalization from the brands they work with, according to Twilio. Those who fail to deliver will lose customers. Further, 49% of respondents in the same study said they would become repeat buyers if personalization is offered.

Make sure everything about your product, and the process you use to sell it, has a personal touch. Your emails should be addressed to the buyer. Your solution should be tailored to that prospect’s specific business needs.

You have to ask pertinent questions that pull out relevant information and make 100% sure you understand your prospect’s situation before you begin making any sort of recommendation.

6. Try the Negative Reverse Selling strategy.

If a prospect keeps ghosting your meetings, won't answer your calls, and isn't opening your emails, it might be time to get honest with them and hope for honesty in return. That’s where the Negative Reverse Selling strategy comes in.

Negative Reverse Selling is a tactic developed by David H. Sandler in 1967 as a part of his selling system. When using this technique, sales representatives make the prospect feel like they’re the one pursuing the deal.

The sales rep convinces the prospect that the prospect’s business desperately needs your. The prospect almost forgets that they’re being sold to.

To use this tactic, here’s what to do:

• Discuss your prospect’s business and pain points in depth.
• Ask plenty of questions to determine the root of customer pain.
• Once you have a comprehensive understanding of the person’s problem, explain how your solution can solve it.

Remember to focus on what your team can do to improve your customers’ lives. This helps the interaction feel less like a traditional sales transaction.

7. Take the time to understand your customer.

Landing a one-call close is a huge rush and seems like a quick win. But if you’re just paying attention to the short term, you may miss huge warning signs that your prospect won’t be a good customer.

Instead of speeding ahead to close a deal, take the time to really understand your customer’s needs and expectations. Delve deeper into your prospect’s situation so they’re completely informed about their decision.

Best-fit, informed customers won’t churn out of your customer base in a few months.

8. Focus on building relationships.

Not every interaction you have as a rep should be geared toward closing a sale. Networking with potential customers can help you foster deeper connections. You can then sell to them when the time is right or use their insights to improve your offering.

LinkedIn is a valuable online tool for relationship building. Find people who might be a great fit for your product. Then, send a personalized connection request. You can take a look at their posts and keep track of the promotion. If you notice their needs align with what you sell, you can follow up with an offer.

In-person events are another way to forge these relationships. Not only will you connect with potential future customers, you can assess industry trends that can help you improve your offering.

9. Develop a strong social media presence.

Social media is more than a distraction. These platforms are powerful tools for closing sales. Today, 61% of organizations engaged in social selling report revenue growth. In fact, sales professionals with a strong social selling index on LinkedIn have 45% more sales opportunities than those who don’t.

Use social media to build awareness of your product and services. If you are not on LinkedIn, TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat, then it's time to join the conversation.

10. Lean on your marketing team.

Alignment between your sales and marketing team is a key driver of success. Organizations that have robust alignment can see 20% growth annually. So remember, you’re only as good as your marketing department.

If you don’t have relationships with your marketing team, start by finding three marketers and connecting over coffee (virtual and in person). Share common pain points you hear from customers and ask for marketing collateral that they have related to these issues.

This should be the start of an ongoing relationship. Your departments should collaborate regularly. Bring the marketing team ideas for ebooks or blog posts that would help you in your sales process. Marketing can help you hit your number, but they need your help to do so.

11. Diversify where your leads come from.

If you’re doing all of your prospecting on LinkedIn or at in-person conferences, you’re missing out on huge swaths of potential customers.

Call your cousin and ask who at their company is responsible for the business area relating to your product. Call your closed-lost accounts from 2021. Go to a networking event and give out your business card while asking how you can help.

Above all: Make sure you’re looking for leads in multiple places.

12. Use an automated meeting scheduler.

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Scheduling a meeting over email often leads to an unnecessarily long thread of messages. An automated meeting booking app can save you from the back and forth.

You can also use HubSpot Sales to improve the meeting scheduling process. Your prospects just have to choose an available time on your calendar that works for them. Then, they’ll receive automatic confirmation of the meeting.

13. Always be learning.

As a sales professional, the information you need to be successful is always changing. You need product knowledge, sales knowledge, and customer knowledge to get the right results.

Ask your manager to review your calls and ask for ways to improve. It’s important to stay in a growth mindset and seek new information and skills constantly. Read blogs or go to industry events to learn about new trends.

You can also take the HubSpot inbound sales certification to teach yourself inbound selling concepts and learn how to apply them to your own sales process.

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14. Sell with a team.

Team selling always wins. If you are missing your numbers, or even if you’re just looking to level up, a team approach can help you grow.

See if your manager can join you for sales calls and give you tangible tips for improvement. You can also work with a sales coach who can share some of their tried-and-true best practices.

Then, get a sales mentor and meet regularly. Find someone who might be a bit further in their career and has shown a consistent approach to exceeding their numbers. You can both discuss ways to improve and how to advance your career.

15. Prioritize work-life balance.

Tired of the hustle culture? Most of us are. It's not sustainable to grind for 14 hours a day, seven days a week. It's important to have grit, but it's equally important to have balance.

Stay pumped up by getting enough sleep, eating a balanced diet, and surrounding yourself with good people. Take care of yourself — if you keep yourself healthy by exercising, staying motivated, and keeping your brain engaged, you'll be happier — and ultimately perform better.

16. Find creative ways to network.

Going to trade shows and setting up a booth is only one way to network. You’ll need to find new, creative ways to promote your product and yourself.

You should be reaching out to prospects on LinkedIn and other social media. However, you’ll also want to build your own brand and become a thought leader they trust. Consider writing blog posts, starting a podcast, or hosting webinars. This way you can grow your network and your credibility.

17. Have a thoughtful LinkedIn strategy.

Just because you have a distant, third-degree connection doesn't mean they're a qualified prospect. Instead, become part of pertinent groups on LinkedIn. Comment on and share articles in your feed.

Keep an eye out on what your prospects post and engage where relevant. Be sure to reach out only once you've made a meaningful, non-creepy connection.

A good rule of thumb for LinkedIn outreach? Always respond in kind.

For example, if a prospect "likes" an article you shared in an industry group, don't immediately send them a direct message asking for a phone call. Instead, reply to the article thread by thanking them for reading your article.

This might not be the fastest way to move leads along, but it will be far more successful than pushing a relationship before they’re ready.

18. Tailor your sales process.

Expecting every prospect to react the same way throughout your sales process is unrealistic. You might have prospects ready to sign on the dotted line halfway through your discovery call and others who need to talk to your lead engineer, their lawyer, and five executives before they're ready to buy.

Be flexible in your approach to each account, learn how to read the signs, and determine the next steps for any prospect you're working with.

Be sure to ask your prospect who needs to be involved in the buying process and how they prefer to communicate. This will give you a sense of how to keep in touch, who to connect with, and when to reach out.

19. Find the right call cadence.

If you call a prospect three times in a day and send two follow-up emails, you're coming on too strong. Don't assume your prospects are viewing your relentless "spirit" as admirable or a sign of dedication and hard work.

Finding the right call cadence is an important milestone for a salesperson and the team they work in. Here's what sales expert Jeff Hoffman recommends for a cadence that won't be off-putting for your prospect:

• Day 0: First touchpoint.
• Day 14: Second touchpoint.
• Day 21: Third touchpoint.
• Day 25: Fourth touchpoint.
• Day 27: Fifth touchpoint.
• Day 28: Sixth touchpoint.
• Day 29: (in the morning): Seventh touchpoint.
• Day 29: (in the afternoon): Eighth touchpoint.

20. Share your successes with your team.

The days of furtively clawing your way to the top of the leaderboard and staying there by keeping your most successful strategies to yourself are long gone.

Team selling is the way to get ahead at your company and close more deals. Whether you're a sales leader or a new rep, seek out your teammate’s tips and advice, and share the tactics you find most successful.

If a rep on your team has a call strategy that repeatedly solves a problem that your team gets a lot of, make her strategy an institutionalized part of your sales process and have her lead the training to the other reps.

Building Your Sales Strategy

There’s no one set of tactics that will work perfectly in every sales organization. That’s why it's essential to experience. Start testing these sales tactics today, and see what works in your organization. From there, you can incorporate the most successful ones into your strategy.

In terms of small business analytics Google pretty much dominates the market. It is easily the most talked about, and installed platform for the micro/small business category. The issue is, that many small businesses don’t know how to interpret this data, or make use of it. Generally, it is because they don’t understand what any of the base statistics mean.

We get inundated with article upon article about entrepreneurs, who are creating a new platform, or inventing a new product that will make our lives better. The reality is, a large chunk of small businesses that open are family owned, or are started with little to no capital. These people can’t afford to hire someone to make sense of analytics data. And yes, they still need to understand analytics so they can grow and build that better future for their children that they are dreaming of.

Yandex Metrica offers them a solution. With free heat maps, click maps, form tracking, and even videos of people using their website, it provides them with a much needed visual aid to establish what they are doing right, and wrong with their site. They can literally skip the data and watch videos of people using their site, and provide themselves with at least a base level of information on how people use and navigate their online presence. Refer to the video below to see an example of one such video:

As you can see in the video, Yandex tracks wherever the user goes on your website. In addition, is the plethora of heat and click maps that can be accessed, absolutely free. There are companies out there that can charge anywhere from $50-$100 per month for these type of services. For those small business owners who don’t know, heat-maps create a visual representation of which areas in your site is popular. Refer to number 16 in this list to see some examples.

Installation of Yandex Metrica is quite simple. It is essentially the same as Google Analytics. Just paste their tracking code in the header or body of your website template page and you’ll be good to go. The main difference is that Metrica calls this code a “counter”, and it can be altered to allow click maps, and videos, or to not track them at all. Note: If you want to see videos of people using your site, make sure you tick that option.

For those that require more, it essentially has the same functionality as Google Analytics, with a few differences. For example, “bounce” rate is calculated a little differently. In Google’s platform, it doesn’t matter how long someone stays on a landing page, if they leave without visiting any other part of the site it’s counted as a “bounce”. With the Metrica platform, if a user stays on the landing page for more than 30 seconds it no longer counts as a “bounce.

With the majority of small businesses starting from the ground as family owned businesses, I believe it’s absolutely important for them to have access to easy information like Yandex provides. After all your average family cleaning service with a website is most likely confused by all the statistical jargon used. I believe Yandex has bridged this gap for them, and allows them to at least get a basic knowledge of how their online performance is tracking.

Ever had a situation with a customer that really wasn’t resolved via email? Perhaps you needed to be able to chat with them face to face in order to figure out the best way to resolve their situation? This situation pops up for many small business owners and employees, most often when there isn’t time to drive to where the customer’s location. Thankfully, we have Google+ Hangouts, where you can video chat with your customers at any time from a computer, tablet, smartphone.

You can use Hangouts for more than just video chatting your customers though. In fact, Hangouts are a great way to communicate creatively with your employees, your customers, and the world. Let’s take a look at 5 ways to incorporate Hangouts in your business.

1. Demonstrations—In your work, do you routinely have to show customers how something works or how to make something work better? Doing a demonstration of your product on Hangouts not only provides valuable information for your customers, it also demonstrates your expertise with the products you sell.
2. Giveaways—This is a great way to get people excited about your products. Just announce your company’s giveaway, along with the date and time for people to tune in. You could even have a special guest do the giveaway.
3. Interviews—There are plenty of people in your industry who have been at it for years and really know the ins and outs of your business. Hangouts is a great place to interview them and share their knowledge with the rest of the world. Ask for questions from the audience before the program starts, select the best ones, and then ask your expert. Involving the audience this way means that they will stick around for the whole interview.
4. Behind the Scenes—People love a sneak peek and using Hangouts to go behind the scenes will make the audience that much more excited about what you do. Another option would be to preview an event that you are hosting or sponsoring. Give your audience an inside look at what goes in to what you do.
5. Feedback and Focus Groups—Your business relies on trusted friends and associates to help when making decisions about things like services, products, or even branding. Hangouts is a great way to gather all of them together to focus on a topic affecting your business. Plus by being face to face, the chance for errors in communication are greatly reduced than if you were emailing back and forth.

When it comes to tools like Google+ Hangouts, there are really no limits as to how a business can choose to use them. Plus Hangouts is easy to set up and run, which means no investment costs or downtime—a boon for small business.

Have you used Hangouts for your business? Talk to us about your experience in the comments.

Even McDonald’s couldn’t quite figure China out. Earlier this month, the fast-food giant sold off most of its China business to a Chinese-owned firm, citing the need for a better understanding of the local market. Meanwhile, Uber lost $2 billion in China in two years before selling its operations in the country to fierce rival Didi Chuxing this summer. Google cut bait in 2010.

Little wonder: China is one of the most difficult environments for any outside entrepreneur, with opaque rules, distinct cultural norms and a government that can put its thumb on the scales in favour of local interests. But for outsiders who succeed, the business lessons can be life-changing.

I moved to Shanghai with my wife in 2005, with the idea of starting an online eyewear business. I discovered the Wild West in the Far East. For other entrepreneurs, here’s what I learned on the front lines that can make an impact whether you’re in Shanghai or Santa Fe.

1. Get comfortable with volatility

Governments everywhere set rules that affect businesses. In China, however, decisions are usually made behind closed doors with much less public input compared to Western democracies. New policies can cause dramatic, uncompromising changes in an instant. When I first started my business, China was a messy labor landscape with laws that were vague and unclear. The economy was largely cash-based, with little transparency or wage protections for workers. That changed suddenly on Jan. 1, 2008, when the government enacted sweeping changes in a labor law that many multinationals argued would harm business.

That experience made me much more flexible—I learned not to be too surprised by huge changes in policy, macroeconomic conditions or regulations. For disruptive companies who are running into new and unexpected regulatory hurdles, like the Airbnbs or Ubers of the tech world, these lessons would be good to take to heart. China taught me I can’t always fight the tide, so it’s wiser to become adaptable and focus my energy and resources on things I can control.

2. Learn what “long-term” really means

Chinese policy shifts may cause tectonic effects, but one virtue of their system is their big plans don’t switch with each election cycle. Planners don’t just aim for flashy results within four years, but can set goals for ten years and beyond for infrastructure, educational reforms or technological development. Chinese organizations learn to think with long timeframes — not just into the future but also the past.

This kind of long-term planning may seem out of place in the tech world, where conditions can change dramatically in a matter of months. But it’s precisely because of this volatility that you need a larger vision — a point on the horizon you can stay focused on despite unsteady seas. At Tesla, for example, it’s “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy.” In our case, it’s a simple mission to provide “better vision for everyone.” This kind of long-term, unwavering vision has helped me thrive in an optical space where new innovations in product, marketing and delivery are the only constant.

3. It’s worth going the extra mile to retain top talent

Of course, retaining top talent is critical to carrying a company’s culture, vision and best practices forward. To do that, I learned I had to be more creative and flexible than my competition. When I started in China, multinationals were fighting desperately for English-speaking Chinese talent to grow their businesses. My employees were prone to jump ship for even incrementally better pay from a bigger brand. It got to the point where I hired two people for every job opening, as a contingency for when one would leave. Surprisingly, competing for their jobs kept my hires continuously engaged and actually prevented many from leaving.

We also began promising long-term retention bonuses to key people if they stayed three years. Our hires tended to be fresh university graduates, but we made sure to wow them with bonuses that would change their lives. The people we hired in those early days are still with us today and are pillars for our company. We didn’t have the deep pockets to out-spend the Nikes, Disneys or other big companies but they didn’t have our ability to react and adapt.

Many businesses challenges are unique to China. And I don’t want to oversimplify the on-the-ground realities. But I believe the lessons China offers entrepreneurs can be important and universal. For other founders, a stint in China may prove difficult but well worth the challenge: Think of it as boot camp for mastering the startup grind.

Roy Hessel is founder and CEO of EyeBuyDirect. The ideas in this article are his personal views and do not necessarily reflect those of the company. Follow him on Twitter: @RoyHessel

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MORE ABOUT ENTREPRENEURSHIP & CHINA:

• Why 2017 could be the time to get back into emerging markets
• 10 lessons for Canadian firms trying to crack the Chinese market
• What Canadians need to know about doing business in India now
• How investing in emerging markets is getting more complicated
• Dynamic Structures’ wild ride from steelmaker to theme park innovator
• For many MBA programs now, global experience comes standard
• How to hire amazing employees (and stop hiring duds)
• Why even the smallest businesses need to focus on workplace culture
• Jim Balsillie on how Canada is doing innovation wrong—and how to fix it

The post Three lessons every entrepreneur needs to learn about doing business in China appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

The federal government has been out asking Canadians what we think about innovation. Our answers suggest we are sensitive about the one percenters taking advantage of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s desire to do something big in this regard. We are okay with public funds being used to help business, so long as the money is directed to the little guy.

This is what I deduce from this January 11 Globe and Mail story. The Globe’s Bill Curry used the Access to Information Act to obtain material on focus groups the government hosted in nine Canadian cities in November. Curry said the sessions focused on innovation, climate change, and the culture industry. Of the three, innovation received the bulk of the attention, which makes sense, given that Finance Minister Bill Morneau’s next budget likely will be on the same theme.

Here’s what Curry and the Globe shared from the conclusion of the final report on the focus groups:“When asked, there was strong support for the government offering subsidies to support innovation, rather than providing tax cuts or investments, particularly for smaller organizations,” states the final report summarizing the research. “In terms of sectors, participants favoured assistance for the health-care sector, given Canada’s aging population, along with education, agriculture, forestry, and renewables and clean technology.”

It’s difficult to know how much weight Morneau puts on such findings. He’s a politician, so he will be sensitive to public opinion. He also has spent a long time thinking about policy, so he will know that the public doesn’t always know what is good for it. On January 4, CBC Radio’s The Current played Anna Maria Tremonti’s interview with Yale psychology professor Paul Bloom. Bloom is the author of Against Empathy: the Case for Rational Compassion, which argues that we too often let our emotions get in the way of making sound decisions. An example Bloom offered Tremonti was the stuffed animals that flooded Newtown, Connecticut after a gunman killed 20 students and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in 2012. The toys were sent by thousands of well-meaning people. But the gifts became a nuisance because there were too few families in the community to absorb them all. Newtown also is relatively wealthy; if parents thought their children’s trauma would be eased by a new teddy bear, almost all had the means to buy them one. Municipal leaders asked people to stop sending stuffed animals, but the gifts kept coming, forcing Newtown to figure out a way to store them. Empathy made the situation worse.

In terms of economic policy, our empathy for the owners of smaller businesses can cause us to assume that what is good for them must automatically be good for the economy. It is noteworthy that the focus groups appeared to be okay with subsidizing businesses directly, rather than cutting their taxes or making investments in things like infrastructure. That will annoy those who think governments are poor at picking winners, just as it will encourage those who argue that companies such as Apple and Tesla needed the government’s help to get off the ground.

The rub is the public’s apparent preference for giving public funds to small companies. We romanticize small business as the backbone of the economy. Most of our companies are measured in the dozens of employees, not thousands. But when it comes to innovation, it’s not size that matters—it is the desire of management to grow. The International Monetary Fund has criticized Canada for favouring smaller companies, when it is new companies that generate jobs the fastest and introduce new ideas. Nor are bigger companies that seek government assistance necessarily corporate welfare cases. They may be companies in technology or health with big valuations that want to get bigger still. Can such a company secure venture capital from private sources? Probably, but that private money may result in the benefits accruing somewhere other than Canada. Smaller companies count on business from bigger ones.

So the most efficient way to help such firms could be subsidizing the bigger guy. That could be hard for a lot of us to accept, but only if we let our feelings get in the way.

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MORE ABOUT INNOVATION & SMALL BUSINESS:

• Five ways small businesses can compete with big companies for top talent
• How small businesses can do branding like the big guys
• Why even the smallest businesses need to focus on workplace culture
• How this Canadian company is helping eliminate wires from VR headsets
• The four technologies that really mattered at CES 2017
• Why you need to get your to employees brag about their achievements more
• The inside story of Shop.ca’s failed e-commerce revolution
• Why a new wave of tech startups might actually, finally, disrupt real estate
• What your company needs most isn’t vision. It’s focus

The post Why subsidizing small businesses doesn’t actually boost innovation appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

It is hard to be in business right now without hearing how significant data and analytics are in decision-making.

However, without a clear understanding of the benefits of data integration, it’s hard to realise its value in B2B lead generation.

The following is a look at several ways that you can optimise your B2B business by leveraging data.

Lead Scoring and Customer Acquisition

Don’t rely on anecdotal experience to define your target market; let data guide your creation of buyer personas.

Customer databases with analytics and reporting features provide compelling insights into the qualities and behaviours of your most profitable customers.

Develop a lead scoring model to identify the characteristics of your top buyers and use your evaluation for customer acquisition.

Direct your B2B lead generation systems at acquiring people that match your data-driven profiles.

Projecting Lifetime Customer Value and Retention

Getting people in the door is just the first step in building a profitable B2B company.

Data is useful in tracking your results with individual and target market customers.

A lifetime customer value model is a way of estimating the long-term value of existing customers based on established buying habits.

LTV takes the monetary value, frequency and recency factors into account.

By identifying your best long-term customers, you can direct your retention strategies at these top buyers.

Also, invest resources wisely to maintain relationships, escalate revenue and drive referrals.

Nurturing the Pipeline

Data insights help you confirm which marketing and sales strategies work in lead nurturing.

For instance, you can analyse the communication methods and messages that drive efficient conversions.

Typical CRM software programs offer substantial sales funnel data that helps you look at the big pipeline picture for your organisation as well.

See how many prospects you have at each stage of the selling cycle.

And identify potential bottlenecks where your sales team needs to focus efforts, or where your leaders need to offer enhanced training to help reps perform better at that stage.

Evaluating Promotional Campaign Performance

Evaluation of marketing and advertising effectiveness is another critical area in which data tells a story.

Digital promotional methods, in particular, allow for rapid and thorough measurement of results.

Track the promotional methods and communication strategies that help you meet your response objectives.

Using data to evaluate promotional campaign effectiveness helps you minimise waste in approaches that don’t pay off.

Focus your dollars on ads that optimise your B2B lead generation activities.

Wrap Up

It is not easy to compete with B2B lead generation without integrating data into your organisation.

However, you need to realise ways in which data offers useful information for decisions that impact your business the most.

The information is there; you only need to find it and use it to your advantage.

Why your innovation strategy needs employee ideas and how you can get them

Innovation remains a key focus and stated priority for many organizations, and for good reason. The world is enamoured with the Uber, Airbnb and other disruptive company success stories. For leadership it creates both a desire to create their own equally disruptive offerings and a fear of becoming obsolete. But with disruption leading the conversations around innovation, have we lost sight of the value of continuous improvement? Research indicates that much of the time, it’s these small, incremental changes that yield much better results.

Employees can and should be an important part of an organization’s innovation strategy. If everyone at an organization consciously looks for ways to improve, great things happen. The role of the organization is to develop and provide the right processes, habits, and culture that fosters creativity and innovation.

Can the average employee come up with great ideas?

Let’s start with the pink elephant in the “employees have great ideas” room. Does the average employee actually have great, useful ideas? The answer is not as simple as yes or no. It’s true that it’s rare to generate breakthrough, disruptive ideas using an employee idea program, however, research continually shows that there’s still significant potential in employee ideas.

Consider the power not of big, breakthrough disruptive ideas, but of a bias towards action. Of implementing small, incremental improvements consistently as problems are identified. Organizations that have compared returns from ‘big idea projects’ to returns from ‘continuous, incremental innovation’, have consistently found that a bias toward action for implementing known solutions to known problems has a bigger impact than identifying the biggest opportunities for improvement and launching projects to realize those opportunities. This is true across many use cases like improving patient care, realizing savings, improving productivity and increasing employee engagement. In fact, according to The Idea-Driven Organization, up to 80% of an organization’s performance improvement potential lies in employee ideas.

Why is this? The reason is that small teams or leadership will never know what the employee base knows collectively. The “iceberg of ignorance” was a term coined by Sidney Yoshida to reflect the findings of a study completed in 1989 that’s still relevant today. In the study, he found that leadership could only list 4% of the problems known to front-line employees. While the biggest opportunities and issues are very likely known to leadership, it’s really only the tip of the iceberg for potential innovations. Individually, they do not add up to much, but as a whole, there’s tremendous value in all these ideas. By continually improving, it’s also possible to leapfrog much of what gets labelled as disruptive innovation.

So while we don’t advocate giving up on other innovation efforts, we do strongly believe that an organization needs a strong, healthy employee idea program as part of their innovation strategy.

OK, so employee ideas are good – how hard is it to do well?

Not all employee idea programs are equal and many are in fact unsuccessful. Through my company’s research, we found that there’s a clear and significant difference between an average and well-run program:

• The average suggestion system has just under 10% adoption vs. more than 50% for well- run programs
• The average suggestion system gets fewer than .5 ideas per employee per year vs. multiple ideas per employee per year for well-run programs
• The average program often increases employee disengagement vs. having a significant positive impact on motivation and productivity
• Top performing idea programs have contributed hundreds of thousands, even millions of dollars to the bottom line in the form of efficiency, productivity, savings, decreasing turnover and maximizing revenue streams
• Well-run idea programs have more than 20x the participation and 8x the number of ideas implemented

There’s a lot at stake in putting together an employee idea program well. What does it take? It’s not rocket science, but it’s also not a walk in the park. It takes some commitment to build a successful program and embed it into the way an organization operates.

The main factors that go into a successful idea program

Timely and consistent feedback

In our experience, which is validated consistently by research, timely and consistent feedback on ideas is the most critical element of a successful idea program. Even if ideas are not approved, feedback and transparency on the part of decision makers are imperative. Nothing destroys a program like the perception that ideas are going into a black hole. That doesn’t mean that ideas need to be approved and implemented however. But feedback is key. In one study it was shown that it takes more than 20 failed submissions before employees starts to disengage in a program only if feedback is provided for their turned-down ideas.

The big challenge for organizations is scaling the program so that they can manage a tight feedback loop across dozens, hundreds or thousands of employees.

There are several ways leaders can accomplish this, but there are two key things that we learned that are most important to a successful idea program:

Decentralizing and empowering more people to get value from ideas

Where we’ve seen the best success is with business unit leaders taking charge for their own departments and driving the focus for ideas and seeing through implementation. Put another way, the more targeted the types of ideas are to the specific units that employees and leaders are part of, the greater the success.

Leveraging the idea program as a vehicle for employee engagement

Place an increased importance on using your idea program as a method to drive employee engagement, with an output being good ideas, not vice versa. Here’s what the research says:

• Comparisons between suggestion systems in North America, Europe and Japan demonstrate the importance of putting engagement first. On average, Japanese programs are driving better results. We believe the reason is their focus on engagement and the process of sharing and acting on ideas versus the ideas themselves.
• Within our Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and through numerous conversations with customers, we know that giving employees a voice is motivating and increases productivity. Customers that started with a focus on finding “diamond in the rough” ideas have gradually put more and more focus on the process of just listening and acting on employee input and using SoapBox as a way to get work done. Invariably, this focus translates into more input, better input, and more input translating to an impact on the bottom line.
• Research shows us not only that programs perform better when you focus on engagement first, but that there is an important halo effect on overall employee engagement. Providing employees choices on things as simple as their uniform, when they take breaks and where a barista can place a blender have lead to decreased absenteeism and increases in productivity of as much as 50%.

“Those who can’t do, teach.”

It’s a common saying. Sometimes it’s true. I remember going out bar-hopping several years ago in Los Angeles with a very well-known dating “guru” who couldn’t even talk to a woman to save his life.

But, many times it isn’t true. Some of the most successful – and wealthiest – people I know get a great deal of joy out of teaching their knowledge to others.

That saying bothered me when I started doing sales training ten years ago, when I’d hear it from morons who made the claim that I teach sales because I supposedly “failed” at cold calling. Of course, in reality, cold calling simply doesn’t work anymore, and what’s more, no one in their right mind wants to do it.

In fact, a recent survey by Sandler Sales showed that 1 in 3 salespeople would rather have a root canal than make a cold call!

But I digress. Back to my point….

The fastest way to solve any problem you might have is to find someone with a similar problem, and HELP THEM SOLVE THEIRS!

You’ll learn far more by doing that than you ever would merely working on your own problem.

Taking it a step further, there’s another way to learn more than you ever could any other way:

TEACH others your knowledge, and you’ll quickly find yourself learning even more from the other person than you’re teaching them!

I can tell you firsthand that one of the reasons that I love doing my webinars, as well as live sales training workshops, is because I usually end up learning as much from the audience as they do from me.

I’m a member of a paid Master Mind group here in Dallas consisting of other business owners, and I’ve observed that the leader of the group always leaves our half-day meetings with far more knowledge and insight than he arrived with.

(That’s also one of the reasons why I run a Master Mind group – I come away from our web conferences every time with more actionable knowledge than I had going in.)

But there’s another way you can use this principle to your benefit:

Sell More by Teaching Your Prospects!

Three years ago I was invited to join the Rotary Club of Dallas, one of the original Rotary Clubs dating back to 1911, and I quickly and excitedly accepted. The experience of speaking to many Rotary Clubs over the past couple of years has given me a true appreciation of their guiding principle: “Service Above Self.” And one year’s club motto is “Peace Through Service.”

You may remember, a while back, I wrote an article on the topic of “How to Sell More by Giving First.”

This time, let’s call it: “How to Sell More by TEACHING First.”

When you can give valuable, actionable advice to a prospect, advice that will benefit them – with NO expectation of return or reward by you – you will quickly find yourself rising to previously unimaginable heights of success.

Prospects will immediately recognize you as a person of value – someone who is genuinely interested in their success and well-being, rather than a typical salesperson who is out to make a quick sale and then move on to the next “target.”

You accomplish that by giving first.

BUT – and be forewarned –

You do the exact opposite by cold calling.

Cold calling makes you look greedy, desperate, annoying, or all of the above. Worst of all, it shows that you’re out to get something, rather than to give service and value.

To make matters worse, cold calling not only creates the impresssion that you offer zero value, but it gives away all of your power to the prospect.

The very top salespeople, on the other hand, always go out of their way to show value first, and only try to make a sale after. And they avoid cold calling like the plague because they know that cold calling hands all of the power over to the prospect.

So if you want to become one of those top sales pros, then stop cold calling, start giving value first, and watch your sales numbers explode!

Learn how you can stop cold calling forever and become a sales rock star by downloading a 37-page PDF preview of the Never Cold Call Again System.

More than half of all American adults (68%) own smartphones.

And do you know what the most popular smartphone feature is? Texting. A staggering 97% of smartphone owners use their phone to text versus 75% who check social networks and 47% who play games.

Many businesses have experienced commercial success by employing SMS in their marketing plan. That’s because text messaging is a popular and powerful tool for businesses to reach out to their clients.

From promotional messages to appointment reminders and polls, there are many ways to get your customers to engage with your brand through text.

Here are some tips on how to do it well:

1) Run promotions and sales

Two basic principles are important to keep in mind when offering promotions via SMS.

The first is timing. Text messages are received immediately. Capitalizing on this can help you reap higher ROI. For example, if you sell pizzas, it’s probably better to send out a promotional push in the evening right when people are starting to think about dinner.

The other principle is segmenting. You can boost engagement by breaking down your customer base and grouping them according to purchases, behavior, geography and other demographics.. Specialty retailer Cabela doubled their retail average and tripled their demand goal with a segmentation program.

2) Play with contests

People love free stuff. Engage your users by offering sweepstakes and contests.

Centennial College recently offered prospective students a chance to win a free iPod touch with an opt-in in to their SMS program.

The university ended up seeing 700 opt-ins from one recruitment fair! Contests are a great way to grow your opt-in list and grab the attention of your existing clients for a promotional push.

3) Improve your customer service

SMS is also a fast and convenient form of customer service. Most of Americans text at least once a day. More than half of consumers say they would prefer text as a customer support platform over their current preferred method. Texting can offer a lot of benefits as a customer service channel:

• It’s wide-reaching. Customers can be on the go, away from a computer or wifi, and still be able to send and receive text messages.

• It’s convenient. Customers can send a quick message to ask for assistance without having to be on hold on the phone. It allows them to carry on with their day without having to stop everything to deal with their issue.

• It gives customers a record. Texting leaves a written record of all exchanges with a brand. Customers can easily pull up the information and refer to it at a later date.

4) Provide tips and advice

Tips and advice are best when they use customer information to make the advice immediately useful to them. Also, make sure the information is relevant to the customer you’re speaking to.

For example, you most likely wouldn’t send nail styling tips to your male clients nor would you send hair loss prevention tips to young clients. Here are some useful suggestions:

• Dentists: Send a patient who just got a root canal content on how to care for their tooth during the healing process.
• Airline companies: Send a traveler the current weather and exchange rate for the destination they’re traveling to today.
• Hair salon: Send tips on how to maintain hair color to a client who just got a cut and color.

Notice that each of these tips has immediate value to the client.

5) Don’t forget about appointment reminders

Have you ever missed an appointment? Who hasn’t? Even the most organized person can slip up from time to time. Missed appointments are a hassle for both clients and the businesses they keep waiting.

For the businesses, it’s a lost hour, usually with high-paid staff waiting around for nothing. For clients, they now have to go to the trouble of re-scheduling. Appointment reminders are an easy way to make sure clients show up and can help business run more smoothly.

Property management company Marketplace Homes did just this and saw incredible results.: “We went from an average of 25% of our voice mail confirms returned to about 85% of our text confirms returned. This allows us to better plan our days and accommodate drop-ins.”

6) Personalize (people are persons)

Which message would you rather respond to:

“Dear client, here’s a coupon for 10% off spa services this week. Don’t miss out!”

OR

“Dear Sarah, you’re invited to enjoy 10% off on a sports massage any time this week.”

If you’re Sarah, you’d be more inclined to respond to the second message. The major difference is that the second one is personalized. Sarah gets a weekly sports massage so the promotion is both personalized (uses her name) and targeted (uses her purchase history and preferences to aim the promotion).

Targeting and personalization work well on both ends. First, it prevents businesses from spending money on “blanket” promotions that only hit the mark with some of the customers. And second, it increases customer loyalty and retention by offering rewards that are valuable to them.

In fact, 73% of customers want to engage with businesses that use their personal information to provide more relevant shopping experiences for them.

7) Ask for feedback

How about sending an SMS poll to find out what your customers think of a new menu item you plan to introduce in your restaurant? Or asking them how their last shopping experience was? SMS polling is a great way to engage customers and get to know what they’re thinking.

The convenience of text messaging allows customers to respond anytime, anywhere. That’s why text messages result in higher response rates than any other communication platform. It also lets customers know that you value their opinion and that your business is there to serve them.

“Write for the user, not the search engines,” continues to be a mantra of content marketing. In reality, smart content creators write for both.

Quality content is interesting, informative, original, AND it includes keywords, ultimately leading to more visits and helping you achieve your why. Quality content naturally builds links, which improves the site authority, which in turn boosts rankings, and gets more eyeballs on your content.

Integrating SEO with your content is the first step. But to really write smart copy, you should look at terms related to what you are targeting and how Google associates those terms. Then incorporate those terms into your content. Or you can use those findings to identify related topics you may want to write about down the road.

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To really write smart copy, look at terms related to what you are targeting, says @magzsbarr.
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What is semantically related?

From a high level, semantics looks at the meaning behind words. By taking a semantically related view, we look at the relationship between words. Applying this concept to content marketing, we talk about the types of keywords and phrases typically used when writing about a topic. And we bring in SEO by determining which related terms Google expects to see on a page that can ultimately help your content rank better.

Let’s give an example. Say you are writing an article about the best running shoes for women. You do your research process and select your keywords. But what other words are semantically related to “best running shoes for women”?

As you scan the content ranking for that phrase on the first search engine results page (SERP), you notice a lot of similar language in the more detailed descriptions – comfortable, miles, track, treadmill, trails, lifestyle, 5K, marathon, etc.

While you can do this process manually (as Rand Fishkin outlined in a Whiteboard Friday episode), you can also find semantically related terms using various tools to help you gain efficiencies.

Google AdWords Keyword Planner (free)

Google Keyword Planner often is one of the first places many SEO professionals start their keyword research, but it also can help you look at how Google is grouping keywords.

TIP: Google ties its Keyword Planner to your Google account so you need to log in to access the planner.

Here’s an example. You’re writing about hamburger recipes. You type “hamburger recipes” into the keyword planner and get a variety of keyword ideas. Click on the Ad Group Ideas tab to view terms related to hamburger recipes by related term groups – easy, best, beef, meat, meal, ideas, patty, simple, gourmet, and quick. Click on a group to drill down to more related terms.

Pinterest (free)

Pinterest is a hidden gem for helping you understand semantically related terms and topics. Type a high-level term to see related topics that align with your original topic.

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Pinterest is a hidden gem for helping your keyword-related term search, says @magzsbarr. #SEO
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For example, type “dolls” and you’ll see specific brand names (American Girl and Barbie). You’ll also see costumes, makeup, clothes, house, and DIY. Types of dolls (porcelain, handmade, vintage, etc.) are also grouped by categories. You’ll also see industry jargon such as BJD (ball-jointed dolls).

If you narrow your search with a long-tail keyword search, you’ll see additional variations. For example, “18-inch doll accessories” shows categories like easy DIY, free pattern, how to make, products, etc.

BrightEdge (fee)

BrightEdge’s DataCube can help you find related topics and terms. Put a keyword into its program to see a list of related terms (similar to how Google AdWords Keyword Planner works). You can sort the terms by high search volume (higher than 1,000), long-tail keywords (more than three words), or high value (score of 80 or more, which is calculated using cost-per-click [CPC] value and search volume).

For example, you’re writing a piece on amusement parks and use that as your search term:

The results offer other terms you might want to include in your copy, such as “things to do,” “golf courses,” “water park,” etc.

 Conductor (fee)

Conductor’s Audience Intent Explorer helps you discover topic suggestions for your new or existing content based on how consumers are searching for a phrase or discovering content.

For example, type in “golf.” You see a list of keywords that relate to how consumers are searching for that term on Google. To the left, you see filters showing topic suggestions by group. This area is valuable to quickly understand the different themes associated with golf, such as tour, channel, PGA, leaderboard.

At the keyword level, you see data on the phrase, including for what stage of the customer journey it’s used,  search volume, search volume trend by month, and competition for that phrase.

 

Google Correlate (free)

Google Correlate is another place to find related keywords and phrases. For example, if you are writing about sunblock, you may want to include in your copy some of the terms that Google Correlate shows are related to the term “sunblock.”

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.@Google Correlate is another place to find related keywords and phrases, says @magzsbarr.
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Not surprisingly, you see a lot of pool, water, and summer terms. Some phrases won’t make sense for your copy – don’t force them. But looking through Google Correlate can help generate a list of semantically related terms to try and include in your content.

Google related searches and auto fill (free)

Another place to check out potentially semantically related terms is the related searches section at the bottom of the SERP. For example, if you search for the term “piano” in Google, you’ll see this:

Don’t forget to check out the auto-fill suggestions too for some good ideas for related keywords and topics.

Moz related topics (fee)

If you have a campaign set up in Moz, be sure to use the related searches feature. Click on page optimization, then type in the keyword and the target URL. Then click on related topics. You’ll see a relevance score and can look at top-ranking URLs for each topic.

Keywordtool.io (free and fee options)

Another great tool for spotting semantically related terms is keywordtool.io. Type in a keyword and you can quickly scan the list to get an idea of potential related topics and semantically related keywords.

Pop over to the questions tab and you’ll see related question searches, which are great for generating article ideas with topics related to your original query.

Incorporating semantically related terms into your copy

Once you’ve done your research using one or more of these tools, you have an idea of terms that might make sense from a keyword perspective to pull into your copy. Should you include them all? Probably not. Not every keyword makes sense for your content. But look for opportunities where it makes sense to naturally weave in some of these semantically related terms.

Keep in mind relevancy is key. If the keyword has no place in your content, don’t force it or your content will sound spammy. Pushing a lot of spammy content on your site will backfire, hurting your authority and creating a bad user experience.

Please note: All tools included in our blog posts are suggested by authors, not the CMI editorial team. No one post can provide all relevant tools in the space. Feel free to include additional tools in the comments (from your company or ones that you have used).

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Cover image by Wilfred Iven, StockSnap, via pixabay.com

The post 8+ Tools to Find Related Keywords for Your Content appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Do you remember the first time you saw someone wearing UGG boots? You probably gasped with disgust, thinking “oh man, those things are ugg-ly!” Fast forward a couple months later when you purchased a pair. Why did you do this? The answer is social proof. As you stormed through the hallways you noticed that all of your closest friends and older idols started sporting UGG boots. Every fashion website you visited raved about them, and your favorite celebrities were photographed wearing them in every gossip magazine. How could you not jump on the bandwagon?

This story demonstrates the power that social proof can have to influence a buyer to purchase. Whether it be a B2B software solution or a consumer product like a pair of ugly winter boots, social proof can shift our perceptions and push us down the funnel to convert.

What Is Social Proof?

According to Unbounce, social proof is “the positive influence that’s generated when people find out that ‘everybody’s doing it.’ Building social proof into your offer in the form of testimonials, reviews, or trust seals is a great way to generate interest, increase credibility and drive more conversions.”

Social proof is a convincing endorsement of your business, products, or offerings. Using social proof can make a significant impact on the growth of your business.

The Flavors of Social Proof

Social proof can come in multiple flavors. Here are a few of the most common:

Industry Experts

In every industry there are individuals who have become well-known and sought after industry experts. For instance if you’re an SEO consultant, and you get an endorsement on your website from Rand Fishkin (who is often regarded as the father of SEO) then your website visitors will feel encouraged to move forward with your services.

Celebrities

Social proof from celebrities can be extremely hard to come by, but if you’re able to get a public endorsement from such a well-known name it can really transform your business. Typically companies that are much further along, and well-known themselves (think big brand names like Nike, Dove, BMW, etc.) have a much easier time gaining these opportunities since it can be quite a big investment to hire the celebrity to provide social proof. But who could forget the Lincoln ads with Matthew McConaughey?

Smaller companies will likely have better luck seeking out local “celebrities” or industry experts rather than convincing Anthony Bourdain or Reese Witherspoon to give social proof to their product or service.

Recognized Customer Brands

My favorite form of social proof lies in having your customers do the bragging for you, because who would know better than them? The key here is choosing big customer brand names to provide the social proof. For example, let’s say Google is using your employee training software; if you’re able to get a review, case study, or even just use their logo on your website, this would be a huge win in providing social proof from a well-known (as in everyone knows it) and respected brand.

Peers

Peer reviews are most effective in aggregated forms – for instance a 5-star average out of 21,043 ratings! Why is this method effective? Because people read and trust reviews from their peers. According to BrightLocal, 88% of consumers say that they trust online reviews as much as personal reviews. If you’re able to aggregate several reviews in a easy to display format, this can make a huge impact on gaining consumer trust.

Two of the most critical places for digital marketers to use social proof are in their online advertisements to get people to their websites, and on their landing pages to ensure folks are compelled enough to purchase. Here are some best practices for doing just that.

4 Ways to Use Social Proof on Your Landing Pages

1. Big Brand Customer Logos

Including some big name customer logos on your landing page can really tip people over the edge. If they see several brands they respect and admire then their trust will strengthen with higher likelihood of converting.

Check out the subtle example for Zapier below.

2. Short Testimonial Quotes

Including powerful customer quotes on your landing pages is a great way of utilizing social proof to draw on the emotional side of a viewer’s brain. Compelling anecdotes from customers can often lead to purchase! I love the example from Drupal below where they also use a photograph of the customer to show an even more human side.

3. Video Testimonials

This is probably the most compelling way to turn a lead into a customer. Video allows you to really pull at the heartstrings of your visitor, and bring social proof to life. Check out this great example from Steve & Kate’s Camp.

4. Media Mentions

Did Forbes or Business Insider give you a positive endorsement? This is the perfect opportunity to provide social proof on your landing pages. Big media companies are often trusted by consumers so showing that they endorsed you provides further legitimacy behind your brand.

Check out the example from optinmonster below.

4 Tips to Use Social Proof in Your Paid Ads

1. Seller Rating Extensions

Check out the ad below. Including star ratings directly in your ad immediately gives the shopper social proof that they can trust your business before even clicking on your ad. If you’re using Google Shopping then you can take the steps to make these appear. Follow the instructions outlined here.

2. Review Extensions

Review extensions are another great way to add social proof to your PPC ads. They’re like adding a mini customer testimonial directly to your ad. These extensions are also easier to control then seller ratings, and aren’t limited to the Google Shopping Network.

3. Run Customer Testimonial Video Ads on Social Media

Do you have some really compelling customer testimonial videos? Don’t limit the exposure of these to just your testimonial or case study pages. Rather run some video ad campaigns on Twitter and Facebook to gain even more exposure to these intriguing anecdotes to provide social proof to a larger audience.

4. Partner with a Well-Known/Respected Brand to Run a Social Contest

Have you ever heard the expression “famous by association”? That could be you! Co-marketing with well-known brands that are willing to partner with your business is not a new marketing tactic, but it is one that is underutilized on social media. Propose to one of your rockstar partners the idea of running a co-branded contest on social media, and create some compelling advertisements showcasing both of your brands. Having new leads see your brand tied to one they already respect and follow provides another big sprinkle of social proof.

We do this a lot at Wistia! Check out the example below of an event we hosted with HubSpot. While HubSpot is not the most well-known brand in the universe, it is well-known for our target customer base so it makes us look famous by association.

Don’t underestimate the value social proof has on growing your business. Implementing some of these tactics could lead to surprising results.

Draw inspiration from the greatest strategists and marketers when creating your plan for the year ahead

It's the time of year for setting out what you want to achieve in the coming twelve months at both a personal and business level.  Given that 'the road to hell is paved with good intentions', you'll also want to think through how and when you will achieve them.

It's all too easy to get back into the work routine and find yourself so swamped with daily tasks that taking a step back and thinking about planning and vision for the long term ends up taking a back seat. Before you know it you're several weeks into the year and you still haven't found the time to sit down and properly plan out your strategy. For businesses working on digital transformation, inspiring digital transformation through vision statements can help here.

To inspire action, we have put together some of our favourite marketing planning and strategy quotes, so you can take some time out of your busy schedule to prompt some long-term thinking about planning and strategy. After all, our recent developing digital skills survey found that 77% of marketing professionals think a planned approach focusing on analytics and continues optimisation is the most effect way of managing digital marketing, whilst only 14% thought a relatively unplanned, reactive approach was best. We know it's never easy to find the time 'in the real world', but if anything can inspire you to make time then it's these evergreen quotes from great thinkers, strategists and marketers.

Marketing strategy and planning quotes

Sun Tzu's legendary work on the 'Art of War' is over two thousand years old, but still is regarded as perhaps the greatest ever work on strategy ever produced and has even been applied to digital marketing strategy creation. Held in high regard by characters as diverse as General Mattis, US secretary of Defense and the fictional Tony Soprano, it may seem strange to suggest that the lessons of the warring states period of ancient Chinese history can be applied in a marketing department, but Sun Tzu's advice really is timeless. This quote is among his most valuable nuggets of wisdom, and one marketers would do well to heed. Too often today marketing departments have become so focused on tactics like social, email or SEO, that they forget the bigger picture and the real objectives. This 'tactification' strips the strategy from marketing and leaves it as little more than what Mark Ritson has called 'the colouring in department' in his article "Tactics without strategy is dumbing down our discipline'. As the great Chinese general said, tactics on their own won't get you anywhere. You need to get the strategy right first.

Marketing Week's Mark Ritson has railed against the dumbing down of marketing and the focus on one of the 4Cs of marketing (communications) to the detriment of all others. This quote is always important to bear in mind when thinking about your marketing plan sfor the year ahead.

Strategy must always come first. Tactics are the buttons you press to implement the strategy, they are subservient to the strategy and their success or failure comes down not to how well the buttons were pressed, but how smart (or stupid) the strategy which required those buttons to be pressed was.

Kenichi Ohmae brought Japanese business thinking to the west. He's most famous for bringing the idea of a 'long-term planning horizon', common in Japan but not in the West where short-term concerns like boosting share price tend to take priority. This quote again shows how crucial it is to get the overall strategy right, and that it is aligned with objectives. It doesn't matter how hard you are working every day if what you're doing isn't going to be impacting your key objectives.

Marketing technology quotes

Marketers involved in agency pitches to clients will recognise the ability of intelligent fools to make things more complex. Pitch documents have become huge wads of information, containing a menu of a million different strategies for the baffled client to choose from. I'm sure we can all agree it would take a whole lot of courage for an agency to pitch with a few sides of A4 that said in simple terms 'this is what we will do, and we won't try and sell you any tactics we don't think will work'.

The tendency to over-complicate often also works its way into planning. When writing your plan, always try to make everything as simple as it possibly can be, anything else will simply waste time. Our Digital Marketing Toolkit resources cover the detailed analysis and insight needed for an informed, data-driven strategy, but we take care to include one-page summary formats to help simplify the overall strategy.

Marketing automation and Machine Learning is all the rage at the moment as our vote on the top marketing trends for 2017 shows, so it's worth remembering this famous quote from Bill Gates. Automation is only as smart as the way it is implemented. Automating effective tactics is likely to massively boost effectiveness, but it's easy to waste time automating tactics that aren't actually delivering value. This ends up just wasting time and money.

This is a great quote to remember for digital marketers. Sometimes big organizations engaging in digital transformation can be a mix of old legacy technologies creaking under years of poorly-implemented bug fixes and bodged integration, and flashy new enterprise tech from Cloud providers that is at the absolute cutting edge of what is possible. This can be really confusing for employees and might also affect the customer journey. Try to ensure you distribute new systems evenly across the business to bring all areas up to date, rather than buy snazzy new tech for some divisions whilst leaving others working with creaking legacy systems.

Consumer-centric marketing quotes

With ad-blocking becoming increasingly common, particularly among the tech savvy under 35s, marketing is going to have to shift from being intrusive to being helpful. This quote from marketoonist writer Tom Fishburne reminds us that really good marketing makes us forget we are even being marketed to.

David Ogilvy richly deserves his status as the 'father of advertising'. This quote has been given new meaning in the age of behavioural economics and 'nudges', designed to get the customer to do certain things the marketer wants. Sometimes this forgets that the customer is not some abstract concept without free will, but is your husband, your brother or your mum. Treating your customer like your friend, rather than an idiot you can subliminally nudge into doing what you want, is bound to leave them feeling more valued and thus more likely to return.

Analytics Quotes 

The only historian ever to win a noble Prize for literature, two-time prime minister,  two-time first lord of the admiralty and cigar aficionado, Churchill spent most of his life working on strategies and made at least his fair share of strategic mistakes. If anyone should know when to re-thinking a strategy, it's the mastermind behind the catastrophic Gallipoli and Italian campaigns. Churchill's quote reminds us of the importance of analytics and taking time out to review them. No matter how good your strategy looks on paper, you should be careful to properly measure it and be willing to change course if it's not having the intended effects.

Bob Hoffman, better known as 'The Ad contrarian' has been doing great work critiquing the stupider trends in the ad industry over the past decade, and makes an excellent point that analytics teams should be better aware off. You can be swimming in data, but data is not valuable by itself. You need facts, principles and models. Humanity has watched the movement of the planets for thousands of years. The Greek root of the word 'planet'  means 'Wanderer', because people watched the planets wander across the night sky. But it took Isac Newton coming up with the theory of gravity to work how and why they move in the way they do. Newton didn't have any new data, but he created a theory that could predict the movement of any astronomical body perfectly accurately. He established facts.

Marketers are swimming in data, but are all too often lacking facts. We might be able to count how many clicks our banner ads get, but we don't know who's clicking on them, we don't know why they're clicking on them, and we don't even know if they're actually human or just a bot. Marketers are like the ancient Greeks, able to look up at the sky and see the movement of the planets, but totally unable to explain why they move in the way they do.

What will 2017 bring for journalists? As part of a recent survey of more than 100 digital media professionals, Parse.ly found that this question is top-of-mind for digital media professionals, who believe that the role of journalism in society will be the digital media industry’s primary focus in the coming year.

Sachin Kamdar, co-founder and CEO at Parse.ly, predicted this in a recent blog post supposing that journalists will begin more seriously considering how to best cover the news in 2017. And already, journalists are beginning to ask some important questions about the ways in which they approach reporting: How should we cover terrorism? How should we cover crime? How should we cover sexual assault? How should we cover a Donald Trump presidency?

While the answers are still unclear, simply asking these questions is a good starting point.

A Look Back at 2016: Monetization and Content Distribution Take Lion’s Share of Resources

Their changing role is not the only thing that weighs heavy on journalists as we approach 2017. Take a look at the full results of Parse.ly’s two-question survey, below.

On one hand, many of the digital media industry’s primary concerns from years past have carried into 2017:

• 27 percent of digital media professionals said they dedicated most of their resources to finding ways to monetize in 2016. This corroborates the results from our 2015 survey, in which a majority of digital media professionals predicted that monetization would be their biggest challenge in the year ahead.
• 20 percent of this year’s respondents admitted to dedicating most of their resources to third-party content distribution — the same percentage of respondents that expected content distribution to be one of the biggest challenges of 2016 in last year’s survey.

On the other hand, there has been some reprioritization of the main issues newsrooms are facing today. Nineteen percent of respondents to this year’s survey reported dedicating the most resources to incorporating data and analytics into their newsrooms in 2016. (Parse.ly saw the result of this, firsthand, via a growing list of customers who are using our analytics tool to help determine what content resonates best with readers.) However, only 13 percent of respondents said that use of data strategies would be a focus in 2017.

Eighteen percent of respondents reported dedicating the most resources to creating video strategies in 2016, but only six percent said it should be a focus in 2017. One reason for this could be because newsrooms have not seen immediate results from their fledgling video experiments.

Fourteen percent of respondents to last year’s survey predicted that mobile optimization would be one of the biggest challenges for the media industry in 2016. Only 11 percent dedicated the most resources to improving their mobile interface this year, yet 15 percent feel that mobile optimization should be the digital media industry’s focus in 2017.

Could this mean that mobile is becoming more important for digital publishers?

Platforms, Video, and Ad Blockers: Not a Priority for Newsrooms in 2017

Beyond a preoccupation with journalism’s role in society, media companies are still concerned about monetization in 2017, according to 24 percent of respondents. However, surprisingly low on the online media industry’s list of priorities — especially compared to 2016 — are cultivating relationships with platforms (nine percent), video (six percent), and ad issues (two percent).

This is particularly interesting to us because all of these topics made news for the potentially negative impact they could have on the digital publishing industry in 2016:

• Publishers realized they had no clear way to measure content on distributed platforms, and began to seriously consider the benefits of third-party content distribution.
• Many online media companies wrestled with finding the best ways to incorporate video into their content strategy last year. In fact, around 75 percent of respondents to a Reuters Institute survey said they only occasionally (or never) use video news online.
• Ad blocking became an expensive liability. According to a report by Juniper Research, ad blocking software could cost digital publishers more than $27 billion by 2020.

Media Consultant Jason Alcorn interprets the survey results: “This is the year digital subscription revenue becomes the key metric for credible journalism. I strongly believe that. As readers, we get the news we pay for. A huge number more people understand that now. They want better news, and they’ve shown a willingness to pay for it.”

“Publishers who regularly produce credible, original journalism and communicate its value to readers will be rewarded.”

“Everything else,” said Alcorn, “like platforms, video, and ad tech, will take a back seat. It will still be there, we’ll still be talking about it, it’ll be part of the strategy, but it won’t be, can’t be publishers’ top priority.”

Maybe online media companies feel they made some headway in dealing with these issues in 2016, or maybe they know that 2017 will bring with it some bigger fish to fry. What do you think? Are these results in line with your organization’s challenges in 2016 and focus for the year ahead?

During 2015, Google set out to launch its Digital News Initiative (DNI). Their goal? To support journalism through technology and innovation.

Recently, the topic of high-quality and sustainable journalism has risen tremendously. Events such as Brexit, Trump, and the refugee crisis have driven the conversation. The industry reflects: how can we inform accurately while being able to monetize our audiences?

DNI seems like an effort from Google to take the pressure out of immediate monetization from these publishers. If you’re worried about how you’re going to pay salaries, how can you be thinking about improving your business, right?

With that in mind, DNI was launched. So far. it has funded over 252 projects, committing a total of €54M (roughly $57M USD). In Q4’2016, Google announced their second batch of invested projects.

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1. The Identified Web

“Monetizing anonymous reach is limited”. One of the concerns publishers face is the ability to monetize their audiences. The problem worsens when working with audiences you have no data about. Better processing and profiling digital audiences can lead to increased revenues, as your ability to deliver targeted ads grows. Google funded some projects with distinct approaches to this problem. From SingleSign-On to shared DMP’s, the common goal is to enrichen the data publishers have on their audiences.

Newsletters have been a good way to identify and engage audiences. But what else can be done?

2. Better Ads, Better Experience

Let’s face it: we live in the Ad Blocker era. The younger your audience, the bigger this problem gets. Amongst the top reasons to use an Ad Blockers are:

• Ads are intrusive
• Ads disrupt what I’m doing

We live in a distraction-prone world and ads are just another layer on top of it. It’s not that we’re just ignoring ads. We now think they’re offensive: “why the hell are you showing this to me?” or “No, I don’t want to wait 15 seconds to see this video. Refresh”.

It’s fundamental that publishers research and develop ways of improving ad-based experiences. Interesting takes on this were presented by some projects. Trinity Mirror, for instance, will develop a “compelling alternative to promoted content (..) focusing on exclusive, targeted promotional offers that have real life value to users”.

Real life value. I loved this.

3. The news is where the heart is. Local on the rise.

This has to be the biggest trend observed on that list. What’s the reasoning behind it? “Local people still trust their local newspaper to tell them what’s happening in their neighborhood”. In the current state of journalism, we rely on big outlets to produce content that will, ultimately, reach us, be it from search, social or any other medium. But commonly, we are presented with irrelevant content or news and our expectations are let down.

One global goal of all these projects is to increase audience engagement. It only makes sense that publishers try to make content as contextualized as possible. Covering news on a local mindset might just do the trick. (Will it scale, though?).

Local seems to be rising, and it brings a friend to the table. Our #4.

4. Personalization

Allow me to repeat: a common goal with all these projects seems to be increasing user engagement. Another big bet I’ve observed is the pursuit of the individualized news experience. A lot of projects will bet on creating unique(-ish) experiences towards their audience.

A diverse set of factors is used to differentiate such experiences. Location, reading history, time available, interests, and so on.

Personally, I believe the media industry could learn a lot from eCommerce. Personalizing the store front based on who’s looking at it generated tremendous gains for some companies. The play here is to make the same for content. Is this a new “to each according to his needs”?

5. Does AI own the newsroom? No.

But it will sure help journalists. A big conversation is developing online where thoughts that robots will replace humans in almost every line of work is not that far away.

Jim Kennedy, AP’s Senior VP for Strategy and Enterprise Development, said that by 2020, he would like to automate 80 percent of its content production. That’s a big claim for AI enthusiasts.

Still, the projects funded by Google don’t take journalists out of the equation. Rather, they empower them.

After local, this was perhaps the biggest trend I observed: “using AI to empower the journalist”. Take a look at these (super) interesting ideas:

• One project will help journalists by providing support information while the article is being written. Writer’s block? Not a problem, the software will suggest your next sentence;

• Other will take your article and produce, automatically, a video for you. The AI engine analyzes the text and generates relevant video for it. “We make video out of your words” (a great slogan, by the way);

As we’ve seen, AI doesn’t seem to be replacing newsrooms (yet). But there’s a big bet on developing software that helps the production of better content. Now, that’s a proper motivation.

6. Fact Checking & Crowdsourcing

Last but not least, my favorite trend. What I like most about this trend are the solutions they came up with.

With all the conversation around fake news, the need for a “big brother” to save us from fake websites is here. Ideologically, I was never a big fan of the concentration of power. Thus, it makes me uncomfortable to think that in Social Media (for example), someone will decide what news I should be reading.

Yes, we may be talking about just fixing the “fake news” problem here. In my reluctant dreams, I fear that the urge to control the problem scales to the hunger to control the news.

To be honest, I was expecting the proposed solutions to be authoritative. Manageable, in-house. Perhaps creating software that an internal “truth ombudsman” would interact with. I was wrong, which is awesome!

Instead, some fantastic ideas popped up and got funded by Google. Among them:

• One team that wants to give voice to its readers and publish user-generated content directly in their newspaper;
• A project that wants to crowdsource fact checking by readers, allowing them to claim something’s untrue;
• A tool where journalists invite readers to take part in creating content (with them);
• Or the AI-based software that automatically fact checks as the article is being written.

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What Was Missing

Let’s step back for a minute. By now, I’ve shared with you the top 6 trends from Google’s Digital News Initiative. It’s definitely a wide scope of projects with a lot of implications to media and journalism.

Yet, I feel that two big issues have not been sufficiently covered:

• Publishing’s Business Model. Yes, a lot of projects tackle problems which (can) result in better audience engagement. But we’re taking for granted that better engagement will result in increased revenues. And that those revenues prove to be sufficient and/or scalable. What if they aren’t? I expected more experimentation with business models. Subscriptions, branded content, new approaches to sponsored stories. Something that could enlighten publishers that they do not need to depend solely on banner ads, native or programmatic.

• Amplification Strategy. I think publishers missed an opportunity here. Social has become the #1 way for people to discover new content. But today is impossible to organically reach audiences there unless you pay for it. I believe the key to obtain more revenue from content relies on the ability to drive more traffic from social. However, I didn’t see many projects focusing on Social and on how to develop and execute traffic generation strategies from it. My concern is simple: Facebook is making it super easy for you not to leave its platform. You have content, friends, games, everything. Unless you pay, what will make Facebook decide to include you “in the feed”? We need to address this question and I was looking for a great answer in the DNI‘s list. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a proper solution.

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The Road Ahead

2017 will be an important year for content, media and publishers. I hope this article was able to give you a broad sense of what publishers are working on, which problems they’re tackling and what they’re expecting to fix.

What’s your take? Will it be enough?

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Content initially posted at http://blog.getsocial.io/how-technology-will-impact-journalism-2017

At its core, there are a handful of goals that your firm’s content should achieve. These include:

• Providing relevant and educational information that’s of interest to your target audiences.
• Addressing the biggest concerns and problems that your prospects are faced with.
• Establishing your firm’s expertise and building your reputation within the marketplace.
• Increasing your visibility online.

Webinars can accomplish all of these.

While there are many elements to a content marketing strategy – blogging, video marketing, social media, email – webinars can be a big time commitment, both for your firm and for audiences.

The longer time commitment, though, can also mean that webinar attendees are already more interested in what you have to say, and value it. They want to educate themselves. And we know from research that educating buyers is one of the top techniques that ultimately close more business.

Webinars offer an informative and engaging experience for prospects. By using the research you’ve conducted about your target audience, you can tailor webinar content to speak directly to their needs. However, webinars aren’t just for your clients and prospects’ benefit—they can make a big difference for your firm, as well.

5 Reasons to Add Webinars to Your B2B Content Marketing Strategy

1. A deeper level of engagement. Webinars are middle of the funnel content. They’re educational and relevant just like many other content formats, but also require contact information to register and therefore tend to be for warmer prospects.

A successful webinar can help convert a new visitor to a lead or take a current lead and move them further along in the process to submitting a request for a proposal. A lot of B2B content is one-sided with minimal interaction. Typically, your website visitors read content or watch videos on their own, but attending a webinar enhances the level of engagement between your firm and potential buyers.

2. Opportunities for partnerships. Webinars are great opportunities for joint marketing with other firms that have similar audiences. Although you may be hesitant to share the spotlight at first, a partnership can have big advantages. By building relationships with organizations that complement your services, you can tap into their already established audiences, expand your reach, and improve brand awareness. The expertise that you each bring to a webinar means a better value proposition for attendees.

3. Establish your leadership and authority. You want prospective buyers to view your firm as a leading authority in your industry. A webinar is a great opportunity to fulfill a need and showcase the knowledge you have to share.

4. No geographical boundaries. Since webinars are virtual and can be attended from anywhere with an Internet connection, you can encourage prospects from all over the world to participate. Online presentations and Q&A sessions provide an opportunity for potential buyers to connect with your firm regardless of their location.

5. Gain valuable intelligence. By paying close attention to the questions or themes that come up during your webinars, you can gain valuable information to drive your content strategy forward. What did your prospects struggle with? What did they find most engaging? The answers to these questions can give you the insight you need to make your next content choices.

Your B2B content marketing strategy needs diversity to keep prospects engaged through each stage of the sales funnel. Individuals absorb information differently and have content formats that they prefer. Webinars provide a unique and engaging experience beyond typical content digestion. The mutual benefits for your prospects and your firm make webinars an effective addition to your content strategy.

 

There’s a blurry line between pride and arrogance, but there are a few ways you can avoid the trap of arrogance. When you’re judging your own value, avoid looking at intrinsic talent and instead focus on effort.

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Keyword performance is difficult to predict. With limited keyword data available it’s often a guess as to which keywords will generate revenue.

But that doesn’t mean B2B marketers have to blindly trust instinct when creating findable content for search engines.

In this post we present a way to measure the value of keywords and content marketing performance in terms of revenue. Revenue information aids the content generation process by helping marketers create better articles and content downloads that resonate with target audiences.

1) Build Your SEO Keyword Strategy Around Revenue

Start with the end goal of revenue front and center. To do this there are a few important technologies to have in place. We define core marketing technologies for pipeline marketers here.

At Bizible we started with core tools such as a CRM to measure revenue generated and a marketing automation platform to publish and distribute content. We kicked off our content marketing program with those base technologies.

Interestingly enough, we are now beginning to use SEO tools to help us fine-tune and improve our ROI from organic search.

While this may seem backwards, it makes sense we are now focused on optimizing our organic search channel. Given that we’ve proven the value of the organic search marketing channel in terms of revenue the correct next step is to understand how to optimize it.

This is so important because if marketers only focus on top-of-funnel metrics they’ll optimize for clicks and miss out on insights gained from revenue data.

As a quick example, we can see in the plot below that clicks and search engine results page rank (SERP) has an exponential relationship. Articles with high click rates are have high rank (high rank meaning closer to 1).

But if you focus only on maintaining the content that ranks well (the top left corner of the graph) you would never know whether that content is satisfying your buyers’ needs or just satisfying the needs of audiences that never convert.

Next, let’s talk about how to approach your keyword strategy after implementing the needed technologies to track revenue.

2) Build A Keyword Strategy Based On User Intent

Marketers need to think about how their content matches their user’s intent to generate revenue from organic search. The best estimate for user intent are search queries and because we can’t see all search queries we have to approximate them by keywords.

Some broad examples of user intent include the following:

• Navigational: trying to find a certain website
• Information: Looking for certain information
• Transactional: Looking for a specific product to purchase

Informational and transactional are both broad categories so we can drill down and categorize them further. Organizing keywords into sub categories can help you better understand user intent around a topic, which in turn will help you create the right content.

Here’s an example, of drilling down into a broad keyword to better understand user intent. The first chart showing the search volume for keywords related to “B2B marketing” and the second chart shows the same for the keyword “marketing operations.”

We can see a stark contrast between the proportion of search queries (or keywords) related to concepts compared to search queries that are related to job searching.

Examples of job search keywords include “marketing operations interview questions” and “marketing operations job description”. On the other hand, conceptual keywords include “b2b marketing plan” and “b2b marketing framework.”

As you can see, user intent can be deciphered by categorizing keywords and answering questions around what people need when they search.

4) Connect Keyword Data To Revenue

What true user intent is begins as a prediction during the keyword research phase. User intent stops being a prediction when marketers can connect session data to opportunities adn revenue.

With Bizible we push web session data so you can see which URL’s (e.g. blog post pages) and which form URL’s (e.g. downloadable content) are getting the most attribution in terms of pipeline or revenue. We can also measure which content is getting the most engagement.

This is important to look at from an SEO perspective because we now have a better understanding of the search intent of our most valuable audiences.

Prioritizing keywords can now be done based on revenue performance. By merging revenue performance SEO keyword data you can now measure the value of keywords you rank for, and get a better understanding of the content your customers are looking for and prioritize new target keywords.

There are a few caveats to matching SEO data like keyword and page rank. For example, multiple blog articles can rank for the same keyword and this forces us to make a decision regarding which article’s revenue attribution to choose for keyword revenue reporting purpose.

The chart below illustrates.

We can see that multiple keywords are mapped to single URL’s.

We can then see which groups of keywords are most valuable to us in terms of revenue. We can then continue targeting these valuable keyword groups and make sure they are updated (to continue ranking well) and that the on page experience is optimized to improve conversion rates.

5) Improve Conversion Rates With Learnings From Pipeline and Revenue Tracking

We now have full-funnel reporting for our organic channel. Now what?

Remember the topic of user intent? Here is where you can use finding from revenue attribution reporting to improve the target keywords you choose and improve your top-of-funnel conversion rates by creating better content offers that align with user intent.

Start with exploring the types of content your contacts are engaging with when they are in later stages of the sales cycle.

Do target audiences have traits you can aggregate by to learn about? Traits like job titles, buyer persona, region, and industry are grouping factors. And the content these groups engage with can clue you into content preference and intent.

With some mining you can explore whether certain groups prefer certain content. And whether certain groups have a need you can fill with resourceful, valuable content.

Here’s an example of content performance measured by engagement (pageviews, content downloads), aggregated by personas. Within each URL is a clue as to what the content is. Perhaps it’s a template or benchmark report, either way we can see whether a resource created especially for a specific persona group is driving valuable engagement.

This chart uses data from form URL tracking and is for example purposes. Note that job titles have been anonymized from Bizible’s real target personas.

This kind of full funnel insight drives a process of constant improvement in the quality of content.

SEO is more than ranking well in organic search. SEO and content marketing are about understanding your buyers and creating valuable content that helps them achieve their goal. In B2B the buyer’s goal is to succeed in their careers and job responsibilities.

6) Explore Predictive To Improve SEO And Content Marketing

Google’s search algorithm epitomizes the use of artificial intelligence to guess what users are searching for. With predictive technologies B2B marketers will get, essentially, a search algorithm based on what their target audiences’ are searching for. This will be based on revenue data and keyword/query data.

It’s easy to imagine deep textual analysis of URL’s and web pages to understand the language and word choice that resonates with your buyers. With this information content marketers will have a clear idea of which topics, keywords, and types of content they need to produce to attract and convert.

Conclusion

To recap:

• Implement the core technologies needed for full funnel measurement.
• Develop a keyword list and keyword strategy based on estimated user intent
• Connect your keyword data to revenue once your content begins to rank
• Improve your conversion rates for ranking content, taking note of your most profitable keywords and true user intent
• Explore the cutting edge of predictive technologies

With these steps in mind you’re ready to build a profit center out of your organic search channel.

The start of a new year is an ideal time to review your content strategy to see what’s working, what’s not working, and how you can improve. Here’s how you can get your 2017 marketing off to a great start…

For the past few years, B2B marketers have been testing the content waters.

According to the 2017 B2B Content Marketing Benchmarks, Budgets, and Trends report, 37% of B2B companies have a documented content marketing strategy. Meanwhile, 17% plan to put one in place within the next year.

But having a strategy isn’t enough.

The report also states that the most successful B2B marketers not only have a content strategy but can quickly adjust it when things change.

The start of a new year is an ideal time to review your content strategy to see what’s working, what’s not working, and how you can improve.

To help you out, I’ve compiled the latest research on what makes B2B content a success.

What Types of Content Should You Produce?

The B2B Technology Marketing Group surveyed more than 600 tech marketers to find out the latest content trends and best practices. According to the results, the most effective B2B content marketing tactic is case studies, with 44% of respondents saying that it helps them achieve their lead generation goals.

Here’s the rest of the survey’s top 10 list:

1. Case studies
2. Blogging
3. Social media
4. Customer testimonials
5. In-person events
6. White papers
7. Webinars
8. Videos
9. Online articles
10. Infographics

Buzzsumo and Uberflip also researched the most successful B2B content formats for 2016. The following content formats tend to perform well:

1. Practical guides and helpful content, such as:

• Guides
• Tips and advice
• How-to posts
• Trending topics
• Research and insights
• Case studies
• Infographics
• Authoritative industry news

Case studies earned a top spot in both surveys because stories are compelling!

While prospects may not believe what your corporate marketing team is telling them, they will believe what your customers have to say. Telling your customers’ stories is a powerful way to earn their trust.

Are you ready to make your 2017 content a smashing success?

Download Your 2017 B2B Content Planning Guide: The 5 Questions You Need to Ask to Make Your Content Successful This Year and Beyond.

CLICK HERE TO GET THE FREE GUIDE

What Should You Write About?

According to the B2B Technology Marketing Group survey, the most effective content subjects are:

Again, case studies are topping the charts. They are the most effective marketing tactic and subject. It’s clear that B2B marketers should make case studies a priority in 2017.

For more information on creating compelling case studies, read 5 Ways to Take Your B2B Case Studies From Blah to Brilliant.

Your 2017 Content Strategy Check Up

A lot can happen in a year.

Mergers … acquisitions … product launches …

All of these things can throw a wrench in your content strategy. Here are five things to consider as you plan for 2017:

1. Your content marketing goals

What are your top marketing and business goals this year? Did you have any changes in your business within the past year that will impact your goals? If so, do you need to update your content strategy to reflect your new priorities?

2. Your target audience

Do you have a clear picture of your ideal customer? Has this picture changed during the past year? For example, are you going after a new customer segment? Or do your existing customers face new challenges that you need to address?

3. Gaps in your content

Check for holes in your content strategy. For example, did you launch a new product but don’t have content to support it? Do you need to build a library of content for a new customer segment? Do you have content that answers all of the questions that prospects ask throughout every stage of your sales cycle?

4. What you want to talk about

The stats provided earlier in this post give you an idea about what topics resonate with B2B buyers. Would you like to focus on any of these areas? For example, do you want to share more of your customers’ success stories to build social proof that your product or service delivers results? Or would you like to offer customers more helpful tips and how-to articles to display your thought leadership?

5. Your resources

If you’re like most B2B marketers, you’re producing more content than ever. Do you have all of the resources that you need to support your increased production? For example, do you need more copywriters or designers? Do you want your internal subject matter experts to share their expertise on your blog?

Next Steps

Are you ready to make your 2017 content a smashing success? Download Your 2017 B2B Content Planning Guide: The 5 Questions You Need to Ask to Make Your Content Successful This Year and Beyond.

Seven major banks have signed up to a new project aimed at increasing global trade among small and medium-sized businesses using blockchain, or distributed ledger, technology.

Deutsche Bank, HSBC, KBC, Natixis, Rabobank, Société Générale and UniCredit have all signed up to a Memorandum of Understanding, signalling that they will work together to develop and commercialize a new product called Digital Trade Chain (DTC). All the banks participating in the DTC project are equal investors and have each put in a six-figure sum.

Andrew Betts, Head of Global Trade and Receivables Finance at HSBC, told Business Insider: "What we like very much is the collaboration approach. We've been advocates of the industry working together and blockchain has been very much front of mind. We really, genuinely pool our resources and expertise in terms of what we know about this technology so we can generate benefits for clients."

DTC is based on a prototype trade finance tool developed by Belgian bank KBC, which uses blockchain technology to connect all parties involved in international trade — buyers, sellers, transporters, banks financing the deals on either side etc. International trade is currently a disparate and convoluted process where each party deals directly with generally only one other participant, rather than seeing the whole process.

Betts says: "What we're trying to do is get something that is simple, fast, efficient, and secure for customers to be able to trade within a secure platform. By using a strong, secure, authorised and closed network, enabled through blockchain, it will enable the customer to initiate transactions digitally, be it online or through mobile devices, and then be able to track those transactions all the way through from commitment to pay, settlement, notification, and so on."

Betts said he hoped to have a version of the project launched to clients by the end of the year. 

The DTC project is the latest example of talk developing into action in the blockchain space. Banks around the world have been talking about the potential of blockchain to transform finance for almost two years now but the technology is only just beginning to filter through into concrete projects.

Blockchain technology, also known as distributed ledger technology, is a form of shared database originally developed to underpin the digital currency bitcoin. It enables all parties to see the same version of a ledger and uses complex cryptography and group authentication to police the editing of the ledger.

It will enable the customer to initiate transactions digitally, be it online or through mobile devices, and then be able to track those transactions all the way through — Andrew Betts, HSBC

The technology was originally developed to do away with the need for a central bank for bitcoin, meaning it could be totally independent. But this feature has almost endless applications for other industries and processes that involve a trusted middleman or central authority and banks have been particularly keen to apply it.

Blockchain's inbuilt security and trust checks mean banks can cut out middlemen in processes like settlement and clearing and instead deal directly with each other. This, in turn, cuts down costs. Santander estimated in a 2015 report that the technology could save banks as much as $20 billion.

The seven banks say in a statement announcing the collaboration that the DTC will "address the challenge of managing, tracking, and securing domestic and international trade transactions." By allowing real-time monitoring of various parties on the blockchain, the product will reduce paperwork and increase transparency.

Last year the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and Wells Fargo used blockchain technology for a "proof of concept" test on international trade, with two parties using the tech to buy a cotton shipment.

The banks involved in the project will promote it in different areas: KBS in Belgium and Luxembourg; Natixis and Société Générale in France; Deutsche Bank and UniCredit in Germany; UniCredit in Italy; Rabobank in the Netherlands; and HSBC in the UK.

Join the conversation about this story »

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Some of the things I hear from tyrant, cold-call-loving sales managers and their brainwashed minions never ceases to amaze me.

The biggest – or should we say, dumbest – of all is this one:

Frank, you’re not a sales trainer! You’re not teaching people how to sell! You’re teaching people how to market instead!”

Well duh – that’s the entire point!

Why?

Because “selling” is stupid. Marketing is smart. And that fact can not be refuted.

Sales vs. Marketing … for Salespeople

The most successful sales professionals learn to stop selling – which is an uphill process of trying to convince someone to purchase – and instead, they learn to market. Marketing is the process of getting people to come and buy from you.

Would you rather go on cold calling, endlessly prospecting, wasting time at endless networking mixers (that are all full of other sales reps and zero decision makers), and other fruitless endeavors while continuing to worry and be anxious over making enough sales to keep your job and pay the bills?O

r would you prefer to implement a self-marketing system that gets hot, qualified prospects contacting you, ready to buy right now?

The Key to, umm, “Sales” Success

After I stopped cold calling and discovered more and better ways of getting leads, I quickly rose to new heights of achievement. Many people assumed that I must have been getting leads handed to me by the boss.

My co-workers never rose to great heights of sales success and in fact are still struggling to make ends meet, cold calling day after day, still convinced that my success is all about “luck” or “chance.”

All because they think that what I did was “impossible.”

They’re too close minded to understand the simple truth that anyone can do it… anyone can learn to stop selling and start marketing!

As Napoleon Hill said, when some of his students presented him with a beautiful dictionary as a gift, the first thing he did was take out his pocket knife and cut out the word “impossible.”

It wouldn’t be unwise for you to do the same!

It’s 2017. Let the 1950s have their cold calling back.

How would you like to learn about the most effective ways to increase your website traffic?

Have you been trying various methods to get website traffic, and are not seeing the results you hope for or expected?

You are in luck! We are detailing 21 highly efficient methods of increasing website traffic, and the tangible steps you will need to implement them (along with any specific hints and tips). This article is the first part of a series, so if you feel we have missed any big ones out, email and let us know. In this introductory part, we are looking at eleven highly effective ways to drive traffic to your website. We will have the other ten (and maybe a few more) on the second part soon.

Establishing your audience and knowing how to speak to their problems, needs, wants, and desires is a crucial element to starting a robust content marketing strategy and getting website traffic. However, by itself, you are not going to get any visitors to your website.

Gaining clarity is just the first part of our formula to a successful business:

Clarity + Focus = Execution

When you gain clarity as to who you are talking to and what problems, needs, and desires are relevant to them, it is easier to find them and build a strategy to reach them (focus). However, the execution phase is where you do the actual work to reach and connect with them. In this article, we will analyze eleven ways to increase web traffic to your website. Most of these are free, but there are a few (like PPC advertising) that do cost money.

Let’s begin at the top our list!

1- Cultivate A Loyal Audience By Developing A Weekly Newsletter

If you are hoping that the website traffic your website already gets will continue to come back for every article you publish on their own, you might be disappointed with the results. Unless visitors have a particular reason to do so, many who leave a webpage rarely come back. So what’s the solution to getting them into your community? Creating a weekly newsletter that gets sent out once a week, with an exclusive article that can’t be read anywhere else except for the exclusive list is a way to get new audience members back to your site for months/years to come.

For example: At UnveilTheWeb, we do this with “The Sunday Morning Examiner.” It is a weekly newsletter dedicated to cultivating a relationship with our audience members. To see an example of the content we write, and how it works, look at this sample. Our goal is to provide the most relevant content for our audience and to help them be the best possible marketers. It is a way for them to experience us as a brand, know our style, and decide if what we have to say benefits them without them needing to spend a single cent.

Here are some tips to make the most out of your newsletter:

• Develop a content schedule ahead of time. Spend time studying what the issues that matter to your audience. What are their views on topics? Where do they experience pain?
• Do an audit of your audience. What times do they respond best to emails The answer to this lies in simple trial and error. We send out our emails on Sunday. We have found that our audience responds best when we send out an email on Sunday morning instead of Sunday afternoon.
• Value needs to be at the heart of the newsletter. It is okay to tell your audience about products and offerings, but make sure you deliver more than you sell.
• Create a dedicated sign-up page. The page will allow you to share information about the newsletter with other audiences when you guest post or do interviews with influencers.
• Use a service like MailChimp or Aweber to host your newsletter. They provide advanced analytics and integrations you will need to get started.
• Create advanced pop-ups (we use Boxzilla – a FANTASTIC company) and OptimizePress to create on-exit popups that deliver more signups (you will see when you exit the page if this is your first visit in a while). We will cover this topic on Part II of this list, but we will say for now that we have found those to be far more efficient than any other method of popups. Plus we do not get hit with the January 10^th Google Popup Penalty

SIDE NOTE: Developing landing and sign-up pages

OptimizePress is also used extensively in other places of our website such as the newsletter signup page. It is a full-fledged membership and landing page suite. It is our preferred alternative to other landing page solutions. For popups, we love It in combination with Boxzilla– which allows for advanced pop-ups and banners. The popup you will see on our website is powered by Boxzilla, while the form content itself is OptimizePress.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

By developing a stronger relationship with your audience through exclusive and consistent content, you are encouraging them to stay engaged with you and your blog. Because the readers know you and your content, they are more likely to read each new article on your blog and share it with their friends than non-subscribers and fans. Retaining website traffic can almost be as powerful as gaining it.

2- Wow Your Influencers With The “Hot Off The Press” Method

Blog commenting has been around for years. It is one of the oldest ways of connecting with influencers and those who serve the same audience you do but in a different way. Leaving small, somewhat relevant comments that add little value does not do much for you or the influencer you are targeting.

So what can we do about this?

Target new articles and be the first commenter. Leave highly relevant, valuable comments that enhance the original article.

Here are the steps we use at UnveilTheWeb for this method:

First– before anything, make sure your comments would add VALUE (that is solving one problem, for one person, with one problem at a time). If the influencer writes about dentistry and you are a plumber, there’s little overlap and room for adding value to a blog post. Comment on articles and websites that are relevant to you and your specialty. If you are a content marketer, it is a good idea to target websites like ProBlogger, Backlinko, and DigitalMarketer.

Second– Scan for fresh content daily. If you prefer doing it manually, bookmark your influencers and visit their blogs every morning. Services like BuzzSumo will allow you to find new content automatically and can help you stay on top of commenting opportunity.

Third– Read through the content and find points of relevance where you can add insight. Write them down or keep them in the back of your mind. If you are an SEO agency, reading a blog article about creating compelling blog posts might have segments where you can add insight on how to deliver organic website traffic to a company.

Fourth– Leave a comment expanding on the points of relevance you have identified. Leave as many actionable tips as possible in the comment. Think of it less as a comment and more of a mini-article that enhances the knowledge and insight already presented article. Include a relevant link back to your website so that those who want to know more about your specialty can find you.

Fifth- Comment back on any responses, going deeper if needed. This process is about developing relationships that leads to traffic and conversions for your business. It has little to nothing to do with off-site SEO. The goal is to build a relationship with both your audience and influencers. Doing so will naturally increase the traffic to your website.

This scenario seems like it would be obvious, yet sometimes it just doesn’t come to mind. The “Hot Off The Press” method is a tactic we use extensively at UnveilTheWeb. See an example here: http://www.problogger.net/8-reasons-youre-losing-money-blog/. Nothing we did was pushy, sales, or non-relevant. Don wrote a comment that added value. That comment has brought us traffic interested in learning more about our message. Some of them even became subscribers and customers.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

Valuable, relevant comments are welcome additions to any blog. You are creating utility and positive emotions, two dominant share triggers that encourage those unfamiliar with your brand to investigate your content further. It is a non-obtrusive way to tap into your influencer’s audience.

3- Develop A Steady Stream Of Website Traffic Using Paid-Per-Click Advertising With Google Adwords

Adwords is an older PPC platform that is tried and true. Though being one of the only paid methods on this list, PPC advertising is still effective and delivers consistent website traffic. A word of caution: PPC works best for those with larger budgets. It is dependent on keyword research, a highly relevant message, and solving a pain for a problem, need, want, or desire that a potential customer has.

To begin, create an account at Google Adwords.

Here are tips and methods to make your campaigns more successful:

• Identify keywords and SERP results. SERP stands for the Search Engine Results Page. When you type a keyword into Google, a list of results will popup. The results you see are called the SERP. Look at the websites that are listed. Are they relevant to your topic and theme? Do the websites on the SERP serve a similar audience to you? If there is little relevance, target a different keyword. The goal is to match up what you are offering with a customer who needs a solution. If the websites for an individual query are indicating they serve a different audience or the same audience with you with a different problem, it is best to try again with a different query. For example: typing in “Search Engine Optimization Tips” is going to bring up a different problem than “Search Engine Optimization Agency.” Mainly, the focus on “SEO Tips” is learning the art of SEO, and is geared more towards educational solutions. “SEO Agency” is a commercial based query, lending itself to those who are advertising themselves as service providers who do a job for a customer.
• Build a relevant landing page around the needs, wants, desires, and problems of your customer. Speak in their language. What problems are they having? Google will rank your landing page based on how relevant it is to the customer searching for it. Include the search term in a natural manner surrounded by latent semantic keywords. These are the “Searches related to” keywords at the bottom of a SERP.

• Launch your Ad and fine tune it every few days. PPC is like a strategy game- once you build your campaign it needs to be tuned and refined every few days for optimal performance. Analyze reasons why it might be changing (for good or bad). Common causes include
  1. The relevance of the targeted keywords.
  2. The relevance of your landing page.
  3. The relevance of ad text.
  4. Your click through rate.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

Creating highly relevant ads gets you in front of your target audience fast. It is one of the quickest ways to get traffic to your website, but it does come at a cost. For higher end service providers and product creators, it carries the benefit of delivering qualified leads.

4- Reach Your Audience And Build A Raving Online Community With Facebook Ads

In the world of PPC, Google is not the only player. There are times when a particular audience does not search on Google or isn’t on that platform looking for solutions. Situations like these are where Social Media fills the void. Facebook offers access to engaged communities who are passionate about specific topics. While creating a page could reach them, making an ad is a definite way to connect with them. After creating an ad manager account, you will have access to an extensive suite of data, tools, and ad creation resources. At first, it feels like becoming a data-powered superhero, capable of reaching entire audiences with a single click.

A few ways to make the most of Facebook Ads:

• Target magazines, newspapers, blogs, and websites where the dedicated members of your audience spends time. If you are targeting authors, don’t target “Kindle.” Readers, authors, celebrities, and most everyone will be there. Pages like “Kinde” are so generic and will lower the number of actual audience members you will Target niched pages. For authors, “Indie Author Group” most likely is a page that has the target audience.
• Send them to a free offer that is attatched to a mailing list. Facebook is not a community that responds well to being “sold” right away. Facebook communities are relational and demand that they get to know a brand before spending any money. Moreover, that makes sense- how often do you give money to those you do not know, trust, and feel that they can fulfill a need? Create a highly relevant freebie. Consider:

• 1. Guidebooks
  2. Cheatsheets
  3. Mini-Pamphlets
  4. Checklists
  5. Email templates
  6. Examples (in the case of proposals, emails, and custom content)
  7. Toolkits
  8. Resource Lists
  9. Worksheets
  10. Calculators
  11. Generators (Name generators, website domain generators, and more like these)
  12. Spreadsheets

Tip: Look at one of DigitalMarketer’s freebies. They have a high conversion rate and are experts at making lead magnets.

Analyze how the community is responding to your ad. If you notice similar ads in your feed, analyze them as well. How are they performing? Are the comments both recent and relevant? Do they have a better image and tighter text? Sometimes the best way to improve our ads is by studying the audience and how they respond to various types of ads. A/B testing is powerful here. If a format is not working, add a short video or moving image (gif). Make tweaks if the performance is poor.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

Developing an audience and getting them on your mailing list is a way to have a consistent, relevant source of traffic to your website. Facebook’s community is thriving. Tapping into their database is a reliable alternative to Google Adwords for those audiences that don’t search for specific solutions on Google.

5- Connect With Passionate Audiences On Forums To Build Relationships That Will Enhance Your Brand

Forums are notoriously strict places. They are passionate about their topics and consist of a lively, target audience filled population. Developing relationships with forum members through value-based posts can lead to relationships that will push your business in the right direction. NOTE: It is important to come at this strategy from a mindset of adding value. Look to give more than you receive.

Tangible steps to success on forums:

• Find forums where you can authentically connect with your target audience. You can find niche forms on http://www.thebiggestboards.com/. Use these search terms to supplement your quest:
  “Powered by Phbb” your keyword
  “Powered by vBulletin” your keyword
  “Powered by SMF” your keyword
  “powered by IPB” your keyword
  “Powered by PunBB” your keyword
• Look at the threads and topics posted in the forum. Where can you lend your expertise? Where does your knowledge and skills have the potential to benefit others? Engage authentically for a minimum of ten posts.
• In your bio, place your website so that those who get value from your posts can discover more about you. Don’t worry if it is not much initially. While this is a start, it is not the heart of this strategy’s website traffic development.
• After developing a relationship with the community, let the forum know about new articles published on your website that will benefit them. Forums thrive on authentic, non-spammy content that is relevant to them and their wants, needs, desires, and problems.
• Continue to cultivate a relationship with them. Powerful Influencers are often members on blogs. You might land a nice mention, share, or backlink by being an active participant in the community.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

Building authentic relationships is a powerful key to any business. By connecting with passionate members of your audience you are investing in the relational health of your brand. Beyond just getting immediate traffic, providing value where your audience is at allows you to build into their lives and impact them, opening relational doors for years to come.

6- Strategically Being Promoted By Influencers Using Guest Posting

Chances are you know of guest posting and the benefits it can bring to your business. It brings two benefits to the table if done right: high authority (in SEO terms) from an influencer, and access to their audience. It is one of the fastest ways to be seen and positioned as an expert in your industry. Because you are (quite literally) placed on a pedestal in front on an influencer’s audience, it is likely that you will see a massive surge of free website traffic after your guest post goes live.

So how do you make the most out of guest posting? Here are a few actionable tips:

• Find an influencer that accepts guest posts. Type in “keyword” + “submit a guest post” in Google. Identify websites that serve the same audience you do but in a different way.
• Read through their articles to get a sense of their content, style, and topics. Make sure to read the comments and learn what content encourages the audience to react well.
• Copy their website address. Create an account at Ahrefs.com. In the “Site Explorer” submit their website. You will get a list of data that might not always make sense. The goal here is to look at their overall rankings. Are they authoritative? Do they have traffic coming to their websites? Look at “Referring Domains” and “Organic Traffic.” If both of those are decent (above 200 each, but that is highly subjective), consider them as a viable influencer.
• Make notes of what the main topics are. Think of how you can approach them and what angles work best. If you are an SEO agency, and the website in question is Copyblogger.com, articles centered on how content influences SEO would work well. Write down the angles other guest posters have taken. How did the audience react to those angles? Are there certain angles they appreciated more than others? Judge this by comments, the number of social shares, and backlinks (check those using Ahrefs.com or MajesticSEO).
• When pitching a guest post to an influencer, make it as personal as possible. Don’t use “Dear webmaster,” or “Dear Mister,” those do not work in the modern world of marketing.
• Tie in other articles and content they created when crafting your guest post. Linking internally to their other content creates a MAJOR plus for them (it proves you pay attention and value their content).

How this method helps increase website traffic:

Guest posting is nothing new, but it is highly effective. That is why it lasted for decades. Creating relevant content for influencers can, in turn, lead to a significant increase of visitors to your website.

7- Bring New Perspectives To Your Existing (And New) Audience Members By Sitting Down With An Influencer

Admit it- you do not know everything. As a business owner and marketer, that can be hard to recognize. Dedicated marketers like myself want to be the best at every aspect of digital marketing. We want to be the go-to source for SEO, content marketing, email marketing, and conversion funnels… all at once. However, often that is not the case. When we acknowledge we cannot be the absolute expert on everything, sitting down with an influencer who has an outside perspective on a sub-category of your industry (digital marketing or not) can be a powerful tool to both reinvigorate your existing audience and give you access to theirs. The hardcore fans of the influencer you are going to interview will follow them where ever they go. Look at this example of Brain Dean (from Backlinko) doing an interview at SmartPassiveIncome.com.

If you want to interview influencers on your site, here are tips to make it more effective:

1. Look for speakers who have a similar interest in your topic, but covers it slightly differently.
2. Search specifically for influencers who actively do this. Don’t waste your time by asking someone who has never done it before.
3. Make a list of influencers, their specialties, and possible angles for them to approach.
4. “warm them up” by following them on social media, commenting on their posts, and engaging authentically before sending them a single email. Get in their space and make your name known.
5. Familiarize yourself with their background and focus. If they have any notable projects that overlap with what you are doing, keep note of that.
6. When emailing them, tell them something you found interesting. It could be something they have been talking about or are developing.
7. If possible, wait until they are about to launch a book, product, or course. It might be a viable promotion strategy for them- and will make them more likely to sit down with you for an interview.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

It is hard to overstate the importance of influencers. These are the people who can move you in the right direction. Connecting with influencers in an authentic way and doing interviews with them signals to their audience that you are someone they can trust. By doing an interview, audiences will recognize you as an authority in your space.

8- Be Recognized As An Influencer By Contributing To Roundups.

One of the greatest link building (and audience building) strategies is hanging above our heads but most of us do not even realize it. Hundreds of blogs in every niche and industry do roundups every month on nearly every topic. If you have written an exceptionally written article or infographic, some influencers are specifically looking to share their authority and website traffic with you.

Here are a few steps you can take to reach the fruit dangling above you:

• Identify roundups in your industry by using Google. Use the search string: “keyword” + “weekly link roundup” to find round up articles related to you.
• Determine if the search results are delivering relevant influencers. Only contribute to roundups where you serve the same audience as the website owner.
• Pitch to them through email. If you cannot find an email address to send to, use Hunter.io to discover possible email addresses.
• Email the article writer explaining how you came across their weekly roundup, loved it, and might have an awesome resource to include in their next edition. Make sure to customize this message to each website owner. Nothing screams “FAAAKKE” more than a generic template. Point out a few things you genuinely liked about their website, post, or content.
• When the author writes back expressing interest, send them the URL.

NOTE: This does not work flawlessly everytime. Some users do not bother to respond back, others get busy and respond late. If that happens, don’t worry about it and keep pushing forward. This strategy is a numbers game at the end of the day.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

First, this method is a reputable source of backlinks. It is possible to submit to several roundups, get accepted, and reap the SEO value from it. The audience sharing that comes from it can boost your traffic significantly.

9- Get Positioned As An Expert On Aggregator Websites

Content aggregation is a powerful method of sharing your content with others. Even more so, unlike spammy websites which exist only to “farm” backlinks and game Google’s systems, aggregators are fully white-hat and safe to use. Websites like Alltop.com exist to help their users find the best, more relevant information on a topic or theme. Because they categorize websites based on specific industries and niches, you are guaranteed to get targeted traffic from them. Even better, most aggregators include the title and description of your latest five articles. These descriptions give the audience a perspective on who you are, what you talk about, and how you meet a need, want, problem, or desire. It is not just a simple source of website traffic- it is highly relevant and niched.

Here are a list of specific aggregators to consider submitting your website to:

• http://alltop.com/
• http://blogengage.com/
• http://www.bizsugar.com/
• http://www.blogorama.com/
• http://blogrific.com/
• https://www.blogcatalog.com

Most aggregators want to know you are a legitimate blog. Often, you will have to fill out an application to be accepted. Don’t worry too much about this- it is to protect their audience and make sure you are a good fit for them, and vice versa. Being open and detailed about who you are and what you do can land some nice referral traffic (and a few backlinks- bonus!).

How this method helps increase website traffic:

Aggregators thrive off connecting with bloggers and industry websites. By providing high quality, relevant content, you can align yourself with aggregators who know how to get you in front of your target audience. Plus those powerful backlinks are extra SEO juice that makes a handy bonus.

10- Position Yourself As A Thought Leader Using Webinars

Since 2010, webinars have become one of the most attractive avenues of audience development. Figures like Kimra Luna, Derek Halpern, and others have become famous in the marketing space due to their aggressive use of Webinars. For some, it is the exclusive way they market, and for a good reason. It merges the power and authority of seminars with the flexibility and connectivity of the internet. Thanks to technology, the power of standing in front of five hundred people can happen from your in-house office instead of a $2,000 hotel ballroom that might get $2,100 in sales. At UnveilTheWeb, webinars are a staple of how we connect with our audience.

Here are some tangible steps you can take to benefit from the power of webinars:

• Identify topics and themes that are familiar to your influencers and audience members. What issues cause them to struggle with an area of their life that your business can solve? Jot down notes as you spot ideas that would work well for a webinar.
• Set up a landing page to gauge interest. Include some tangible values and benefits that the audience will receive by the end of the webinar. Be hyper-specific if possible (“Learn the 4-Step method we used to generate $5,437 in sales over two weeks”). Obviously, my example here was made up- but that is the proper frame of mind.
• Funnel new subscribers into an exclusive mailing list. This way you can see who has signed up and gauge interest in the webinar ahead of time.
• Take your topics and plan content around it. Plan for a 45-minute speech and 15 question and answer session. This structure allows your audience to process everything you have said, and ask questions to clarify what they have
• At the end of the webinar, notify them of a related product or service and offer an exclusive deal for attendees of the webinar. For example, Derek Halpern uses some webinars to promote his WordPress course plugin, ZippyCourses. His webinar was about how to plan and launch an effective course that makes money. At the end, he tied in his product with the theme of the webinar. At least one person on the webinar bought it… not naming names here
• Have another member of your team log into the webinar and serve as a moderator. They can answer simple questions and address concerns while you, the speaker, give the presentation. At times the moderator will need to signal the speaker to talk further on a particular point of interest.
• Start the webinar broadcast early and welcome the attendees as they come in. The goal is to make them feel welcome and appreciated. These are your friends, and it is best to treat them as such.
• Continue to follow up with the attendees of the webinar. We are not informing them of any other products here; we are making sure they have a grasp on the concepts of the webinar. At UnveilTheWeb we send out occasional articles related to what we talked about on the webinar. Of course, nearly all webinar attendees are already on the Sunday Morning Examiner newsletter, but we want to fill the gap for those who are not for whatever reason.

You might have questions about what webinar software to use. For quick reference, here are the top webinar services:

• GoToWebinar
• AnyMeeting
• ClickMeeting
• WebinarJam
• WebinarNinja

The power behind webinars is that they do not have to be a single, one-time event. Most webinar platforms allow you to create “evergreen” webinars that are always live and on demand. To see an example, check out “The 5 Step Formula to Attract Your Audience, Increase Sales and Position Your Business for Success!” Visitors can sign up and watch that webinar whenever they want. There’s no need to wait. Moreover, if they have questions about the content they are welcome to email us.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

Webinars allow brands to increase reach, marketing messages to permeate minds, and audiences to develop into loyal fans. They are one of the most powerful ways to position yourself as a thought leader in your industry. Combined with the other methods listed in this article, they can be an unstoppable force of growth.

11- Attract Visitors To Your Website Using A Free Ebook

Do you have a topic that’s highly popular on Amazon? The ebook economy is stronger than ever, and with the indie author movement picking up steam, there’s a large opportunity for us marketers and business owners. You may have seen niche books advertised on blogs, podcasts, and niche sites across the internet. The beauty of it is that when free or low-cost ebooks are positioned correctly, they can drive traffic and audience members to your website consistently with little upkeep. As a result, more website traffic could lead to more potential customers. We used this method with a book on branding called “The Shift: The Fast Paced Transition from Mass Marketing to Context Marketing.”

When launched, it was a free book. That launch drove hundreds of visitors to our website and provided an influx of new audience members who were just learning about us. That book (and the traffic we gained) was what we needed. You might notice now that the price is $2.99. Unfortunately, Kindle does not allow books to be perma-free unless you jump through some serious hurdles.

However, every few months you can use a promotion to make the book free, catching the attention of the massive audience on Amazon looking for great Kindle books relevant to them.

How can you do the same? Here are some steps that will guide you:

• Validate your book idea by looking for competition on Kindle. Yes- you WANT to see other competitors here. It proves there is traffic and demand for the topic. There’s no point in doing this if there won’t be any traffic or book downloads.
• Look for bestsellers in the categories. How many reviews do they have? What does the audience like about the book? What do they dislike? By gauging the pulse of your audience you can fine tune your book to speak to the needs, wants, desires, and problems your audience has. Take notes of interesting points of reference.
• Use paid tools like KindleSpy and KDPRocket to analyze in-depth statistic on keywords, competitors, and more. KDPRocket, in particular, is a high-end resource that can measure profitability (not as important for this method, but does give more insight into how much demand there is for a topic), competition, and how difficult a genre/keyword will be to rank for. The more research you can do in this phase, the better your book will do.
• Identify high performing keywords and look at what is doing well. Are there certain subtitles that are being used to leverage the audience? Analyze the emotion and fulfillment of needs, wants, desires, and problems in the titles (and subtitles).
• With notes on what works and what doesn’t, create a brief outline of the book. Write down the overall themes of the chapters and leave descriptions of what they will talk about. Use bullets and numbered lists to plan what content will be there. Find ways to include rich media such as images and links to valuable websites.
• Fill in the details and make your initial rough draft. Now, when this the draft is finished, notify your email list and fan base of your intentions. Tell them that you have a new book coming out, and it will be free for the first five days. Ask them if they would like to be part of an exclusive group that gets it ahead of time. If you have done your research and it lines up with their problems, needs, wants, and desires, a solid group will be ready to accept your offer. For those who are part of this group, place them in a separate newsletter where they can get the book and updates. Send the finished rough draft to them with the intent of gathering feedback and thoughts.
• Make a list of all the suggestions and concerns your beta-readers have of the book, but take some with a grain of salt; there will always be those who are overly negative about everything. If possible, identify the root issues they have with the book overall. Sometimes it is not feasible, and the best course of action is to disregard them. Revise your rough draft as necessary.
• Reach out to influencers in your industry, especially contributors you have worked with and mentors who have helped you along your path. With your revised version, reach out to them and ask them to provide further feedback on your content. Listen more to these readers as they are more experienced in your field than most members of your audience. Revise again with the goal being to fix grammatical errors in the next round of edits.
• Hire an editor or proofreader to go through the content and clean it up. The goal is to make it professional and presentable.
• With the book ready to launch, reach out to your influencers with the goal of landing interviews on their websites, podcasts, and YouTube channels. You want to get in front of their audience. At the same time, send out emails to your newsletter getting them ready for the book launch.
• On launch day, release the ebook. Set it to be a free book using the following steps:
• Log into kdp.amazon.com and find your book.
• Under “Kindle eBook Actions” click on “Promote And Advertise.”

• Below “Run A Price Promotion” select “Free eBook Promotion.”

• Set the dates for your free ebook promotion. You can choose to do seven days or less at once. I suggest either three or five-day promotions as those seem to work best. However, this is your book- it is up to you.

Plan this process ahead of time:

There is a two-day waiting period before a book goes free. Plan for that ahead of time. You can set the book to go live and “Launch” it later “Officially.” This launch plan is a common business practice, especially in restaurants and retail.

• Notify your mailing list and influencers of your “Launch” day. Ask them to download the free ebook when that day comes and leave a review. All of your interviews, guests posts and appearances have built up to this moment. With an army of followers and influencers on your side- you are well positioned for success.
• On the actual launch day notify everyone again. Follow up as much as you feel is necessary. How you do it is an art more than a science.

Your book launch will succeed based on the demand that is there for the topic, the outreach you have done, and the passion the audience has for the topic at hand. Therefore, if a book is properly positioned, there’s no reason a quality ebook cannot bring in hundreds (maybe even thousands) of new visitors to a website a month. Think of all the newsletter sign ups, and ultimately new customers you will get. Keep at it!

NOTE: As mentioned above there is a way to make a book perma-free, but it is challenging and questionably worth it. Amazon does not always play along. To do it, go to other book platforms such as Kobo, Nook, and Apple Books and load your book for free on their platforms. Have your customers notify Amazon that the book is available for free on other websites, and after enough haggling, they should make the book perma-free on Kindle. This strategy does not always work- Amazon is in the business of making money off of book sales and does not want to make their products free.

How this method helps increase website traffic:

Tapping into Amazon’s massive fanbase is an approach for the serious business owner. I am not going to sugar coat it- this is going to take work. However, the benefits if done right can be massive. It has the potential to be the single most powerful way to get website traffic.

Conclusion: Getting More Website Traffic Takes Work

There are so many more methods that we wanted to include in this list, but at 11 strategies we are already at 6,000 words. That is why we are splitting the list into two separate articles. There’s a decent chance Part II might be even longer. We want to provide the most comprehensive, in-depth resource we possibly can. If you see any strategies we left out that you want to see included, let us know in the comments below.

Here’s a sample of what you can look forward to:

• On-Page SEO
• Internal Linking
• Blogging Communities
• How to improve your web traffic rankings

…and so much more.

Marketing and sales departments can sometimes be at odds with each other, and ineffective lead hand-off is a major contributing factor.

The marketing team wants to maximize reach and evangelize the company’s brand. They’re looking for ROI with their lead generation efforts. Meanwhile, the sale team wants to close deals and spend their time talking to qualified leads—not just anyone.

When marketing doesn’t deliver a sales-ready lead, salespeople push back. When salespeople can’t close, marketers push back. This creates more animosity between the two departments.

So, what is the proper procedure to hand off leads? How can marketing and sales work together to achieve more synergy?

Keep the Lines of Communication Open

More than anything else, sales and marketing need to agree on when leads should be handed off. This helps marketing gain a better understanding of what sales is looking for, and it helps sales make more effective use of their time.

The exact moment of lead handoff will depend on your organization and the criteria you use to score your leads. Sales and marketing need to communicate and agree on a strategy, and the simpler it is, the better. You also can go back in and tweak the process later, but starting with a complicated setup is a good way to set yourself up for failure.

To make this process as efficient as possible, setting up your CRM correctly is essential.

When Leads Should Be Handed Off

You need to be on the lookout for two signals. Leads should be handed off when:

1. They are warm. They’ve recently taken an action—or several actions—that indicate interest in your business and products. For instance, they may have visited multiple pages on your website, submitted a webform, have been actively engaged with your emails or a combination of all of these. New leads won’t be “warm” forever, but they shouldn’t be handed off to sales unless they meet certain criteria—more on that later.
2. They are qualified. They fit the description of your target audience. By matching up their data with your buyer personas, you can determine whether they are your ideal customer. You can look at criteria like job title, location, company size and other factors to establish their qualifications, which should be determined ahead of time.

Unfortunately, tracking all your leads can be a challenge unless you’ve automated the process with CRM software. This is also where lead scoring comes in.

Implementing a Lead Scoring Strategy

The sales-readiness of a lead is a moving target. It can change based on their behavior, as well as when you last reached out to them. If their role changes within a company, or if they move to another company, that’s another factor that may affect their overall score.

A lead scoring system allows you to rank all of your prospects on a 0 to 100 scale, for example, which can inform you when a lead is ready for handoff.

If you know who your ideal customers are, you can begin developing your lead scoring strategy by determining point values for each of the factors, such as what industry they’re in, their company’s annual revenue, number of pages they’ve viewed on your website, and so on. We’d suggest sticking to the 100-point scale mentioned earlier.

Then you can score each of your leads and assign positive and negative attributes to them.

Finally, you need to create a score threshold for when a lead is ready to be handed off to sales. For example, you could set the threshold to 70 or 80 points. This is something marketing and sales should agree on.

Note: It’s unlikely that your strategy will be perfect upon implementation. It will require some tweaking, and the ongoing collaboration between sales and marketing will facilitate the necessary changes. This process may require patience, but will lead to better results.

Nurturing & Managing Your Leads

Per HubSpot, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50 percent more sales-ready leads at 33 percent lower cost.

Lead nurturing is the process of delivering personalized, relevant, contextual content to your prospects to better prepare them for sales. You can generate as many leads as you like, but some won’t be ready to talk to sales no matter how qualified they are, and others will never buy from you.

It’s important to nurture leads on your prospect list, but who aren’t ready to buy. Proper lead management can help marketing identify which campaigns attracted the highest quality of leads. It can also help sales save time from talking to leads who aren’t ready to purchase, and can generate more information to personalize the selling experience.

Lead management is a combination of prospect tracking (which allows you to see who visited your website and what pages they viewed), lead intelligence collection (everything you find out about your leads through form submissions, email marketing, social media, and so on), lead scoring, CRM and ongoing lead nurturing.

In addition to lead scoring, lead management will help you determine when to hand off your prospects to sales.

Maximize Your Results With Effective Lead HandOff

Both marketing and sales want to make effective use of their time. Both want to contribute to the bottom line of the company and meet important business objectives. Their roles may be different, but their purpose is essentially the same.

If your lead handoff happens at the right time, everyone involved will be able to focus on their role, and therefore be more effective. Establishing proper communication between sales and marketing is crucial to your success.

Silicon Valley and its New York counterpart Silicon Alley have long reigned as the main coastal hubs for tech innovation. 

Founders, venture capitalists, and tech employees flock to the Bay Area and New York City to launch and build startups, fund new ideas, and simply just live among their tech-obsessed brethren. 

But there's a new wave of companies eschewing the Valley/Alley life in favor of building their startups in their hometowns or in less tech-focused metros. Now, places like Utah, Seattle, Boston, and Colorado are becoming hubs for enterprise and consumer startups. 

We've compiled a list of exciting startups outside of New York and San Francisco by talking to investors, fellow journalists, and active members of the tech scene. Unless otherwise noted, all funding information comes from venture capital database PitchBook. 

Below are some of the most exciting startups from cities across the US. 

SEE ALSO: The 21 hottest women-founded startups to watch in 2017

Uptake is helping to improve some of the nation's oldest industries.

Where it's from: Chicago, Illinois

What it is: Uptake uses analytics and predictive software to increase safety and enhance performance for companies in industries like construction, aviation, mining, and rail, according to Forbes. Uptake was founded by Groupon cofounder Brad Keywell and has the backing of construction-equipment giant Caterpillar.

Founder: Brad Keywell 

Funding: $51 million from Lightbank, Caterpillar, GreatPoint Ventures, and New Enterprise Associates.

 

 

Hudl is a tech tool for sports teams.

Where it's from: Lincoln, Nebraska

What it is: Hudl is a key component in helping more than 100,000 sports teams nationwide win games. The startup allows coaches to record or upload video to its platform, annotate it with text, drawings, or voice, and share it with players on their mobile devices. 

Founders: David Graff, Brian Kaiser, and John Wirtz 

Funding: $77 million from Accel Partners, Nelnet, Nebraska Angels, and others.

Heptio wants to take Kubernetes mainstream.

Where it's from: Seattle, Washington

What it is: In 2014, Google released the free software Kubernetes — a tool to manage and maintain huge piles of containers that's based on the tech it had developed for the same function. Kubernetes became a smash hit, with developers all over the world using it to get a little bit of that Google magic in their own computing infrastructures. Now two of its founding team members have launched a new startup, Heptio, to turn it into a business and make it accessible to enterprises everywhere.

Founders: Joe Beda and Craig McLuckie

Funding: $8.5 million from Accel and Madrona Ventures.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Multimeters seem simple enough to use. You turn it on, connect the leads, then start poking things. Really though, there’s a quite a bit going on in a multimeter and a lot of different settings to get used to. Make has a guide that walks you through everything you need to know.

Read more...

Traveling by train is one of the simplest ways to get around, and it can also be the most photogenic. These 12 routes from around the world are so visually striking you’ll be glued to your railroad car’s window for the entire trip.

Read more...

You do not get rich off your salary; you get rich off your investments. With my mindset some of the most important innovations coming from Silicon Valley revolve around financial technologies. Fintech has consistently been a lagging field as the financial markets tend to be conservative and focus more so on their bottom line than on introducing innovative solutions.

However, 2016 has been a tremendous year for Fintech with the widespread support of a number of disruptive companies, such as Robinhood, which allows free stock trading. This year is sure to continue this success and be the year that Fintech breaks out into the light.

1. High Yield Savings Accounts

Earlier in 2016, Goldman Sachs unveiled a savings account with no minimum that gives over a 1% interest rate. For anyone with a savings account, this is a huge increase from the near-zero or zero interest rate accounts most banks offer.

As Goldman Sachs is limited by cash reserves when it comes to their investments, due to regulations after the 2008 crash, they know if they can just get cash in their vaults they can make much more than the 1% by using their investment teams.

What this means is that not only should people drop all of their other banks and switch to Goldman Sachs, but also there is going to be a switch to create more innovative money management solutions on behalf of the banks in order to serve customers higher interest rate accounts.

Furthermore, this indicates a future in which not only will more banking be done online (as this Goldman account is entirely online), but also we will likely see a bigger transition of investment banks (such as Goldman, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, etc.) crossing the line into consumer banks (such as Wells Fargo, Bank of America, PNC, etc.) and vice versa.

2. Simplified Insurance

Does anyone really know what their insurance premiums go towards, what their rate changes will be each year, what is covered and what is not, or what types of insurance they need are? Insurance is one of the most complicated industries if for no other reason than the fact that it involves so many facets and moving parts.

Furthermore, companies tend to focus on specific types of plans and stratify coverage to give consumers more options. When consumers cannot understand what they are buying, they do not want options.

Just as Robinhood eliminated much of the red tape surrounding stocks, trading fees, and overall took a hardline to give consumers a perfect user experience, the insurance industry will need to see similar adoption. Already there are companies popping up offering simple and straightforward insurance coverage via apps.

Some solutions arising are pay-as-you-drive car insurance, easy-to-understand life insurance, and more. This is a big pain point for consumers and so will see huge adoption if someone can properly solve the problem.

3. Cryptocurrency

Bitcoin crossed the $900 mark this year, one of the biggest rallies of the digital currency since its spike and crash back in 2014. Additionally, Ether arose as a widely “mined” and traded crypto, proving that further currencies beyond just Bitcoin have viability to rise to similar prominence as Bitcoin.

According to Michael Gastauer, founder of WB21, venture capital funding has continued to pour into the industry and online wallets for the coins have grown consistently.

He explains while this industry still lacks any real value or substance behind the investment, it is beginning to reach a level of risk that is tolerable by a wider market and an increased dispersion of knowledge that makes it seem less sketchy.

As consumerization of cryptocurrencies continue to expand this had the potential to be a breakout industry where the concept of decentralized investments could have huge impacts on society in 2017.

4. New-Age Stock Trading

Robinhood is the golden standard of Fintech companies and while only a couple years old is already rapidly approaching a billion-dollar valuation and is continuing to improve their product offering.

The newest roll-out is a premium offering which offers margin trading, instant trading, after-hours trading, and more.

While it seems unlikely that anyone will be able to compete with Robinhood in their court, they are more than content to continually outperform themselves. This makes the entire industry of stock trading an interesting vertical to watch since it is almost guaranteed to keep getting disrupted as long as Robinhood is alive and kicking.

5. Shifts in Tax Policy

While this is not quite Fintech, tax policy will most definitely change in the coming years due to Republicans controlling Congress and President Trump campaigning on major promises to cut out loopholes in the tax code.

Some of these changes include eliminating the lack of capital gains taxes on realized gains of municipal bonds; meaning when you loan money to a city for public works, the interest on that loan is no longer tax-free.

Similar shake ups in bonds and various investment preferences will drastically alter the way in which private equity is invested and managed in America. Such changes will open and close opportunities for Fintech and need to be taken into account.

“Strike the right balance between respecting your rivals and focusing on how you can beat them, and you’ll have a winning formula.” – Richard Branson

It is impossible to be at the top of your game without first understanding what you are up against. Ask an
yone that sells a “commodity”, and they will tell you that their customers are often confused about what differentiates their product from that of their competitors. Why?

Because after awhile, every business starts to sound the same — promising the same benefits, in the same time frame at roughly the same cost. In order to achieve a sustainable competitive advantage in the market, you need to conduct a thorough analysis of your competition.

Why you should conduct a competitive analysis

A web search on “Competitor analysis” mostly brings up advice for small business owners preparing a business plan. Imagine if your organization never looked at the competitive landscape after they put together an initial business plan. This approach would likely land you in the same spot as the Taxi industry when Uber came on the scene. Completely blindsided.

Strangely, most large organizations have no formal process in place for collecting competitor intelligence. But here are some benefits to putting one in place:

• Gaining an understanding of who else your customers are considering when making the decision about your product offering.
• Understanding what products your competition is promoting and how they are communicating to prospects.
• Knowing where your competitors are spending their marketing dollars (online ads, social media, sales events, etc).
• Recognizing your competitors’ strengths and weaknesses.
• Increasing intelligence and insights on where to focus and how to push your business to new levels.

Now that you understand why it’s important to get a handle on your competition, how should you get started?

3 steps to gather competitor intelligence

Conducting a competitive analysis doesn’t have to be a year-long, complex process. In fact, you are far more likely to make this part of your regular business approach if the process is simple.

With that in mind, here are 3 steps you can follow to start gaining competitive intelligence immediately.

1. Determine who your competitors are.

You may be able to easily come up with a list of companies that you compete with head-on. But in business, your list of potential competitors is much broader. Consider who else is vying for your prospects’ time and attention. (And if you don’t know, now is a good time to ask your customers for their input).

Competitors include:

• Organizations that provide the same benefit and target the same market
• Organizations that provide the same benefit but target a different market
• Organizations that offer the same benefits in a different way
• New Entrants or Other options to achieve the same result, such as building the capability in-house, upgrading equipment, etc.
• Choosing to do nothing (This is by far your biggest competitor, as people generally hate to change)

2. What should you know about your competitors?

Once you have the list of your competitors ready to go, what information should you collect about them? You may want to conduct a formal SWOT analysis, or you can use the below questions as a starting point.

• Who is the competitor targeting?
• What does the competitor do well?
• Where are they having success in the market?
• Where does the competitor fall short?
• What is their value proposition? Is it strong or weak?
• What tone of voice do they use (Casual or Serious, Educational, Informative, etc)?
• What content are they producing and promoting? What events are they participating in?

3. Where can you go to collect information about your competitors?

There are numerous ways to find information about your competition – online and offline:

• Conduct a professional marketing research study whereby your competitors are interviewed or surveyed directly. This is best conducted by a 3^rd party to increase participation rates and ensure that you gain an unbiased view.
• Check out your competitors’ website and marketing collateral. You can easily do this by going to their website and social media properties. Annual reports and other financial documents, as well as press releases also provide a great deal of information about where your competitor is focused. Also, don’t forget to pick up sample sales collateral and marketing content while at trade shows or other industry events.
• 3rd party research. Think about the research and analyst firms that are relevant in your industry (such as Gartner or IDC for the IT Industry). They often publish agnostic reports detailing strengths and weaknesses of players in a specific category. You can also seek out product review sites to see what users are saying, such as CNET for electronics and Spiceworks for IT solutions.
• Interview business colleagues, salespeople and industry influencers to understand what your competitors are doing and where they may be having success. These can be formal interviews or causal conversations at an industry networking event. A great source of information is new employees that just left their employment at your competitor.

Ultimately the purpose of understanding where your competitors are and what they are doing is so that you can position your business for success. The information you collect will help determine where your company may have a unique advantage to provide and communicate to your prospects. And isn’t that what we all strive for?

All sales leads are not equal. I know this is something that most sales and marketing leaders understand and it’s why they put lead qualification and validation into most of their sales, marketing and lead generation programs. They don’t want to waste time and money like the companies that Straight North recently evaluated.

For more than 18 months, StraightNorth conducted an analysis of 373,000 business inquiries, consisting of more than 135,000 online form submissions and more than 237,000 phone calls (totaling more than 1 million minutes). The study rejected 23,000 of them as unsuitable, leaving 350,000 inquiries to go through the entire analysis. Of those 350,000, about half—178,000—were actual sales leads. The report revealed a lead generation waste count of roughly 50 percent.

But when it comes to social selling and LinkedIn marketing, it seems that lead qualification and validation is getting thrown out the window. Business leaders and sales and marketing professionals are not identifying and focusing on those prospects who are ready, willing and able to make a decision in investing in their product, software, service or solution.

They are playing a numbers game, pushing out sales messages on LinkedIn to as many prospects as they can hoping that something will stick and that people will say yes to a demo or sales call. Business owners and sales and marketing professionals are treating these prospects who say “yes” to a call or demo as valid sales leads and they’re wasting time and money. Let me show you what I mean.

Logistics Company Wastes 90% of Their Time with the Wrong LinkedIn Sales Leads

Most social media firms focus on how many leads they are able to deliver on a weekly and monthly basis. For the President and CMO of a logistics company, a well-known LinkedIn lead generation company was delivering 5 to 10 leads for sales calls per week.

However, those sales leads they were delivering sucked! 90% of the calls were with prospects who were not in the right stage of the buying process at this time, or they were with people who were not even a decision maker or influencer. The people who said “yes” to a call were just looking for free information, to network, and maybe refer the company.

There was no lead validation and qualification. What good were those leads if there were no relationships being created and leveraged to drive revenue opportunities? The President and CMO could have been engaging in revenue generating activities instead of wasting time on calls with unqualified and un-validated sales leads.

Social Selling Expert Teaches Her Followers to Go for the Call on LinkedIn Leading to Wasted Time

The Chief Learning Officer at PeopleLinx, CEO of Social Selling Link, and Co-Founder of Business Development University and Social Selling GPS tells clients:

“With each new connection, determine if they are someone you’d like to speak with and tweak the LinkedIn message slightly: NAME, it is nice to be connected on LinkedIn. Typically I like to have a brief call with my new connections so we can explore ways we might be able to work together now or in the future. Here is a link to my calendar: xxxxxxxx. Please pick a time that is most convenient for you. I am looking forward to our call.”

So she’s telling business leaders and sales and marketing professionals to go for the call – don’t worry about lead qualification and validation. She’s saying don’t worry if they haven’t seen your value yet and that you haven’t demonstrated your relevance. Don’t worry if you haven’t identified a need yet and don’t worry if they are not in the right buying stage. This shotgun thinking assumes that getting the sales information “out there” may eventually lead to a sale. But all it really does is cost you time and money.

Why would you want to take time out of your busy day to possibly see how you can work together with a prospect – instead of taking time when you know there is a need and that the timing to move is right? Why would you want to have a phone call just to have a phone call?

When you have a complex sales process the only way to drive revenue opportunities is to build and leverage relationships. When you think the timing is right to move forward – you qualify and validate leads to ensure you’re not wasting time. Click here to see our process in action.

In an era when the average business buyer only contacts a brand when he/she is 67 percent through the buying process, there’s every reason to make sure that you’re reaching prospective customers at every stage of their research, not just when they’re ready to buy. Otherwise, when buyers finally do start to contact vendors, you may not even be part of the conversation.

This is especially true for technology marketers, and doubly true for those in nascent or emerging categories, when much of the marketing challenge may consist of convincing buyers that they have a problem to solve in the first place. Smart technology marketers look to capture buyers early on in the sales cycle, then engage them in a consistent nurture campaign to build credibility, trust, and to position their solution favorably for when the buyers are ready to engage with sales.

It’s puzzling, therefore, why so many SEM campaigns in the high tech space focus exclusively on late-stage offers, namely trials and demos. Actually, I know why it is. One reason is a general (short-sighted, in my view) opinion of SEM as merely a tool to find prospects who are ready to buy. But the second reason is because technology marketers (and their sales counterparts) are impatient, have short term business horizons, and don’t want to “wait around” for leads to be qualified.

However, by limiting paid search (SEM) campaigns (and social ads like LinkedIn also) to prospects who are ready to look at a product, marketers do themselves and their companies a disservice. If you expand your SEM offer strategy to include early-stage content, yes – you’ll generate a mix of leads and not just highly qualified demo-ready prospects – but, if you have the right nurture strategy in place, you’ll end up with many more qualified leads, and a greater ROI, in the long run.

There’s also a smart way to do it.

What do we know about prospects who are ready to download a free trial or schedule a demo? We know that they’re probably in the later stages of their research process, have identified the type of solution they need to buy, and in all likelihood are evaluating vendors. The types of keywords, therefore, most likely to generate late-stage prospects are those related to your brand, product, or product category.

Conversely, early-stage prospects may be far from evaluating solutions. They may not know that such solutions exist. Most likely they’re simply looking to solve a problem. That level of need lends itself to keywords related to pain points, problems, issues, challenges, and opportunities.

The best way to expand your SEM offer strategy, therefore, is to set up separate campaigns with separate and distinct offers, keyword groups, and landing pages:

• a demo or trial campaign focused on brand, product, or category keywords
• an “early stage” campaign focused on pain points, problems, and opportunities

To stress – this strategy is meaningless without a robust and effective nurture strategy in place. Otherwise, you’ll simply to be throwing unqualified leads at your SDR team only to be told “they weren’t ready.”

For a more detailed look at B2B search strategy, download our white paper: “Top 10 B2B Paid Search Mistakes.”