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If you happen to be one of those New Yorkers who uses the mostly non-existent/sometimes crappy cellphone service and Wi-Fi inside train stations as a reason to ignore dreaded things like work emails, texts from an ex and the dreaded "showtime," your days of excuses are over.

Wi-Fi is finally arriving at all the train stations of New York City and so is another basic necessity of communication — cell phone service. By Jan. 9, the 5.7 million people who ride the NYC subway system every day will finally be able to access Wi-Fi and cell phone service for all four major carriers(AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless) while underground, according to an announcement by Gov. Andrew Cuomo.  Read more...

Finance Canada quietly released its long-term fiscal projections for the country over the holidays, anticipating mounting debt and widening deficits for the next two decades:

Canada’s deficit will peak at $38.8 billion in 2035-36, according to the report. The projections stand in stark contrast to the government’s previous long-term fiscal update, released in 2014. Back then, the department projected decades of surpluses. (In 2035-36 specifically, the department pegged the surplus at $49.6 billion.)

What changed? Oil prices collapsed, for one, and the federal Liberal government has made deficit spending an explicit part of its agenda. Long-term forecasting will always be fraught with uncertainty, of course, but the one unavoidable challenge highlighted by Finance Canada’s report is the impact of the country’s aging population.

“The ratio of Canada’s workers to our elderly population is expected to decrease dramatically over the coming decades,” according to the report. And that will weigh heavily on economic growth.

The demographic picture underscores the need for the federal government to be prudent with spending and make the right investments to boost productivity. Otherwise, the country’s finances will only deteriorate further.

How higher interest rates could make Ontario's debt problems even worse

MORE ABOUT THE ECONOMY:

• To grow Canada’s exports, we have to look past the U.S. market
• How globalization is changing the game for central banks
• What’s worrying Canadian CEOs now (and what should worry them more)
• Brexit has awakened dangerous forces in the world economy
• Why are Canadians turning their backs on free trade?
• Why are Canadian companies so afraid to go global?
• Canada is failing to attract new manufacturing. Here’s how to fix it
• BDC CEO Michael Denham on helping Canadian firms go global

The post Canada isn’t projected to run a balanced budget until at least 2050 appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

VANCOUVER _ NASA has chosen a Canadian company to build a spacecraft platform that will venture to a metallic asteroid called 16 Psyche.

MacDonald, Dettwiler and Associates (TSX:MDA) says the contract is expected to be worth $100 million when finalized (US$75 million).

Its SSL unit in Palo Alto, Calif., will provide a spacecraft platform equipped with a high-power solar electric propulsion system.

NASA says the spacecraft is expected to be launched in 2023, pass by Mars two years later, and arrive at Psyche in 2030.

The U.S. space agency says the asteroid is about 210 kilometres in diameter and thought to be primarily made of metallic iron and nickel, similar to Earth’s core.

MacDonald, Dettwiler is the supplier of the robotic system used aboard the International Space Station and the Canadarm used in NASA’s retired Space Shuttle program.

It’s also involved in a variety of high-technology businesses including satellite-based data collection and information technology.

The post Canada’s MDA to supply NASA with spacecraft platform for asteroid mission appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

DON’T CRASH AND BURN IN THE ARR RACE

If you’re planning for a Q1 GTM (Go-To-Market) expansion as part of your 2017 strategy, you need to hit the ground running as soon as possible. I know firsthand that every company’s GTM expansion process will be different. Where you are revenue-wise, in product and service adoption, your average sales price (ASP), and your existing client base all affect your strategy. I can also tell you that it’ll take longer and be more expensive than you think.

From growing our company in five markets and partnering with other expanding companies, I’ve learned that it’s important to look beyond the obvious data-driven decision. To expand successfully you need to understand cultural differences, what skills and experience really matter, and how to have long-term customer and employee loyalty. Learning from others is the best way to create a successful GTM strategy.

Before planning to GTM in a new territory or vertical, understand your motivation by asking yourself why you are expanding, what your goals are, and who you will need to make success happen. Typical reasons I’ve seen as the impetus for expanding are: success in an existing market, a desire to go up-market, or client demand. If your current market is becoming saturated or you’re hearing from current clients that they’re ready to use your services elsewhere, looking for new opportunities is natural for a CEO or VP of Sales.

To determine a new location or vertical, use culture and available talent supply as drivers. Your technology, ASP, and who you’re selling to will dictate your team expansion approach and whether you need to grow your inside sales or your enterprise sales team. When going to market in a new territory, move only two to three key people to lead your new office. Displacing too many people can backfire, and you will benefit more from hiring local talent.

WHO GOT YOU HERE WON’T GET YOU THERE

For small to medium sized businesses, it’s an interesting challenge to expand in a different geography. Not every city has the same level of talent. It’s impossible to get the same employee in two unique places. I’ve found it is very important to learn the traits of the available talent in the new territory you’re looking at before deciding to establish an office and start hiring. Finding top talent can be done in any location, but you have to know what type of employee your company needs. For companies opening inside sales teams outside of the Bay Area or Silicon Valley, you can expect cheaper talent and less of a battle to hire. Areas like Denver, Salt Lake, Austin, and others are great locations.

I’ve found that companies can get raw sales DNA straight from towns with universities or business schools. These companies then put in place processes to train these people. Although the onboarding is longer because of these necessary training processes, there is less hiring competition in emerging tech hubs. In these talent areas, you can expect more loyal employees that will work for your company longer and grow with your company. They will tend to have more realistic expectations and appreciate the job and salary you have to offer them. You can imagine the impact to your business and how you can better service your customers.

When it comes to hiring for enterprise sales teams, hiring from outside your company is best practice. Promoting internally will most likely not grant you the right talent that can lead a new territory or vertical. Your current top salespeople are successful within your established network. You need to look for talent that has enterprise experience, knows how to work remotely, and can hit the ground running. This experience with the enterprise structure is key to launching a new enterprise sales department. With the longer sales cycles and larger client targets, enterprise teams need to be built for each vertical and territory.

NO TWO CITIES ARE THE SAME

CEOs and Sales Leaders often ask me for my recommendation on what expansion location is best. Betts is in both established tech hubs and emerging markets. Each type of location has their pros and cons. You should prioritize culture as a way to determine whether or not a city is right for your company’s product or solution, regardless of established or emerging tech environments. Also, make sure your office space is sales friendly. Starting off in a co-working space like WeWork is a simple workaround to a long-term contract. You can explore a new territory without a real estate commitment. However, make sure you aren’t stifled in a communal work area. If you can’t make calls or host clients because you don’t want to disrupt your neighbors, you can’t turn a profit. 

But what about Europe? If you’re looking to expand, Europe offers a brand new area to target and is appealing to many companies. My experience at Betts expanding from San Francisco to New York to London was eye-opening. We realized we had a lot to learn about the culture, talent pool, and the timeline for success. If you’re deciding between domestic and foreign expansion, you need to understand your target.

The sales cycle to recruit in Europe is much slower. We’ve found that there is less SaaS-experienced talent available. Companies that we see as established are viewed as startups. Comparing Europe to San Francisco reveals remarkable different experiences, expectations, and realities. Expanding to Europe as an investment that takes time to develop. I’ve learned that expanding to Europe always takes longer than anticipated to become profitable. Setting a realistic timeline, reasonable goals, and taking the time to understand the workings of your new area is how your company will become successful in Europe.

SO HOW SHOULD YOU START?

Regardless of your current success, set the right expectations. Start small to grow your company. Find a core team, pick a location that makes sense for your business, and do your research. Today’s ARR race can sweep many VPs and CEOs into a whirlwind of data analysis, projections, and rash decisions. Don’t lose sight of the basics of how you initially started your headquarters. You found success without access to these larger tools because you understood your market and matched to your culture. The same applies for your expansion.

Want to learn more? Click here to watch Carolyn Betts Fleming’s full webcast on Going to Market in New Territories & Verticals.

The post Secrets to Speeding Up Go-to-Market Expansion appeared first on Sales Hacker.

With the start of the New Year, the goals of customers are on my mind and the minds of many customer success managers. It’s no wonder. Goals help customers achieve success. They make it possible to align expectations. They focus efforts on what’s most important. Later, they will help to evaluate a customer’s progress and the value they’ve realized.

Across a customer base, I’ll usually see some customers with very strong, effective goals. They have clear goals for the outcomes they want to achieve, the milestones along the way and the near-term activities. Each of their goals are S.M.A.R.T.: specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound. They’re likely to be star performers.

At the same time, I’ll see other customers who have weak, ineffective goals. Amazingly, there are customers who don’t even have goals. These customers should be a red flag for customer success managers. Without effective goals, customers won’t be on top of the value they’re getting from your solutions, or the progress they’re making towards realizing value. Later, at a critical moment, they won’t be able to argue successfully for the continued purchase of your solutions. You’re likely to encounter a customer downsell or lose the customer.

The good news is this creates an opportunity for customer success managers to engage customers in setting more effective goals. While it can be challenging to get their engagement, there are various tactics that can be helpful.

Here are some tips that have helped me with goal-challenged customers:

1. Offer to give feedback.

Sometimes, a customer’s goals are unclear. For example, increase product sales and reduce lead generation expenses are too ambiguous to align expectations. When I recognize this, I’ll ask if they would like my perspectives and insights on their goals, based on my experience with other similar customers. I know the results others are getting and how they achieve them. I can tap into customer data to identify benchmarking metrics and benchmarks across similar customers, too. This knowledge gives me credibility and unique insights to share.

2. Ask insightful questions.

When a customer’s goals are too general and unclear, I try to move them from the abstract to the specific. I use a combination of questions (like those below) to help the customer think more critically about the outcomes they need to achieve. I want to help them frame their goals with business value in mind.

• What are you trying to accomplish with our solution?
• How do you see results changing with our solution?
• How will you know you’re successful with our solution?
• How does our solution help your business do what it does better?
• How can our solution impact your company’s business goals and initiatives?

I want the customers to come away with goals that allow for effective expectation management, success planning and measurement of business value.

3. Confirm they have the right set of goals.

Some customers have goals that are incomplete. Often, I’ve found their goals are based on near-term actions to take such as “complete solution training for all sales development reps in Q1.” But, they’re missing goals for the business outcomes they need to achieve while using a solution. Other times, they have effective goals for these desired outcomes, but they’re missing goals for the actions to take to get there. I always look for goals for business outcomes, milestones along the way, and the near-term actions. If they’re missing any of these, or if they’re not connected, I know their path to value realization and success is at risk.

4. Let them know what’s realistic to achieve

On occasion, customers will share their ’dream’ or ‘wish list.’ I appreciate their value for driving innovation and excellence, but unless goals are achievable, people will become disenchanted. Then, they lose the motivation to even set goals. This is where benchmarking with your own customer data can help. Share what’s best, worst and average for customers like them during the applicable stage of their journey with your business. Offer benchmarks relevant to their desired outcomes, as well as leading indicators which could be product adoption, product usage, key feature usage, program engagement and so on. I’ve found that helping customers develop realistic goals in this way strengthens relationships.

5. Tackle resistance to goal setting

There’s always a cabal of customers that avoid setting goals. While many people credit their success to setting goals, there are others that don’t see the value or reason to do so. They’ll resist your efforts. Trying to engage these customers to discuss goals can feel like pouring gasoline on a fire. I remember a tech company CEO once told me “Jim, you’re not going to pin me down.” I knew then that neither he nor I would be successful. Several months later, the board replaced him.

I don’t back away from these resistors. I try to gain an understanding of their viewpoint by asking insightful ‘why’ questions. I hope to find common ground from where we can start and grow from there. In some cases, they believe they don’t have enough information to set a goal. You know what? Sometimes they’re right. Their business leaders haven’t set clear goals. Or, they bought the product without defining the desired business impact. When this is missing, I’ll try to persuade them to commit to a goal of gathering information that’s needed to set goals afterwards. Another tactic I’ve used is to encourage setting 1 or 2 ‘micro goals’ for a 3 to 6-month period. It can be easier for the customer to accept. It helps to build their skills and confidence which leads to success.

Wherever these customer conversations go, I emphasize what I’ve learned from experience: customers who set effective goals have more success than those that don’t.

In the beginning of "Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope," rebel leader Princess Leia (RIP the great Carrie Fisher) was captured by the evil Empire. The rebels had managed to steal the plans for the Empire's secret weapon, the Death Star, and so the Empire's agents were ruthlessly hunting for them all over the galaxy.

Leia told her captors that the planned Imperial crackdown on the rebels, using the Death Star to terrify planets into submission, wouldn't work.

"The more you tighten your grip," she said, "the more star systems will slip through your fingers."

Replace the words "star systems" with the words "Chinese yuan" and you could use the phrase to talk about what's troubling Beijing right now.

Over the past week, the Chinese government has instituted even stricter capital controls to prevent citizens and corporations from taking money out of the country, according to a note circulated by Wells Fargo's Cameron McKnight and Robert J. Shore on Friday, January 6.

Now regular citizens have to report transfers over $10,000 and banks have had their foreign transaction reporting limits cut by 75%. This is on top of three months of the government tightening its grip on where Chinese people and companies send their yuan.

When it slips

But it's not working. Money is still leaving the country — $82 billion last month, to be exact — and that is pushing the value of the yuan lower against the dollar. On December 28, China's Central Bank was forced to deny media reports that the yuan fell to 7 yuan to $1. It insisted that yuan traded between its comfortable "band" of 6.9500 and 6.9666 per dollar.

"But some irresponsible media reported that the onshore rate of the yuan broke the psychological threshold of 7.0000," the central bank said, according to Reuters.

The futures market was not satisfied with that response, as indicated in this tweet from Bloomberg Chief Asia Economist Tom Orlik:

This is a deadly loop. The more controls the government puts on, the more desperate it seems. The more desperate it seems, the more people want to take their money out. Bloomberg estimates that China has suffered about $1.7 trillion in capital outflows since 2015.

And the longer this goes on the more investors are starting to think this loop will make a meaningful difference in the value of the yuan.

From Bloomberg:

"By repeatedly tightening capital controls, China risks eroding confidence in its currency, said [Benjamin] Fuchs, chief investment officer at BFAM Partners (Hong Kong). At the same time, the dollar’s advance against the yen and other currencies is increasing competitive pressure on China to let the yuan depreciate, he said in an interview."

Last year, Fuchs correctly predicted that the yuan would not suffer a sudden devaluation, as many hedge fund managers — like Hayman Capital's Kyle Bass — argued through early 2016.

This is not to say that the government doesn't have tools to stabilize the yuan as outflows persist. It just doesn't have many, and they're not that great. China has been using its foreign currency reserves to buy yuan to prop up the currency's value. But it can't do that forever, since it needs that money to pay foreign denominated debt.

Plus, China has already spent a ton of reserves on this. The exact number is fuzzy, but we do know China's Central Bank was holding $4 trillion at its highest point in 2014. Now official data shows that the number is hovering around $3.01 trillion, down from $3.05 trillion in November, according to official numbers released this weekend.

China bears, like hedge fund manager Jim Chanos of Kynikos Associates think it could be lower. Specifically, his firm calculates that net reserves could be around $1.7 trillion.

Another interesting factor is that China has tried really hard to get people to stop looking at the yuan in comparison to the dollar. It announced that it would peg the yuan to a basket of currencies. The problem is that no one cares. It's still a dollar-yuan world, and in that world a yuan slide against the dollar breaking a psychological threshold, like 7 yuan to $1, has consequences.

Peking University Professor Christopher Balding wrote a great post about this earlier this week:

"Ultimately, of course, the only way to break free of the dollar is to accept a floating currency without capital controls. The government shows no appetite for the volatility this would entail, not least because in the short run, downward pressure on the yuan would prompt even larger outflows. But cosmetic changes to a basket of currencies — most of which don't even trade with the renminbi — are no substitute."

Until this is resolved, currency will continue to slip through the government's fingers, no matter how it tightens its grip.

SEE ALSO: Here's how things could get ugly if Trump's China tweets hit the wrong nerve

SEE ALSO: Want to get ahead on Wall Street? Here's everything you need to know to land your dream job

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This is the Excel trick that will change everything about how you work with data

Do you have a large Facebook following?

Perhaps you’re trying to build a large following?

The custom Facebook tab allows owners to create their own custom landing pages right on their Facebook page. Facebook landing pages have no limits in regards to content – contests, customer support, events, lead generation, the choice is completely up to you.

To get the most out of your Facebook landing page, experiment with these 38 Facebook landing page ideas, tips, and examples.

1. Focus on Visitor Intent

When constructing your Facebook landing page, focus on the intent of your visitors. What are you helping them accomplish? Are you redirecting them back to your website? Are you entering them into a giveaway?

Knowing the intent of your visitors helps you serve their needs much more efficiently.

For all-star entrepreneur Gary Vaynerchuk, giving his fans access to his event schedule is top priority. He uses his landing page to meet the intent of his Facebook page visitors — getting the latest Gary V news.

2. Keep Visual Design Consistent

It is important to have congruent branding and visual design across all of your web properties. This way the design of your Facebook landing page will be immediately recognizable. Consistency means using complimentary colours, fonts, and images.

Malibu Rum sticks with their caribbean flare right down to their Facebook landing page. The opt-in landing page keeps the brand’s playful design and creates a comfortable experience for visitors.

3. Optimize for Mobile Devices

If you haven’t heard, half of all web traffic is now from mobile devices. Year after year this is becoming more apparent and not being prepared is basically a death sentence.

The simple solution to this is to make sure your Facebook landing page is mobile responsive, meaning it can adapt to any screen size. Employing a landing page building platform (like Wishpond) automatically makes your landing page mobile responsive.

4. Optimize for Speed

Upon landing on your Facebook landing page you literally seconds to hook your visitor’s attention and convince them to convert. The quicker your page loads the less likely your visitor is to bounce elsewhere.

A few ways to optimize for speed is to lower image sizes, reduce the length, reduce the number of graphics and colours, and avoid embedded content. Better software will produce a faster loading landing page so it helps to test drive each one first.

5. Leverage Contrasting Design

Contrasting design elements can be a powerful tool to direct user attention. Contrast can be used through colour or size. Important elements on the landing page, like the form or CTA, should be heavily contrasted from the rest of the page. This could be done, for example, by increasing its size or by making the background much darker than the form fields.

6. Keep Things Simple

Don’t overcomplicate things. Don’t overcrowd your landing page with unnecessary copy or flashy design elements. Provide only what is needed (according to visitor intent remember?).

A restaurant menu with 100 choices causes undue stress compared to a menu with 10 choices. Your landing page should act the same way.

You couldn’t get much more simple than MailChimp’s Facebook landing page. Their bare bones landing page only includes 4 elements: a logo, headline, form field, and CTA. The benefit is clear and opting in couldn’t be easier, what more could you want?

7. Match Headlines with Ads

When running ads to your Facebook landing page, say for a giveaway or contest, it’s important to match your headlines. For example, “Enter to win a $100 giftcard!” should be included on the ad and at the top of your landing page. This is so that the visitor isn’t confused after clicking and being redirected elsewhere.

Congruence plays a big role here. If a visitor clicks expecting to enter into a contest, being presented with a free ebook can lead to confusion and an eventual bounce.

8. Match Images with Ads

Just like you matched headlines, your landing page and ad image should also match. The image you used to advertise your contest for example, should be immediately recognized so that your visitors know that they’re in the right place. I should see the photo of the awesome prize package you’re giving away in your ad and on your landing page.

9. Keep CTA Above the Fold

Keeping your CTA above the fold ensures that everyone will see it regardless if they scroll downwards or not.

The CTA can get lost on a Facebook landing page packed with colour and visuals. Make converting as easy as possible for your visitors by sticking your form fields and CTAs above the fold.

10. A Single Conversion Goal

The paradox of choice states that “more possible avenues does not simply complicate a person’s decision, but demotivates them from making it at all.” When presented with a variety of options (e.g. buttons to click) a visitor is more likely to bounce than to make a decision and convert.

Help make the decision easy for your visitors. Provide them with only one choice. This way they can either choose to accept your offer or reject it.

Links back to your website to see a blog post or share your Facebook page for example, only distract your visitor and detract from your main conversion goal.

This NBC Sports Facebook landing page has only one conversion goal: sign visitors up for the NBC Sports newsletter. If NBC Sports included other CTAs it would distract from an already lengthy registration process.

11. Use a Directional Cue

Using a directional cue is a subtle way of saying, “look right here!” to your visitors. Visual cues like arrows pointing towards a CTA button directs a visitor’s gaze to an area of importance.

Let’s imagine a visitor lands, reads the headline, subheadline, list of benefits, then wonders what’s next? A directional cue will naturally lead them onto the form and hopefully end in a conversion.

Images can also work as visual cues for visitors. The guy in the example below is looking directly at the landing page CTA. The way his gaze is positioned naturally leads your eyes in the same direction.

12. Encapsulate the Form

To help increase the contrast of your Facebook landing page encapsulate your form and CTA. A bright background colour or thick border are a couple of ways to increase the contrast of your conversion goal.

In the example below, adding the dark blue background around the form area contrasts it with the rest of the page. It’s a subtle yet powerful way to bring more attention to your most important element.

13. Run a Social Media Giveaway

Gather together a big prize package, decide on a fun way to engage your audience, and promote your very own social media giveaway right on your Facebook page. A social media giveaway still ranks as one of the best ways to quickly grow your following and collect leads for your business.

Overwatch used this contest landing page to giveaway a bunch of Overwatch gear to their followers. It was published to their custom Facebook tab and hosted right on their Facebook page. The contest was a massive success and they received thousands of entries and shares for very little cost.

14. Information Hierarchy

When organizing the information on your Facebook landing page make sure it follows proper information hierarchy. This entails using design and copy to display what areas should attract the most attention.

The headline for example, should be large and contrasted to grab attention and communicate what the page is about. The subheadline should then be smaller and describe further details. By following a hierarchy elements on the landing page should descend by importance.

Take a look at Shopify’s Facebook landing page and the information hierarchy it uses. The headlines lend detail therefore are the largest elements on the page. The headlines and background image hook the reader and lead them down towards the form.

15. Follow the AIDA Copywriting Formula

Stuck organizing the information on your Facebook landing page? Follow the tried and true AIDA copywriting formula.

AIDA stands for:

• Attention. Hook a visitor’s attention with a compelling headline or image.
• Interest. Capture their interest by speaking directly to their problems.
• Desire. Explain the benefits of your solution to create desire.
• Action. Tell them what to do with a strong call-to-action.

16. Follow the PAS Copywriting Formula

Much like the AIDA copywriting formula, the PAS copywriting formula provides a framework for organizing the information on your Facebook landing page.

PAS stands for:

• Problem. Address the problem you’ve set you to solve.
• Agitate. Dig into the problem and elaborate on why it sucks.
• Solve. Become the hero and present your solution.

17. Employ Social Proof

You’re more likely to visit a restaurant with positive online reviews than one with negative reviews. Even with the possibility of those reviews being fake or biased, your decision will still be swayed. That’s the power of social proof.

Testimonials, social sharing, and reviews are just a few of the ways you can use social proof to your advantage.

18. Clear USP

A strong and refined USP or unique selling proposition should not be forgotten in the landing page building process. Your USP is what defines your business and what separates it from your competition. Make your USP the star of your landing page.

If a visitor cannot determine why they should pick you over a competitor then you’ve not communicated your USP.

Most assume that a USP should focus on trying to be the best but they’d be wrong. Instead, focus on being the best at something no one else is even attempting.

Domino’s isn’t competing to be the best pizza according to its USP. It’s competing to be the best pizza that is free if not delivered in 30 minutes.

19. Use Numerals Instead of Numbers

When it comes to writing headlines use numerals (20,000) instead of numbers (twenty thousand). Why? Large numbers always attract attention. This applies to percentages, prices, and any sort of data.

20. Trust Symbols

Trust plays a big role in determining if a visitor decides to convert on your offer or not. Signals on the page either add trust and credibility or detract from it. No offer, no matter how valuable it is, will convince a visitor to convert if they think their information won’t be protected.

When dealing with sensitive information consider adding secure transaction logos to your landing page.

21. Clear List of Benefits

Clearly communicate what your business brings to the table. It might sound obvious but visitors won’t convert if they’re confused about what you’re offering. Don’t assume your visitors have the smarts to figure it out themselves.

Listing out your benefits and features is crucial. Online Marketing News uses this Facebook landing page to collect newsletter subscribers right on their Facebook page. If you’re curious as to why you should subscribe they include a long list of benefits.

22. Two-Step Opt-In

Instead of placing a form field on your Facebook landing page, try a two step opt-in instead. A two step opt-in requires visitors to click a CTA button first then fill out a form. Studies have shown that a two step opt-in process converts better and at a higher quality than a single step.

Why is this?

Once a visitor clicks your CTA button they’ve begun the opt-in process — they’re invested. Once someone has started a process they’re far more likely to complete it. This is referred to as the Zeigarnik effect. A single step opt-in does not require a decision to be made by the visitor thus it is often ignored. There is no investment by the visitor.

From your Facebook landing page have your CTA send visitors back to your website or a separate form where they can complete the second step of opting in.

23. High Value Lead Magnet

This might sound obvious but the value of your lead magnet should match or exceed the information you’re asking for. Asking for even just an email isn’t as easy as it once was. There must be an equal exchange of value before anything is accomplished.

If you’re Facebook landing page is low on conversions look at what you’re offering. Is it being communicated clearly? Is your lead magnet providing enough value to your visitors? Are you asking too much of them?

24. Giveaway Free Stuff

Giving away free stuff is a no brainer for easy lead generation and fan engagement. To get new visitors through the door a free gift can be just the thing to do it.

Yotopia tempts visitors with a free frozen yogurt to grow their Facebook presence. Their simple yet elegant Facebook landing page is built to convert leads by way of free frozen yogurt. Once a lead is collected they’re sent a coupon for free yogurt by email.

25. User Generated Content

If you’re having trouble demonstrating trust and credibility, the use of user generated content might be just what you need. Experiment with user generated content on your Facebook landing page to encourage your followers to participate. Knowing that others are participating in a contest in their area for example, is enough to persuade others to join.

Coors Light features a fan gallery on their Facebook landing page to promote their social giveaway. Real images of real fans builds trust amongst others who are contemplating participation.

26. Create Tabs for Different Purposes

As we mentioned above, a Facebook landing page should only have one conversion goal. Too many choices make for lower conversions. To solve this problem it’s best to create multiple Facebook custom tabs each for a different purpose.

A custom Facebook tab as dynamic as it is, can be used for many different landing pages. Contests, FAQs, video, the choice is really up to you. Just be sure that each tab only serves one purpose.

27. Leverage Visuals

A picture says a thousands words goes the old saying. Whenever possible, instead of words, leverage visuals. Online readers have incredibly short attention spans and can decide to bounce from a page within seconds.

Eye catching visuals work to hook a reader’s attention. Images, videos, infographics are only a few examples of elements that help keep and move attention down the page.

Visuals are used in every section to powerful effect on this Nutella Facebook landing page. Each section is bright and eye catching, begging to be explored further. Instead of large blocks of text, let images do the talking for you.

28. Urgency

When it comes to actually claiming your offer there must be a sense of urgency. To light the proverbial fire under your visitors they must be aware that your offer won’t be around forever. Urgency will create action.

One of the many ways you can create urgency is with a deadline or a countdown timer. Many of the contests and offers Wishpond has helped create include a countdown timer. This way visitors know that the opportunity is limited.

Cake Bake & Sweets Show ran a baking contest for its fans right on its Facebook page. To create urgency on the page they included a countdown timer right on the entry page. To be included in the giveaway, participants had to meet all contest rules before the clock reached zero.

29. Scarcity

Scarcity is created when demand exceeds supply of a certain product/service. You’ve likely seen scarcity at play, especially during the holidays (e.g. Black Friday, Christmas) when the demand for goods sky rockets. To include an element of scarcity on your Facebook landing page include a supply counter. If hosting a webinar for example, the total number of seats left creates the feeling of scarcity. Unless visitors register immediately they stand to lose their seat to someone else.

30. Complementary Colours

The power of colour is often lost in the fold when creating a Facebook landing page. Like stellar copywriting, colour can have a powerful effect on the overall feeling of your landing page. For the most appealing and user friendly Facebook landing page use colours that are complementary to one another

Everything about this Taylor Swift fragrance Facebook landing page is meant to appeal to her audience. The colour scheme complements her new products and her overall brand. Taylor Swift’s choice of colours communicate a consistency throughout all of the products she offers across her brand. Keep things consistent throughout your own brand by using complementary colours.

31. Less Form Fields

To improve your conversion rate reduce the number of form fields on your Facebook landing page. Conversion studies show that the less form fields you require, the higher the conversions. But what if you need more information you ask?

Only collect the information you absolutely need at your first touch point with your visitors. An email for example, gets the lead through the door first. More information can be collected later on as you develop the relationship.

32. Step-by-Step

To reduce conversion friction for your Facebook landing page visitors, include step-by-step information. A lot of conversions are lost to hesitations. The ambiguity of the process can hold back visitors from converting. By listing out exactly what the process involves it can clear up many of the questions your visitors have.

Groupon lists out the process of sending a Groupon gift card for visitors. The 4 steps take out much of the confusion of a digital gift card.

33. Use Checkboxes

Instead of time consuming drop-down lists, try using checkboxes instead. If you only have a set amount of answers in your form make it easier for your visitors with checkboxes. It will speed up the opt-in process and remove much of the headache for your visitors.

34. Create a Prize Package

When it comes to creating a prize for your contest or giveaway on your Facebook landing page, create a prize package instead of one single prize. This way it will appeal to a wider range of people. Listing the total prize package value also makes the incentive more appealing.

35. Tie the Prize Back to Your Business

When selecting a prize package make sure it ties itself back to your business. You’re not just giving away free stuff after all!

To do this, include something like a gift card or a product from your business. It will ensure that only those interested in your business/niche will enter to win. This way you’ll have repeat business or a new customer and reviewer for your product.

36. Run a Vote Contest

In terms of uses for your Facebook landing page, a vote contests is a fun way to engage your fans. Anyone and everyone can join in on the fun and have their say in your next business initiative.

M&M’s used their Facebook landing page to have their fans vote for their next M&M flavour. It allowed all of their fans to participate and have their say.

37. Use it for Navigation

For those new to your business, a Facebook landing page can be used as an introduction or navigation portal. Those coming for a Google search for example, are often lead to your Facebook page first. Give them a hand by filling a Facebook landing page with helping information, links, or copy.

Yelp does just this by using their Facebook landing page to redirect visitors to helpful areas of their business. Visitors can visit the blog, look at careers, sign up for the newsletter, or download their app. It all works in part of their customer success loop.

38. Support Your Fans

The fact that you can engage with your Facebook fans right on your custom landing page make it a great forum for support. Users can leave comments and questions from their Facebook profiles and receive direct support from you.

Nike uses their Facebook landing page to provide support to all the Nike fans around the world. The page features FAQs and news for those looking for more information.

This post continues my series published to show you tasks you can delegate in the New Year. As I mentioned in my previous posts, the question I often hear is:

“I know I need a virtual assistant but
I don’t know what to delegate.”

In this installment, I will discuss a few ways a virtual assistant can help you get a handle on your content marketing.

Repurposing Content

If you’ve been employing content marketing for any length of time, you more than likely have a vast collection of content. Take a look at all of the blog posts, eBooks, reports, social media posts, articles, infographics and other audio/video content that you’ve created to date. You probably have accumulated enough content to fill a library! You can use this collection of content, and future content, in a more productive manner. And it’s a great job to outsource to a virtual assistant!

Creating and managing your editorial calendar

You know what to share but if you post it all at the same time, people will get confused. You will be surprised how quickly you run out of things to share. To avoid this you need to create an editorial calendar. In other words, make a timeline and plan which topics you want to post first and which ones should follow in a chronological order. If you know your destination and the best way to reach it, you can easily get back on track when you get side tracked (and you will). After meeting with you and learning your goals and purpose for the content, a marketing virtual assistant can do the “paperwork.”

“If you need a template to get started, there are many available on-line and a google search will provide a variety of options. Hubspot is my favorite.”

Finding and editing photos

If you aren’t using images in your content, i.e. blogs, articles, posts, now is the time to start. It will radically increase your audience attention and interaction. MDG Advertising makes the case for using images in your content in their infographic.

Infographic by MDG Advertising

Many of the entrepreneurs I work with tell me they don’t have time to search for relevant images for their content or edit those images. This is a great task for your marketing assistant. He/she can find appropriate images, edit and insert them into your content.

Finding Statistics for your content

When you quote statistics in your content it helps establish the validity, credibility, and relevance of your piece. The toothpaste companies are the best example of this with ‘9 out of 10 dentists recommend our toothpaste.’ By referring to someone who is recognized as an expert, they set themselves up as the best product.

Finding these statistics and ensuring they are from a valid source can take time. Be sure you don’t take any statistic at face value. It’s a good idea to investigate the source.

Promoting your content

If you’re consistently publishing high quality, relevant content and no one is reading it, ask yourself how you are promoting that content. There are literally millions of websites on the internet competing for the publics’ attention. If you are only posting your content on your blog, or even a few social networks, it will be hard to get anyone to notice you. To get your target audience to read your content, you need to promote it. There are almost as many ways to do this as there are websites on the internet. Be sure you are implementing the best practices for your industry or niche. This blog post will give some insight and help you get started.

All of these content marketing tasks and many others can be completed quickly and efficiently when you outsource them to a professional virtual assistant. This will save you time and your content will become a valuable marketing tool.

LONDON — Citi is advising investors to take another look at domestic UK stocks that have suffered since the Brexit vote, saying there could be value in the group it has dubbed the "Anti UK8".

In a note sent to clients last week, analysts identify eight large domestic UK stocks that have suffered since the vote and could be undervalued: Marks & Spencer, BT, Lloyds, British Land, ITV, Legal & General, Persimmon, and Costa Coffee and Premier Inn owner Whitbread.

Citi writes: "These stocks, in aggregate, have been sharply de-rated in the last year and now trade on a 20% dividend yield premium to the market. When taking into account the DY premium of Oil & Banks, value investors may want to take a closer look at some of these stocks."

The term "Anti UK8" is in reference to Citi's earlier group of UK8 stocks — eight companies it identified ahead of the Brexit referendum that it thought were good hedges against a "Leave" vote.

But the investment bank says that not all UK stocks are equal. While the FTSE 250, which is mostly made up of domestic companies, has also de-rated since the vote to leave the European Union, Citi's analysts write: "We still find it hard to get too excited about UK mid-caps, in aggregate, at these levels given the backdrop of UK macro uncertainty and weak GBP trends."

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How much money you need to save each day to become a millionaire by age 65

The business-to-business sales spiral is a seductive metaphor, implying that a wide net of potential customers will somehow plummet into a sale as if gravitationally pulled there.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t quite work that way. Prospects can become stalled at any point in the sales process. They can also wiggle their way up and out of your sales spiral at any given time.

It’s often challenging to know exactly where a customer is in the spiral, particularly with a B2B model. With different touchpoints and considerations, a business client is far less transparent than a traditional customer. Moreover, the sales process is often long and complex. Put together, these qualities not only make it easy to overlook the need for a personalized approach to customer experiences, but they point to the importance of doing so. In a nutshell, that’s why a customer relationship management (CRM) integration like a Cisco Salesforce CTI, is critical.

Importance of Personalization in B2B Sales

It goes without saying that personalization is significant in any sales relationship. People want to feel that their money is well-spent. It takes more than a solid product or service to make them feel that way. However, it isn’t only in the traditional business-customer relationship that this plays out.

Evidence suggests that by the year 2020, there will be 33 billion Internet-connected devices around the world. That’s a rate of 4.3 devices per person. In turn, buyers are researching and learning about companies long before stepping into a store — both virtual and brick-and-mortar. In other words, customers and prospects are making decisions about vendors long before they even contact a sales representative. This makes personalization more challenging but all the more necessary in order to stand out among the competition.

Of course, it’s worthwhile asking whether such techniques help. However, according to the Aberdeen Group, the answer to that question is a resounding ‘yes.’ Businesses that utilize new technologies to increase personalization report a 21 percent stronger lead acceptance rate and 36 percent higher conversion rate than businesses who do not. Consider these facts as well:

• In 2012, 78 percent of salespeople who used social media to tailor their conversations with CEOs outperformed their colleagues in sales;
• Businesses that use differentiation see substantially higher revenue growth;
• The average business sees a loss of 10 percent of its customers annually;
• Sixty percent of customers will pay more for a better customer service experience;
• Ninety percent of B2B executives plan to maintain or increase spending on customer experience;
• Nearly 90 percent of executives believed that customer service will be their primary mode of competition by the end of 2016

The question now is: How can a B2B model facilitate a tailored customer experience?

Sales Techniques That Provide Context for Personalization

Computer-telephony integration

According to the Harvard Business Review, 90 percent of business decision-makers won’t respond to cold calls. The key to understanding this statistic can be found in the word ‘cold’. Decision-makers will respond to personalized phone calls. That’s where having an effective CTI system like a Salesforce Cisco CTI integration proves valuable. Such a program allows you to:

• Respond to incoming leads immediately
• Automatically log detailed notes about calls into the CTI system
• Log any inbound or outbound phone calls
• Have a ‘local presence (link to this blog)’ when making outbound calls

Customer relationship management system

With the myriad of options available to buyers, vendors must do something to be visible. Using a CRM system provides this opportunity. For instance, it allows you to track customer birthdays. You can then wish them well and entice them back to your store with a special offer for the occasion.

A CRM system also forms a communication framework so you’re in touch with customers and prospects periodically, thereby preventing the sense that you only contact customers when you want to sell them something. Stay in touch through emails to ask for feedback, offer discounts, and provide company updates.

Reward system

Any small gesture you can make to reward frequent customers will provide considerable payback. Identify loyal customers and reward them with discounts, coupons, giveaways — virtually anything that encourages a return visit. It’s easy to overlook those clients — who hopped aboard at the start of your business journey — as you chase new business. However, it’s critical that you don’t forget this important group.

Pulling it Together

Just as customers are able to educate themselves about products and services online, B2B buyers are behaving more and more like B2C buyers. As a result, companies need to establish stronger relationships and relevance early in the buyer journey.

With the increase of information available, salespeople can gauge where the customer is in the buying process, respond to customers at the moment of interest, and develop repeatable tactics.

Why Magento and other B2C platforms are not the best choice for your next B2B site…

As I speak with B2B executives responsible for “digital” within their organizations, this story is far too common. “We purchased a B2C eCommerce platform and tried to repurpose it for our B2B customers.” If that sounds like your organization, I hope this article will save you from years of frustration, wasted time and money.

Todays leading B2B eCommerce sites and customer portals are providing much more than the Amazon or Nike.com experience. They are giving their customers powerful online tools which improve speed, accuracy and make their job easier. Basic tools like intuitive search are critical but also very complex tools like advanced product configuration, key account micro-sites and even global inventory allocation. In the hands of your users, these tools become more of an enterprise solution which automates procurement functions between buyers and sellers.

Now I’ve been in the B2B eCommerce space for over 15 years and it continues to amaze me how a b2c platform provider can claim to become an overnight expert at B2B. Agencies are jumping on the bandwagon and telling their clients that they are experienced in B2B and “no problem…it’s just like b2c“. They are telling clients that they can simply do a few customizations to Magento and it will work perfectly for their B2B clients. Unfortunately, that scenario never ends well. I can refer you to many companies who sadly made that mistake and poured six-figure budgets into customization only to realize they should have started with a B2B platform in the first place.

“…it continues to amaze me how a b2c platform provider can claim to become an overnight expert at B2B”

If you are a B2B company looking for the right solution or if you are an agency helping your client choose the right platform, let me share a short list of features which any strong B2B vendor should be able to demonstrate easily and without customization.

Top 10 differences between a B2C (Retail) Platform and a B2B (Enterprise) Platform:

1. Customers – This is the most obvious difference. B2B companies have many different channels, user types and personas. One size does not fit all.
2. Payments – b2c is often credit card only. B2B needs to provide the option for PO, order approvals, payment on credit and even the ability to check available credit.
3. Products – You are not selling simple products like t-shirts and tennis shoes. B2B products are complex and may even require advanced quoting & configuration.
4. Performance – Most companies don’t learn this until it’s too late. B2B companies often need to handle much larger sku counts and order volumes than b2c sites.
5. Search – All eCommerce sites need a great search but B2B often needs to personalize the search to each user type and even to the specific company ordering.
6. Multi-site – b2c typically offers a single site. Leading B2B companies are able to provide customer-branded microsites and ordering portals for their key accounts.
7. Check-out – The B2B checkout process can be quite complex. Multiple order approvals, payment complexity and credit limits make it harder than B2C.
8. Globalization – Most B2B companies are global. Not only multi-lingual and multi-currency but flexible enough to handle B2B international shipping and tax issues.
9. Integrations – This is a big one. Most B2B projects fail or go way over budget on integration. Do not underestimate the importance of a strong integration toolset
10. Developer Tools – The platform must have strong B2B features out-of-the-box but also allow the dev community to extend and scale while staying on the upgrade path

Most importantly, I would challenge your vendor to PROVE these features and your specific use-cases in a live demonstration. If they can’t spin up a site that shows strong B2B functionality, it’s time to find a different “expert” to help you with B2B.

I hope these tips will provide you with some guidance. By no means is this an exhaustive list but just a few thoughts to help guide your selection.

Ready for one more New Year’s resolution? It’s just 6 words but packs a punch.

Use visuals in your B2B content.

Consider this stat: The right visuals have the power to increase a person’s willingness to read an article by 80%.

We live in a predominantly visual world, in fact, studies have shown that the human brain processes images 60,000 times faster than text — wowza! Are you harnessing the full power of this PR tactic in your B2B marketing?

Another study showed that people who were presented with visual information (such as infographics or video) were able to retain 65% of the information three days later, compared to 10% when visuals weren’t included. The ability to visualize is an incredibly influential part of the human learning process. It would be negligent to ignore this in your B2B content just because it requires a little bit more effort than the written word.

When you review your arsenal of PR tactics, don’t ignore the powerful impact of visuals.

How Visuals Can Benefit Your B2B Content

Generate Conversions

When’s the last time you were drawn to read an article based on paragraphs of text? Unless it had an amazing opening or was so on point with your life or business, I doubt it. We are naturally drawn to articles with attractive visuals.

A visual can generate more engagement for your article, and compel people to take a certain action. Content with relevant visuals attracts a whopping 94% more views than content without relevant visuals. For example, calls to action are most likely to convert your readers into B2B leads when they include an eye-catching visual component. So strive to use visuals in all aspects of your content.

Empower SEO Results

Would you like to stay even further ahead of the infamous Google search engine? Visual content has the power to get you there. When you optimize that stunning, high quality visual graphic correctly, it will help you rank higher in search engines.

How do you optimize your visuals? Since Google doesn’t know how to interpret images on its own, it uses what’s known as the alt text, or alt tags, to determine what the image is about, and how it fits in with your SEO efforts. Make sure your alt text includes your keyword.

Increase Your Social Following

What motivates people to like and share on social media? Whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, or whatever network you choose, visual graphics engage more.

Vary the kinds of visuals you share across your social networks — include infographics, quotes, tips, statistics, screenshots, and how-to graphics that engage your audience and increase likes, shares, and follows.

“Visuals help to capture and keep attention, and illustrate points more effectively, all while making content easier to share.” –Sujan Patel

The Six Pillars of Effective Visual Content

1. Make it Unique

Dispel any nagging feeling that your audience has seen it before. Make it stand out from your other visuals, and those of your competitors. Yet, remember that “unique” doesn’t mean disruptive — keep it in harmony with your brand’s established tone.

Look at this unique visual content example from General Electric. This interactive globe shows how GE is working in various industries (such as infrastructure, energy, and healthcare) around the world to effect change and deliver a new industrial era. It’s unusal but also fit with its innovative, technologically advanced brand.

2. Pay Attention to Design Elements

You don’t need a degree in graphic design to create compelling images with a designer’s eye. However there are a few key points you’ll want to remember:

• Simplicity. Don’t overwhelm your visuals with too much information.

• Interesting. Your visuals should stand out, and catch a reader’s attention.

• Text. Don’t overload your image with text, but make what text you have easy to read.

• Colors. Choose colors that fit your brand identity and the tone of the information you want to convey.

Design can always be improved. Next time you’re looking at art and graphics, strive to learn more about the emotional effects of design elements on people. Study lines, shapes, textures, and spaces to see how you can create similar effects in your designs.

Take, for example, this graphic from Grammarly, an online subscription tool that helps writers proofread their work. It is simple and clean, not cluttered, with bold, easy-to-ready text that draws the eye in, and one image that accentuates the point the company is trying to make. Plus, it makes the point in a humorous way.

Now, this infographic from Pepto Bismol shows what can happen when you attempt to cram too much visual information into your graphic. The eye doesn’t know where to go, and isn’t drawn to any one point. The text gets lost in the confusion. Most audiences would quickly move on, without investing the time to decipher the brand’s message.

3. Size It Appropriately

You want your image to look appropriate for whatever platform you use. Each social media platform uses pre-determined sizes. Otherwise, your careful and creative work could be cropped out or look out of place on a social network.

4. Make It Real

People are more likely to connect with images of real people or real stories. The realer, the better. You could use photos of behind-the-scenes moments of your company’s employees, actual customers using your product, or photos of how your company is making a difference in the community.

Show how you’re not just a company — you’re people who have created a product or service to help other people. That caring, human side will attract audiences to your visual content.

Take this instagram post from Zendesk. It shows part of its team working in its local community, painting for a program called Housing Intiatives. The company appears as a group of real, down-to-earth people who care about their community.

5. Choose Relevant Images

Not every image will fit your industry or your brand. Choose your images carefully to reflect the principles of your company — this way, you will attract readers who are serious and who are most likely to become qualified B2B leads.

Use images to show that your company is still relevant in the current social climate. Display how you fit into to current trends that are on people’s minds.

Images have a way of grabbing attention, getting people to comment and share, and of making your content more interesting and more relatable. –Kim Garst

6. Create Visuals in a Sharable Format

Do research to see what your target audience likes and shares. Could infographics work for your B2B company? How about video? Slideshare? The right format could buttress your visual efforts to succeed.

A Few Points to Remember:

• Visuals have been proven to improve conversion rates, SEO, and social following.
• Use real people and real stories to create truly compelling visuals.
• Make your visuals sharable and appropriately sized for social sharing.
• Always look for ways to improve your visual designs.

No matter what your marketing goals are, visuals can help you reach them. Don’t neglect the powerful impact visuals can have on your B2B content.

There’s nothing like well-written book to help clarify goals, inspire action, and improve job performance. Plus, it’s just plain enjoyable to put up your feet and kick back with a good read, whether the words appear on a glowing screen or in print.

We’ve compiled a guide to some of the best business books released in 2016 ‒ books that give practical advice on effective marketing, explain the psychology of persuading and selling, showcase major trends that will shape our jobs in the near and distant future, preview new technologies and developments looming on the horizon, assist us in improving our professionalism, and help us tap into our passions and creativity to benefit both our careers and our daily lives.

Marketing, Sales, and Branding

Marketing is both an art and a science. The best marketers combine creativity, psychological acumen, and solid measurements and analyses to gauge the wants and needs of potential and existing customers. The following books offer a slew of valuable insight into the profession and ways to tap the potential of communication, technology, and sway:

1. Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade

Author: Robert Cialdini

More than three decades after the release of Robert Cialdini’s Influence, the classic and, well, very influential marketing and sales book, the well-known psychologist is back with another must-read work for anyone who makes a living convincing people to buy certain goods and services. In Pre-Suasion, Cialdini, a researcher in the application of psychology to sales and marketing, discusses the power of swaying consumers to act by capitalizing on the essential window of time before an important message is delivered. This “privileged moment for change” prepares people to be receptive to a message before they experience it; therefore, optimal persuasion is achieved through optimal “pre-suasion.” To change minds, Cialdini says, a pre-suader must also change states of mind. The book offers a revealing look at the human psychology of buying and explains the practices of shrewd, skilled communicators.

2. The 12 Powers of a Marketing Leader: How to Succeed by Building Customer and Company

Authors: Thomas Barta, Patrick Barwise

Former McKinsey partner Barta and London Business School professor Barwise stress that marketers inhabit an essential overlap area where the needs of a company intersect with the needs of its customers. In this sweet spot, called the Value Creation Zone, or “V-Zone,” marketing leaders’ expertise and connections can have a huge effect on the customer experience. To optimize their performance in the V-Zone, marketers should become proficient in 12 key “powers” ‒ including tackling only big issues, aligning marketing with the company’s priorities, forming alliances and cultivating non-marketing relationships, helping their teams spot trends and maximize revenue based on them, and focusing on goals that will benefit their company’s customers.

3. The Conversion Code: Capture Internet Leads, Create Quality Appointments, Close More Sales

Author: Chris Smith

As the world of sales moves farther away from traditional, in-person contact to the cyberspace realm of Internet transactions, marketers need to rethink and revamp their approach to transforming online customer engagement into revenue. Smith, the co-founder of Curaytor, a social media, digital marketing, and sales coaching company that helps businesses grow faster, provides an outline for converting leads generated on the Web into real-world profit. Smith advises readers on engaging with online consumers effectively; using social media, apps, and blogs to cost-efficiently capture more leads; making connections and using the right words to close more sales; and creating websites that maximize sales by minimizing off-putting informational clutter.

4. Digital Influencer: A Guide to Achieving Influencer Status Online

Author: John Lincoln

Do you believe influencers are born and not made? If so, author John Lincoln believes you are wrong. Lincoln, CEO of the SEO company Ignite Visibility and a digital marketing teacher at the University of California at San Diego, argues anyone can transform into an influencer by taking the right steps. He lays out what is required for people to become authorities in their fields and leaders skilled in directing and persuading others. Digital Influencer guides readers in crafting and adopting strategies for engaging their communities, growing their followings, and building a powerful online persona. Lincoln provides a plan of action on topics including gaining influence through blogging, guest posting “like a pro,” using SEO to drive authority, and using viral marketing concepts for exponential reach.

5. Branding: In Five and a Half Steps

Author: Michael Johnson

One of the world’s leading brand consultants and graphic designers, UK-based Michael Johnson offers a step-by-step visual guide to fabricating a successful brand. Johnson breaks down common brands to reveal their key components and offers case studies that clearly show why consumers select one particular product or service over another. The author demonstrates that a brand originates not with finding a solution, but rather with finding a gap in the market in need of an answer. Ideally, this opening should be identified through comprehensive research and sound strategic thinking. Johnson’s visually striking, illustration-rich guide highlights some of the planet’s most successful corporate identities and provides templates to enable readers to create and improve their own brands.

Technology and Trends

Marketers’ work is never done ‒ and they never get to rest on their laurels. As we all know, the only constant is change, and marketers must keep up with it! Staying abreast of new technologies and incoming trends is all part of this demanding and ever-evolving profession. These “look-ahead” books do an excellent job of aiding that quest by giving marketers a heads-up on the future:

6. The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future

Author: Kevin Kelly

The key developments that will unfold over the next three decades and profoundly change our lives have already been set in motion by existing and evolving technologies. In other words, they are inevitable. Kelly, the Silicon Valley-based founder of Wired magazine, outlines how advances like artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and the on-demand economy will have a huge impact on our culture, our daily lives, our jobs, our educations, our communications, our perceptions, and our buying habits. Offering an optimistic view on an amazing and mind-boggling future, The Inevitable provides an insightful look at where we are headed. Such knowledge is extremely useful to those who make their living anticipating customer mindsets.

7. Small Data: The Tiny Clues that Uncover Huge Trends

Author: Martin Lindstrom

Like the Brady Bunch’s “Marcia, Marcia, Marcia,” lately it has been “Big Data, Big Data, Big Data” getting all the attention. But what about Small Data? What can it tell us? According to Martin Lindstrom, a global expert on brand building, the answer is … quite a lot. Lindstrom argues that useful, insightful market research calls for a deeper understanding of individuals and how they behave in context. That intimate understanding can only be gained from examining the clues gleaned by studying real people in their native environments ‒ their own homes ‒ and not by crunching numbers in huge, anonymous data sets. Lindstrom spends the vast majority of his time living in strangers’ houses and gets a front-row view of the elements that make up their daily lives ‒ their habits, routines, decors, technology usage, likes and dislikes, and so on. From these observations he derives people’s true desires and turns them into groundbreaking products for major companies.

8. Building the Internet of Things: Implement New Business Models, Disrupt Competitors, Transform Your Industry

Author: Maciej Kranz Wiley

“The Internet of Things” or “IoT” is a hot buzzword. It’s also a term that describes a somewhat complex subject ‒ the ever-increasing interconnectivity of computing devices and mechanical and digital machines, as well as the system in which everyday objects send and receive data. Wiley’s book describes some of the major impacts the IoT will have on both our personal and work lives and delivers a blueprint for businesses to take advantage of this major development and technological transformation. Building the Internet of Things explains how companies can create IoT strategies that capitalize on certain advances while avoiding disruption from others, and how the combination of people, processes, and data will provide new opportunities for organizational change and potentially huge benefits for businesses.

9. The Third Wave: An Entrepreneur’s Vision of the Future

Author: Steve Case

The Internet’s First Wave began when companies such as AOL ‒ which author Steve Case founded in 1985 ‒ established the foundation for consumers to connect to the Web. The Second Wave involved the creation of online search and social networking capabilities and the smartphone revolution. Now the Third Wave approaches. In this period, entrepreneurs will shape a transformation that will dramatically change the way we use and interact with major sectors such as health, education, transportation, energy, and food. Successfully navigating this unfolding era will require a specific skill set, which case lays out. He also explains how businesses ‒ and, inevitably, marketers ‒ will have to rethink their relationships with customers, competitors, and governments, and how they can craft sound and profitable strategies to prosper in the new age.

10. Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice

Authors: Clayton M. Christensen, Taddy Hall, Karen Dillon, David S. Duncan

For many years business experts have told us that “understanding the customer” is the key to innovation. According to Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen and his co-authors, however, the true catalyst for driving innovative success is not understanding the customer, but rather understanding the customer’s job. When people purchase a service or product they are basically “hiring” it to get a job done. If it does this job well, they “rehire” that same service or product. If not, it gets fired and the customers move on to hire something else. When companies truly understand what job their customer is looking to complete, they’re able to see beyond existing solutions. The writers argue that studying and analyzing the factors that prompt customers to hire a product or service is essential for any business looking to improve its performance by creating products that customers truly want ‒ and will pay top dollar for.

Creativity and Productivity

Marketers work in a demanding profession that requires elasticity, openness, forward thinking, imagination, an embrace of innovation, stamina, and a very strong work ethic. In other words, they need oodles of creativity and productivity. Here are five excellent 2016 books that offer great insight into making the most of both essential qualities:

11. Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind

Authors: Scott Barry Kaufman, Caroline Gregoire

Launched at the very end of December of 2015, Wired to Create is close enough to being a 2016 release for our purposes. Hey, we’re flexible ‒ and that’s one of the hallmarks of creativity. In this book, cognitive scientist and professor Kaufman and Huffington Post psychology and neuroscience writer Gregoire explore the mysteries of the creative mind. The book highlights research on the qualities and habits of very creative thinkers and takes a look at the lives of such diverse and accomplished figures as Pablo Picasso, Marcel Proust, John Lennon, and chess champion Josh Waitzkin, among many other well-known artists, musicians, writers, and innovators. Wired to Create gives readers a better understanding of creativity, suggests ways we can bring more of it into our work, and reassures us that a messy, nonlinear path to imaginative output is a-OK.

12. Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World

Author: Adam Grant

Adam Grant, the youngest-ever tenured business professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, explores how “original” thinkers can best change the world by adopting and advocating for unconventional, untraditional, and non-conformist ideas and practices and fighting “groupthink” ‒ but without risking it all. Grant offers insights into tapping our own buried creativity, building cultures that welcome dissent, managing fear and doubt, choosing the right time to act, forming coalitions with like-minded allies, and nurturing originality in kids. Through surprising stories from the worlds of business, politics, sports, and entertainment, Grant offers lessons in overturning the status quo garnered from a diverse range of people, including an entrepreneur who pitches his start-ups by highlighting the reasons not to invest, an Apple employee who challenged Steve Jobs from three levels below, and a billionaire financial genius who fires employees who fail to criticize him.

13. Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

Authors: Bill Burnett, Dave Evans Knopf

“Design thinking” helps people craft remarkable furniture and products ‒ but can it also help them craft fulfilling and meaningful lives? Silicon Valley veterans Bill Burnett and Dave Evans Knopf answer that question with a resounding Yes! Burnett, who is Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford, and Evans, an adjunct lecturer, management consultant, and co-founder of Electronic Arts, propose that it’s entirely possible to envision and shape a life you love, at any age, and no matter your background ‒ and you don’t even have to know your passion out of the starting gate. They discuss ways you can attract joy, constant creativity and productivity, and the potential for surprise. Additionally, the authors identify attitudes that often hold people back, such as assuming there’s only one correct route to an amazing life. Au contraire, say the professors ‒ the path is not narrow, but wide.

14. Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

Author: Cal Newport

Those of us in developed countries are used to multi-tab web browsing, jumping from smartphone app to smartphone app, and taking in bits and pieces of a constant stream of audio and visual stimuli. In short, our attention spans are short. This sea change in modern humans’ habits severely hinders our ability to complete “deep work” ‒ which Georgetown University computer science professor Newport defines as the act of focusing without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. Deep work, he says, is like a superpower in our current economy as “it enables you to quickly (and deliberately) learn complicated new skills and produce high-value output at a high rate.” It’s also an activity that brings meaning and fulfillment to our professional lives. Newport describes how we can improve our ability to work deeply and how we can make deep work a major part of our already busy schedules.

15. Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

Authors: Jake Knapp, Josh Zeratsky, Braden Knowitz

In business, a question lingers every single day of the year. Leaders and entrepreneurs ask themselves: What’s the most important place to focus our effort, and how do we start? Google designer Jake Knapp created a five-day process ‒ or “sprint” ‒ for answering this question, as well as others, such as: What will our idea look like in real life? How many meetings and discussions does it take before we can be sure we have the right solution? At Google, sprints were used on everything from Google Search to Google X. Knapp joined Braden Kowitz and John Zeratsky at Google Ventures, and together they’ve completed more than a hundred sprints with a diverse range of companies. This practical guide helps businesses solve critical dilemmas and it offers assistance to “anyone with a big opportunity, problem, or idea who needs to get answers today.”

16. Be Obsessed or Be Average

Author: Grant Cardone

Grant Cardone is now a multimillionaire entrepreneur and the creator of five successful companies and a best-selling author ‒ but before all that he was broke, out of work, and addicted to drugs. Although in his youth he’d harbored big dreams of wealth and fame, Cardone was persuaded by friends and family to “tone it down and play by the rules.” That strategy was a disaster. Cardone owes his life’s turnaround to his fierce embrace of one major quality: obsession. Being “unapologetically obsessed” makes you hyper-focused, persistent, creative “to the point of appearing magical,” and insatiably determined to win in a way that attracts great talent and brings out the best in other people. Cardone tells readers how to set crazy goals ‒ and reach them, how to value money and spend it on the right things to bring more money in, and how to use critics’ negativity as fuel for great achievement. After all, argues Cardone, why be average when you can be exceptional ‒ and exceptionally successful?

What do you think of our list? Were there any other outstanding business books that came out in 2016 that we missed? Let us know in the comments section!

A compelling, meaningful and relevant value proposition enables you to increase the quantity and quality of prospective opportunities, gain market share in your targeted segments, and charge a premium price. Conversely, poor positioning contributes to long sales cycles, low close rates, customer confusion, channel indifference, and sales organization discord. It’s nearly impossible to survive or thrive without a unique, pertinent value proposition. So, no wonder over 80% of the companies who participated in a recent survey said that their teams needed to adjust or re-think their company’s positioning strategy.

But most marketers are challenged to get it right. In his book entitled “On Competition” Michael Porter states that the three keys to strategic positioning include the creation of a unique value position, making trade-offs, which includes choosing what not to do (sometimes the hardest part), and creating fit among a company’s activities.

Your value proposition is the keystone to your strategy. Strategy decisions revolve around the needs of the customers, the business objectives of the organization, and the activities of your company. Only by understanding your market and customers and how your company fits in the competitive landscape can you formulate a value position that will enable your company to compete more successfully.

Components of a Compelling Value Proposition

Unique compelling value propositions are clear, concise and speak to:

1. Your customers’ unmet needs/problems
2. How your solution uniquely addresses those needs (solution value)
3. How your solution is better than other options on the market (your competitive differentiation)
4. Proof points for #2 and #3

Make Your Value Proposition Customer-Centric

The uniqueness of your value position depends on how much better you know and understand the needs of the markets you serve than your competitors. A customer-centric value proposition requires:

• Analysis and insights related to market requirements
• Your competitive differentiation

Connect Your Value Proposition With Your Customers

Developing a meaningful value proposition requires some good old fashioned research and thinking. To start developing your value proposition you’re going to need to conduct market research to understand market needs relative to what your business provides and what is important to them. Once you understand these two components, employ these 10 steps to a value proposition that connects to your customers’ needs:

1. Research and document your customers’ business needs – financially, competitively, and operationally, their goals plus future sales, marketing, and product development (etc.) activities.
2. Identify and record the issues and problems your customers are facing and will face in the future.
3. Research customer expectations for solutions to the problems they are facing. What do they expect to happen when they implement a solution? What do they expect not to happen or to avoid?
4. Assess and record industry trends, market trends, and your company’s capabilities.
5. Identify any constraints facing the industry.
6. Formulate how and to what extent your product/service and/or company addresses issues and needs in Steps 1-5.
7. Develop a realistic group of potential experiences and results your customer can have as a result of applying each item you formulated in Step 6.
8. Select and test the value that delivers the best experience and results.
9. Develop a value proposition statement.
10. Test the value proposition and collect data points on how well the real experience and results tracks to the claim of the value proposition. Modify as needed.

It’s Easy to Get Started and to Avoid the Common Pitfalls

While the task is challenging, because a unique and compelling value proposition increases the quantity and quality of your leads and pipeline, revenue, and market share, it is an imperative strategic initiative. Sometimes the best way to begin is with an internal dialogue. But trying to develop a strategic positioning platform and key messages internally without assistance from outside the organization often results in vague, inside-out, myopic, and ultimately unbelievable positioning. The reason for this failure is that office politics and deeply held biases heavily influence internal teams. To speed your initiative and avoid these potential pitfalls, check out our interactive, cost-effective positioning and messaging workshop.

In our previous article, we covered how to find and target your audience by selecting the right social networks for distribution, defining content sharing patterns and generating content consistently. These are basic considerations in any social media strategy, but on their own they aren’t enough to establish an effective acquisition channel – social posts also need to be optimized for reaching new audiences and engaging existing followers. This is the topic we’re going to cover in the following article.

There are many ways in which people get exposed to new content on social media: On Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook, people discover content through news-feeds, notifications and search. Each social network comes with its specific nuances of these three exposure factors. On Twitter, for example, you can see content in a home feed, in a list, by getting mentioned, by visiting a profile or by searching for a keyword or a hashtag.

For these reasons, social posts need to be optimized to reach the most people while considering the specifics of each social network. For example, optimizing for a news feed requires snappy annotations and good images, optimization for search requires good keywords and hashtags, and optimizing for notifications requires tagging. Taking the time to improve the way a post is served and adhering to a few best practices is guaranteed to multiply your visibility and engagement rates.

Ahead is a concise overview of the best content sharing practices based mostly on a subset of our data consisting of 12 million social posts.

Best Annotation Structure

There are many headline structures that work and I encourage you to experiment to find the best ones for your specific audience. There is, however, a single structure that has brought more clicks than any other over the years. This structure was identified by Jeff Goins and has proven to be extremely successful at driving engagement with social posts:

Number or Trigger word + Adjective + Keyword + Promise

Following this structure, the headline for this article could have been something like this:

8 Proven Ways to Help You Write Amazing Annotations

The correct sentence structure and the location of mentions, hashtags and links in an annotation can make a big difference to your post’s reach and engagement.

Optimal Annotation Length

According to our data, the optimal length for annotations in 2016 is between 6 and 9 words. It’s significantly less than in 2013 when Outbrain identified the optimal length to be 16-18 words. The difference is not surprising considering that the amount of online content has multiplied by 8 since Outbrain’s publication. This inevitably leads to shorter attention spans and hence better performance of shorter headlines.

Here’s how inboundli ensures that your annotations are of recommended length:

Best Words to Use in a Headline

Our data showed that 90% of social posts that go viral contain a few common adjectives, nouns and verbs. Here are the top 5 from each category:

Punctuation Best Practices (Applicable to All Social Networks)

Punctuation can affect engagement in various degrees. Below are punctuation practices where we were able to clearly correlate and measure the impact on engagement.

• Put words that describe the content in square brackets
  • +5% engagement
  • Example: “How to Write Annotations That Get Noticed [Infographic]”
• Add an exclamation mark (!) or a question mark (?)
  • +3% in engagement
  • Example: “Write Annotations That Get Noticed!”
• Break an annotation into a headline and sub headline using an en-dash (–) or colon (:)
  • +4% engagement
  • Example: “Writing Amazing Annotations – 15 Content Experts Share Their Experience”
• Insert numbers (preferably odd) at the beginning of an annotation.
  • +16% engagement
  • Example: “11 Little Known Ways to Write Amazing Annotations”
• Use up to two emoticons per post and keep them positive
  • +12% engagement
  • Example: “These 7 Brands Mastered the Art of Annotations – #5 is Hilarious :D”
• Write headlines in all caps
  • +7% engagement
  • Example: “ALL CAPS: HOW TO WRITE HEADLINES THAT STAND OUT”

Introducing emoticons, exclamation marks, brackets or numbers is likely to boost your engagement. Nevertheless, these elements should be used only when appropriate as headlines that are overloaded with them run the risk of appearing clickbait-like. Clickbait headlines will erode your brand’s authority over time.

Tagging Best Practices

Tagging is a great way to reach out to strangers on social media because people are likely to get a notification in their social account or email when tagged. Although sharing many similarities, tagging works slightly differently on each social platform:

Twitter

Twitter has it’s own name for tagging called mentioning. When curating content, it’s a good practice to mention the content publisher using the “via @name” syntax and the author using the “by @name” syntax. This often results in direct interaction with the content’s publisher or author who may be valuable influencers to connect with. If the content you are sharing is clearly relevant to a customer or prospect, you might want to consider mentioning them as well in which case you can omit the “via” and “by” prepositions. You can also tag people in images that you post on Twitter but it should be done with extra care when tagging from company profiles.

Facebook

You can tag people, companies and groups on Facebook by using the “@name” syntax or by tagging them in a photo. Tagging people in a photo as a company page can be awkward, which is why it’s important that the context is very clear to the person being tagged. Private profiles can tag their contacts using the “tag people” button, which might be suitable for industry events but should generally be avoided.

LinkedIn

You can tag people and companies in updates only from a private profile (company pages can’t tag people). This is hardly limiting because all the useful outreach and sales workflows on LinkedIn require private profiles anyway.

To make things easier, some social publishing tools such as HubSpot will introduce the right tag inside the annotation automatically. Here is what automatic tagging looks like in inboundli:

Hashtags Best Practices

Hashtags are a great way to extend the reach of your posts by helping strangers to more easily find your content. As with tagging, hashtags share similar mechanics across social networks, but unique nuances exist on each network.

Twitter

Using 1-3 hashtags per post will boost your visibility but using more than 3 hashtags will make your posts look spammy and will reduce engagement. Not using hashtags at all will reduce the reach of your post.

When using hashtags, it’s important to make sure that they are specific to your industry and don’t have other meanings on Twitter (when in doubt, it’s better to find another hashtag). To check for ambiguity, you can search for the hashtag on Twitter and see what comes up in the search results. For example, if you look for “engagement”, you will find a lot of content about weddings rather than content about improving engagement rates on social media.

Facebook

Over the last year, we spotted growth in hashtag adoption on Facebook and using 1-2 hashtags can add noticeable visibility to your posts. Since you are practically unlimited in annotation space on Facebook, putting hashtags after the annotation text will prevent your posts from appearing spammy and will deliver more engagements. Like on Twitter, it’s important to check the context of the hashtags you want to use. The nice thing about Facebook is that it will show you how many people are talking about a hashtag when you type it in the search field.

LinkedIn

LinkedIn doesn’t support hashtags.

In inboundli, we address hashtags by recommending the most relevant hashtags to use for a specific post and sorting hashtags by their search volumes on social networks:

Image Size Best Practices

Using images results in an average 160% increase in engagement with posts. It’s important to make sure that images are of optimal sizes and look the best they can on your social feeds.

Twitter

• Recommended dimensions: 506 * 253 px
• Minimum dimensions: 440 * 220 px
• Maximum dimensions: 1024 * 512 px

Facebook

Recommended dimensions: 1200 * 630 px

LinkedIn

• Image post: 531 * 400 px
• Link to an article: keep a 0.61 width to height ratio (width * 0.61 = height) or 1.63 height to width ratio (height * 1.63 = width)

Here is a useful spreadsheet maintained by Sprout Social which summarizes image sizes on social media: “Always Up-To-Date Social Media Image Sizes Cheat Sheet”.

inboundli automatically pulls images and GIFs from an article. It then filters them by file size and dimensions to ensure that you select from images that are optimized for your social channels:

Other Media

Videos, podcasts and GIFs are a great way to capture attention and generate engagement on social media. Although these media types are much more effective for B2C companies, they can be useful in B2B industries when done right. In depth videos and podcasts are good for engaging B2B audiences, and from a personal observation, data and workflow visualizations fare especially well in a GIF format.

An example GIF of the workflow to optimize a post in inboundli:

Summary

You already did the hardest part – creating or finding great content to share! So don’t let the content get lost in a torrent of millions of posts that are published on social media every single minute. Putting just a bit of extra effort into optimizing your post will result in a significant boost to your reach and engagement as you make your posts searchable, visible and targeted.

Below is an infographic that sums up the main points from this article and can be a useful reference when crafting social posts.

Infographic design by Sveta Sobolev

'AirBar' is a magnetic device that you attach to the bottom of your regular laptop screen turns it into a touchscreen.

It works with PC laptops that are 13-inch to 15-inch wide, as well as the MacBook Air. Read more...

The US payments ecosystem is in the midst of a shift toward mobile, and countless new and old stakeholders are attempting to accelerate this migration, which is moving at a glacial pace relative to other markets globally. But mobile payments can rise to the mainstream. For companies seeking to build out a robust mobile payments product, China's thriving mobile payments ecosystem offers some insight — and some lessons.  

Total mobile payments volume in China will reach $6.3 trillion by 2020, according to our estimates based on iResearch data. This marks a healthy 33% five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR). In comparison, the US will generate $154 billion in mobile payments volume this year by our estimates, which amounts to just 6.5% of China's mobile payments volume. 

Even accounting for population discrepancies, China will generate over $1,700 in mobile payments volume per capita in 2016, compared with $475 in the US, based on forecasts from BI Intelligence and eMarketer. China's advantage will eventually diminish, but it will still produce around twice as much volume per capita in 2020. 

China has unique factors buoying the industry, like the dominance of mobile phones, a lack of legacy infrastructure, and the surging popularity of digital retail marketplaces. Some of the characteristics behind the country's success can be mimicked, or even replicated to some extent, in other markets like the US. However, one fundamental barrier in the US is that it's being forced to layer mobile payments on top of an existing payments system, and the ecosystem is very fragmented.

A new report from BI Intelligence takes a deep dive into China's mobile payments ecosystem and deciphers which growth drivers can be exported to the US to help spark its relatively lackluster market. 

Here are some of the key takeaways:

• China claims the world's largest mobile payments market and serves as the global benchmark for other markets to pursue. China will process a whopping $6.3 trillion in total mobile payments by 2020, according to our estimates based on iResearch data. This marks a healthy 33% five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
• It dwarfs the US' mobile payments industry. The US will generate $154 billion in mobile payments volume this year by our estimates, which equates to just 6.5% of China's mobile payments volume. Meanwhile, China will generate over $1,700 in mobile payments volume per capita in 2016, compared with $475 in the US, based on forecasts from BI Intelligence and eMarketer.
• Mobile commerce, a lack of legacy infrastructure, and marketplaces have fueled China's enormous success. Consumers in China are much more comfortable shopping on their mobile phones compared with their counterparts in the US, and the devices face less resistance from other legacy payments methods like credit cards. The open approach to mobile shopping has been fortified by Alibaba, a Goliath-sized marketplace, and WeChat, a go-to messaging platform, which support Alipay and Tenpay, respectively. 

In full, the report:

• Forecasts and compares mobile payments volume, in-store mobile payments users, mobile payments volume per capita, and mobile commerce penetration in China and the US. 
• Overviews the key competitors in China's mobile payments market, and how new entrants may shuffle the hierarchy of dominant players.
• Uncovers the key drivers propelling China's mobile payments market.
• Identifies which drivers the US can import from China, and which barriers may be standing in the way.

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

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

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NOW WATCH: JIM ROGERS: The worst crash in our lifetime is coming

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The UK's fintech sector overwhelmingly supported remaining in the EU in the runup to June's referendum. And after the Brexit vote, many industry leaders expressed concerns about difficulties bringing in foreign talent and losing access to the single market, among others. 

Now, as Brexit looms closer, France sees an opportunity to lure these concerned fintechs to its own shores by promoting advantages it believes the UK will lose following its exit, according to a report by Europlace, a French lobbying group, and Axelle Lemaire, France's digital minister. Lemaire told Business Insider that "many" UK companies had already made inquiries about moving to or at least expanding into France. 

Here are the reasons why France might prove attractive to UK fintechs, according to Lemaire and Europlace: 

• Fintech-friendly regulation. Lemaire called attention to a new law that sets a threshold below which no authorization from regulators is needed to start a fintech business, and said that domestic regulators have also established a "one-stop shop" to fast track registration and authorization for foreign startups. In addition, France recently reformed its notoriously complex labor laws, making it easier for employers to fire employees and make negotiations with labor unions, which have historically held disproportionate influence. However, France's labor laws are still some of Europe's most convoluted, prompting several candidates in France's presidential election to run on a platform to cut down the legislation dramatically. Also, French regulators have not yet been as active as the UK's FCA in promoting fintech. 
• Privileges for tech entrepreneurs. Lemaire says that 180 foreign entrepreneurs have applied for and were granted France's "Tech Ticket" package. The program, launched in September 2016, includes a €45,000 ($47,000) grant, visa facilities, and fast-track administrative procedures. Although the package offers features that other European countries have long had in place, its newness is likely to attract the attention of UK fintechs worried specifically about tighter immigration controls and a closing of borders.
• A healthy investment climate. According to Lemaire, while investment in UK fintech dropped recently, it increased in France by 71% from January to September 2016. However, it's worth noting that even though UK investment has slowed, none of the top 10 European fintech deals in Q3 2016 were made in France. Germany pulled ahead of France in this respect, with deals reaching a volume of $77 million, according to KPMG. 
• Infrastructure. France has recently launched several incubators and financial services centers, including the 30,000 square meter Station F incubator and Finance Innovation, a hub for financial firms, which will likely prove attractive to startups, including those in the fintech sector. Moreover, in 2013, a €20 billion ($21 billion) program was launched to roll out super-fast internet across the whole of France. In the UK, the government has been making efforts to promote fintech in areas outside London: This suggests that some UK entrepreneurs are struggling with the high cost of living in the British capital. Given that office real estate in France is far cheaper than in the UK, a greater focus on building out tech infrastructure in the country could attract UK fintech talent.
• Tax benefits. Europlace emphasized that the corporation tax in France will soon be cut from more than 33% to 28%, and that the government will cut taxes for companies employing staff in France. In addition, it will reduce taxes for shares distributed by startups to their employees and allow angel investors to make tax-free investments in French startups. As a whole, these are attractive changes, but it is worth bearing in mind that the UK's current corporation tax of 20% is lower than France's will be even after it is cut. Moreover, the UK also allows tax-free investments in startups and charges lower taxes on startup shares for employees. Additionally, many other European countries also offer similar tax breaks. 

Even with several caveats, the UK risks losing its lead as rival hubs successfully copy the model that made it a fintech leader. France is a prime example of this: It is rapidly mimicking the features that have most drawn startups to the UK, including friendly regulation and tax breaks. More importantly, it is combining these elements with advantages that the UK may lose, such as access to the EU market, or that it has never boasted, like easy visa procedures and affordable real estate. As such, as a hard Brexit looks increasingly likely, the UK cannot afford to be complacent about protecting its fintech lead. 

We’ve entered the most profound era of change for financial services companies since the 1970s brought us index mutual funds, discount brokers and ATMs.

No firm is immune from the coming disruption and every company must have a strategy to harness the powerful advantages of the new fintech revolution.

The battle already underway will create surprising winners and stunned losers among some of the most powerful names in the financial world: The most contentious conflicts (and partnerships) will be between startups that are completely reengineering decades-old practices, traditional power players who are furiously trying to adapt with their own innovations, and total disruption of established technology & processes:

• Traditional Retail Banks vs. Online-Only Banks: Traditional retail banks provide a valuable service, but online-only banks can offer many of the same services with higher rates and lower fees

• Traditional Lenders vs. Peer-to-Peer Marketplaces: P2P lending marketplaces are growing much faster than traditional lenders—only time will tell if the banks strategy of creating their own small loan networks will be successful

• Traditional Asset Managers vs. Robo Advisors: Robo advisors like Betterment offer lower fees, lower minimums and solid returns to investors, but the much larger traditional asset managers are creating their own robo-products while providing the kind of handholding that high net worth clients are willing to pay handsomely for.

As you can see, this very fluid environment is creating winners and losers before your eyes…and it’s also creating the potential for new cost savings or growth opportunities for both you and your company.

After months of researching and reporting this important trend, Sarah Kocianski, senior research analyst for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has put together an essential report on the fintech ecosystem that explains the new landscape, identifies the ripest areas for disruption, and highlights the some of the most exciting new companies. These new players have the potential to become the next Visa, Paypal or Charles Schwab because they have the potential to transform important areas of the financial services industry like:

• Retail banking

• Lending and Financing

• Payments and Transfers
• 
Wealth and Asset Management

• Markets and Exchanges

• Insurance

• Blockchain Transactions


If you work in any of these sectors, it’s important for you to understand how the fintech revolution will change your business and possibly even your career. And if you’re employed in any part of the digital economy, you’ll want to know how you can exploit these new technologies to make your employer more efficient, flexible and profitable.

Among the big picture insights you'll get from The Fintech Ecosystem Report: Measuring the effects of technology on the entire financial services industry:

• Fintech investment continues to grow. After landing at $19 billion in total in 2015, global fintech funding had already reached $15 billion by mid-August 2016.
• The areas of fintech attracting media and investor attention are changing. Insurtech, robo advisors, and digital-only banks are only a few of the segments making waves. B2B fintechs are also playing an increasingly prominent role in the ecosystem. 
• It's not all good news for fintechs. Major hurdles, including customer acquisition and profitability, remain. As a result, many are becoming more willing to enter partnerships and adjust their business models. 
• Incumbents are enacting strategies to ensure they remain relevant. Many financial firms have woken up to the threat posed by fintechs and are implementing innovation strategies to stave off disruption. The majority of these strategies involve some interaction with fintech firms. 
• The relationship between incumbents and fintechs continues to evolve. Fintechs are no longer viewed exclusively as a threat, nor can they be ignored. They are increasingly viewed as partners, but that narrative alone is too simple — in reality, a more nuanced connection is taking hold. 

This exclusive report also:

• Assesses the state of the fintech industry. 
• Gives details on the drivers of its growth. 
• Explains which areas of fintech are gaining traction. 
• Outlines the range of current and potential models for fintech and incumbent interaction. 

The Fintech Ecosystem Report: Measuring the effects of technology on the entire financial services industry is how you get the full story on the fintech revolution.

To get your copy of this invaluable guide to the fintech revolution, choose one of these options:

1. Subscribe to an ALL-ACCESS Membership with BI Intelligence and gain immediate access to this report AND over 100 other expertly researched deep-dive reports, subscriptions to all of our daily newsletters, and much more. >> START A MEMBERSHIP
2. Purchase the report and download it immediately from our research store. >> BUY THE REPORT

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the fast-moving world of financial technology.

Join the conversation about this story »

Ever had to listen to yourself repeating the same instructions to coworkers?

Are you struggling to remember how to complete a task you last tackled a month ago?

Remember feeling frustrated by the time and effort wasted?

It doesn’t have to be this way.

Picture this:

You need Jane to take over some of your tasks because you’re moving onto another project.

It all seems simple enough to you, but there’s a lot of moving parts – and plenty of margin for error.

There are email templates you’ve been using for months, and pages of guidelines to stick to.

You explain the general idea to Jane before signing off with an admission of guilt: the best way you can think of to say that you know you haven’t explained a task properly is “Let me know if you have any questions”.

A week later, you find everything is a total mess.

Consistency of work is all over the place, and you wonder “How did this make it through the approval process?’.

Then you remember: there is no approval process. At least to Jane’s knowledge.

For you, the task was simple. For anyone else it was a confusing nightmare.

Our Success Lives And Dies By The Quality Of Our Processes

A thorough set of processes is what separates success from an embarrassing shambles.

It may sound boring and bureaucratic, but trust me – you don’t know the meaning of the word boring until you’ve explained the same task over and over to different people.

And the great thing is that you can create processes for pretty much anything.

As a rule of thumb, I recommend you formalize processes for any task you do more than twice.

That’s why processes are 100% necessary for success in our roles, and ultimately for businesses too.

What Exactly Is A Process?

To summarize in a sentence: a process is a set of instructions for carrying out a specific task.

For example, as a writer I often need to edit content for various purposes, meaning I regularly use an editing process. Here’s a sample of it:

1. Wait for a day before editing
2. Split the article into sections
3. Check for spelling and grammar errors
4. Check for inconsistent phrases
5. Fact-check the article
6. Remove adverbs and filler words
7. Convert from the passive voice to the active voice

Now, obviously these simplified task overviews aren’t all that’s in the process. You’re going to need to flesh out the steps with text, maybe images, videos or file uploads.

For example, with the 2nd step, I’ve added clarifying information:

Since we’ve made creating processes our topic of expertise, as well as using Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) for ourselves, we also create SOPs for our customers so they can systemize things like client data backup and software deployment.

While you’d expect process creation to take a lot of time, it generally takes an hour or two at first but pays off massively in the long run.

The editing checklist shown above took me an afternoon to create (it’s detailed, but most of it is for training purposes, not execution) and has been used ever since to train new writers.

Another vital process we’re currently perfecting is our customer support process. For support trainees, it covers exactly what to do with 95% of the tickets we get in.

Since leads could theoretically ask us about anything, it has taken a long time to perfect. It includes references to saved replies, procedures for sales and marketing, as well as how to test and report technical issues.

Sometimes there’s nothing you can do to make a lightweight process, because it’s better to make a process that covers all eventualities than it is to make one that falls through most of the time.

Now I’ve shown you some examples, I’ll tell you how we write them.

How To Write The Perfect Process

In your experience with SOPs, you might have seen a couple of different kinds:

• Option #1: Ruthlessly thorough, legal document-style processes.
• Option #2: Amateurish, incomplete processes

Both of them have the same common issue: usability. This brings me to my first point:

The Current Assignee Should Write The Process

In The Checklist Manifesto — one of the best books about processes — the author interviews Daniel Boorman, the man in charge of writing SOPs for pilots at Boeing.

“Bad checklists are vague and imprecise. They are too long; they are hard to use; they are impractical. They are made by desk jockeys with no awareness of the situations in which they are to be deployed. They treat the people using the tools as dumb and try to spell out every single step. They turn people’s brains off rather than turn them on.” — Daniel Boorman

Not only will it waste an unnecessary amount of time having someone learn a task from scratch so they can write a process, it will probably be a perfect how-to guide on how to make a quick job long-winded.

Someone with experience doesn’t just know a way to do it, they know the best way to do it.

So the best person to write up a process is the one currently performing the task itself.

Write Like You Speak

No one’s going to be impressed by your ability to complicate their job, so it’s best to write in the tone you’d use to speak.

Compare:

• Option #1: Input the contents of document 368 into the “body” field before depressing the “send” element.
• Option #2: Paste this: [content here]. Hit send.

If option #1 wasn’t so verbosely hilarious, it’d be enough to bore anyone to quit their job. Option #2 is the clear winner in this fictitious comparison because it’s clear, concise and intelligible.

A pair of fantastic resources I often reference for this are:

Politics and the English Language — George Orwell

On Writing Well — William Zinsser

You’d be surprised at how Orwell’s essay on political language translates to writing processes.

The Process For Creating A Process

The most efficient way I’ve found for creating a process is to record my screen while I do the task. Afterwards, I make a list in WorkFlowy of what I did, step-by-step.

This means I can naturally do the task then properly write the process and not slip up by trying to do too many things at once.

Once I’ve got a draft I’ll check if it’s concise or if I’ve overlooked anything. I’ll screenshot the screencast and annotate them using Evernote, then send it over to the person who needs to follow it with the original screencast attached.

Either by sitting next to them or video calling them, I’ll be there while the assignee goes through the process, and see if there are any parts that are unclear.

If they make a mistake, I know it’s my fault for not optimizing the process, so I edit it as I go so it doesn’t happen again.

After that, it’s all smooth sailing.

I usually make good use of the last step to demonstrate my keen sense of humor:

And there you have it.

From now on your only operational problems will be the result of un-optimized processes, which is much easier to fix than days of shabby work.

Any tips or stories to share about processes? Let me know in the comments!

A discount can help accelerate a slow-moving deal, create goodwill, and give you leverage for requesting concessions.

But you’ll only reap these benefits by discounting strategically -- not whenever your prospect asks for one.

Promising your prospect a discount before the actual negotiation can have three negative consequences:

1. The buyer subconsciously attributes less value to you and your product. After all, if its ROI is what you claim, why are you so willing to sell it for less?
2. The focus shifts from value to price. Instead of talking and thinking about your product’s potential impact on their business, the prospect is thinking about how much it costs.
3. You lose some of your bargaining power. Successful negotiations require give-and-take.

If you offer a discount in the beginning stages of the sales process, you’ll miss the opportunity to ask for something in return because you don’t yet know what your prospect wants. That sets a dangerous precedent of one-way concessions.

When the time comes to put together the actual agreement, the buyer will be accustomed to getting what they ask for without giving anything up.

Of course, responding to discount inquiries during the actual negotiation is challenging too. You must satisfy your prospect’s expectations without destroying your profit margin.

If you’re struggling to find the right words, use these replies throughout the sales conversation. And if your prospect says, "It costs too much," we've got a few answers for you here.

How to Negotiate with Clients on Pricing and Discount Requests

During the Connect Call

1. “You’re asking the right person. But before we discuss discounting, let’s figure out what you’re looking for in an offering. That will allow me to give you a far more accurate estimate."

If the price of your product or service largely depends on the individual prospect’s needs, goals, and situation, it’s too early to discuss discounts. Without knowing the final value of the deal, you can’t determine a rate that will both satisfy them and keep you in business.

 

Hello [Prospect name],

I appreciate your question. Before we talk about discounting, I'd love to find out a little more about the pain points and priorities of Wakanda Labs -- to ensure I can make the best recommendation on how we can help. 

I think we should set up a 30-minute call this week. Would you like to book a time on my calendar that's convenient for you? [Insert calendar link here]

Best,

[Your Name]

Brushing off the prospect’s question will make you seem more interested in your agenda than their own. Instead, acknowledge them and explain why it’s mutually beneficial to table this discussion until later.

2. “Good question. Do you see price being a major obstacle to this purchase?"

There are some objections that can't be overcome. If your prospect’s request comes right after they've asked for pricing information or your prices are available online, it’s possible they don't have the budget to purchase your product at full price. They're trying to learn whether you’ll consider a discount. Say no, and they’ll likely walk away.

Alternatively, they might be capable of paying the normal rate -- but interested in getting a discount if they can.

This question helps you figure out the buyer’s motivations. If they respond that price won’t be an issue, use response number one. If they say it is, delve deeper into their financial situation. You might need to disqualify them if your product is too far out of his reach.

During the Sales Presentation or Product Demonstration

3. “We can definitely have a conversation about specific numbers, but let’s make sure we’re on the same page about this solution being a good fit for your needs."

At this stage of the sales conversation, a discount request usually indicates the prospect’s desire to buy. Since they agreed to a demo or presentation, they’re clearly interested in the product -- now they’re thinking about the details of the purchase.

However, don’t promise them a discount just yet. Automatically granting their request will make you seem overly eager to close, which will work against you during the actual negotiation. It may also lead your prospect to wonder if they’ve misjudged your product’s value.

Use this response to delay the conversation. You’re not saying a discount is off the table -- but you’re reminding the prospect it’s not relevant until you’re both certain there’s mutual fit.

Negotiation

4. “Why?"

Speaker and writer Jurgen Appelo recommends using this simple and effective response when you’re negotiating with buyers who are haggling for the sake of it.

“My problem with this attitude is that such clients assume that I am intentionally overpaid and that, with some negotiation, it should be possible to talk the fee down to the ‘proper’ price," he explains.

In Appelo’s experience, prospects will often say they were “just wondering" and will go on to pay the entire price.

 

Hello [Prospect name],

I appreciate you asking about discounted pricing. Can I ask why you're seeking a discount? I'd love to learn a little more about your budget and understand if I can explain the value of our solution further.

I'd be happy to jump on a quick call today or tomorrow. Feel free to book some time on my calendar here: [Insert calendar link]

Regards,

[Your name]

“Notice that I don't say ‘no’ to people who ask me for a discount," he adds. “It's quite possible that they have a very good reason! It all comes down to customizing the value exchange."

For example, the buyer might be dealing with a seasonal budget or experiencing a short-term cash deficit. Consider discounting in these cases -- but make sure you ask for something in return.

5. “I can offer you a discount if we [extend the contract, adjust the terms of payment, go with X package or tier, register Y seats]."

Compromise is essential to most negotiations. By offering a quid pro quo discount, both you and the buyer will come out ahead.

It’s a good idea to walk into the discussion with several non-monetary requests, which will help you open up the negotiating possibilities beyond price.

6. “What would be a reasonable discount?"

MTD Sales Training managing director Sean McPheat suggests using the prospect’s response to turn the question around.

If your product is $10,000 and the buyer says she’d like a 15% discount, ask, “Are you saying you think $10,000 is too expensive for [product] or you don’t want to spend more than $8,500?"

This reveals whether they’re not sold on the true value of your product or simply can’t afford it. If it’s the latter, offer them a reduced or less comprehensive option.

You might say, “Previously, you chose [more expensive option] because [it would help you accomplish X in less time, provide maximum cost-benefit savings, ensure you had enough coverage, etc.] But we do offer [less expensive option] for $7,600 if you don’t want to spend more."

According to McPheat, this offer lets you maintain your margins while maintaining value.

If your prospect says they want the more expensive product at the lower price, on the other hand, return to the value conversation.

Responding to a discount request sample letter:

 

Hello [Prospect name],

Your current product requires repairs and maintenance work approximately 10 times per year, which accounts for $3,300 in service and labor fees. You also paid $670 for new parts.

Our data shows these machines tend to break down twice as often after their third year in use, so next year you should expect to spend at least $7,000 for the same costs.

In addition, your productivity is seriously impacted each time it’s not in use -- costing you roughly $2,000 this year and an estimated $4,000 next year. Our product will save you upwards of $11,000 in just one year.

Does that justify the price I quoted you?

Thanks,

Mike

Once the buyer remembers your product will save them money in the long run, they’ll probably back off or soften their request.

7. "What would need to happen to make our offering worth the price I quoted you?"

When a prospect pushes back on price, it's possible they don't have the budget for your product/service. It's also possible you simply haven't done a good enough job of selling it.

By asking "What would need to happen to make our offering more valuable to you?" You can uncover gaps in the case you've made and identify objections that might still exist.

It allows you to add or argue value for your offering and -- if you meet the needs outlined by your prospect -- to earn full price.

8. "Would a month-to-month plan be enough to get you to close today?"

You may not be able to offer this. But month-to-month plans can be a great way to get prospects to close without discounting your product/service. Month-to-month plans are usually easier for prospects to get approved than annual contracts.

If you believe this prospect is a great fit for your solution, a month-to-month contract shouldn't scare you. Instead, you get the chance to prove your value to your prospect-turned-customer and earn the annual contract -- or the cross-sell or upsell -- in the future.

9. "What if we connect next quarter? Do you think you'd have more budget open up then?"

Sometimes your solution is just not in the cards for a prospect's budget. Hopefully, you've discovered this early in the buyer's journey, before you've devoted too much time to trying to close them now.

Make sure you've exhausted all opportunities to work with a prospect who's really enthusiastic about your offer. But, if the budget just isn't there, you can gently ask this question to lead both parties into the best option at the moment.

With these responses up your sleeve, you won’t dread hearing the word “discount" from your prospects.

Want to learn more? Get a list of customizable sales scripts for handling objections here. And find the ultimate guide to handling sales objections here.

If you’ve made the decision to increase your content marketing efforts, improve your overall campaign performance, or fill gaps in your current content processes, there seems to be no shortage of solutions. You could hire internal specialists, work closely with a consultant, batch together a mix of freelancers, off-load everything to a professional agency, or, if you’re like most marketing teams, manage some combination of them all.

Learn about the pros and cons of hiring freelancers, contractors, consultants, agencies, and internal hires, so that you can make a confident and informed decision when executing your content marketing needs moving forward.

Hiring Contractors, Freelancers, and Consultants

Whether you need them for a single project, every few months, or for ongoing challenges, building relationships with quality contract professionals can help you tackle even the most niche content marketing tasks.

Freelancers are typically hard workers who are eager to prove their value, because their business depends on recurring work and satisfied clients. While some choose to work on retainer, others work by the hour, charge by the word, or prefer a project-based agreement.

Since this content marketing solution is often arranged through a 1099 contract, this minimizes risk and expenses for your organization. For example, there is usually much less HR paperwork to sift through, less onboarding, and no guarantee of benefits such as paid time-off or 401k.

Contractors are available with a variety of skill sets, expertise, and budget options. This means that the key to hiring a great consultant or freelancer is to be very clear in what your organization is looking to accomplish.

Start by considering the expertise and resources that you already have at your disposal. Think beyond your team’s functional skills and execution, and look at the type of work that they are strongest at executing. For example, some content managers are strategic thinkers and long term planners, some are more creation-oriented, and others are excellent at administrative tasks, organization, and process management.

After you’ve identified the type of contractor that you are looking for, the next step is to hone in on a budget. Consider the quality of work that needs to be performed, what a successful project will look like, and how much all of it will be worth to your marketing team. Remember, while freelancers can be a cost-effective solution, it’s not always best to find the cheapest solution.

Working with a Professional Marketing Agency

Marketing agencies often offer full-service solutions, optimized content marketing processes, and detailed reports or analytics of the work that they perform.

The larger firms that work with the likes of Under Armour, Chevrolet, or Nike are known for crafting nationally-recognized campaigns that drive millions of impressions and personalized brand experiences—but also come with a hefty retainer fee. Smaller agencies typically specialize in niche areas of expertise, such as SEO, video production, or web design and can offer more budget-friendly solutions.

The ideal agency relationship is typically more long-term than a relationship with a contractor or freelancer. Again, since agencies come in a variety of shapes and sizes, the key to finding a strong solution is to be crystal-clear on what you are looking to accomplish and do your due diligence on researching potential partnerships.

After you’ve identified your core content needs and a handful of possible agency solutions, it’s time to dive deep. In addition to inspecting each agency’s web content, reviews and testimonials, and service offerings, you should research their employees on LinkedIn and other applicable social channels.

Ask the agency to share who will be responsible for working on your account, and then find their profile on LinkedIn to assess whether they have the background and skill set to accommodate your content needs. For example, if your team needs help with search engine optimization, you should identify whether the professionals assigned to your account have an extensive background in SEO and any other complementary skills that could be helpful to your cause. The agency should also openly share examples of work that they have created for other clients—specifically from an industry similar to your own.

While this process can be time-consuming, by assessing the background of any professional that you may work with for talent, expertise, functionality, and overall compatibility, you can make a better decision when choosing an agency partner.

Building Your Internal Marketing Department

Building an internal content marketing department is often the most expensive route to take initially when you consider recruiting and talent search, HR, benefits and insurance, and onboarding time. However, internal hires can be the strongest long-term investment if handled appropriately. (highlight to tweet)

Today’s content marketing is often complex with best practices quickly evolving. The key to building a successful internal content marketing department is to organize a team of professionals with mixed yet complementary skills and strong communication, rather than several rockstar experts. Concentrate on creating a team of collaborators that understand how to work and grow together while adapting to uncertainty through a changing industry.

To find a great internal content hire, start by thinking about the key areas you need help in on a fundamental level. Think about the administrative, leadership, creative, strategic, and execution needs of your content department, and make a short list of must-have attributes. Conceptualizing your needs can help you determine what factors are most important in a new hire and help you narrow in on the right type of candidate. It’s important to prioritize these attributes—it’s unrealistic to expect to find a professional that checks all the boxes, particularly in smaller job marketers.

If you have niche needs or are having trouble finding the ideal candidate near your office location, consider interviewing remote candidates.

Remember that software expertise can be learned over time, but general marketing and content knowledge can take much longer to build.

When considering budget, the costs associated will ultimately depend on each candidate’s experience and your organization’s geographic location and need. For example, if your company is in a smaller or less-competitive market, salaries tend to be much smaller, whereas Silicon Valley content marketers will likely be much more expensive. To get a stronger idea on how much other organizations are paying for talent, look at sites such as Glassdoor, Indeed, and PayScale. Remember to also consider the types of skills needed for each position, because those factors can great impact salary.

The correct content marketing solution is typically a combination of the solutions listed above. You should experiment with, or at least speak with, a few of different types of content solution options to find how each can help your business accomplish your unique content goals.

Have you hired freelance employees, worked with a content marketing agency, or hired an internal content team?What sort of challenges did you have to overcome? Did you find more success with internal hires or external resources? Share your experiences and any feedback that you may have below.

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The running joke in our office is, “Pitching isn’t easy.” Ask any PR professional, and they’ll definitely agree. It can be a challenge to build relationships with publications, journalists, and influencers as a means of building brand awareness and reaching a targeted audience. That’s why my team at Fractl surveyed 1,300 publishers across all beats and authorities to get a better understanding of what they’re looking for and what they’re vehemently ignoring.

With only two percent of publishers surveyed admitting they never read pitches, emails going straight to the spam or trash folder shouldn’t be the go-to explanation for your pitching being ignored (though it’s still a possibility). Rather, the answer is a bit more complex and could be due to a variety of factors typically revolving around the pitch itself.

We narrowed it down to the five most likely reasons your pitch is actually being ignored. Here are some insights on how to avoid falling into these all-too-common pitfalls according to 1,300 writers, editors, contributors, and reporters.

1. Neglecting to Do Your Research

The most time-consuming aspect of media outreach shouldn’t be the email itself, but researching just where and who to pitch. Seven out of ten publishers reveal one of their top pet peeves is pitches that are irrelevant to them and their beat, so take the time to find the right editor or writer for your content once you’re sure you’ve found the right publication.

“Get to know the publications you are pitching to and the people who run them before you pitch. Nothing is worse than spending ten minutes on a call when you’re under deadline only to find out it’s completely useless to your readers.”

– Wall Street Journal

So what should research entail? Building potential contacts begins with brainstorming the publications and websites your target audience frequents, then prioritizing them based on who will have the most influence (usually higher authority sites have more readers and engagement). It’s essential to have a solid understand of where your target audience lives on the internet to help guide your targeting efforts and get your brand and content in front of the right readers.

Of course, just because a publication may be a good fit for you doesn’t mean you’re a good fit for them; be sure they actually publish third-party content before seeking out the best point of contact for your initial pitch. Besides a cursory site search or browsing through the editorial contacts and archives, tools like BuzzSumo and Cision can help you find the best contact as well as influencers in your vertical. Even social media like Twitter lists can be a huge help in list building.

2. Coming Across as Boring

Taking the time to find the best contact and then becoming familiar with that writer’s past work will help you craft a more personal and relevant pitch, which in turn helps you avoid another common publisher pet peeve: boring pitches. Start off with a strong subject line that will grab their attention—it’s the internet equivalent of a first impression.

“Make it interesting—treat your subject line like it’s a headline.”

– Chicago Tribune

Further, stand out from a flood of boring and shallow email templates by finding a personal connection with the writer, whether that’s briefly commenting on an article related to the content you’re about to pitch or sharing a quick anecdote about a mutual interest you found on their Twitter bio. Nearly three out of five writers said a reaction to their recent article would make them more likely to read the entire pitch. While the latter may come off as borderline professional stalking, it is surprisingly well-received—45 percent of publishers said a thoughtful personal connection would make them more likely to read the pitch.

3. Failing to Prove Your Value

Once you’ve caught their attention with a killer subject line and short and sweet personalized introduction, you can move into the body of the pitch, where you’ll want to give a brief synopsis of your content and why it’s valuable to that writer and their audience. Failing to prove your value is another pet peeve among journalists, and given their flooded inboxes and impending deadlines, don’t expect publishers to go digging through your content to find a story. (highlight to tweet)

“Most blanket pitches from publicists who come across as lazy in their pitches or are expecting me to find a story angle most definitely get deleted.”

– New York Times

At this point you should be familiar with the readership and the writer’s beat, so put yourself in their shoes. Analyze the content you’re pitching, and pull the most interesting or unique findings applicable to them. Bullet a few key points, and if possible, include visual assets or other types of in-demand content. While photos are the most commonly published content formats, the demand for data visualizations and infographics are on the rise, according to publishers. Demand for more traditional formats like press releases are on a gradual decline.

4. Being Overly Promotional

One way a pitch will instantly fail to prove value is by being overly promotional, another top pet peeve among 48 percent of publishers. Several journalists revealed they feel some PR professionals have their own agenda that doesn’t go beyond their corporate goals.

“Care about my audience. Be open to how your expertise can be applied in other ways besides your own corporate goals.”

– Fortune

Again, this is where proving the value of your brand’s expertise and content is crucial. Avoid overly promotional rhetoric, and focus the majority of your pitch on the value of the content for their audience more than your own brand—an underlying principle in inbound marketing.

5. They’re Just Too Busy

Unfortunately, there’s not a lot we can do about this final point. We learned 57 percent of writers at top-tier publishers receive 50 to 500 pitches per week, yet the average writer only writes five stories a week (or fewer). I went into writing partly because math was never my thing, but clearly these numbers don’t look great.

“I can only cover three to five things per week. Be direct, and if I want to write on it, I’ll ask for it. I cannot respond to every pitch I get—I would never get any other work done.”

– Forbes

The brutal but honest truth is this: You can do absolutely everything right, but your pitch may still go unread. Luckily, the insights this survey provided have helped us increase our own response rate by carefully crafting each pitch sent. Meticulous list building, personalizing pitches, and proving the value of your content will help you avoid the common PR pitfalls publishers reported as their biggest pet peeves.

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Getting Found Online Depends on You Doing These Five Things written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Serious entrepreneurs know that the key to scaling a company is having a strong online presence.

But the thought of competing for attention online sounds about as easy as getting the attention of your friend across the room at a Justin Bieber concert. There’s lots of noise, lots of motion, and a lot of distraction.

Showing up on page one of the search results is a solid place to start, but even that is an uphill battle. Or is it?

If you’re putting in the work and doing the right things, you have a shot at attracting an audience. So, what are the right things? Let’s take a closer look at five important steps to getting found online.

 1. Find the Right Competitive Keywords for You

The first thing entrepreneurs do when trying to compete online is choose keywords, right? Right. But even though having target keywords is a smart strategy, it comes with two main challenges.

The first challenge is that it’s a shot in the dark. Many entrepreneurs treat keyword research as a guessing game. They make a list of general terms that they assume people type into the search box to find their product. Then, they go guns blazing toward ranking on page one for those broad search terms.

The problem with this is the broader the search term, the broader the searcher’s intent.

The second challenge is finding where you can compete.

If you’ve ever used Google’s Keyword Planner for keyword research, you’ve seen the column that says whether a term has high, medium, or low competition. This competition is only on the Google Adwords platform, which means the ranking only has to do with how much you’ll have to pay to have your ad show up on page one of the search results. It has nothing to do with organic searches.

If you want to rank for organic searches, you must understand how to know if you can compete on page one of Google. This gets a little trickier. You need to have a solid understanding of how valuable Google thinks your website is.

One of the best ways to find this out is to go find your Domain Authority through Moz by using their free tool, Open Site Explorer. Your website will be ranked on a scale from 1 to 100. The higher the number, the more competitive you are.

Compare your Domain Authority to the others showing up on page one for the keyword you’re targeting. If everyone else’s is higher than yours, you probably can’t compete and should choose another keyword to target.

Don’t spin your wheels trying to beat out high-ranking websites on page one. It won’t work. Instead, find the keywords where you can rank and infuse those in the content on your website. You’ll have a far higher chance of showing up on page one faster, making you more visible online.

 2. Come Up With a Plan For Your Content

Ever heard the expression, “what gets scheduled, gets done?” It’s true, especially in the world of entrepreneurship when you’re juggling 117 different balls in the air at once.

You found your keyword in step one but now you need to incorporate these keywords in your website through content. Creating that content takes time.

Although you know the importance of blogging and producing high-quality content, it’s easy to push to the side. But, if you want to rank online, you need to prioritize your content production. Without a robust website, you’re not giving Google any reason to rank you, or people as much of a reason to talk about you.

Plan your content marketing around the keywords where you can rank (as you found in step #1). Come up with ideas around each keyword and then put those blog post topics on your editorial calendar. Commit to writing them. Schedule your content creation like you would schedule a client’s work.

Then, create.

The more content you create, the more reason you’ll give for search engines to rank you and for people to talk about you.

3. Forging Business Partnerships Online

Here’s a sobering fact: It’s much harder to get people to talk about you when they don’t have any skin in the game. Your customers? The only skin they have in the game is their reputation.

I’ll talk more about how to use this to get them talking online in a second, but first, let’s look at the group of people who have more incentive to talk up your brand – other businesses.

Partnering with another business online can be done in a variety of ways:

• You could create content for their blog
• You could offer your product at a steep discount to their audience
• You could take over their Instagram story for a day (and let them take over yours too)
• You could host a business partner on your podcast

The list goes on and on but one thing remains: the key to a quality partnership is when you’re both offering value to the end consumer. Businesses online are always on the hunt for new ways to bring value to their audience. Come up with a way to offer that value and you’ll get more exposure online.

Exposure sounds great, but there’s one more added SEO bonus to forging business partnerships online: It makes you look good in front of Google.

When you create content for another website or give another business a reason to link to you from their website, you’re showing Google you’re valuable. That backlink can boost your Domain Authority, which as I discussed in point #1, can help you rank higher in the search results.

4. Telling Your Customer’s Story

You’ve filled out several buyer personas. You might even have a bulletin board hanging in your office with pictures that represent your target buyer. You’ve done a lot of digging, but still, there’s confusion over who is reading your stuff and what’s really going on in her mind when she’s looking for you.

And therein lies the disconnect between your content and your conversions.

The crux of getting found online depends on speaking a language that excites your buyers. This excitement stems from letting your buyer see herself in your content. To do this, you need to understand the way she views the world.

Seth Godin said it best when he said, “Enough with the facts and figures and features and benefits. They rarely move people into action. It’s our worldview (the way we acted and believed and judged before we encountered you) and your story (the narrative we tell ourselves about who you are and what you do) that drive human behavior.”

The better you tell your buyer’s story, the more likely she is to share your content, share your business, and share your mission with others. When your buyer does that, your word-of-mouth marketing (the most trusted and least expensive kind) will take off. You’ll get found online simply because your customer loved what you were saying enough to share it with her network.

 5. Moving the Conversation Off Your Website

Creating content boosts your website in the search results. That we’ve covered. But what happens when your content appears and gets shared on social media?

Although there’s no direct SEO benefit to sharing your content on social media, there is another benefit – exposure.

“Build it and they will come” has never been a solid growth strategy, so it makes sense that it’s not a reliable strategy for content marketing either. Social media offers an excellent way amplify your content so you get more traffic and quality traffic to your pages.

If you’re creating valuable, interesting, and quality content that speaks to your audience, that traffic will then turn into shares, which will help spread your marketing message to the masses. And that in turn, will help you get more of the coveted backlinks, which will help boost your Domain Authority and help you rank higher in the search engines.

So, We’ve Come Full Circle

Let’s recap:

1. Find keywords where you can compete for a spot on page one of the search results.
2. Plan your content because what gets scheduled gets done.
3. Work with other businesses in your niche to get more exposure and get backlinks to bolster your domain’s authority.
4. Understand your customer’s worldview so it’s easier to share your content, and again, get more backlinks.
5. Amplify your content on social media so you increase your chances of getting seen.

There’s a lot that goes into these five steps, so consider this a bird’s eye view of what needs to happen in order to get found online. Doing at least one of these well will inch you forward and bolster your website.

About the Author

Kimberly Crossland is the owner of The Savvy Copywriter, a content marketing agency that offers content marketing strategy, copywriting, and other digital communications. Visit her website to claim your free worksheet on defining your customer’s worldview and help your business get found online.

Like this month’s theme? We are sharing even more about how small businesses can grow with SEO over at www.SEOforGrowth.com.

You may have heard the term ‘customer experience’ in the business world, and with good reason. In our ever-more-personalized world where customers expect high touch experiences, businesses big and small must invest in a seamless customer experience strategy to grow. In fact, customer experience is outranking and outweighing customer service in 2016. Gartner published a study with the following finding:

“89% of companies plan to compete primarily on the basis of customer experience by 2016.”

With the customer experience being a primary focus, businesses are thriving because of customer relationships and engagement rates more than the traditional one-off communication model of years past. This shift is something businesses of any size must adopt in order to stay relevant with their target audience.

Given that customer experience is now an obligatory part of your business, how can your small business effectively manage it when you’re interacting with consumers across various channels? That is the real question on small business owners’ minds today.

Fortunately, there are five key elements for implementing a seamless and consistent customer experience across channels, and we’ll dig into those today.

Prioritize Your Customers

Put your customers first. Their needs are what drives your business, so keeping them at the forefront of your customer experience mindset only makes sense. Consumers easily recognize when a company values its customers. Leave your clients with the best experience: of being known, understood, and if possible, having a personal connection with an employee. Instilling this sentiment and core belief in your company allows every employee to make decisions with the end-user in mind.

Create a Customer Experience Mission Statement

As trite as it may sound, writing down business objectives helps them stick. Articulate your business’s customer experience mission statement and distribute it among your company. Much like prioritizing your customers, having buy in and alignment around the customer experience provides guidance and a clear path for delivering top quality experiences.

To ensure your customer experience mission statement hits the mark, ensure it is actionable, measurable, and trainable. Questions to ask when crafting your statement are:

• Are we delivering outstanding value to our customers?
• Are we doing right by our customers?
• Are we making it easy for customers to do business with us?

Using these questions, you can more easily align your business’s mission and overall hopes for customer satisfaction. The mission statement provides a business standard for every employee, and reflect what must be delivered to each customer at every point of interaction. This is critically important when your business is operating across multiple channels.

With a concrete mission statement, you can begin to implement thoughtful and on-message strategies for customer experience.

Deliver on Promise(s)

Having a mission statement is well and good, but it needs to be actionable. This is the point where a small business must consider the customer experience objectives and develop tactics for implementation across all channels.

While each channel, from your website to blog to social media to email, has its own best practices, there are inherent pieces of your mission statement that must be present in each channel. The exact wording may be slightly different, but the underlying message is consistent and unwavering. Continually deliver your unique selling proposition to your audience to reinforce what your business is all about.

Every marketing activity should be tied to a piece of your brand promise and connected to your target audience. By keeping these two components at the forefront of your messaging, your customers will see a unified effort across your various channels.

Be Consistent

Omni-channel customer experience is a complex issue that small businesses must tackle to retain customers and continue to grow. Like many other components of small business, customer experience demands consistency. As mentioned in the section above, delivering consistent messages across various platforms is the key to customer satisfaction. Facebook promotions look very different from email marketing, however there is a way to create a seamless experience for the user, so the two initiatives appeared linked and cohesive.

Multi-channel marketing requires finesse, and when deploying a specific campaign across numerous channels, your business must communicate the key takeaway in a way that meets the customer’s needs on that platform.

Be Transparent

Customer experience is all about setting expectations and proactively communicating with consumers. To successfully implement a multi-channel customer experience, being transparent with your customers is of the utmost importance. Clearing stating your customer service hours and designated ways to contact your business, such as email addresses and phone numbers, on each platform establish customer expectations.

Another component of transparency is providing timely and personalized responses. Don’t have an automatic reply set up when inquiries come through. Manage each interaction as if you were speaking with a good friend. Treat them with respect to create a real relationship, even though you’re behind a screen.

Lastly, taking accountability for errors and acknowledging them helps with the customer experience. If clients know you will cop to a problem and proactively tell them about a down system or lack of inventory, they’ll trust your business. Give your consumers every reason to come back and work with you again. This kind of forthrightness breeds loyalty and credibility, which weigh heavily in crafting a positive customer experience.

Guaranteeing the same experience across all your channels is a foundational component for establishing loyal customers and small business growth. While every channel has its nuances, by keeping these five principles of customer experience top of mind, your small business is destined for success. You should embrace multi-channel communication because it is feasible to deliver a consistent experience without much additional effort.

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At CES this week, Nvidia, the leading graphics processing designer, gave a keynote on self-driving car technologies. CEO Jen-Hsun Huang and others from the company discussed the use of its products and technologies in self-driving cars, focusing on the AI and deep-learning capabilities of its processors.

He also announced that the company will work with Audi to roll out a fully autonomous car by 2020, according to MacRumors. This partnership shows the value of Nvidia’s chips, but the companies may trail competitors in terms of deploying fully autonomous vehicles.

Huang noted the increasing importance of the AI and deep-learning technologies offered by Nvidia for self-driving vehicles. For autonomous cars to adapt to the world around them, they need the help of technologies like these to be able to comprehend and analyze the quickly changing nature of the roads, where pedestrians and other vehicles can move quickly and often times unexpectedly. Nvidia’s vision and graphics processing chips and solutions can help cars recognize and react in these scenarios.

The partnership with Audi will place the company’s graphics processing units into physical vehicles built and retrofitted by the automaker. The companies have worked together for nearly a decade, but primarily on Audi’s personal navigation systems. Now, Audi will use Nvidia’s Drive PX 2 processor as well as the company’s Drive computing platform to help build the vehicle. Audi showcased a Q7 SUV concept vehicle equipped with these technologies, and plans to start testing vehicles on public roads in California and other states in 2018.

But this might put the two companies behind competitors in terms of fully autonomous development. Currently, many companies such as Uber and Alphabet’s Waymo are testing autonomous vehicles, though no company has tested a fully autonomous vehicle on public roads without a driver. However, BI Intelligence predicts that such a test will be conducted at some point in 2017 and these vehicles could be deployed on the roads as soon as 2019. This means that Audi and Nvidia would fall behind competitors, and with exact deployment and monetization plans still unclear, they may fail to profit from self-driving cars.

Since the start of 2016, automakers, tech companies, and ride-hailing services have been racing to create a driverless taxi service. This service would mirror how an Uber works today, but there wouldn’t be a driver.

So far, the race has been brutal, as companies jockey for position by spending billions to acquire/invest in companies that will help make a driverless taxi service a reality. Uber recently took the pole position by announcing it would begin piloting its self-driving taxi service (with a driver still behind the wheel) in Pittsburgh later this month. But other companies, including almost every automaker, are quickly catching up as we reach the mid-way point in the driverless taxi race.

For the past two years, BI Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, has been tracking the progress of the self-driving car space. As our reports have shown, the evolution is happening much faster than many expected, but there are still many barriers that have to be overcome before driverless cars become a reality.

BI Intelligence has compiled a detailed report on driverless taxis that analyzes the rapidly evolving driverless taxi model and examines the moves companies have made so far in creating a service. In particular, it distills the service into three main players: the automakers who produce the cars, the components suppliers who outfit them to become driverless, and the shared mobility services that provide the platform for consumers to order them.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

• Fully autonomous taxis are already here, but to reach the point where companies can remove the driver will take a few years. Both Delphi and nuTonomy have been piloting fully autonomous taxi services in Singapore.
• Driverless taxi services would significantly benefit the companies creating them, but could have a massive ripple effect on the overall economy. They could cause lower traffic levels, less pollution, and safer roads. They could also put millions of people who rely on the taxi, as well as the automotive market, out of a job.
• We expect the first mass deployment of driverless taxis to happen by 2020. Some government officials have even more aggressive plans to deploy driverless taxis before that, but we believe they will be stymied by technology barriers, including mass infrastructure changes.
• But it will take 20-plus years for a driverless taxi service to make a significant dent in the way people travel. We believe the services will be launched in select pockets of the world, but will not reach a global level in the same time-frame that most technology proliferates.

In full the report:

• Analyzes the moves 18-plus companies have made in creating a driverless taxi service.
• Discusses the corporate and societal benefits of a driverless taxi service
• Examines the regulators conundrum when deciding if they should or should not allow driverless taxis to operate
• Determines the potential cost of a driverless taxi vs. owning a car, riding in a ride-hailing service, or riding in a taxi
• Explains the barriers including the technological and regulatory barriers these companies will face 

 To get your copy of this invaluable guide, choose one of these options:

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

The choice is yours. But however you decide to acquire this report, you’ve given yourself a powerful advantage in your understanding of the future of driverless taxis.

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2017 is starting off strong in the publication of business books. These are just twenty (and it was hard to pare it down to just twenty) of the books we have our eyes on in the first month of the new year—in chronological order of their publication.

Ask More: The Power of Questions to Open Doors, Uncover Solutions, and Spark Change by Frank Sesno, AMACOM

What hidden skill links successful people in all walks of life? What helps them make smart decisions? The answer is surprisingly simple: They know how to ask the right questions at the right time.

Questions help us break down barriers, discover secrets, solve puzzles, and imagine new ways of doing things. But few of us know how to question in a methodical way. Emmy-award-winning journalist and media expert Frank Sesno aims to change that with Ask More.

From questions that cement relationships, to those that help us plan for the future, each chapter in Ask More explores a different type of inquiry. By the end of the book, you'll know what to ask and when, what you should listen for, and what you can expect as the outcome. Packed with illuminating interviews, the book explains:

• How the Gates Foundation used strategic questions to plan its battle against malaria
• How turnaround expert Steve Miller uses diagnostic questions to get to the heart of a company's problems
• How NPR's Terry Gross uses empathy questions to dig deeper
• How journalist Anderson Cooper uses confrontational questions to hold people accountable
• How creative questions animated a couple of techie dreamers to brainstorm Uber

Both intriguing and inspiring, Ask More shows how questions convey interest, feed curiosity, and reveal answers that can change the course of both your professional and personal life.

The Stress Test: How Pressure Can Make You Stronger and Sharper by Ian Robertson, Bloomsbury USA

From one of the world’s most respected neuroscientists, an eye-opening study of why we react to pressure in the way we do and how to be energized rather than defeated by stress.

Why is it that some people react to seemingly trivial emotional upsets—like failing an unimportant exam or tackling a difficult project at work—with distress, while others power through life-changing tragedies showing barely any emotional upset whatsoever? How do some people shine brilliantly at public speaking when others stumble with their words and seem on the verge of an anxiety attack? Why do some people sink into all-consuming depression when life has dealt them a poor hand, while in others it merely increases their resilience?

The difference between too much pressure and too little can result in either debilitating stress or lack of motivation in extreme situations. However, the right level of challenge and stress can help people flourish and achieve more than they ever thought possible.

In The Stress Test, clinical psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Ian Robertson, armed with over four decades of research, reveals how we can shape our brain’s response to pressure and how stress actually can be a good thing. The Stress Test is a revelatory study of how and why we react to pressure as we do, and how we can change our response to stress to our benefit.

Smart Collaboration: How Professionals and Their Firms Succeed by Breaking Down Silos by Heidi K. Gardner, Harvard Business Review Press

Not all collaboration is smart. Make sure you do it right.

Professional service firms face a serious challenge. Their clients increasingly need them to solve complex problems—everything from regulatory compliance to cybersecurity, the kinds of problems that only teams of multidisciplinary experts can tackle.

Yet most firms have carved up their highly specialized, professional experts into narrowly defined practice areas, and collaborating across these silos is often messy, risky, and expensive. Unless you know why you’re collaborating and how to do it effectively, it may not be smart at all. That’s especially true for partners who have built their reputations and client rosters independently, not by working with peers.

In Smart Collaboration, Heidi K. Gardner shows that firms earn higher margins, inspire greater client loyalty, attract and retain the best talent, and gain a competitive edge when specialists collaborate across functional boundaries. Gardner, a former McKinsey consultant and Harvard Business School professor now lecturing at Harvard Law School, has spent over a decade conducting in-depth studies of numerous global professional service firms. Her research with clients and the empirical results of her studies demonstrate clearly and convincingly that collaboration pays, for both professionals and their firms.

But Gardner also offers powerful prescriptions for how leaders can foster collaboration, move to higher-margin work, increase client satisfaction, improve lateral hiring, decrease enterprise risk, engage workers to contribute their utmost, break down silos, and boost their bottom line.

With case studies and real-world insights, Smart Collaboration delivers an authoritative case for the value of collaboration to today’s professionals, their firms, and their clients and shows you exactly how to achieve it.

Spark: How to Lead Yourself and Others to Greater Success by Angie Morgan, Courtney Lynch, and Sean Lynch, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Leadership isn’t about a job title—it’s about action and behavior.

In Spark, entrepreneurs, business consultants and military Veterans Angie Morgan, Courtney Lynch, and Sean Lynch show how anyone can become an extraordinary leader by embracing seven key behaviors.

Many people believe that leaders are the rare few at the upper echelons of a business or other enterprise. But the truth is leaders can be found at any level of an organization. These are the Sparks—the doers, thinkers, innovators, and key influencers who are catalysts for personal and organizational change. Sparks aren’t defined by the place they hold on an organizational chart. They are defined by their actions, commitment, and will.

When Sparks are ignited, their actions can shape their future. They make things better. They’re the individuals who have the courage to challenge the status quo and take action.

Spark’s insights were hard-earned by its authors, Angie Morgan (Marine Corps), Courtney Lynch (Marine Corps), and Sean Lynch (Air Force), who today are sought-after consultants and keynote speakers, through their firm Lead Star, due to the relevant, engaging way they help individuals reimagine themselves as leaders so they can reach their true potential.

Not only does Spark provide you with the encouragement and motivation to be a leader, it also offers online resources that will further support your leadership development. With Spark as a blueprint, anyone can become a catalyst for change, and any organization can identify and develop Sparks.

Tao of Charlie Munger: A Compilation of Quotes from Berkshire Hathaway’s Vice Chairman on Life, Business, and the Pursuit of Wealth With Commentary by David Clark, Scribner

Words of wisdom from Charlie Munger—Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner and the visionary Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway—collected and interpreted with an eye towards investing by David Clark, coauthor of the bestselling Buffettology series.

Born in Omaha, Nebraska in 1924 Charlie Munger studied mathematics at the University of Michigan, trained as a meteorologist at Cal Tech Pasadena while in the Army, and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School without ever earning an undergraduate degree. Today, Munger is one of America’s most successful investors, the Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway, and Warren Buffett’s business partner for almost forty years. Buffett says “Berkshire has been built to Charlie’s blueprint. My role has been that of general contractor.” Munger is an intelligent, opinionated business man whose ideas can teach professional and amateur investors how to be successful in finance and life.

Like The Tao of Warren Buffett and The Tao Te Ching, The Tao of Charlie Munger is a compendium of pithy quotes including, “Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant” and “In my whole life, I have known no wise people who didn’t read all the time—none, zero.” This collection, culled from interviews, speeches, and questions and answers at the Berkshire Hathaway and Wesco annual meetings, offers insights into Munger’s amazing financial success and life philosophies. Described by Business Insider as “sharp in his wit and investing wisdom,” Charlie Munger’s investment tips, business philosophy, and rules for living are as unique as his life story; intelligent as he clearly is; and as successful as he has been.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution by Klaus Schwab, Crown Business

Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum argues that we on the brink of a technological revolution unlike anything humankind has experienced before, and describes how it will fundamentally alter how we live and work.

Previous industrial revolutions led to the rise of cities, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. We are now on the brink of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, characterized by a range of new technologies fusing the physical, digital, and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies, and industries and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. And this revolution is unlike in other in human history, for a few reasons.

First is the pace of progress. Already, artificial intelligence is all around us, from Watson to drones to virtual assistants. We have 3-D printing, DNA sequencing, microchips many times smaller than a grain of sand. But that’s nothing compared to what’s coming. WEF data predicts that by 2025, we will see: nanomaterials 200 times stronger than steel and a million times thinner than human hair used in commercial manufacturing, the first transplant of a 3-D printed liver, driverless cars equaling 10% of all cars on US road, AI robots collecting taxes and performing corporate audits, and much more.

Second is the speed at which these technologies are proliferating. Consider that in 2003, 500 million devices were connected to the internet. Today, that number is 6.4 billion and is expected hit 1 trillion in under a decade.

Third is the increasing integration of the digital and physical worlds. Think beyond smart thermostats and wearable sensors and imagine “smart factories” in which global systems of manufacturing are coordinated virtually, or implantable mobile phones made up of biosynthetic materials.

Schwab outlines the key technologies driving this revolution, discusses the major impacts on governments, businesses, civil society, and individuals, and offers bold ideas for what can be done to shape a better future—one in which technology empowers people rather than replaces them, progress serves society rather than upending it, and innovators respect moral and ethical boundaries rather than crossing them.

Money on the Table: How to Increase Profits through Gender-Balanced Leadership by Melissa Greenwell, Greenleaf Book Group

If our executive suites and boardrooms aren’t gender-balanced, we’re throwing money away!

The shortage of women in boardrooms and executive suites means companies are missing out on the best solutions, products, and services—and on having the type of workplace that will attract the best workers. Gender imbalance is a serious problem in companies, and the cost is significant—but it is a problem we can solve. Melissa Greenwell challenges leaders in a no-blame, logical approach to bring more female talent into leadership positions for one simple reason: Their companies will make more money if they do.

Leaders of gender-balanced companies profit from differences in the female brain responsible for questioning, debate, idea-generation, and problem solving, and those companies see increased performance and healthier strategies and tactics. Greenwell deftly demystifies gender imbalance, making it a topic we can discuss without fearing perceptions of favoritism or sexism.

Money on the Table is destined to become the go-to book for CEOs and their leadership teams, boards of directors, and top HR leaders, with a clear place in talent acquisition and engagement strategies as well. Greenwell supports her thesis with business cases, interviews with top business leaders, and the brain science that explains why women and men think, communicate, and problem-solve differently. Key insights, explanations, vocabulary, and action plans complete the book along with a compelling list of ten rules that women should abide by to fulfill their part of “getting a seat at the table.”

The Entrepreneur's Book of Actions: Essential Daily Exercises and Habits for Becoming Wealthier, Smarter, and More Successful by Rhett Power, McGraw-Hill

The founder of an Inc. magazine fastest-growing company gives entrepreneurs the secret to building the sustainable growth needed to win in today’s crowded markets.

Equal parts instruction and inspiration, The Entrepreneur’s Book of Actions provides the tools readers need to build a successful company by discarding old habits, thinking in a new way, and focusing their efforts on what’s important. Budding entrepreneurs will learn how to manage their time, their employees, and their money and become the leaders they need to be. In the end, readers will minimize effort needed to complete basic tasks, freeing up more time for creative and innovative endeavors—absolutely necessary ingredients for succeeding in today’s competitive landscape.

Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story by Alexandra Wolfe, Simon & Schuster

In a riveting, hilarious account, reporter Alexandra Wolfe exposes a world that is not flat but bubbling—the men and women of Silicon Valley, whose hubris and ambition are changing the world.

Each year, young people from around the world go to Silicon Valley to hatch an idea, start a company, strike it rich, and become powerful and famous. In The Valley of the Gods, Wolfe follows three of these upstarts who have “stopped out” of college and real life to live and work in Silicon Valley in the hopes of becoming the next Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk. No one has yet documented the battle for the brightest kids, kids whose goals are no less than making billions of dollars—and the fight they wage in turn to make it there. They embody an American cultural transformation: A move away from the East Coast hierarchy of Ivy Leagues and country clubs toward the startup life and a new social order.

Meet the billionaires who go to training clubs for thirty-minute “body slams” designed to fit in with the start-up schedule; attend parties where people devour peanut butter-and-jelly sushi rolls; and date and seduce in a romantic culture in which thick glasses, baggy jeans, and a t-shirt is the costume of any sex symbol (and where a jacket and tie symbolize mediocrity). Through Wolfe’s eyes, we discover how they date and marry, how they dress and live, how they plot and dream, and how they have created a business world and an economic order that has made us all devotees of them.

A blistering, brilliant, and hysterical examination of this new ruling class, The Valley of the Gods presents tomorrow’s strange new normal where the only outward signs of tech success are laptops and ideas.

Narrative and Numbers: The Value of Stories in Business by Aswath Damodaran, Columbia University Press

How can a company that has never turned a profit have a multibillion dollar valuation? Why do some start-ups attract large investments while others do not?

Aswath Damodaran, finance professor and experienced investor, argues that the power of story drives corporate value, adding substance to numbers and persuading even cautious investors to take risks. In business, there are the storytellers who spin compelling narratives and the number-crunchers who construct meaningful models and accounts. Both are essential to success, but only by combining the two, Damodaran argues, can a business deliver and sustain value.

Through a range of case studies, Narrative and Numbers describes how storytellers can better incorporate and narrate numbers and how number-crunchers can calculate more imaginative models that withstand scrutiny. Damodaran considers Uber's debut and how narrative is key to understanding different valuations. He investigates why Twitter and Facebook were valued in the billions of dollars at their public offerings, and why one (Twitter) has stagnated while the other (Facebook) has grown. Damodaran also looks at more established business models such as Apple and Amazon to demonstrate how a company's history can both enrich and constrain its narrative. And through Vale, a global Brazil-based mining company, he shows the influence of external narrative, and how country, commodity, and currency can shape a company's story. Narrative and Numbers reveals the benefits, challenges, and pitfalls of weaving narratives around numbers and how one can best test a story's plausibility.

Fit for Growth: A Guide to Strategic Cost Cutting, Restructuring, and Renewal by Vinay Couto, John Plansky, and Deniz Caglar, Wiley

A practical approach to business transformation.

Fit for Growth^* is a unique approach to business transformation that explicitly connects growth strategy with cost management and organization restructuring. Drawing on 70-plus years of strategy consulting experience and in-depth research, the experts at PwC’s Strategy& lay out a winning framework that helps CEOs and senior executives transform their organizations for sustainable, profitable growth. This approach gives structure to strategy while promoting lasting change. Examples from Strategy&’s hundreds of clients illustrate successful transformation on the ground, and illuminate how senior and middle managers are able to take ownership and even thrive during difficult periods of transition. Throughout the Fit for Growth process, the focus is on maintaining consistent high-value performance while enabling fundamental change.

Strategy& has helped major clients around the globe achieve significant and sustained results with its research-backed approach to restructuring and cost reduction. This book provides practical guidance for leveraging that expertise to make the choices that allow companies to:

• Achieve growth while reducing costs
• Manage transformation and transition productively
• Create lasting competitive advantage
• Deliver reliable, high-value performance

Sustainable success is founded on efficiency and high performance. Companies are always looking to do more with less, but their efforts often work against them in the long run. Total business transformation requires total buy-in, and it entails a series of decisions that must not be made lightly. The Fit for Growth approach provides a clear strategy and practical framework for growth-oriented change, with expert guidance on getting it right.

*Fit for Growth is a registered service mark of PwC Strategy& Inc. in the United States

If You're in a Dogfight, Become a Cat!: Strategies for Long-Term Growth by Leonard Sherman, Columbia University Press

When Yellow Tail wines launched in 2001, they battled 6,500 other wineries for a share of the American market. By 2007, Yellow Tail sales in the United States exceeded the sales of all French wineries combined. How did this new business enter such a crowded market and succeed?

If You're in a Dogfight, Become a Cat! explains how businesses such as Yellow Tail survive and thrive in industries embroiled in "dogfights"—intense competition among established companies for a small piece of the market. Leonard Sherman, a longtime business consultant and faculty member at Columbia Business School, has developed a three-part strategy based on years of consulting for such companies as Audi, Toyota, and United Technologies. His advice: compete on different terms to attract new customers. FedEx, Apple, Southwest Airlines, and Starbucks have thrived as cats by differentiating their businesses, aligning their goals and practices, and continuously innovating their products. Rather than compete head-on with other PC manufacturers, Apple introduced a new category of tablet devices to unlock latent demand for mobile computing. Yellow Tail turned beer- and liquor-lovers on to casual, inexpensive, drinkable wines through youthful packaging. In this book, managers of companies big and small encounter dozens of model strategies for product design and forward-thinking organization that have resulted in real long-term, profitable growth.

Creative Change: Why We Resist It . . . How We Can Embrace It by Jennifer Mueller, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

One of the nation’s leading psychologists asks why today’s corporate leaders desire but reject creative solutions—and finds some surprising conclusions.

All corporate CEOs, top executives, and other business leaders say they want creativity and need real innovation in order to thrive in a competitive world. But according to startling research from former Wharton management professor Jennifer Mueller, the truth is that many business leaders chronically reject creative solutions and often embrace the familiar, even as they profess commitment to innovation.

Mueller’s research also reveals that it’s not just CEOs, but educators, scientists, and many, many others who often struggle to accept new and creative ideas even when desired. Mueller parses the tough questions that these findings raise. Could people love but also hate creative ideas? Could the mindset we use to evaluate ideas turn this love or hate on or off—in an instant? Do experts struggle even more than novices with this bias? And even more startling, could the “best practices” that organizations employ to manage innovation activate this bias, and inadvertently, kill innovation?

Mueller diagnoses this hidden innovation barrier, and provides solutions, including:

• A four-step process (and a fifth lifeline) to self-disrupt your current mindset and recognize creative opportunity;
• an idea-pitching framework aimed at helping you overcome other peoples’ sticky preference for the status quo;
• key organizational levers to disrupt the cultural beliefs holding your company back;
• tips to more accurately recognize creative leaders who can lead organizations in productive new directions, and
• strategies to generate ideas without harming your ability to make them count with the decision-makers.

Based on the latest psychological studies in the field, along with numerous illustrative examples, Creative Change is the kind of provocative creative leadership book that will be discussed for years to come.

Own It: The Power of Women at Work by Sallie Krawcheck, Crown Business

One of the highest ranked women ever to work on Wall Street shows women how to elevate themselves and their careers by embracing and investing in the unique traits proven to make women stonger leaders, better team players, and more valuable assets to companies and employers. Picking up the conversation where Lean In left off, she shows women how to go beyond sitting at the table and how to rise to the next level.

Sallie Krawcheck has had it with advice implying that if women simply leaned in a little farther, played the game a little better, and demanded just a few more seats at the table—i.e. acted a little more like MEN—they could finally break through that glass ceiling. This is a contest rigged to lose. A better strategy is to embrace and invest in the unique traits that make women better positioned to lead and succeed: broader perspective, greater long-term focus, healthier attitude toward risk, higher aptitude for creativity, better people skills, empathy, and more. Women who capitalize on these traits won’t need to demand a place at the table; employers will offer it to them—not out of political correctness—but because it makes good business sense.

Having been the lone woman at the highest rungs of Wall Street, Krawcheck knows what it takes to succeed as a woman in a man’s world. And now she puts her research analyst background to work to reveal irrefutable evidence that companies perform better when they fully engage women; that companies with women leaders serve clients and customers better, have a stronger and more engaged culture, are more innovative, and sustain profits over a longer term. Drawing on this research and on stories from her years at the top echelon of the biggest boy’s club in the world, Krawcheck empowers women to elevate themselves and their companies by bringing their true female selves to work.

The Aisles Have Eyes: How Retailers Track Your Shopping, Strip Your Privacy, and Define Your Power by Joseph Turow, Yale University Press

A revealing and surprising look at the ways that aggressive consumer advertising and tracking, already pervasive online, are coming to a retail store near you.

By one expert’s prediction, within twenty years half of Americans will have body implants that tell retailers how they feel about specific products as they browse their local stores. The notion may be outlandish, but it reflects executives’ drive to understand shoppers in the aisles with the same obsessive detail that they track us online. In fact, a hidden surveillance revolution is already taking place inside brick-and-mortar stores, where Americans still do most of their buying. Drawing on his interviews with retail executives, analysis of trade publications, and experiences at insider industry meetings, advertising and digital studies expert Joseph Turow pulls back the curtain on these trends, showing how a new hyper-competitive generation of merchants—including Macy’s, Target, and Walmart—is already using data mining, in-store tracking, and predictive analytics to change the way we buy, undermine our privacy, and define our reputations. Eye-opening and timely, Turow’s book is essential reading to understand the future of shopping.

Getting to "Yes And": The Art of Business Improv by Bob Kulhan, with Chuck Crisafulli, Stanford Business Books

Amidst the deluge of advice for businesspeople, there lies an overlooked tool, a key to thriving in today's fast-paced, unpredictable environment: improvisation.

In Getting to "Yes And" veteran improv performer, university professor, CEO, and consultant Bob Kulhan unpacks a form of mental agility with powers far beyond the entertainment value of comedy troupes.

Drawing on principles from cognitive and social psychology, behavioral economics, and communication, Kulhan teaches readers to think on their feet and approach the most typical business challenges with fresh eyes and openness. He shows how improv techniques such as the "Yes, and" approach, divergent and convergent thinking, and focusing on being present can translate into more productive meetings, swifter decisions, stronger collaboration, positive conflict resolution, mindfulness, and more. Moving from the individual to the organizational level, Kulhan compiles time-tested teaching methods and training exercises into an instrumental guide that readers can readily implement as a party of one or a company of thousands.

$UPERHUBS: How the Financial Elite and their Networks Rule Our World by Sandra Navidi, Nicholas Brealey

Provides an intimate glimpse into the world of the financial elite.

$UPERHUBS is a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how the world's most powerful titans, the "superhubs" pull the levers of our global financial system. Combining insider's knowledge with principles of network science, Sandra Navidi offers a startling new perspective on how superhubs build their powerful networks and how their decisions impact all our lives. $UPERHUBS reveals what happens at the exclusive, invitation-only platforms—The World Economic Forum in Davos, the meetings of the International Monetary Fund, think-tank gatherings and exclusive galas. This is the most vivid portrait to date of the global elite: the bank CEOs, fund managers, billionaire financiers and politicians who, through their interlocking relationships and collective influence are transforming our increasingly fragile financial system, economy and society.

A Man for All Markets: From Las Vegas to Wall Street, How I Beat the Dealer and the Market by Edward O. Thorp, Random House

The incredible true story of Edward Thorp, the Indiana Jones of mathematics: the card-counting professor who taught the world how to beat the dealer, invented the first wearable computer, and started a revolution on Wall Street.

Professor. Card-counter. Bestselling author. Inventor. Hedge fund manager. Growing up as a kid of divorced parents living first in Chicago, then in California, Ed Thorp never imagined that he would grow up to become a professor who would mathematically prove how card-counting gives every player an edge; that his discoveries would cause such an uproar among the casinos that they would attempt to change the rules of the game; that he would invent the wearable computer, heralding the wearable technology that we use today; that he would write a bestselling book; or that he would take his knowledge of gambling to Wall Street, revolutionize investing, and make millions. And yet, all of that happened. By applying the science of information technology—the basis of computers and the Internet—to gambling, Thorp discovered a means of making as much money as possible as fast as possible. And he proved it at the blackjack tables in casinos all over Las Vegas, until the casinos first barred their doors to him, and then drugged him and sabotaged the brakes on his car. After beating the casinos at blackjack, roulette, and baccarat, Thorp, bored and looking for new challenges, took “the Kelly formula” to his hedge fund, Princeton-Newport partners, where he would make millions—even during the crashes of 1998 and 2008—and become an investor who even Warren Buffett respected. This is the uproarious true story of a man who, through a series of twists and turns, went from a professor to a gambler to an investor. Told in a voice that is equal parts Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman and Bill Bryson, this is an exciting, personal look at the predictability of chance and how the riskiest choices are sometimes our best bets.

Data for the People: How to Make Our Post-Privacy Economy Work for You by Andreas Weigend, Basic Books

A longtime chief scientist at Amazon shows how open data can make everyone, not just corporations, richer.

Every time we Google something, Facebook someone, Uber somewhere, or even just turn on a light, we create data that businesses collect and use to make decisions about us. In many ways this has improved our lives, yet we as individuals do not benefit from this wealth of data as much as we could. Moreover, whether it is a bank evaluating our credit worthiness, an insurance company determining our risk level, or a potential employer deciding whether we get a job, it is likely that this data will be used against us rather than for us.

In Data for the People, Andreas Weigend draws on his years as a consultant for commerce, education, healthcare, travel, and finance companies to outline how Big Data can work better for all of us. As of today, how much we benefit from Big Data depends on how closely the interests of big companies align with our own. Too often, outdated standards of control and privacy force us into unfair contracts with data companies, but it doesn’t have to be this way. Weigend makes a powerful argument that we need to take control of how our data is used to actually make it work for us. Only then can we the people get back more from Big Data than we give it.

Big Data is here to stay. Now is the time to find out how we can be empowered by it.

Work PAUSE Thrive: How to Pause for Parenthood Without Killing Your Career by Lisen Stromberg, Benbella Books

After the birth of her second child, marketing and advertising executive Lisen Stromberg did something she never imagined she would do: she opted out and chose to stay home with her children.

But her career didn’t end there. Stromberg paused, then pivoted to become an award-winning journalist writing about women, work, and life in Silicon Valley. Along the way, she met many highly successful women who told her they never “opted out” but had, in fact, temporarily paused or downshifted their careers. Their journeys revealed an alternative, non-linear path to the top that enabled them to reconcile family with their careers.

In Work PAUSE Thrive: How to Pause for Parenthood Without Killing Your Career, Stromberg details how these trailblazers disrupted the original paradigm by incorporating pauses into their careers and embraced all aspects of life. Deeply rooted in social science research, cutting-edge data collected from nearly 1,500 women, and through 186 first-person interviews, Stromberg provides a blueprint for stepping back from your career without sacrificing your ambitions. She shows you how to successfully opt not out, but in—not just to your career, but to your whole life.

With Stromberg’s guidance, you’ll learn:

• Who pauses and how and why
• How pausing can enrich both your career and your life
• How to innovate your own path by strategically incorporating a pause into your career
• What we can—and need—to do as a society to make it pausing possible for more people to achieve their personal and professional goals

There is a way to find integration when it comes to your work and your life. Work PAUSE Thrive reveals new and exciting trends in the workplace and offers targeted solutions for companies to help ensure both women and men are able to lead the lives they want, lives in which they can build both a career and a family.

How to boost the effectiveness of your content marketing with properly mapped buyer personas

If you want to maximise results from your content marketing strategy, it is essential to map your buyer personas to the buying cycle. This is executed by delivering the right content, to the right people, at the right time.

If your business is B2B, your content marketing strategy is crucial to your success because 64 percent of B2B customers will engage in upwards of five blogs prior to purchase. However, a mere five percent of marketers believe their content marketing strategy is moving in the right direction, according to Top Rank Marketing.

Blogs, videos, ebooks, case studies, and infographics are all invaluable content marketing assets. And you want these content marketing assets represented in each stage of the buying cycle.

To make the absolute most of your content marketing strategy, you need to develop your buyer’s journey. This allows you to encompass purchase points for your buyer personas, ending with familiarity on both sides of the fence, simply driving sales.

Let’s take a closer look at how mapping buyer personas to the buying cycle can maximize your content marketing strategy.

What is a Buying Cycle and How Can You Use it With Your Content Marketing Strategy?

A buying cycle is essentially the journey you want your potential buyers to take. You want to take them from being completely unaware of your company’s mission, products, and services, to seeing you as a company they can count on for solutions.

The buying cycle consists of three key elements with a top down funnel approach. These elements are the Top of the Funnel (TOFU), Middle of the Funnel (MOFU), and Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU). This is why a buying cycle is often referred to as a buying funnel.

A buying cycle is comprised of five customer stages, including awareness, interest, evaluation, commitment, and sale. These customer stages are important, because they are where you want to utilize the right assets of your content marketing strategy.

Download Expert Member resource – Evaluating Content Marketing ROI Guide

This guide is aimed at helping you improve your confidence in the value of content marketing by stepping you through a range of techniques to help marketers evaluate and prove their content effectiveness. These techniques will help you to prove to your colleagues or clients which content types and distribution techniques are most effective.

Access the Evaluating Content Marketing ROI Guide

Smart Insights Expert members can also download a persona template for mapping TOFU, MOFU and BOFU content to each persona from our researching personas guide.

Research by Ogilvy, Google and TNS found valuable brand connection attributes you can employ when mapping your buying personas to the buying cycle.

• 73 percent chose a brand that offered useful information.
• 70 percent chose a brand that engaged customer passions and interests.
• 64 percent chose a brand that demonstrated its principles during evaluation.
• 63 percent chose a brand that shared news, updates, and special offers.

All of these considerations need to be present as you map your personas to your brand’s buying stages.

What Type of Content Should You Create?

Noble Crawford, tech entrepreneur and CEO of Video Social Creative suggests,

“Depending on which stage of the buying cycle prospects are in, salespeople are wise to have three specific content assets readily available.”

Crawford identified blogs, videos and case studies as powerful content marketing assets. Below are a few more content marketing assets ranked by effectiveness.

• Social Media Content (93 percent)
• Case Studies (82 percent)
• Blogs (81 percent)
• E-Newsletters (81 percent)
• In-Person Events (81 percent)
• Articles on Your Website (79 percent)
• Videos (79 percent)
• Illustrations / Photos (76 percent)
• White Papers (71 percent)
• Infographics (67 percent)

Content Marketing Strategy for the “Top of the Funnel” (TOFU) of Your Buying Cycle

The TOFU is where your buying cycle begins. And understanding the content marketing assets you need to employ at this step is vital.

Potential buyers who have stumbled upon your website and content are generally unaware they need you. It is also possible they have an issue, but they are far from thinking about a solution.

At this step of the buying cycle, you are simply raising awareness. You want to have the right content to engage and connect with your potential customer.

However, you want to stay away from any sales focused pitches. Offer value first, allowing potential buyers to gain insight about their issue, and seek the solution you are about to propose.

Blogs, expert content, videos, and infographics are assets you want to use at this stage in your content marketing strategy buying cycle:

• Blogs are certainly the most common content regarding TOFU. They should be informative and offer a connection between potential buyers and your solutions. Simply focus on giving massive value to your readers.
• Expert Content. Expert content, or pillar content, is detailed and used as a powerful education tool to raise awareness and fix pain points for your buyers.
• Using videos as part of your content marketing strategy is a powerful way to create awareness. Video in emails can lead to a 200 to 300 percent CTR increase, according to Small Business Trends. And 92 percent of mobile video viewers will share videos.
• Infographics are almost as powerful as videos when it comes to your buying cycle and content marketing strategy. Research on colorful visuals by Xerox found that people are 80 percent more engaged in reading content if it is presented using visuals. But don’t get to caught up on graphics. You want your infographics to include plenty of useful data too.

At the awareness stage, you want to focus on helping to identify the pain points of your buyer personas and offering them solutions to solve these pain points.

Content Marketing Strategy for the “Middle of the Funnel” (MOFU) of Your Buying Cycle

The MOFU of your buying cycle is a very important moment. It is when your potential buyers have become aware of an issue and are actively seeking a solution. It so happens that you have the solution, but your potential buyer has yet to realize it.

During this step of the buying cycle, potential buyers are gathering information about the solutions they now realize they need. And your goal is to ensure they understand what they need, and how your company’s products and services meet that necessity.

This is when you begin to nurture and educate. Utilizing assets in your content marketing strategy that educate your potential buyers is best practice. You want them to visualize your solution without the pushy sales routine.

Ebooks, white papers, and webinars are all exceptional content marketing aspects you can employ during this step in your buying cycle.

• Offering in-depth content in ebooks not only creates value by informing your audience, it also allows you to build your email list and increase ROI efforts, according to Forbes.
• White papers. Relatively similar to ebooks, white papers a should be focused, concise, and more in-depth. Think academic peer-reviewed articles with lots of data point and possibly sharing groundbreaking research that others in the industry haven’t shared.

• Webinars are simply 45 to 90 minute conversations that let potential buyers learn, discuss, and share insights on a specific issue. Many companies use webinars as a way to offer discounts for those who attend as well.

At this stage, your buyers understand they have a problem and know that your company offers a solution. They are exploring potential ways of solving their problems and companies who offer the products or services they need. Showing them though leadership can help create brand affinity and create an opportunity for them to connect with you and choose to buy from your brand, over others.

Content Marketing Strategy for the “Bottom of the Funnel” (BOFU) of Your Buying Cycle

Once potential buyers have reached this step in your buying cycle, it's time to get more sales minded. You have now successfully mapped your buyer personas to the content marketing assets that drive commitment and sales.

The BOFU is where your potential buyers have read, watched, and researched your solution. They are not ready to choose you just yet, but you are in the running. Potential buyers commonly compare you to your competitors at this step in the buying cycle.

Employing demo videos, comparisons, case studies, and influencer resources are all powerful assets to employ during this very important moment. Free trials and product specs can also be useful asset at this stage as well.

• Expert Content. Interview experts and industry influencers and get them to endorse your company. Using influencers is nvaluable during a potential buyer’s evaluation process. A report by Google found that 74 percent of people made purchases based on a key influencer’s recommendation.
• Demo videos. Demo videos make potential buyers into buyers and followers. They are essentially tours of how your solution is the best fit. Demo videos can be live or recorded and uploaded. You can use this content marketing asset to showcase your products and services in real time, making the bottom of your buying cycle sales driven.
• Product Comparisons. Comparisons are another useful BOFU asset to drive sales at the bottom of your buying cycle. Many potential buyers are on the fence, comparing your solutions to your competitors. A comparison based on how you stack up against competitors is best practice in saturated industries.

Maximize Your Content Marketing Strategy with Powerful Buying Cycle Assets

Mapping your buyer personas to the buying cycle of your content marketing strategy is vital to boosting your brand awareness and converting potential buyers into purchasers.

The benefits of a well-developed content marketing strategy is a two-way street as well. Your customers get the solutions they need, and you get to maximise your marketing efforts.

Mapping your content strategy to your customer's buying cycle lets you use the right content assets, for the right people, at the most opportune moments. This most certainly increases those coveted conversions, allowing your business to grow exponentially and your investment in content to be maximised.

I have set myself a goal to read at least 25 books this year, which roughly translates to about a book every couple of weeks. I also did not just want to read these books but also absorb and internalise the content of these books.

What better way than to recollect what I learnt and share it with my friends here on my blog as a summary.

So, here is the first book that I finished reading this year –

The Growth Gears.

Authors:

Both Art Saxby & Pete Hayes are executives at Chief Outsiders. Chief outsiders is an agency which helps mid-sized companies hire executive talent, specifically CMO’s who can help them grow, without actually taking them on their payrolls. Both of them have a lot of experience as CMO’s themselves and have helped many companies script good growth.

Target Audience:

If you own or are CEO of a mid-sized business, then this book is for you.

Main Concept of the book:

Art and Pete use the analogy of gears to illustrate the point that in order to grow your business, you need to follow the following three steps:

Gear One: Gain insights

In this section, the authors focus on three main areas of insights, which they call the Three Cs.

• Customers: One needs to know a lot about the customers that one is serving, their needs, their wants, why do they buy from us and why dont they buy from us.
• Competitors: One also needs to understand who are our real competitors. How are they competing with us? Where are they winning and why?
• Company: It is equally important to understand our own company culture, strengths and weaknesses.

The book gives a lot of tactical advices on how to go about gaining insights about each of these levers.

Gear Two: Define a Strategy

Once you have enough insights about your customers, competition and your own business, it is time to define the strategy for growth.

The quality of your growth strategy will be dependent upon the quality of your market insight.

In this section, the book explores the different strategies that one has access to growth.

• Market (existing or new): Your target customer and how you will sell to them.
• Offerings (existing or new): Your products, services, features, and pricing.
• Positioning (existing or new): How you talk about your product and compare to competition.

Gear Three: Execution excellence

In this section, the book explores the fact that coming up with a great strategy is easy, its is executing on the strategy well that matters. And this is a change management challenge rather than anything else. So, the book goes on to explore how to communicate this change in destination to the employees, how to ensure alignment at all levels and then shares the three levers for execution excellence which are:

Resources:

• Money or budget
• People and their time, which means not just the cost of the people but also the amount of time they’re going to put in
• Systems and technology that will be deployed to support your strategy

Tactics: Answers to the following questions would help defining the actual play in the market.

• How do we want to be perceived? (That aligns with gear one, Insight.)
• What do we stand for? (That aligns with gear two, Strategy.)
• Are we able to communicate those things in how we look, in how we describe things, and in the voice we use in our digital media?
• Is our website talking about the things we do or how we do them? Or are we talking about the types of problems we solve and the value a buyer can get?
• Can buyers get the information

Metrics: The book shares the importance of identifying and tracking lead metrics to track progress.

Whether or not you’re already evaluating your marketing effectiveness, there are two dimensions to consider:

(1) Are you getting a return from the investment you’re making?, and

(2) do you have access to leading indicators that will demonstrate the effectiveness of your marketing before the end of your sales cycle or before the ability to measure an actual dollar return?

What is Great about the book:

The best part about the book is that this is a tactical how-to guide about what could business owners could do and in what order to find growth for their business. It is simple to read and easy to follow. I also believe that the advice given to business owners is good.

What could have been better:

What would have made the book really a class apart is for them to have one or a few case studies of how a real life business owner used these tactics to find significant growth for their business. I think this could have been possible simply because both the authors are practitioners and had access to this information amongst their clients.

Final words:

I think that this book would be a good read if you are looking to grow your business – irrespective of the fact that you own the business or you are just someone in an organisation responsible for a small part of that business.

I would rate this book 7.5/10.

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Walmart has acquired e-commerce pureplay ShoeBuy for $70 million in a bid to bolster inventory on Jet.com and help boost overall online sales growth, reports Recode.

While the acquisition has the potential to breathe new life in Jet.com's wavering performance, the marketplace's struggles with customer loyalty in the past could minimize ShoeBuy's contribution.

Jet.com's sales soared during the holidays, but maintaining this growth will be challenging. Jet.com has had trouble breeding customer loyalty and encouraging shoppers to return for future purchases. As of February 2016, 70% of all sales were from first-time buyers, according to Slice Intelligence, meaning just 30% of purchases were from loyal shoppers.

Even with new inventory from ShoeBuy, Walmart could continue to see limited returns from Jet.com if consumers fail to come back for future purchases. Looking ahead, Jet.com will need to focus on engaging consumers and encouraging them to return via initiatives like loyalty programs, or by expanding inventory and product categories.

E-commerce has been on the rise in the last several years, thanks in large part to titans in the industry such as Amazon and Alibaba. E-commerce will truly become the future of retail, as nearly all of the growth in the retail sector now takes place in the digital space.

BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, forecasts that U.S. consumers will spend $385 billion online in 2016. Moreover, BI Intelligence predicts that number will grow to $632 billion in 2020.

This is hardly surprising considering e-commerce's healthy growth. Though the U.S. retail average growth rate in the first half of 2016 was just 2% for total retail, it was 16% for e-commerce.

The number of online shoppers has grown by nearly 20 million from 2015 to 2016. And these 224 million shoppers are spending more, as the total amount spent online grew from $61 billion in the first quarter of 2015 to $68 billion in Q1 2016. Finally, these customers are transacting more frequently, as the number of online transactions has risen by 115 million from 2015 to 2016.

But all of this shopping online creates its own set of challenges, both for consumers and the companies that are trying to get their products onto shoppers' screens and into their shopping carts. In short, you need a plan.

And to create your ultimate e-commerce battle plan, you need the right intel.

BI Intelligence is here to help.

Our team of industry experts has you covered on topics such as:

• Shopping cart abandonment
• Marketing effectiveness
• Merchandise returns
• Customer satisfaction
• Social media monetization
• Mobile payments
• Accommodating shoppers at the 11th hour
• And much more

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