Rnordman

The world of content marketing is always changing. What you may have seen a few months ago may no longer be useful. Therefore, it’s important to always be ready to give your content a new and creative spin. Remember, when it comes to content marketing, it’s not just about how much content you produce. It’s about producing content that gets people engaged. And, keeps them engaged enough to keep following your company until they convert over.

Do you need some direction to help give your content a push? Then take a look a look at these tips:

Get Yourself the Technology You Need

Creating content that actually makes a positive impact on your lead generation takes the utilization and understanding of how to use appropriate technology. There are a lot of new types of technology out there which make it easier for us to connect with our audiences.

For example, is your company honing in on IoT? Are you familiar with the different kinds of smart devices that are out there? And, are you catering your content to work around this technology?

If you can’t keep up with the virtual reality devices and the smart refrigerators quite yet, you still have some time. After all, your company may not be so suited for this kind of technology at the present moment. But, you best be figuring out how to catch on to it sooner or later!

Use That Technology to Alter Your Content

Though there’s always a little bit of debate when it comes to technology, there’s nothing wrong with trying it out. Giving things like location-based marketing a try is a great way to give your content the push it needs. By using relevant data from your leads and your current customers, you can really put an interesting spin on your content that your competition may not be able to do.

Use Those Visuals!

Visual marketing is still growing as one of the biggest components of digital marketing. Companies are spending more time and money to waste less of the customers’ time and money. They are investing in new ways to give customers visual content. Strong visual content will provide customers with a powerful insight into the company at large.

Don’t Be Shy

If you’re going to give your content the push in needs this year, then the biggest thing you need to do is get over your shyness. Today’s type of content demands to put your company at the center of attention and make you more accessible to your audience. We’re talking live video streams (Facebook Live, Periscope, or Meerkat), Snapchat, and other social media outlets to make yourself a little more “exposed.”

Nothing is Out of Line…Especially If It’s Not Written Content

There’s a lot of debate nowadays as to whether or not written content is still useful. The answer is, of course, “yes.” However, the more you can branch off into alternative types of content, the more readers you’re going to see. We know that in 2017, video content is really going to be a hit. But, beyond that, remember that content doesn’t need to be just articles or videos. It can be engaging with your audience on Twitter or hosting a photo contest on Facebook (user-generated content.) Or, it could be designing infographics or making boards or pins to Pinterest.

Don’t limit yourself to all the different kinds of content possibilities out there!

When it comes to creating content, you have to take risks. This year, give your content the push it needs so you can bring in more leads!

And, want to know whether or not your strategy is effective? Then request a demo with Mission Suite. We’ll help you automate your content and keep an eye on how your leads and customers are responding to it.

Your LinkedIn contacts are not leads.

They are contacts, and you have some work to do before they officially become a lead.

I saw a comment in my LinkedIn news feed today where someone said, “I have been on LinkedIn for years. Has anyone got a fresh lead on LinkedIn that turned into a sale? I never have.”

I could feel her frustration and disappointment, especially since the post she was commenting on was promoting a free eBook about finding leads on LinkedIn. (The book was free when you reached the seventh and final hoop of the opt-in, by the way.)

If you are as frustrated as the person I mentioned above, you might be thinking about LinkedIn in the wrong way. LinkedIn is not a massive opt-in list grown from your content marketing campaign. It’s not a list at all or a database: It’s a network. And fortunately for all of us, it gives us behind-the-scenes data about everyone in the network.

If you want to find success on LinkedIn, I encourage you to try something different: Put yourself in their shoes.

Here is one way to approach it.

1. Have you ever had any communication exchange with this person?

Before reaching out to a new contact, or any contact, do your research. Look over their profile, review their website, search online for articles about them or their business, and read some of their LinkedIn (or blog) posts. Try to learn something about them, and by doing this, you can look for challenges they have that your products or services could resolve. HOWEVER… even if you find something, don’t you dare go try to sell your services yet.

Tip: When you are viewing their profile, you can view their recent activity and get to know them. How about that?!

2. Do NOT add them to your newsletter database or any other database.

Just because they accepted your LinkedIn request doesn’t mean they opted-in to your newsletters or emails. You’ve skipped an entire process in the marketing funnel.

3. Make your first communication a nice formal hello.

Send them a thank-you for connecting and comment about their profile or something you have in common.

4. Make your second and third action (get the drift) helpful.

Share or comment on one of their posts as they appear in your news feed. Or use that handy tool I showed you in step one and find an update to comment on or share. Be genuine, and think about what you are writing.

5. Track your interactions through the Relationship Tab in their profile or your CRM.

Write some notes about what you’ve learned. Set yourself a reminder to follow up, or check in on them in a few days/weeks.

6. Later, go back to their profile, updates and information.

Is there something they need that one of your contacts could help with? Send them a note and let them know you would be happy to make an introduction. (Don’t you dare make that introduction until they tell you it’s Ok.)

Make a note of their needs and challenges and when you come across something online, like an eBook or article, send it to them. No strings attached.

7. Do you think you know them now?

Invite them for a call. When they receive your email, they will recognize your face as that nice person who has helped them in the past. Now that you know more about them, prepare a value item for them. Is there a report or research that you have that will help them? Is there an eBook that your company created that will support their business goals? Is there a case study that shows how your company has saved thousands of dollars for businesses just like theirs?

Let them know there are no strings attached (and mean that). Your call will uncover a wealth of information you didn’t know about them. This I guarantee. You will find all kinds of intersections and the natural flow of the conversation will let you know if they are a lead.

8. And guess what, even if they aren’t a lead, they will become a referral source.

They will have no problem referring you because you are a nice and professional business contact of theirs.

Is your brain hurting? Are you thinking, ‘I don’t have time for all this.’

Well, do you have time to reach out to hundreds of people only to have a low to zero return on your efforts?

I sure don’t.

While this strategy won’t sell a hundred widgets by Friday, keep in mind LinkedIn wasn’t designed for that. This strategy has made a me a better person, a better LinkedIn contact, and it keeps our company’s pipeline bursting at the seams.

Visit LinkedIn’s about page and you’ll learn that LinkedIn was founded nearly fourteen years ago and today is the world’s largest professional network with more than 467 million members in over 200 countries (when this article was published.)

Yet, despite LinkedIn’s success in the social media stratosphere, it was seemingly not as shiny an object as other social media platforms in 2016.

Facebook has been encroaching on LinkedIn’s turf with Facebook for Business which integrates Messenger, Instagram, Pages and Targeted Advertising with a robust offering for marketers, including B2B marketers.

While Facebook may be more preoccupied with one-upping Snapchat rather than LinkedIn, many people have become so predisposed to the Facebook experience that the lines are blurred between professional networking, and just networking. In fact, many professionals are actively engaged in Facebook Groups on business topics. Business groups used to be the sole domain of LinkedIn.

Let’s face it, LinkedIn has needed a makeover to become more than a platform for job hunters and recruiters. LinkedIn Marketing Solutions has been hard at work to deliver value to marketers who want to reach their target audience through sponsored updates.

LinkedIn Makeover

The makeover plans began on June 13, 2016 when the world’s largest professional network agreed to be acquired by Microsoft. Now that the Microsoft acquisition has closed, it’s a new day for LinkedIn. CEO Jeff Weiner himself said in a company wide email, “in so many ways, we’re just getting started.”

And, I agree…

As a B2B professional, I’m optimistic for LinkedIn’s potential. I believe the combination of LinkedIn and Microsoft can benefit you and me in many ways. Here’s a glimpse of what I think we might see in the next 12 to 24 months.

In 2017 I expect LinkedIn to take steps toward becoming relevant again. The LinkedIn experience has to become both more enjoyable, and more productive.

Let’s look at the issues that are important to B2B professionals and how LinkedIn and Microsoft can address them.

Career Development

Ongoing Skills Improvement

Business Development and Sales Success

To address each of these, Microsoft and LinkedIn are planning tight integration between their respective technologies at scale. The potential impact is exciting.

In an email from Jeff Weiner to LinkedIn employees, he lists eight areas of focus.

I’m honing on three of these to keep this article brief.

LinkedIn identity and network in Microsoft Outlook and the Office suite

A day is coming where you will be able to engage with your LinkedIn network from your Outlook email as well as while you’re working on a spreadsheet in Excel, or a report in Word or in a presentation in PowerPoint, or on a Skype call. Add artificial intelligence to the mix and we can expect to get suggestions about who to engage on LinkedIn to share your PowerPoint deck, or who in your LinkedIn network can help you complete that report. Let your imagination flow. The possibilities are many.

Extending the reach of Sponsored Content across Microsoft web properties

Microsoft has a gigantic, global footprint. Sponsored Content opportunities will get more sophisticated, including the ability to reach subscribers to Microsoft properties such as MSN.com. This is a huge opportunity for marketers because targeting people within LinkedIn’s traditional eco system has always been limited to reaching users who are logged into LinkedIn. By reaching people in Microsoft’s digital properties, that dependency is eliminated. Imagine the potential of reaching and re-targeting people on Microsoft web properties.

Redefining social selling through the combination of Sales Navigator and Dynamics 365

I believe this is perhaps the biggest breakthrough potential for LinkedIn. No other platform, not even Facebook or Google, has the combined benefit of technology at scale and reach at scale as LinkedIn and Microsoft have together. No other social network addresses the needs of the business professional as robustly as the combined LinkedIn and Microsoft. As Sales Navigator eats into Salesforce’s turf with integration to Microsoft Dynamics, the B2B professional will have more networking power, more sales power and more educational power than is possible with any other social network. The insights that will be available on customers and prospects will be exponentially greater.

LinkedIn is No Copy Cat

I don’t expect to see LinkedIn copy Facebook’s feature hype. For example, I don’t expect to see live video available in LinkedIn anytime soon, except maybe for brands with advertising accounts. LinkedIn understands that a stream full of individuals posting live video has potential to create an extreme case of video spam and a bad experience for the member. I don’t expect LinkedIn to get into a tit-for-tat feature war as we’re seeing between Facebook and Snapchat. Of course, I could be proved wrong.

What Else I hope to See

I hope to see very tight integration with all Microsoft products without showing preference for Windows users. As a Mac user, I hope not to feel left out because I’m not a Windows user. I use Office 365 every day on my Mac. I look forward to enjoying the integration features I mentioned above. I also hope to see deeper analytics with potential to provide greater insights into engagement opportunities for improved business development potential. This is what will keep LinkedIn members loyal.

With accelerated popularity in Account Based Marketing (ABM), I look forward to tighter integration between Navigator and Microsoft Dynamics to provide more robust targeting opportunities with greater ease. This will help companies reach their target accounts with more effectiveness.

Overall, LinkedIn has potential to re-emerge as “cool and useful” for business users. I hope the evolution stays focused on adding value to its members with a balance of free value and paid value. Unfortunately, I’m hearing that several features currently free such as advanced search are going away to be available only in Sales Navigator.

I look forward to seeing LinkedIn be the professional network of choice for many years to come. The Microsoft acquisition should provide the boost it needs to achieve this goal.

Disclaimer: I have no access to inside information. The thoughts expressed here are mine based solely on articles in the public domain and my speculation.

The U.S. media has come under intense scrutiny, with analysts, politicians, and even journalists themselves accusing it of bias and sensationalism — of having failed us — in its coverage of the presidential election. Critics across the political spectrum have said that fake news and cyberattacks played a big role in determining the course of events. The prevailing logic has an “if only” tenor: If only the media had been less swayed by shocking stories, if only bias in the media had been purged, and if only fake news had been eliminated and cyberattacks curtailed, the outcome would have been different. The presidential transition has been marked by the same attitude: if only the media were less distractible and headlines more accurate.

Thinking that way is tempting, but it misses the mark. The media did exactly what it was designed to do, given the incentives that govern it. It’s not that the media sets out to be sensationalist; its business model leads it in that direction. Charges of bias don’t make the bias real; it often lies in the eye of the beholder. Fake news and cyberattacks are triggers, not causes. The issues that confront us are structural.

To the question, If the media were to cover the election again, with the benefit of hindsight, could we expect anything different? my answer is a sobering no. This is for two reasons: the way news is produced and amplified (the supply side) and the way consumers process news (the demand side).

A caveat is in order. The analysis here is not concerned with which candidate deserved to win or whose message was “better.” It is concerned with examining the media and its coverage, identifying its root causes, and understanding what we should expect going forward.

The Supply Side I: Connectedness Matters More than Content or Money

Political campaigns are marketing campaigns, messages aimed at selling a product. Like marketers, politicians obsess over messaging (what journalists would call “content”) and a few key metrics that historically have determined success: amount of television advertising, number of “foot soldiers,” intensity of get-out-the-vote operations, and voter demographics. But in the last two contests in which Hillary Clinton has participated, the 2008 primary and the 2016 election, she won on most of these metrics — and lost the elections.

Two developments bear noting. First, and most obvious, traditional media is no longer the only way to spread the word. Any candidate can communicate directly and instantly with millions of people. Media companies are experiencing an extreme form of competition that comes with digital technologies: Everyone is a media company today.

Second, and even more significant, social media is distinct from traditional media in that it connects users to each other. This means that messages can spread far more easily and quickly (compare how often you share a TV ad and a tweet).

Essential Background

The implications are threefold:

The best product doesn’t always win. Even if you have the best product or candidate, if you run a hub-and-spokes campaign, you’ll attract followers one by one. Create a product or candidate that connects users, and your message — and advantage — will spread rapidly. Apple learned this the hard way. For 20 years, starting in 1984, the Macintosh was superior to any PC. Yet by 2004 its market share was down to 3%. Apple had a great product, but Microsoft had a network of connected users. Because more people used PCs, and wrote software for them, they became the default choice for nearly everyone.

Many organizations and entrepreneurs miss this lesson. Focus only on creating the best content or product, and you can lose because of untapped user connections — a phenomenon I call the “content trap.” It explains why firms that have anchored their strategies to content have ceded digital leadership to those that have focused on connections.

Consider the Scandinavian media firm Schibsted, which engineered an impressive digital transformation through a philosophy of connectedness. It focused its efforts on earning a majority share of Europe’s digital classified advertising market (a product that connects buyers and sellers). It then shifted its news focus from great content to content rooted in the question “Can we help readers help each other?” During the volcanic ash crisis of 2010, what it offered wasn’t prize-winning stories about the roots of the eruption or its health implications, but an app (Hitchhiker’s Central) that allowed readers to share travel plans and offer rides to each other. Similarly, during the 2016 election, many American voters found journalistic content less relevant than what they were experiencing in their own lives.

Bigger marketing budgets may not pay off. In a digital world full of product clutter, the best marketing campaigns spend nearly nothing. JC Penney spent no money on television advertising during the 2015 Super Bowl, yet its “mittens” campaign was one of the most watched. The campaign relied solely on Twitter and went viral by virtue of intentional spelling mistakes. Once a “connected” product draws in users, those users effectively become the sales force. Facebook, Uber, and Airbnb are all examples of this. Donald Trump spent only half of what Clinton did during the campaign.

Expectations matter. In connected worlds, expectations about future growth affect what current users choose; people want to be on a winning platform. This has led to a strategy known as vaporware, a term for when firms announce strengths they may not possess or supposedly imminent product launches to draw users. Consider Trump’s first words in the June 2015 announcement of his candidacy: “Wow. Whoa. That is some group of people. Thousands.…This is beyond anybody’s expectations. There’s been no crowd like this.” This wasn’t just a campaign message; it was an effort to shape expectations and trigger connectedness.

The Supply Side II: Ratings Determine Which Messages Get Amplified

The first phase of a marketing campaign is deciding how and where to spend your marketing dollars. The second is influencing how your message gets amplified. One of the most important mechanisms for this is traditional media — so-called “earned media coverage.” You can spend a lot in the first phase and get little amplification in the second, or vice versa.

Recycling the same message won’t earn amplification. And in today’s media environment, even “normal” news doesn’t break through information clutter; big, surprising events do. The media’s bias toward big events stems from three features of its economics:

Fixed costs. The cost of covering a golf tournament doesn’t depend on whether Tiger Woods plays. But if he does, ratings — and revenue — double. The same phenomenon affects decisions about covering news stories or political rallies.

An advertising-based model. Advertising (and other indirect charges like cable operator fees) are central to the economics of most news media, and this creates a bias whereby the number of viewers is more important than whether viewers like the coverage. (What matters is that you watch news coverage, not whether you are ready to throw a chair at it out of disgust.) Fixed costs have always been central to the economics of media. Advertising came later — and when it did, in the early 20th century, news became more sensational. That’s hardly surprising: The main metric by which news outlets are judged is the ratings they command, the page views they get, or the copies they sell.

Spillovers. A big event in media and entertainment doesn’t just draw viewers to the event itself; it also entices viewers to consume follow-on or related products (and a company’s previous products, too). People who watch a television program are far more likely to watch the next program on that channel, for example.

Each of these factors, individually, means that ratings or page views — the size of the audience — matter a lot for media firms. Together, they lead to a fixation on ratings to the exclusion of almost anything else. Competition further reinforces this dynamic, making audience size the metric by which media firms are measured. The outcome is a “ratings bubble” within which companies operate.

Big-event bias is even more pronounced in entertainment worlds, where getting noticed has gotten increasingly hard over time. This explains the trend toward spinoffs, sequels, and franchises in broadcast television and movies (viewers are already familiar with the basic story) and big-name authors in books (they generate publicity) and why successful sports franchises tend to get even more successful over time (they draw lots of viewers, which allows them to spend more on star players, who draw even more viewers). Success might have more to do with awareness than with quality. When the pseudonymous Robert Galbraith published A Cuckoo’s Calling in 2013, the novel sold about 1,500 copies in the first month. After the author was revealed to be Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling, sales rose to over one million.

Piggybacking on big events has allowed certain media companies to grow over time. Fox News, for instance, entered the seemingly mature cable market in 1996 and experienced notable upticks in viewers after “big news” events — the 2000 election, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the start of the war in Iraq. When an event drew viewers to cable news in general, Fox’s ratings grew along with the other networks’. But more of the viewers who tuned into Fox stayed with it after the event had passed when they realized the network’s coverage was different.

In political campaigns, big events arise in one of three ways. The first is sporadically and unpredictably, as with the San Bernardino shooting or the Access Hollywood tape. The timing of such surprises can be particularly fortuitous or damaging (see: James Comey). The second is through name recognition. Events become more newsworthy if they’re accompanied by a big name. The third is by being created. Steve Jobs understood this more than most technology executives, which is why he elevated product launches to an art form: Every media firm had to cover a new Apple release. And Trump understood this more than any other candidate: Every time he made a provocative comment on a new subject, the news outlets covered it.

These forces help explain why Trump got so much more media coverage than, say, Bernie Sanders, who touted a similarly antiestablishment, populist message. Populism and inequality aren’t news; calling Mexican immigrants rapists and vowing to build a wall are. So Sanders’s brand of populism wasn’t news; Trump’s was. The reason was rooted in media economics, not in the effort or preferences of journalists and programming executives. A combination of fixed costs, an advertising-reliant model, and spillovers produced a staggering difference in earned media coverage during the primaries: $2 billion for Trump and $300 million for Sanders. Television advertising, where Clinton had a huge leg up on both, hardly seemed to matter at all.

Competition Can Backfire

Competition and private firms operating in their self-interest typically lead to well-functioning markets. But that’s not always what happens. A well-known exception occurs when externalities exist — side effects on other people or firms that aren’t usually accounted for by private actors. (Canonical examples are cigarette smoking or pollution, or a store manager in a large retail chain pursuing actions that benefit his individual store but damage the parent company’s brand.) In situations like these, following your self-interest (in this case, as a media firm) doesn’t necessarily further the collective good, or even your own.

In 2009 Netflix needed high-quality content to grow its streaming business. It could get that content only from Hollywood studios. The studios had seen Netflix grow its DVD business for a decade, and now, with a stronger bargaining position in the streaming market — the first-sale doctrine that allowed any DVD owner to resell did not apply to streaming — they could have chosen not to license to Netflix and nipped it in the bud. But they granted licenses, and Netflix soon became the giant they hadn’t wanted to see arise. Why did the studios act against their own interests?

If they could have collectively agreed not to license to Netflix, the result would have been different. But they couldn’t. At first only Viacom relented, licensing archived Beavis and Butt-head episodes. One show, it reasoned, could not a streaming giant make. But then everyone followed that logic.

It wasn’t that the content providers didn’t see what was happening; it was that they couldn’t coordinate. It’s why newspapers let Google crawl their content for Google News. It’s why they handed content to Facebook for its Instant Articles format last year.

So, too, with the recent political campaign. If every media outlet had ignored Trump’s rallies and rhetoric, it would have paid handsomely for one outlet to cover them. But once one did cover them, no others could afford not to.

These events coalesced dramatically toward the end of the campaign, when Trump announced a press conference in which he would ostensibly make a major announcement about President Obama’s birth certificate (a lie that he had prolonged that had found traction in media coverage several years back). Nearly every media outlet showed up. How could they not cover a major announcement by a presidential candidate? But it was a sham — there was no real announcement, other than that there would be no more announcements on the subject.

This is the prisoner’s dilemma of reporting amid competition: Following your self-interest does not always further the collective good. The situation generated one of the most dispiritingly candid statements ever from a media executive: Early in 2016, when the head of CBS was asked about the disproportionate attention given to Trump, he quipped, “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”

The network wasn’t alone. Cable news outlets enjoyed similar gains in 2016, marking it as their best year ever. Meanwhile, public trust in the press reached its lowest level in history.

The Demand Side: Consumers Consume What They Want To

One of the longest-standing debates in marketing is not whether advertising works, but how it does. One view is that marketing persuades consumers to purchase. Hear a song once, and you may not like it; hear it repeatedly, and you’ll start to, regardless of how good or bad it is (hence the phrase “all publicity is good publicity”). Others argue that marketing merely increases awareness without altering beliefs. By this reasoning, repeated exposure to a song that doesn’t match your taste might make you less likely to buy it.

Does media reporting change what we believe, or do our preferences shape what media we choose to watch in the first place?

Most research indicates that the latter is central: Our preexisting preferences largely determine what media we watch. One of the most reliable findings in the study of television entertainment is that viewers watch programs whose characters are like themselves. Older people watch shows featuring older characters, younger viewers watch shows featuring younger ones; the same goes for gender, ethnicity, and income. A similar effect is seen in news: We watch outlets whose reporting is consistent with our beliefs. Viewers who identify with the right are more likely to watch Fox, while left-leaning people are more likely to watch MSNBC. Similar differences apply to intra-network program choices, since programs on the same network can differ in their positioning.

These patterns in news-watching would be puzzling if all that news providers did was provide verifiably objective information. But like entertainment programs, news programs and channels differ in their positioning, in the way they report information (often referred to as slant), and in what information they report (agenda setting). News positioning matters — viewers watch news programs and channels whose positions match their tastes and beliefs.

This pattern of sorting on beliefs is amplified over time by various additional factors. The first is competition among media, which has increased as digital technologies have led to a vast number of new media outlets, each catering to more-niche tastes. The second is viewers’ confirmation bias, which leads us to reject valid information that is not consistent with our beliefs. Confirmation bias is deeply rooted in human behavior. It affects not just how we process information but who we associate with, creating “filter bubbles.” These bubbles are further reinforced by website algorithms designed to personalize the information we receive based on our past behaviors. Persuasive effects of the media also serve to solidify these bubbles. (And even small persuasive effects can have large effects in close elections.)

Each factor increases viewer polarization, which on certain measures has reached unprecedented levels. Together, they shape how we respond to bias in the media. Consider the debate over left and right media bias, which goes back several decades and has grown in intensity over time. Part of what makes discussions of bias so thorny is that we almost never agree on what bias is. Both the debate and studies tend to focus on what the media reports — on content. But studies show that content is not the only place where bias lives. In experiments, when two people with different beliefs view exactly the same content, their perceptions of bias differ.

Add it all up, and the implications are profound.

First, we watch what we believe, but what we don’t watch, we don’t believe. This is the effect of sorting based on beliefs.

Second, negative coverage can have unintended consequences. Hear a source you don’t trust, and when it reports something inconsistent with your beliefs, you’ll discount that thing even more. (The rare exception is when events are incontrovertibly verifiable — for example, the question of who said what on the Access Hollywood tape.) During the election season, more newspapers endorsed Clinton than any presidential candidate in U.S history. Papers with a tradition of endorsing Republicans endorsed her; papers with a tradition of not endorsing a candidate did, too. But none of it mattered; editorial content was essentially irrelevant.

Third, and for the same reason, charges of media bias can actually help an outlet. The more your favorite channel is alleged to be biased by people you disagree with, the more you’ll watch it. Trump wasn’t the first to see this phenomenon: In Fox News’s early days, senior executives often acknowledged that charges of bias appeared to help them. And it isn’t specific to right-leaning voters. After the election, when Trump tweeted complaints about the New York Times and Vanity Fair, both outlets saw a rise in subscriptions. Charges of bias harden beliefs and reinforce polarization.

Particularly sobering is that all this has nothing do with the much-lamented problem of fake news. Get rid of all verifiably fake news, as Facebook and others certainly should, and filter bubbles, polarization, and charges of media bias will remain.

Where Does This Leave Us?

Three forces combine to create the media coverage of political campaigns we observe today: connected media, which spreads messages faster than traditional media; fixed costs and advertising-reliant business models in traditional media, which amplify sensational messages; and viewers’ news consumption patterns, which leads to people sorting across media outlets based on their beliefs and makes messages they already agree with far more effective. Each reinforces the others. Without these enabling factors, even the best marketing campaign would go nowhere, and fake news or leaked information from cyberattacks would have little effect.

Fair questions have been raised about the lack of investigative journalism early in the campaign, false equivalencies in reporting, and the use of paid campaign operatives as experts on television news. But digital technology and business incentives exerted more influence over the media coverage than editorial decisions and missing voices did. The ratings bubble had as much impact as filter bubbles did. The forces at work here — the search for profitability, competition, and self-interest — are things we embrace as profoundly American.

Competition in the media leads to efficiency as well as to checks and balances — all good things. But it fails to internalize the externalities from profitable but sensational coverage. It leads to differentiation and more voices (also good, and what’s been the focus of regulatory efforts) but also to fragmentation, polarization, and less-penetrable filter bubbles (dangerous).

It’s tempting to stretch the analysis between marketing and politics too far. They are different in important respects. Most notable, in marketing you can win through strategies that exploit the big-event bias of media (through attention-grabbing rhetoric) and the beliefs of consumers (through allegations that discredit your competitors). These strategies draw in consumers who are right for your brand. But in presidential politics, the same approach is incredibly risky because when you win, you serve everyone, not just those who “purchased your product.” Despite these differences, the same economics of information supply-and-demand that shape digital strategies in business are doing so in politics.

Which leads to my conclusion: Even if we could somehow push “reset,” we would have to expect the same sort of coverage that we got. The problems are too deep and structural for anything else.

What’s the way forward? There are no easy answers to the question. This analysis mainly points to solutions that won’t work. Voluntary efforts at restraint by well-meaning journalists won’t work, because of advertising-based business models and competition. Eliminating fake news won’t change the fact that voters ignore ideas contrary to their beliefs. And it won’t solve the media’s structural challenges or change its incentives. Media companies, their regulators, and their customers — all of us — have to look for ways to confront these challenges. The stakes could not be higher.

When you hear the term lead generation, social media probably isn’t the first thing that comes to mind…but maybe it should be.

With 75% of B2B buyers and 84% of C-level/Vice President (VP) executives incorporating social media as a key part of their decision-making process according to IDC, social channels are becoming essential to building relationships with prospects and customers throughout every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Companies employing lead generation strategies on social media are able to achieve better results throughout the funnel—building brand awareness and generating conversions, achieving better sales productivity, producing higher revenue growth, and creating a sense of community for advocates and followers. And according to a recent study by LinkedIn Pulse, B2B buyers who feel a “high brand connection” are 60% more likely to consider, purchase, and even pay a premium than “low brand connection” competitors.

In this blog, I’ll outline seven ways that you can generate leads on social media:

1. Special Offers

Everyone loves freebies, so consider hosting a sweepstake or offering giveaways on social media. These types of campaigns are something people enjoy sharing on their social channels, and by including an entry form, you’ll have the opportunity to capture important lead data. At the end of the form, be sure to incorporate a way for entrants to share the offer via their social channels. This way, participants can spread the word with their community and with every mention, you’re able to continue building the relationship by engaging and acknowledging their posts.

We recently partnered with Uberflip on their 12 Days of Uberflippin’ Giveaways campaign. Participants were asked to enter some basic information (name, company, and job title) to access exclusive content. This was a success on both sides—the contest drove many new names and those who participated received entertaining or educational content.

2. Polls and Surveys

Rather than assuming what your audience cares about, just ask them! Your followers can provide you with a wealth of knowledge, and polls offer a unique way for people to express their opinions. This is a fantastic way to get feedback on how people are using your product, what their pain points are, and what they’d like to see on your roadmap. You can even offer incentives to increase the response rate.

This Twitter poll from Pam Moore, CEO and Founder of Marketing Nutz, helps her understand how her audience feels about Snapchat for B2B marketing. Based on the responses, she can create content that addresses the issue.

3. Refer-a-Friend

This can be tricky, but if you play your cards right, referral campaigns can be a great way to engage your followers. With 92% of buyers trusting the recommendations of their friends and family, referrals are a great way to break the ice with prospects. Create compelling offers for both the referrer and the referees such as gift card or cash incentives. It might be the nudge your customers need to recommend you to their network.

With a social application that’s integrated with your marketing automation platform, you can easily set up a referral campaign that extends across major social media platforms, allowing you to grow your customer base fast. Since each shared message will include a special link that tracks the responses at every stage to the conversion event, you’ll be able to track the campaign’s progression and effectiveness and understand how prospects are helping to get the word out. Here’s an example of a referral campaign that we ran for our annual event, Marketing Nation Online. Participants were encouraged to refer their friends through social media for a chance to win an Amazon gift card.

4. Discount Codes

Flash deals and discount codes are a great way to increase brand awareness and generate demand. By including a strong call-to-action and time constraint, you can create a sense of urgency for people to respond to your campaigns. Many consumer companies are adopting this as a way to combat skyrocketing cart abandonment rates, but it is also highly relevant in the B2B space as well.

For example, Content Marketing Institute offered potential conference attendees a chance to save $100 on their registration by using their limited-time discount code. Want to pack a one-two punch? Discount codes can allow you to get even more granular in your attribution reporting. By assigning unique codes for each social channel, you can track which platform directed the most traffic.

5. Promote Gated Content

Promoting gated content on social media is one of the easiest ways to generate leads. Social media is a great megaphone to get your content out in the world, and by developing posts that direct to landing page where users are prompted to fill out a form, you can generate new leads and nurture existing ones in your marketing database. One of the most critical components of this method is to ensure your social posts provide content that captures the interest of your followers. Use images, gifs, or stats to visually tell the story of your content. According to Guy Kawasaki, “Every post, other than a response or comment, should have a picture or video. That’s one of the most important things to remember.”

Most leads take only a few seconds to decide whether they’ll read a page and give their information, so keep your landing pages simple and design minimal to avoid overwhelming your leads. Here’s an example of one of Marketing Prof’s latest posts directing to their virtual conference. It’s clear what users should expect after clicking through, and the visual is captivating and relevant to the content.

6. Host a Tweet Chat or Live Stream

Going live is a great way to directly interact with your followers and engage with them in real-time. By answering questions, gathering feedback, and generating awareness about your products or services, live chats give you the opportunity to position your brand as an expert in the industry. You can also drive cross-channel traffic by directing participants to branded content, landing pages, and offerings. A great example of this is Hootsuite’s recent participation in the #TwitterSmarter Tweet Chat.

Last year, we launched our #marketochat program, which is a bi-weekly Tweet Chat with our partners, customers, and influencers. It’s been a great way to highlight our unique expertise and build relationships with our participants. One way that you can encourage engagement is to gather a list of all participants at the end of each chat so we can send them a shout out for participating. In addition, we compile all of the Tweet Chat responses in a Storify and post it for easy consumption. With Twitter’s new Moments, you’ll have this capability directly within the platform. We’ve also found sending out personalized invites via Twitter asking participants to join future chats helps maintain engagement after the chat ends.

7. Paid Social Ads

With recent updates to many social networks’ algorithms, advertising on social media platforms is becoming more important than ever. These updates are made to give users a better experience, so they’ll see less promotional content and more of the relevant content that they want to see. This means that, as a marketer, you’ll need to supplement your organic posts with paid promotion to get your posts seen. Each social platform has unique demographic criteria that allow you to target ads (e.g. location, job title, age, industry, gender, etc.). Leverage the right platform and targeting options to ensure you’re going after the audience who will find value in your content and that you’re not wasting paid resources on megaphoning.

When you’re promoting your posts, be sure to include a strong call-to-action to get the most out of your investment and generate conversions. For example, you can ask followers to download an asset, attend a webinar, or learn about a new product. You want to ensure those seeing your ad have something to click on, similar to what we’ve done with our recent Facebook ad promoting our new Definitive Guide to Social Media Marketing.

Still on the fence about investing in social media as a lead generator? Michael Stelzner said it best, “Social networks are the fastest and lowest cost way to generate leads, bar none.”

Are you finding success leveraging social media for lead generation? If so, share how below!

 

When it comes to lead generation, timing is everything. If you don’t reach the right consumer at the right stage of their shopping journey with the most appropriate message, it’s a wasted opportunity. Accordingly, when your data is not timely, it can’t tell you when the time is right to reach out to your target consumers, which means you have only a shot in the dark at effective marketing.

Don’t Jump the Gun

Many marketers make the mistake of acting on early signals of intent way too soon, because it’s the only signal they get. Too many organizations have their sales reps call a lead as soon as they download one piece of content. As a recent blog by Quintain Marketing points out, “Ideally, only certain forms should trigger a lead to the MQL stage, such as direct business offers and other sales-ready calls to action (CTAs).” But, many companies expect their sales reps to call as soon as a lead downloads one top 10 list.

Just because you downloaded a company’s Top 10 List, doesn’t mean you want to speak with one of the company’s sales reps right now. In fact, you are probably in the very early interest phase of your buying journey. There are a number of reasons why it’s not a good practice to automatically call a lead as soon as they download one piece of content. It is, quite frankly, an annoying experience for the consumer who is now left with a poor opinion of the brand, making her less likely to buy from that company in the future.

What is crucial is contacting your leads with the right message at the right time in their buying decision journey. If you come on too hard, too soon, you will blow your chances. If you wait too long to get into the game, you’ll lose out to the competition that got in at the right time.

But, the legitimate challenge is knowing where each consumer truly sits in their buying journey. To make the argument for the businesses calling as soon as a lead downloads one piece of content, most companies only have insight into what actions consumers are taking on their own web properties; and they have no insight at all into what activities they may have engaged in with other brands and third party websites. Perhaps they are actually further along in their buying journey than their one action on your website indicates.

How to Get the Timing Right

The right data source will provide you with a complete look at the consumer’s journey, so that you have insight into where exactly she was in the journey when she downloaded that Top 10 List.

If it was her very first action, you know it’s too soon for a sales rep to call her. Whereas, if that data reveals she has already visited several different websites over the past several weeks researching this purchase, then she is further along in her journey and it may be exactly the right time to call.

If the data tells you that she’s actually narrowed her options down to just your company and a competitor’s company, you know that she is in the decision phase of her buying journey and you need to move quickly to provide an enticing offer for your to choose your business over your competitor’s.

Don’t Forget Your Existing Customers

Looking at the other end of the spectrum, retention marketers face a great challenge in trying to reduce customer churn: no way to know when a customer is leaving to go to a competitor until it’s too late. When you don’t know a customer is defecting, there’s nothing you can do except hope you can stay in touch until the next time they are in the market.

For example, many mortgage lenders have traditionally relied on credit pulls or MLS triggers as their main indicator that a customer is about to defect and go to another lender. While, in the past, this may have been better than nothing, it is pointless if you don’t get that indicator until it’s too late to take action on it, which is usually the case.

With access to the right data set, you can see when your customers are actively shopping for the services you already provide to them or for complementary services you could cross sell to them. When you have these indicators that they are researching these services, you can act at exactly the right time with the right tactics and messages.

How Would You Prefer to Work?

With the right data, you can identify an active buyer early in their journey and educate that consumer with the right content to nurture them appropriately through all stages of the buying cycle.

Without timely data about your consumers’ journeys, you will just continue working based on guesses, which means you will be getting it wrong more than you are getting it right. Which way do you want to work?

When starting off in online marketing, you may feel a little bit under water. From content writing to media outreach, everything seems like a challenge. One of the most difficult things you can be involved in as an online marketing is creating a sales page.

You’ve probably already written great content such as blog posts and email newsletters, but now you need to focus on a page that will ultimately convert visitors into customers.

Sounds easy, right? Well, not exactly.

Building, testing, and optimizing a sales page is one of the biggest challenges you will face in your career. But it doesn’t have to be that way! High converting sales pages all have a few key elements in common, the first of which – copy – is what I will focus on in this article.

You can have the most beautiful layout, but if people do not understand your offer, they certainly aren’t going to buy. When creating a sales landing page, I try to focus on the 5 Point Copy Formula for structure which leads to higher conversion rates.

1. An Attention Grabbing Headline

Don’t spend hours looking for the perfect headline. I’ve seen a lot of copywriters lose sleep and sanity over headlines. Headlines don’t need to be complicated, but they do need to grab your reader’s attention and hook them in.

Take a look at this headline from affiliate marketing guru Neil Patel:

Do you see what he did there? He took a problem his readers are likely having and simply told him how he could solve it.

Digital marketers and business owners need visitors on their website. The only way they can make more money is get more people looking at their product.

Coincidentally, marketers and business owners don’t always have the extra moolah to spend on ads.

In one short and simple headline, Neil’s showcased the desired result (more web traffic) and overcome the problem (the budget for ad spend).

The most important aspect of your headline is that it conveys the value of your product.

(If you’re really losing sleep and can’t seem to settle on headlines, head on over to Digital Marketer’s blog post on headline creation. They’ll supply you with a few tricks of the trade for crafting proven headlines in a matter of minutes.)

2. Create Common Ground

You’ve spent a lot of time getting to know your product as an affiliate marketer. You know the need it fulfills and the problem it is trying to solve. Now, you need to convey that to the reader.

Highlight the motivation and then create common ground through your experiences with this product. Do this by making a list of the most relevant details and address common questions to show your visitors how your product or service can better their life.

3. Offer Your Solution

Now that you’ve got them warmed up, it’s time to lay your cards on the table. Share the successes of your product and make sure to show how it solves the problem of the consumer. This is where your value proposition must shine through.

Keep the word “results” in the forefront of your mind. People could care less about your discount packages or promotions. They don’t buy problems, they buy solutions to those problems.

High converting sales pages focus on presenting the results, not the shiny packaging. Tell them what your product or service does to improve their lives – that simple.

4. Tell Them What to Expect Next

Cliffhangers are meant for movies, not sales.

You need to address their concerns before they occur. Outline exactly what they can expect during the purchase process. Be realistic about delivery times and what they can expect after the purchase (customer service, etc.).

Be specific as this could be the difference between them buying from you or buying from your competitor.

5. Leverage the Social Proof

Whether you do this through endorsement or by modeling your practices after industry leaders, social proof is an effective way to get visitors off the fence and into the party. If have great reviews from past clients, now is the time to highlight them.

One of the most common ways marketers showcase their product is by embedding Amazon reviews to their sales pages. Not only does this give visitors a direct link to verified reviews, it creates an element of trust between you and the reader.

What your customers think of the product you’re selling is worth 100X more than what you say about yourself or the product.

Take a look at this 5 Star review on Yamaha’s Studio Headphones:

Nothing you can say could beat the copy nugget called a good review. By embedding these in your sales pages, you’re showing the visitor right away that people think what you’re selling is worth the money.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, sales pages can make or break your career. Why? Because if you can’t close a sale, you’re not going to make any money.

Luckily, high converting pages aren’t impossible to attain. With a little hard work and copywriting, you’ll see the conversion rates of your sales pages raise significantly.

What do you do to ensure high converting sales pages? Share your strategy in the comments!

I’m going to come right out and say it: “social selling” is just a buzzword. It describes how to use a new set of tools (i.e., social networks) to do something that salespeople have always done.

Look, we’re all in sales. Whether you own the company or occupy the C-suite, whether your job is to serve existing customers or go out and find news ones, you are selling. Convincing your colleagues of the merits of a business strategy? That’s selling too.

Convincing people to buy what you’re selling comes down to three basic factors: first, the strength of your network and the relationships you have with people in it; second, your presence, visibility and reputation among people within your network; and finally, your ability to differentiate yourself and what you’re selling from others.

Social selling is simply a collection of social networking activities and habits that sellers (i.e., ALL business professionals) need to incorporate into their day-to-day routines.

Three age-old activities you need to do in business

Here’s what social selling boils down to:

1. Build a network

Make sure you are connected on LinkedIn with your most important clients, target prospects and industry peers and influencers.

This is your network, the most powerful asset you have as a business professional. Harness it. Nurture it. Grow it. Serve it. Social networks (not only LinkedIn, but Twitter and Facebook and others too) are very efficient tools for maintaining contact and building relationships with key people in your network.

And notice that I’m not just talking about new leads and prospects. Interacting with clients positively online contributes to retention. Helping prospects understand and define their business challenges attracts them to you and your solutions. Building relationships with peers and industry influencers keeps you informed and referable. It’s not rocket science.

2. Be visible in your network

Be active on LinkedIn, Twitter and your other social networks daily.

Focus on two main activities:

• Share curated content of interest to your clients/prospects/peers; and
• Like and comment on what your clients/prospects/peers are sharing.

These activities increase your visibility and “top-of-mind-ness” among the people in your network. They also establish you as a giver, sharer and helper – not only a seller.

People notice when you pay attention to them. When you invest time in paying attention to and promoting others, it triggers reciprocal behavior. Thus, the way you get attention online is to pay attention to others.

3. Differentiate yourself

Write and publish your original thoughts and ideas.

Share your insights about the industry you are in. Share your thoughts about why you do what you do. Be authentic and as open and honest as you can. All of this differentiates you and your offering in the marketplace.

Articles you write can and should be published on your LinkedIn account, in addition to your company blog or in industry trade journals. If you can’t write, outsource to someone who can write articles for you based on your insights and observations. Or make a series of candid videos.

People are looking for ways to justify their buying decisions – which is why they like to buy from recognized leaders. By using social networks effectively, you can make yourself into an industry leader.

Yeah, I know you’re busy

The barriers to using these social selling techniques are commonly lack of time and lack of skill or knowledge about what to do. Yet, almost everyone I have interviewed that has become a prominent online influencer has started from nothing, watched others and taught themselves. They make the time. They invest in building their networks for the long-term. And, yeah, they’re also busy.

In my experience, the other key ingredient is leadership. Sales people will continue doing what they have always done, until someone tells them to do it differently – and makes them accountable. So, in addition to meeting sales targets, sellers need to be made accountable by their managers for increasing their online visibility on key social platforms, namely LinkedIn and possibly Twitter. Metrics such as total impressions and engagements in social networks can be used to measure progress in social selling performance.

If you’re your own boss, make yourself accountable. Grab your bootstraps and pull up hard. There’s a lot of work to be done!

As the new year opens many of us are reviewing our core assumptions about our business. One thing that often comes up is pricing. We have all been told that ‘pricing power’ is a great way to measure the resilience of our company, “If you can’t increase your prices you have a serious business problem” and at the same time field sales is shouting out that “we have to cut prices to match the competition.”

At the beginning of the year I get an influx of people asking me for help with pricing. Generally they want a quick fix to their price levels or some tweaks to their pricing architecture. Usually I can’t help them.

Many people who think they have a pricing problem actually have some deeper issue. Usually ones they are reluctant to discuss. Some days being a pricing consultant is a bit like being a psychotherapist!

The symptoms of a pricing problem are well known.

• Excessive discounting
• Confused buyers
• Disgruntled salespeople
• Lots of off-invoice services and concessions
• Customers selecting the wrong pricing tier or package (wrong because they won’t get the value they are looking for and because the company will fail to optimize revenues)
• Reacting to competitor price moves rather than responding
• Inability to raise prices
• Price destruction across entire markets

People come to me with some combination of these problems hoping for a simple fix. “If we could just get our price right all our problems would go away.” No, they won’t.

Pricing problems almost always connect to some other problem.

Roger Martin’s classic Cascading Choices model applies as a much to pricing as to other choices an organization makes. Martin begins with Aspirations, what are you trying to achieve, and then works done to Where to Play and How to Win Choices. Specific capabilities will be needed to execute on the How to Win Choices and systems will have to be in place to support the capabilities.

Conventionally, pricing is usually seen as a How to Win Choice, more of a tactical than a strategic issue. This is true if we are talking purely about price setting. But the overall pricing strategy is really a Where to Play choice that needs to support your overall aspirations for your business.

• Aspire to be a premium brand? Don’t offer discount pricing.
• Discounting to invest in a market? How and when will you get a return on that investment?
• Your differentiation is cost reduction? Then plan to reduce the cost of what you offer.
• We want to be the market leader. But we react to competitor price moves.

Almost all pricing challenges come back to two things: a failure to understand the customer and how the customer gets value; a failure to anticipate competitor responses and then reacting to the competitor rather than responding.

Value is always a combination of the emotional and the economic. What does your offer make your customer feel about themselves? How does your offer improve their business model? Pricing begins by asking what value is created for a customer compared to the alternative. A good pricing metric tracks value, like click throughs for search advertising or leads for a CRM. There is always an alternative, and it is often a competitor.

In a conversation with pricing guru Tom Nagle (author of The Strategy and Tactics of Pricing) he mentioned to me that many managers struggle with pricing because it is not a process that can be optimized. It is a game with several different players making moves. At a minimum there is you and your customer, making a series of moves as you commit to each other, there is usually one or more competitors, and you are all making moves with very partial information.

The worse thing you can do in pricing is to react. When a customer pushes back on a price, or sales gets frustrated and asks for discounts, or a competitor lowers a price it is easy to react by giving the discount or making a price cut. This is seldom the right move in the game. At the very least you want to respond rather than react. A response is a move that thinks through a sequence of moves. “If I lower my prices what will the customer do? What expectation am I establishing about future pricing? How will my customer respond?” The secret to good pricing is to think of it as a game that you are playing with your customers. Not a zero sum game, where what one player wins the other loses.

Good pricing is a positive sum game, where by focusing on value and aligning the price with value you can create a win-win situation for you and your customer. It always feels good to win, but there are some customers that are better served by your competitors. Over the long term you win by creating value for a coherent set of customers where you are the dominant supplier.

The post Your SaaS Pricing Problem Goes Deeper than You Think appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The fundraising market is in flux. The data indicates that it is certainly reverting to the mean after two record years in 2014 and 2015. Late stage market dynamics are changing as hedge funds and mutual funds seek other areas to invest. In 2017, there will be a lot of comparison between the prices public bound companies fetch at IPO compared to the last round private valuations as the public window opens. Given all that change, which early round will be the hardest to raise for founders in 2017?

Let’s take a look at the Crunchbase data for US startups. Seed rounds have seen the greatest growth since 2010 from approximately 1000 rounds per year to more than 4000 rounds per year in 2014. In 2016, they also saw the greatest drop, 37%, to about 2500. Series As and Bs counts grew 40% from their 2010 figures before falling 20% in 2016. They follow the same pattern, but not nearly to the magnitude of seed rounds.

Median round sizes across the three different investment rounds all exhibit signs of inflation. Series Bs in particular have grown by 30% from $10M to $15M median. Series As have grown steadily from $3M to $6.6M, 17% annual growth. Seed medians have tripled from $272k to $750k, the fastest of all, at 25% per year.

If we examine total dollars invested in each round, Series Bs reached nearly $15 billion in 2015. Notably, series B dollars have roughly equalled Series A dollars until the 2014-2015 bull market. The data suggests a reversion to the mean after a period when Series B dollars exceeded Series A by 30%.

This data suggests Series Bs may become harder to raise on a relative basis than other rounds. The aggregate amount flowing in the stage is falling the most in gross dollar terms and relative to Series As. Let’s see how the ratio of Series B to Series A dollars has changed over time.

In 2010, there were 1.4 Series B dollars for every 1 Series A dollar. That coverage ratio declined through 2013 when the ratio touched 0.88. In 2016, the ratio is 1.22. Not a seven year low by a long stretch. So, there does seem to be plenty of Series B dollars for all the Series A startups who will be in market this year.

If we run the same analysis for Series A and Seed rounds, we observe a different phenomenon. Relative to Seed investments, the amount of Series A dollars available has increased steadily by about 4% per year from 2012 through 2016.

So, which is the hardest round to raise in 2017? One argument is the seed round, because the number of rounds has seen the greatest decline and the 18% y/y drop in investment in 2016 is a sharp correction.

However, the data suggests the harder rounds will be the Series B. The aggregate amount of financing is falling the most gross dollar terms (23% from its highs), and the coverage ratio of Series A dollars is declining. In addition, as Series A round size continue their steady growth, the expectations of Series B companies will increase in lockstep.

2017 isn’t the hardest Series B market of the 2010s. That distinction belongs to 2013 and 2012. Despair not, despite the vacillations of the market there’s near record-levels of capital out there to finance startups. Even if 2017 is a bit off the highs of 2014 and 2015.

Cybercrime has been an unnatural disaster for businesses everywhere in 2016. No company was too small and no industry was too well protected from the predatory practices of canny hackers. If this year is any indication of the hunger and resourcefulness with which cybercriminals continue to steal data and create mayhem, then 2017 will be a year for cyberattack record books.

Our research and interactions with industry experts lead us to believe that some of this year’s worst cybersecurity threats will continue to plague businesses. Here are some familiar threats expected to only get worse as the tech trends of 2017 emerge.

Data Breaches Expected to Rise

Reports of data breaches in 2016 already surpassed the year before, with an increase of 25% over those reported in 2015. Healthcare providers, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and even large businesses were victims of hacks, costing millions to each individual business. Yet in spite of all these publicized data breaches, most organizations are still trying to come up with a cybersecurity strategy.

One study shows that businesses are implementing data breach response plans but run them without being proactive, neglecting to reevaluate their plans or make necessary updates. Hackers constantly explore new ways to bypass unchanging security practices, and businesses without a proactive cybersecurity strategy will continue to be victimized.

Ransomware Will Run Rampant

Few cybersecurity threats blindsided the industry quite like ransomware. Going from relative obscurity to cybersecurity buzzword of 2016, ransomware extorted everyone from small businesses up to Fortune 500s. And the price wasn’t cheap. Small to mid-sized businesses are projected to lose $75 billion in ransom fees and lost productivity.

Now that ransomware is mainstream, even more cybercriminals will try to make a quick buck taking your data hostage. In fact, the popularity of this illicit scheme is spawning an entirely new phenomenon: ransomware-as-a-service. Criminals without any encryption experience now have the ability to hold your data for hostage, as long as they split the money they wrest from businesses with the ransomware’s programmer.

Unfortunately, there are no easy ways to prevent ransomware attacks. A robust cybersecurity plan that implements strong system architecture, backup and recovery protocols, and employee training is the only surefire way to proactively defend against your data being kidnapped. In the end, that means having well-trained cybersecurity professionals on-hand.

Cyberwarfare on the Rise

Warfare has gone online and businesses will get caught in the crossfire. More countries are practicing digital espionage and non-military targets are increasingly fair game. China’s secret military hacking group is alleged to have targeted US Steel, Allegheny Technologies, SolarWorld, and even Coca-Cola. Russian hackers or hackers on their behalf targeted the DNC. Cyberattacks on US businesses are increasingly taking on a political edge and are only getting more destructive.

This year, we saw the San Francisco Muni system being temporarily shut down. Though not military related, this demonstrates the next direction for cyberwarfare. Experian predicts similar tactics will be employed in a larger scope. As instances of espionage and sabotage escalate, more countries will take action, expanding the number of businesses compromised.

Your company does not need to be a governmental or military target to get hacked. If state-sponsored cybercriminal believe that your business will help strengthen their international position, you are a target.

Preventing Losses from Cyberattacks on US Businesses

With the increase of potential threats, there is an even greater likelihood that more cyberattacks on US businesses will hit home. More often than not, the question facing companies is not will they prevent cyberattacks, but can they mitigate their potential damage?

At the core of that solution is a strong cybersecurity presence. Companies that hire internal IT security professionals have a much better chance of fending off hackers and fostering security best practices that prevent many of the worst problems from happening.

Say hello to Uber Freight. Last summer, good old Uber acquired the company Otto, which planned to bring self-driving trucks to the hauling market. The concept tested reasonably well, delivering mega loads of beer and Christmas trees to San Francisco. Now, since the buy up, it looks like Uber is pivoting that branch away from just autonomous and towards their traditional product: decentralized movement. Drivers can sign up to deliver long distance, users can sign up to avoid traditional contracts with shipping companies. Sounds legit right? 

While this seems like a bootleg industry nightmare to me, the ability to monitor the behavior of human drivers and their use networks will help further development of the Otto autonomous line. This is expected to depress some shipping costs, but does leave plenty of room for the beloved surge pricing. While multiple other tech brands have shown interest in the shipping world, this is the boldest move ahead yet.

The details are still gray but given the arrival of the new Uber Freight website, they should be delivered pretty soon. 

Customer surveys may not be exciting, but they're still crucial to business success

Customer surveys are a traditional marketing research method. The advancement of technology has attempted to push them to the side in favour of other means, such as email. However, there are many reasons not to renounce this particular practice and instead, see them as an addition to the typical advanced strategy. Customer surveys are not a novelty, but they are still relevant in today’s digital marketing environment. Here are 10 good reasons to convince you.

1.    Offer Better Services

The primary purpose of any customer survey is getting feedback from clients. However, this feedback is only the means to an end. Just collecting your client’s opinion is useless if you don’t do anything with it. The expected outcome of any marketing research is an improvement. If you have struggled to convince people to participate in a survey, you need to get to phase two once the research is completed. The data input you received from respondents will carefully be analyzed. The consolidated results you finally put together must help you draw several business improvement ideas.

Even a single customer survey with 5 to 10 yes or no questions can help you come up with great ideas on how to improve your services. You don’t need to be a marketing expert to understand and interpret the results. Ask simple questions and get simple answers. Crafting a survey is quite easy and quite reliable in terms of customer feedback.

Make sure you always have your client’s answers in mind. Look at their complaints, desires, or simply the scores they assigned to your products. This will give you enough insight to offer better customer experience and even boost conversion rates. The primary goal of customer surveys is to help you offer better services, and that hasn’t changed.

2.    Strengthen Your Relationship with Customers

The second huge advantage of surveys is their capacity to help you build customer trust. Most clients stumble upon a product and purchase out of curiosity or necessity. Unless they buy expensive items or niche products, people don’t usually make a documented choice. Most of the time, they just buy what comes at hand. This is not necessarily bad, put it raises some brand awareness doubts.

You need to make sure that your customers know who you are and that they are likely to come back to you. Surveys help you build loyalty and increase your popularity because they engage people. Clients will think about your product and how benefited them. Taking part in a survey makes them connect to your business and remember your brand. If you showed you value their input, they would be likelier to return.

3.    It’s Easier Than Ever to Conduct a Survey

One of the best things in the digital marketing era is that everything happens fast because it happens online. Thanks to social media channels, you can reach out to hundreds of people in a matter of seconds. This also enables you to send out your questionnaire faster and get immediate feedback. You could also send the feedback request via email or place it on a visible spot on your website.

No matter how you do it, make it fast, up to date and interactive. This will convince people to participate. Technology helps you come up with funny, engaging ideas to make your clients enjoy taking part in your survey. The era of customer surveys is not over. It only has a modernized face and speedier replies.

4.    You Will Get a Variety of Perspectives

When it comes to evaluating a product, each client has his or her own criteria. People with similar demographics and interests can respond differently to questionnaires. This is the interesting and exciting part of analyzing the results. You get to learn and understands many different things about various client categories. This will give you a broader view of people’s needs. It will enable you to customize your product accordingly. You might even feel inspired to create new products that go beyond your current expertise.

Innovation is key in the digital era, which is why receiving feedback and listening to a variety of opinions could help you improve the performance and reputation of your business.

5.    Everyone Tends to Be Honest While Filling in A Survey

People are often reluctant to express their opinion face to face. It is easier to gather your thoughts and write them down. It is also more comfortable than stating them out loud. People are more willing to post a comment or answer a questionnaire instead of responding to your questions directly. Clients tend to be more open and sincere especially if they are not required to leave their name.

In the end, it doesn’t matter who complained about your services, but why they did it and what you are going to do to change things for the better. The anonymity that customer surveys retain is critical to receiving honest feedback.

6.    You Can Analyze and Predict Customer Behavior

Consumer behavior is one of the most debated topics in today’s marketing research. This niche analyzes customer’s purchase habits to improve their experience. Questionnaires are a great way to gather valuable data and define your client’s behavior. This task is a little bit more challenging as it requires patience and analytic skills. More complex questionnaires centered on client’s demographics will help you create customer profiles or stereotypes.

These are the first things marketers should look at when they aim to boost sales. You need to know a person to be able to fulfill his or her needs. Client profiles help you reach out to hundreds or thousands of people who share similar exigencies. Dividing your customers into multiple categories also helps you distinguish their purchase peculiarities and make sales predictions.

7.    Show Customers You Care

Asking for feedback is a proof of loyalty. You want your clients to be faithful to your brand, but you must work on this relationship too. Just offering good services is not enough. They don’t like the feeling that they are mere consumers. You should not let them leave your store or office with the impression that you only wanted to cash in. Clients want to feel that their opinion matters.

A survey is not just a formal set of questions meant to evaluate your products, it is also a proof of care for your clients. They are the core of your business. Make them feel so by asking constant feedback. It’s valuable in today’s crowded market.

8.    Help Your Team Understand Your Business Through Surveys

You are not the only one who should understand you client’s needs better. This is also important for employees who have a direct impact on your product or provide customer support. Your entire sales process depends on them. Day to day experience helps them catch a glimpse of client’s real needs. However, it is highly recommendable to share your survey results with co-workers. They will understand what is expected of them and what reactions they trigger in clients. Finally, employees can do some brainstorming to improve work procedures and standard operations.

A useful suggestion is to include several to the point questions in your surveys that reflect your staff’s activity. For example, if you are interested in measuring your customer care department’s performance, ask people to rate their service. Be careful how you deliver the results. Your staff should not feel scared or embarrassed about it. The only goal is continuous improvement regarding business, customer experience, and individual skills.

9.    Retain Old Clients and Create Prospects for New Ones

Customer retention is essential for every business. It offers you a sense of safety and stability. You need to know there is at least a handful of clients you can count on. Your company technically relies on these loyal customers who generate constant revenue each month. Surveys are still relevant for your business because they can reveal customer retention facts.

Therefore, most of them include questions related to client’s awareness and fidelity. It is important to know how long clients are prone to stick with you. No matter what product your questionnaire focuses on, ask them for how long they have been using it. If you want to make your job easier for statistics, set multiple choice answers with time ranges (i.e.: A: 6 months – 1 year; B: over a year, etc.).

If you find out that most of your clients are new, you might need to think about an effective customer retention strategy. Afterwards, you can go back to your results and figure out what is missing and think about a solution. Clients might have several reasons to complain. It might be the product, poor customer service, late delivery, or numerous others. Try to spot the most disturbing problem and work on it first.

10. Measure Customer’s Satisfaction

This is one of the primary purposes of conducting a survey. You want to be better at what you do, improve your products or change your marketing strategy. All these factors that are crucial for your company’s future can be reflected by customer satisfaction analysis. These are questionnaires where people are asked to state their personal view about the products they used. If you want a reliable result, don’t limit your research to one survey.

You need to measure your improvements, so send out similar requests regularly. Repeat the questions to see if client’s answers vary. If they are similar, you need to struggle more. When you design your customer satisfaction survey, make it personal. You must get at the bottom of the issue and find out what exactly pleases or upsets your clients the most. It will help you identify your strengths and weaknesses.

Customer satisfaction is not only a matter of building trust or loyalty. In the end, it is a matter of business. You need to learn how to perform better if you want to increase profits. And that, in itself, is everlasting and cannot be matched by anything else.

Surveys are a traditional marketing research method that stood the test of time and are still relevant for your business. The fast-paced growth in marketing makes them more necessary than ever. The results are still one of the fastest ways to get client feedback, and it is essential to act fast in today’s competitive market.

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In The Value of a Vote: Malapportionment in Comparative Perspective, published in the British Journal of Political Science, two scholars from the University of Minnesota Department of Political Science document more than 20 industrial democracies where the votes of rural citizens -- who skew older and more conservative than their urban counterparts -- carry more weight than city-dwellers' votes. (more…)

"In my whole life, I have known no wise people (over a broad subject matter area) who didn’t read all the time — none," Charlie Munger, the vice chairman at Berkshire Hathaway, once said.

With that in mind, we've highlighted 27 classic works that every Wall Streeter should read.

Many of these books show up time and again in lists of books recommended by the pros themselves.

Topics covered include everything from the most important principles of investing to inside stories of the worst financial crises in modern history.

"The Intelligent Investor" by Benjamin Graham

"The greatest investment advisor of the twentieth century, Benjamin Graham, taught and inspired people worldwide. Graham's philosophy of "value investing" — which shields investors from substantial error and teaches them to develop long-term strategies — has made The Intelligent Investor the stock market bible ever since its original publication in 1949."

Find it on Amazon »

"Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" by Philip Fisher

"Widely respected and admired, Philip Fisher is among the most influential investors of all time. His investment philosophies, introduced almost forty years ago, are not only studied and applied by today's financiers and investors, but are also regarded by many as gospel. This book is invaluable reading and has been since it was first published in 1958."

Find it on Amazon »

"The Theory of Investment Value" by John Burr Williams

"This book was first printed in 1938, having been written as a Ph.D. thesis at Harvard in 1937. Our good friend, Peter Bernstein mentioned this book several times in his excellent Capital Ideas which was published in 1992. Why the book is interesting today is that it still is important and the most authoritative work on how to value financial assets. As Peter says: 'Williams combined original theoretical concepts with enlightening and entertaining commentary based on his own experiences in the rough-and-tumble world of investment.'

"Williams' discovery was to project an estimate that offers intrinsic value and it is called the 'Dividend Discount Model' which is still used today by professional investors on the institutional side of markets."

Find it on Amazon »

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Learn What Hashtags Mean On Each Social Network

Twitter may have been the first social sharing site to use hashtags to increase visibility — other networks like Facebook, Instagram and Google Plus have become just as important when it comes to getting your content noticed.

Hashtags are great for researching your market and connecting with others — when you see a hashtag in a tweet and want to see what others are saying about that subject, all you have to do is click on the hashtag and you will get a list of tweets and people that use that word.

If you would like to improve your reach on social media you will need to know the nuances of how the hashtag is used on the different networks, and how to best leverage them.

1. Twitter Hashtags

When Twitter began the use of hashtags the intent was to make it easy for people to find relevant topics quickly. Because this has become the industry standard, hashtags on Twitter are still at the top of the list for being effective to communicate and network with the right people.

The key to the use of hashtags on Twitter is to have your profile on a public setting and to limit the use of keywords to a maximum of three. Too many can clutter your already brief update and you want to leave room for people to retweet.

Capitalizing on Trends

An easy way to find out the most popular hashtags on Twitter is to take a look at Trends which is located from the Home or Discover menus:

When you click the ‘change’ link, Twitter allows you to customize your Trends:

Not only can hashtags help you discover what is most popular on Twitter, but the use of these in your tweets will increase your engagement, retweets, and followers. Take a look at what other influencers are using in your industry and follow the same pattern to achieve the best results. You can do this with several easy to use tools like WhatHashtag, Twubs, or Hashtracking. These are all free search tools, which stay on top of the latest trends.

2. Facebook Hashtags

It was not until 2013 that Facebook finally started to incorporate the use the hashtags as it prepared for its public release of Facebook Graph. Today users can use these on both profiles and Pages for posts, like this example from radio personality, Karina Sanchez:

The unique function of Facebook hashtags is that you can discover Pages, Groups, Videos, Latest News, ect.:

One drawback to the use of hashtags on Facebook is that many profiles are public, therefore, Pages are of good value for search results and connecting with others. Like Twitter, the too many keywords in your posts will clutter your message, and so you will want to keep these to a minimum.

3. Google+ Hashtags

From the very beginning Google has incorporated hashtags into posts and like Facebook these are also clickable which will bring up results (similar to Twitter) that are trending:

As with Twitter and Facebook, hashtags should be used sparingly for better visibility. The biggest benefit of Google+ finding influencers and potential customers through communities and collections:

The more targeted hashtags will result in better results.

4. Instagram Hashtags

In this popular social network hashtags are widely used – to the extent that they often take the place of descriptions on photos and videos. These are mainly used as a discovery tool, and can help a business or brand to gain more followers.

Two great tools you can use to help find the best hashtag trends on Instagram are Iconosquare and Web.stagram. The great part about this social network is that you can safely use between 10 and 15 keywords instead of a limited number of three maximum.

I found this great Instagram Hashtag Cheat Sheet that will provide lots of perhaps new ideas for you that I think you will have fun with!

Since the latest algorithm update where the most relevant posts from your followers are being seen it is more important than ever to choose your keywords to a targeted audience. The more narrow the focus the better — this can greatly increase your brand’s visibility like this example from travel entrepreneur, Ann Tran:

You can click on a specific hashtag to gather more posts related to the topic or search inside Instagram directly:

Using the right hashtags in your posts will help your brand attract more targeted followers who are interested in what you have to offer.

More Hashtag Resources

Now that you have discovered the use of hashtags on the major social networks there are a few more tools to track these on any of the platforms, like this example in Tagboard:

Another free real-time hashtag search tool for Twitter is called Keyhole, which uses a very simple platform and gives you in-depth trends and tracking results:

Focused hashtags will not only help you gain new followers, but also increase the sharing of your content. Make them easy to read, targeted and memorable.

Now that you know how hashtags work on each social network, and what to look for, put them to good use then watch your community and influence grow.

Despite the wild popularity and critical acclaim of RSA style whiteboard animation over the past decade, you might still be skeptical of the power of whiteboard animation—and that’s understandable. Embracing animation as the medium for your message can feel like a big leap. Many companies are concerned that whiteboard animation is too simple, or not as persuasive or informative as a talking head—with a real-life flesh and blood expert—can be.

But that’s just not the case.

Over the past 10 years, whiteboard animation has proven itself again and again as the hands down favorite for reaching viewers with complex nuanced information. Everything from product explainers, detailed software launches and updates, and even full blown fictional storytelling benefit from whiteboard animation. The neuroscience is in, and whiteboard animation wins vs. a talking head video every time.

Your Brain Loves Whiteboard Animation

The strength of animation is rooted in the way our brains processes information, particularly complex ideas, new concepts, and challenging topics. We’re just not that good at taking in large amounts of new information at once—especially when each piece of information builds on the previous point. It’s a matter of memory retention, and the problem is focus. People just don’t stay focused on talking head videos.

The speakers themselves are a distraction, as our brains struggle to analyze and correlate every facial tick and twitch of the eye. From the instant we see another person, we’re gauging their reliability and authority against a complex background of previous experience that the producers of the talking head video can’t possibly anticipate. Even the background of a live action video can provide numerous distractions and obstacles to focused attention.

Whiteboard animation literally removes those obstacles and provides the viewer a clean, blank canvas populated by only the most basic, readily identifiable symbols and elements. The stage is first cleared, then set for exactly the story the animation wants to tell—and nothing more.

Simplicity and Structure: Why You Brain Likes Whiteboard Animation

Neuroscientist and Ph.D Carla Clark explains how we process data, and why whiteboard animation is almost perfectly tailored to conveying information:

“The simpler the object is, the less effort the brain needs to process and relate to the image. Applying this neuropsychology to whiteboard videos vs. talking heads, we’re wired to pay more attention to the simplicity of whiteboard videos. This frees up processing power to digest the narrative.

Animation subtracts opportunities for misinterpretation and distraction and replaces them with digestible images with baked-in concepts. Whiteboard animation is a palette cleanser and appetizer all in one that leaves viewers both satisfied and hungry for more.

Even the motion of the hand in a whiteboard animation is a part of how our brains connect plot points.

Suspense and Reward: The Science of Whiteboard Animation

The structure of the message—the hand moving across the canvas as it draws—pulls viewers along with a clear linear message that has suspend built in. Dr. Clark calls attention to this “vivid visual progression, where viewers consume information one step at a time in a logical sequence.” She argues that animation, “keeps viewers engaged and prevents wandering attention.” What’s more, as the hand draws each image the viewer is naturally engaged trying to anticipate the next stage of the video based on what they’ve already seen.

As the image is drawn before their very eyes, the viewer’s anticipation is either satisfied with an image they expected—they’re rewarded with a little dopamine hit for paying close attention to the information that came before—or they’re surprised by a novel image (and a little more dopamine) and are further drawn into the narrative. It’s a natural engagement feedback loop that fosters both retention and interest and either way, it’s a win-win from an engagement standpoint.

Whiteboard animation literally rewards viewers for just paying attention. And people do pay attention.

The Retention Deficit

To test this theory of engagement, psychologist Richard Wiseman showed 1,000 people two videos with the same script. The only difference was that one was a talking head video and the other was a whiteboard animation of this same speech. The results?

92% of viewers remembered essential information from the whiteboard video version, while only 70% of viewers remembered vital information from the talking head video version.

Wiseman calls that 22% spike in attention “absolutely massive.” “Simply by adding animation,” Wiseman continues, “you see a very big increase in not only enjoyment and entertainment, but in knowledge transfer—and that’s what’s absolutely key because we’re seeing a huge shift to online learning.”

Whiteboard Animation is the Future of Learning

2016 was the first year that mobile video became the dominant way people watch online video, and mobile viewers are nothing if not easily distracted. Whiteboard animation lets viewers hone in on the the information you want them to learn, and nothing else. And that’s just the tip of the animation iceberg.

You can make numerous improvements and tweaks to your animated video that increase engagement. Higher production value, quality voiceover talent, an engaging soundtrack or original score, extensive character development, and professional scripts all improve the viewer experience. Once you embrace animation as the medium for your message, the sky is literally the limit.

The Marketing Power of Animation

Kate Harrison, a marketing expert and Forbes contributor highlights this clarity. “Whiteboard animation videos are an essential tool for marketers trying to convey complex ideas in a compelling way—without ‘talking heads’ or expensive video production.” She continues, “They blend professional quality audio with real-time illustrations that come to life before the viewer’s eyes, whiteboard animation makes even dry material interesting.”

And more and more people are turning to online video as an instructional or primary education tool—even for complicated “boring” material.

Engaging Video is the Key

“I think what [whiteboard] animations do is hold attention—in an incredibly engaging way, and that means the information simply goes in,” concludes Wiseman. No matter what your stylistic preferences are or your brand identity, the power of animation can’t be ignored. Whiteboard animation gets your message across.

Cartoon-style whiteboard animation with its readily identifiable characters (sometimes their t-shirts are even labeled!), might seem simplistic, but in an increasingly mobile world where distractions are everywhere, a little clarity is what your viewers crave.

The Talking Heads broke up in 1991. Ditch live action for whiteboard animation and boost attention, retention, and interest with videos that keep people watching. Or stick with what worked in the 90’s. Your call.

 Every day brings another exciting story of how artificial intelligence is improving our lives. But for every AI success story, countless projects never make it out of the lab. That’s because putting machine learning research into production and using it to offer real value to customers is often harder than developing a scientifically sound algorithm. I call this “crossing the AI… Read More

Today’s competitive credit card market has turned lucrative for consumers, meaning what would have been a good offer just a few years ago no longer measures up.

For example, 1 per cent cash back for credit card spending is no longer competitive. Zero-per cent interest for a year may sound generous, but today it’s lacklustre. The best offers include sign-up bonuses, rewards and no-interest deals to manage your debt. Many cards have no annual fee, but if you pay one, you should expect superior rewards.

Each credit card issuer is trying to create a mix of benefits that attracts customers they value most _ those who pay their bills on time and spend a lot, says Robert Hammer, founder and chairman of R.K. Hammer, a credit card industry consulting and research firm.

“There are so many more choices today than ever before. There’s almost a product for every credit score,” Hammer says.

Still, just because a card offer comes in the mail, runs entertaining TV ads or is pushed by your bank doesn’t mean it’s a wise choice. Here’s what a good deal looks like for three basic types of cards, assuming you have good credit.

CASH REWARDS CARDS

Many rewards cards offer 2 per cent to 5 per cent cash back on specific categories of spending, such as gas, dining out or travel, while paying just 1 per cent on everything else. But some programs can be complicated, especially those with rotating bonus categories. Simpler, and potentially more lucrative in the long run, is a flat-rate cash-back card. You get the same rewards rate regardless of what you’re paying for, whether it’s a book on Amazon.com or an insurance copay at your doctor’s office.

Benchmarks to look for:

_At least 1.5 per cent cash back on everything. If you charge $1,000 per month on your card, you’ll get $60 more cash back per year than you would with a 1 per cent card.

_No annual fee. Exceptions: If you want outsized rewards or have only an average credit score, you might have to pay a fee.

Power user tip: If you’re willing to add complexity, combine a flat-rate card with one that offers bonus cash back in certain categories. Then use whichever pays the higher rate for a given purchase.

DEBT MANAGEMENT CARDS

Many credit cards offer no-interest periods on balance transfers and even new purchases. If you carry a hefty balance and need breathing room to pay down that debt without finance charges, this is the type of card to explore.

Benchmarks to look for:

_At least 15 months of no interest. Cards that offer a year at zero per cent are no longer competitive, with dozens offering 15, 18 or even 21 months.

_Balance transfer fee of no more than 3 per cent of the amount transferred. A few cards don’t charge a fee to transfer balances, but most do.

_No annual fee.

_Interest rate under 15 per cent. Credit card rates vary widely depending on your creditworthiness and prevailing rates. But if you have excellent credit, look for an ongoing rate _ after a 0 per cent period _ as low as 11 per cent. At credit unions, you might find a rate under 10 per cent.

TRAVEL REWARDS CARDS

Travel cards often have annual fees and large sign-up bonuses. Some are hard to evaluate because their rewards programs are complicated and they offer perks that mean more to some people than to others, such as airport lounge access or free checked bags.

Benchmarks to look for:

_No foreign transaction fee. Paying no surcharge for purchases abroad should be standard for a travel card.

_Sign-up bonus worth at least $200, after subtracting the annual fee. Miles or points bonuses vary from 20,000 to 100,000. When in doubt, value miles or points at a penny each, though actual values vary depending on what you redeem them for. Currently, the average bonus for a miles card is more than $425, according to NerdWallet data.

_Benefits that offset the annual fee. Many travel rewards cards have an annual fee, some as high as $450. Some issuers waive the fee for the first year, giving you a chance to try the card for free. The key is to reap more value from the card than you pay in annual fees. The sign-up bonus plus any perks with obvious cash value, such as reimbursement for travel expenses, should pay for at least three years of the card’s annual fee.

Of course, some decent cards will be exceptions to these guidelines. Just make sure they have good reasons for falling short and provide other benefits instead.

The post Your next credit card: What a good offer looks like appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

In tech companies, getting people to grasp new ideas and ways of doing things is critical to the sales process. This got me wondering if I might be able to apply established teaching principles to the marketing videos we make for tech companies. I set out to explore some of the best blogs and websites from some of the top eLearning experts. What follows are tips and concepts that apply to marketing videos—tips you, too, should take into consideration in scripting and producing videos.

Light Bulb Moments

The age of bite-size learning is upon us. In eLearning circles, there’s buzz about micro-videos and micro-learning—recommending six-second learning bursts, for example. People seem to learn best in short bursts—light bulb moments—better than they do by continuous effort. Concentration is hard to maintain in a world with so many competing demands on attention.

We’re not sure how many light bulb moments can be crammed into a short video, but it certainly makes sense to have at least one and build the video around it. It might be something along the lines of “Look how easy it is to do X.” Regulatory compliance, for example, is generally seen as an important but uninspiring subject for a video. But if you can show how compliance processes speeds up customer onboarding, as we did in a video for a Canadian software company, light bulbs will go on.

Tell Them, Show Them, Let Them Do It

People naturally pay attention if they think they’re about to learn something practical to use right away. Most buyers, for example, are at least as interested in their own career advancement as they are in a marketer’s solution. They want to make a splash, but they don’t want to take risks.

“Tell them, show them, let them do it” is a pretty standard eLearning approach that may apply. It is especially applicable in B2B content, where the problem you solve is the same problem your competitors solve. You don’t need to show the viewer why something matters. The “why” is the same for everyone—it’s the how that sets you apart. (highlight to tweet)

We like to build videos around practical demonstrations that venture into the weeds—talking to M&A attorneys about negotiation over indebtedness covenants, for example, or a real life scenario that quantifies the value proposition.

Consider the Cognitive Load

Cognitive load theory holds that learning is a matter of processing information in “working memory” to fit existing patterns (schema) by which it can be stored in long-term memory. Our working memory is pretty limited, so it’s important not to overload it.

Total “cognitive load” consists of:

• The complexity of the information itself (“intrinsic load”), plus
• The amount of information that is not relevant to learning—decorative elements, non-relevant animations, etc. (“extraneous load”), plus
• Elements like examples and exercises that assist information processing (“germane load”)

If the intrinsic + extraneous + germane loads exceed the capacity of working memory, learning becomes very difficult.

Obviously, a video producer can’t accurately measure or estimate these loads. However, according to eLearningIndustry.com, there are some best practices for reducing cognitive load that can be applied in video.

Best Practices for Reducing Cognitive Load

1. Present some information via the visual channel and some via the verbal (aural) channel.

Video already does this, you’ll say. But the vast majority of marketing videos load all the complex information (the messaging) into the aural channel, and load up the visual channel with eye-catching extraneous information like talking characters and decorative graphics. These can make videos compelling and fun, but we should also recognize that they consume brainpower needed for learning.

2.  Break content into smaller segments and allow the learner to control the pace.

These smaller segments might be:

• Short videos that teach in bite-size chunks.
• Interactive videos. (See this useful guide.)
• Videos that allow the user to process information effectively without taxing working memory.

3. Remove non-essential content.

This is tricky in marketing videos because videos that fail to dazzle with motion, music, and other razzmatazz don’t feel like the videos that delight us most. The guiding principle in an eLearning context is that if content doesn’t support the instructional goal, it should be removed. In a marketing context, some professional pizzazz is expected, but we should at least keep in mind that dazzlement is not the goal.

4. Tell, Show, Do, Apply

According to eLearning expert Dr. Joel Gardner, the fundamentals of instructional design haven’t really been improved upon since you learned how to add and subtract: Tell-Show-Do-Apply.

Here are some ways this model can apply to designing a video for explaining your technology solution:

• Introduce new learning using appropriate attention-grabbing techniques: a specific problem, a comparison, a memorable visual, a thought-provoking question, a clear contrast, a checklist.
• Tell viewers how what they’re about to learn applies.
• Refer to prior learning to link what you are about to teach to personal experiences.
• Discovery learning: Help viewers discover and become aware of what they already know.
• Show your relevance using real-life examples, contrasting examples with non-examples, case studies, and realistic scenarios.
• Use step graphics and tables to break down complex processes into steps to keep viewers engaged.

Understand that in marketing videos, it’s usually more important to put across examples of what you can accomplish with a solution than it is to show how it’s done. But if you can come up with a series of software screens that tell a story and exemplify the concept, you can turn an abstract concept into something that feels like real life. Get prospects to take the next step with interactive videos, including calls-to-action, downloading a free trial, branching, quizzes, and even chapterizing your videos.

Using eLearning insights can give you a competitive advantage.

Explainer videos have become somewhat commoditized with stock cartoon characters and motion graphics. There is a competitive advantage in applying eLearning principles—the overwhelming majority of technology solution providers don’t.

If you can come up with strategies that encourage people to learn what you want them to learn, you’ll be ahead of the game.

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

Alexa, slow down the pace of change.

You’ve got to give marketers credit for trying to keep up with the constant changes in customer behavior over the past five, ten, and fifteen years. After the advent of email and social came a reliance on mobile, IoT, and now AI — and marketers are expected to meet every behavioral change with personalized touchpoints and relevant content.

It’s a tall order. But Vala Afshar believes marketers are up to the task, and he’s got the data to help us through.

On this week’s episode of the Marketing Cloudcast , the marketing podcast from Salesforce, we’re discussing The State of the Connected Customer research with Vala Afshar, Chief Digital Evangelist at Salesforce and author of the book The Pursuit of Social Business Excellence.

You may also be following Vala on Twitter (@ValaAfshar), where he shares business and marketing insight with his 160,000+ followers.

This research is a survey of 7,000 consumers and business buyers worldwide, revealing what it truly means to be a connected customer and shining a light on the resulting business directives. Vala is the perfect person to dive into what that really means for the state of the connected customer in 2017.

Check out our Marketing Cloudcast interview with Vala on iTunes, Google Play Music, or Stitcher.

Preview the episode by listening here:

You should subscribe for the full episode, but here are a few highlights from our conversation with Vala.

Customers expect an intelligent relationship with brands. If they don’t get it, it’s easy for them to take their money elsewhere.

“Customers expect every touchpoint with companies to be immediate, to be personalized, and to be proactive. The ability to anticipate customer needs is at the forefront of what the report covered. In fact, 65% of consumers expect companies to interact with them in real time,” says Vala.

If you don’t anticipate needs, respond in real time and an intelligent manner, you risk losing the customer. As Vala points out, “7 out of 10 consumers stated that technology has made it easier than ever for them to take their business elsewhere.”

Brands can get ahead by leveraging data and being proactive with content. “Only 15% of companies have advanced analytics, processes, and tools to engage in a digital economy. There’s 85% room for businesses to understand and leverage technology to improve and delight customer experience,” he explains.

Yet many marketers are irresponsibly passing along so-called leads to sales.

“When it comes to the top two success-critical factors to achieve advanced capabilities, the first is analytical skills, talent, and tools,” says Vala. “The second . . . is alignment within the lines of business in an organization,” he says.

However, “According to HBR study, over half of marketers today pass leads to sales unqualified. Essentially they’re burdening sales with the job that a good marketer should do. Frankly, it’s irresponsible,” says Vala.

As Vala points out, you don’t know someone until you know what they need and want. “The role of marketing today is to be able to anticipate those needs and then work with different lines of business to create meaningful engagements,” he shares.

Social media is the #1 use of the web.

“I don’t think the majority of marketers have absorbed the fact that social networking is the number one use of the web,” says Vala. People are constantly sharing information about you and your competitors on social. “Your brand is what people say about you when you’re not in the room. The web is the room,” says Vala.

As a digital marketer, you not only have to bolster your social listening skills, but you also have to think like a publisher to identify those moments of truth in real time across every channel. Vala advises, “When you realize there’s a moment to educate, inspire, and ignite action, you have to have access to that content so you can deliver across the right channel, at the right time, to the right audience, with the right value proposition.”

Marketers must consider not mobile-first, but mobile-only.

“Mobile is at the epicenter of instant gratification. The connected customer feels that there shouldn’t be any lag time when it comes to communicating with a company. 80 percent said that a company responding immediately influences their loyalty,” say Vala.

Yet, many brands still aren’t harnessing the power of mobile. He continues, “In spite of customers’ preference to use mobile for key buying activities, only 8% of B2B sales organizations and only 13% of B2B sales teams have the ability to provide outstanding mobile sales.”

“By 2020, 6 billion people will have a supercomputer in their pocket, on their wrist, or on their face with the next generation of Glass. As digital marketers, we have to consider not a mobile-first, but a mobile-only ecosystem,” Vala says.

Marketing, selling, and customer service are converging.

When it comes to servicing B2B customers, “70% of all customer touchpoints come through the customer service organization. They are your brand. They are the individuals and line of business that ensure companies deliver on their promises,” says Vala.

But as Vala explains, “The key here is that the customer owns the conversation and the channel preference. For you to earn their attention, you have to be informed, available, trustworthy, and proactive. That’s a team sport.”

His mandate for marketing, sales, IT, and community: “Have a 360-degree view of the customer that’s shared across the business so that in those moments of truth, you can engage the business as a whole and to deliver to the customers needs in a proactive and intelligent manner.”

Vala (@ValaAfshar) shared many more useful marketing mandates for 2017 in our full podcast episode with him.

Get Vala’s episode and join the thousands of smart marketers who already subscribe to the Marketing Cloudcast on iTunes, Google Play Music, and Stitcher.

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Tweet @youngheike with marketing questions or topics you’d like to see covered next on the Marketing Cloudcast.

Last February, Shop.ca was in trouble. The e-commerce startup was bleeding cash, and the board of directors was seeking a way to keep the company afloat. A group of existing investors was willing to pony up new funds and reached out to co-founder Drew Green. Although he retired as CEO in 2014 at age 40, Green remained the majority shareholder and a board member. The investor group had one big stipulation before pouring in more money: the shareholder agreement would have to be rewritten. Green would effectively be giving up rights he enjoyed as a co-founder, limiting his control over the company. The prospect of additional funding, combined with a new plan from management, offered Shop.ca not just a chance to survive for a while longer, but a shot at turning an actual profit. Moving ahead, however, proved anything but straightforward.

Green had reason to maintain an interest in Shop.ca. He liked to say it was the largest online shopping site in Canada, and that it could one day become a billion-dollar company. Like many Canadians, Green was unimpressed with the state of e-commerce in this country. Duties, brokerage fees and shipping costs for products that were already priced higher here than in the U.S. made purchasing items online a miserable and expensive endeavour—assuming shoppers could even find what they were looking for in the first place.

Green proposed an alternative: a marketplace that carried items customers actually wanted, shipped from Canadian sellers to Canadian buyers, with no added fees. Shop.ca would function like a virtual department store and boast more than 25 product categories, including toys, electronics, baby goods, and apparel.

In the world of Canadian tech startups, which tend to build dull business-to-business products and services, Shop.ca stood out when it launched in 2012—boldly eschewing the enterprise crowd for everyday consumers. The concept was enough to attract more than $70 million in funding, along with a handful of notable names. Author and businessman Don Tapscott joined as advisor, and Bill Gregson, the former CEO of The Brick, signed on to the board.

Despite the funding and in-house retail expertise, Shop.ca led a rocky existence and ended up filing for bankruptcy protection earlier this year. The company serves as a case study of the challenges that face many fledgling businesses—namely costly growth tactics and differing opinions on strategy. But Shop.ca was particularly troubled, a picture gleaned through numerous on- and off-the-record interviews with former staff and investors. Tensions among the executives and at the board level weighed on the company, and the relationship between Green and his co-founder, Trevor Newell, was left severed. Without these clashes, Shop.ca would have had a more successful run, according to a former company insider: “No doubt in my mind whatsoever.”

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Drew Green and Trevor Newell were, in fact, childhood friends. They were born in Toronto, in the same year, in the same month. The pair spent summers together at camp, and their families were close, too, even taking a trip to Disney World together.

As they grew older, their interests diverged. Green studied kinesiology, while Newell opted for a degree in business administration. Green was later swept up in the dot-com boom, bouncing from Toronto to New York to Chicago, and by 2005, he was a senior vice-president at an American online comparison-shopping website called Shop.com. (In many ways, it served as a model for Shop.ca.) Newell, meanwhile, worked in product management and strategy for clients in professional services.

In 2010, Green got in touch with his childhood friend. Each was interested in starting ventures of his own, and both happened to involve e-commerce. Green saw that Canada lacked a market leader like Amazon, while Newell was intrigued by loyalty and rewards programs. The pair sketched out the plans for Shop.ca and quit their jobs in 2011 to pursue it full-time. Green, as the majority shareholder, assumed the CEO role, while Newell was president.

Shop.ca raised $27.4 million ahead of its launch in July 2012, a round led by Torstar Corp. and including capital from Slaight Communications. The company made its office in a 1,600-square-foot loft downtown. There was beer in the fridge and a ladder in the kitchen, built by Newell’s dad, that led to a roof where early employees would sometimes gather for lunch.

“[The] office culture at Shop.ca was defined by extremely hard-working staff that came in early and would often leave after 8 or 10 p.m. at night,” Green wrote in an email to Canadian Business. In the year prior to launch, he says he drove eight to 10 hours between Toronto and Chicago to see his wife and children on weekends until the family moved back to Canada.

The site earned a lengthy write-up in the Globe and Mail around the time of its debut. Green was described as looking like “the host of a wild party, the morning after.” He stood at over six feet tall, with a scraggly beard and circles under his eyes; Newell, on the other hand, was clean-shaven and came across as the more buttoned-down of the two. (He also serves as a Cub Scout leader, and includes the organization’s motto on his LinkedIn page.) Green, the charismatic salesman, signed deals and built relationships with merchants and marketers, while Newell worked behind the scenes.

As a pure play marketplace, Shop.ca didn’t own any warehouses or ship products. Rather, it served as an intermediary, signing up retailers, brands, and distributors. Merchants handled inventory, shipping, and listing their products on the site, while Shop.ca assisted where necessary and looked after customer service, taking a cut of every sale. The company recruited more than 850 retailers, which allowed Shop.ca to boast a virtual inventory of more than 15 million items across 4,000 brands, including Samsung, Sony, Fila, and Miele, and retailers such as Sporting Life and Bad Boy. The hope was that Canadians who had grown accustomed to buying from myriad sites—or none at all—could get everything they needed in one place. “I think everyone had their own little personal story of trying to order something online and not being able to find it on a Canadian site,” says Scott LeBlanc, the company’s former director of product experience, and one its first employees.

The plan hinged on one thing: scale. Shop.ca’s model reduced operating costs, but margins were razor thin. Generating millions of dollars in revenue each month was the only way to turn a profit. That meant selling all things to all people, and building a massive number of loyal, repeat customers—at all costs.

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In December 2013, Shop.ca gave discount codes to everyone who attended an NBA game between the Toronto Raptors and the Philadelphia 76ers, blanketing every seat in the Air Canada Centre with a sea of company-branded red flyers. It was a characteristically flashy advertising initiative. The company spent big on marketing, even sponsoring Toronto Maple Leafs left-winger Joffrey Lupul, and plastering its logo around the ACC during basketball games. To further entice shoppers, practically every item on the site shipped for free. Returns were free for up to a year. In 2013, the company spent $13 million on marketing and sales, equivalent to 60% of its annual revenue.

The aggressive approach to marketing and customer acquisition is not uncommon for startups, nor was the focus on vanity metrics to showcase the company’s success. (In November of that year, for example, Shop.ca issued a press release announcing the site had its first “million-dollar day,” meaning more than $1 million in revenue earned over 24 hours.)

But what neither could compensate for were bad customer reviews. “[The] prices were terrible,” complained one user on RedFlagDeals.com. “Literally nothing on that site you couldn’t get for cheaper elsewhere.” Others cited products that were frequently out of stock, faced shipping delays, or never shipped at all. Yet more complained of products that didn’t arrive as described, and difficulty reaching customer service. Even LeBlanc, an employee, encountered these problems. “If I didn’t work there I probably wouldn’t be shopping [there],” he says.

Many of Shop.ca’s merchants lacked online selling experience, especially in the company’s early days. “It was pretty much anybody who wanted to come on, because we wanted as many diverse products as possible across many different categories,” says Aven Santo Domingo, one of Shop.ca’s former marketplace managers. He estimates that during Shop.ca’s first two years, more than half of the site’s merchants had never sold online before. This meant dealing with merchants who weren’t familiar with the intricacies of shipping and the costs involved, or best practices for describing a product. A merchant selling furniture, for example, might have neglected to include dimensions in a product’s description—if there was one.

And while the site boasted of a large virtual inventory, it was hard to shake the feeling that much of it wasn’t very good. “When you have a directive of trying to get very big very fast, you will almost list everything and anything,” says Santo Domingo, who was responsible for onboarding merchants. The company later employed stricter merchant standards, but when customers encountered problems, there was only so much Shop.ca could do as an intermediary.

Spending on customer acquisition intensified into 2014, and in May the company raised $31 million from the venture capital arm of Shaw Communications, alongside Shop.ca’s existing investors, which around that time valued the company at $200 million. That same month, Green negotiated a loyalty program with Aeroplan to court higher-income customers, scrapping Shop.ca’s own plan.

Meanwhile, tensions were building inside the company. Concerns were brought to the board that Green was using company funds to pay for personal expenses, according to multiple sources familiar with the matter, and the directors established a committee to investigate. At the same time, a disagreement over strategy had been brewing. Some investors were pushing for Shop.ca to focus on profitability instead of scale, according to a former insider, who requested anonymity so as not to risk breaching a confidentiality agreement. “Whereas Drew felt that he was a mini-Amazon, and even if you lost money on every transaction, you can still grow the business and raise cash,” says the insider.

In October of that year, Green departed the company. There was no fanfare, and Green told staff he was retiring to spend more time with his family. “It was unexpected,” LeBlanc says. (The company lost more than $20 million that year, according to bankruptcy documents.)

“To be clear, my retirement did not stem from disagreements on the growth strategy of the company, nor was my retirement a result of my expense account,” Green wrote in an email to Canadian Business. “If at any time my corporate card was used instead of my personal card, it was paid back in full. These amounts were insignificant and only happened in the instance I did not have my personal card with me, or room on my personal card.”

With one co-founder gone, the other was about to assert himself.

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Trevor Newell, Shop.ca’s president, was getting antsy. Change at the company was not happening fast enough under Green’s replacement, a longtime broadcast industry executive named Jamie Haggarty who assumed the CEO role in October 2014. (He’d served as Shop.ca’s chief operating officer since that April.) While the company was putting some emphasis on profitability—a second-quarter report to investors in 2015 obtained by Canadian Business highlights improvements to product margin and gross profit, for example—it continued spending heavily on marketing. Shop.ca raised another $15 million in May 2015 from existing investors, just to stay afloat.

In August, Haggarty started exploring strategic alternatives, which meant either a sale or more funding. (He also told the press the company was considering an IPO.) The following month, the company signed a deal with Toronto-Dominion Bank that gave Aeroplan cardholders $50 to spend on Shop.ca along with 3,000 Aeroplan points, worth another $50. That meant Shop.ca was effectively paying customers more than $100 to shop on the site. The deal ran until December, and there was no limit on how many cardholders could take advantage of it. Many of them did—to the point where Shop.ca pulled the plug early. According to multiple sources, in no small part due to the TD deal, Shop.ca was on track to run out of cash by the end of 2015, and there was no compelling plan to reduce costs.

By October, Newell had come up with his own plan. Supported by other members of the management team, Newell organized a call with the board’s strategic committee. “FYI, Jamie is not aware of this call,” he wrote in an email to the committee. “I am ready to lead; but I cannot do it without your support and action.” A change was necessary, given how the e-commerce landscape was evolving. Amazon had expanded its Canadian offerings, while retailers like Walmart and Canadian Tire were redoubling their online efforts as well.

Not everyone on the committee responded positively to Newell’s proposed pivot, as he called it. “I understand that some members of the Strategic Committee believe that today’s call was a ‘coup d’etat,’” he wrote in a subsequent email in October. “I am not attempting to overthrow, I am not forcing a seizure. I am trying to communicate to you that I care, I am passionate, and I am showing leadership,” Newell continued, expressing his intent to give Haggarty “the opportunity to re-align or disagree.” Haggarty stepped down later that month. (Haggarty and Newell declined interviews.)

He was replaced by Anthony Chvala, a former Amazon executive who had been on Shop.ca’s board for three months. First, he slashed marketing costs dramatically, which still accounted for $15.4 million by the end of 2015. “It was clear they wanted to grow top line as much as possible at whatever cost,” said Chvala. In addition to laying off 28 employees, about half of the company’s headcount, Chvala instructed staff to focus on curating the products and brands on Shop.ca’s platform, rather than try to sell everything to everyone. “We concentrated on some very core categories, based on some analytics that clearly showed those customers that were buying within those categories,” Chvala says. Home products, electronics, fashion and baby and children products carried higher margins and were more likely to attract repeat customers, according to bankruptcy filings.

Chvala also intensified the company’s reliance on analytics to better track and understand the site’s most valuable customers. Finally, he suggested licensing the company’s custom merchant-facing technology, which helped sellers more easily input product data to the site.

“There was optimism,” Santo Domingo recalls. “We were trying to be more data driven, which was something new, and something that gave us hope.”

By February of 2016, some of Shop.ca’s existing cash investors had grown confident enough in Chvala’s plan that they had warmed to the idea of pursuing further investment—provided the shareholders agreement was revised. The group felt the agreement gave Green a disproportionate amount of power considering he was no longer at the company. According to multiple sources familiar with the matter, Green was told both in person and in writing that the company needed the funds to survive. Green says that he “confirmed verbally that I was willing to make any necessary changes to the shareholder agreement to support funding.” But Green says he never received a formal proposal detailing the suggested changes. The investor group apparently became convinced that Green would not budge and thus never bothered with a formal proposal. The talks were effectively a statement, according to one insider. The prospect of new financing died, and in the months that followed, there was an exodus from the company’s board.

Chvala immediately set about trying to sell the company (Canadian Tire and Wal-Mart were among the potential suitors, according to the Globe and Mail) but despite receiving letters of intent from two large Canadian companies, both deals fell through. By the end of June, the company had just $1.5 million in cash, and executives expected to run out of money by August. With no potential suitors, and no one willing to invest, there was no choice but to file for bankruptcy protection to allow more time to find a buyer.

The company, which had 40 employees at the time of the filing, held a going-out-of-business sale of sorts at its headquarters over the summer. Members of Toronto’s tech community picked over the office’s contents, claiming pieces of furniture with Post-it notes. “The office had just stunning, beautiful furniture,” recalls one attendee. What stuck out the most, however, were the large red letters hanging from the ceiling, spelling out the name Shop.ca. “That alone must have cost huge amounts of money.”

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The bankruptcy filing was not the end for Shop.ca. In July, a newly formed private equity firm called Transformational Capital acquired the company’s assets for an undisclosed sum.

Transformational’s approach is the opposite of Shop.ca’s initial model in many ways, with a focus on profit instead of revenue growth. “We believe the new era of e-commerce is one that is grounded on sustainability,” says Ghassan Halazon, Transformational’s CEO, and the co-founder of daily deals site TeamBuy. To that end, the company is aiming to acquire troubled e-commerce companies and keep operating costs low by sharing resources. Halazon says that since purchasing Shop.ca’s assets, Transformational has renegotiated with merchants to secure more favourable margins. And because the site now shares an office in Toronto, a management team, and back-office costs with two other e-commerce brands (Halazon says the company is not yet prepared to name them), Shop.ca is on track to turn a profit. He concedes revenue is down, but argues that profitability is the “strongest weapon in ensuring we deliver to customers and merchants long-term.”

As for Green, he wrote to Canadian Business that, “I am as disappointed as anyone in the outcome.” In a previous email sent during the course of reporting, Green wrote, “Drew Green was the heart and soul of this company. In less than two years without his leadership, Shop.ca filed [for] bankruptcy protection and [was] consequently sold.”

His retirement did not last long. Last December, he moved to Vancouver and became CEO of Indochino, the online men’s suit retailer. Newell is currently unemployed. Sources say the two no longer speak.

Green has ambitious plans for Indochino, aiming to open 150 retail locations in the next five years and generate roughly $500 million in revenue by 2020. At Indochino, he gives a copy of The Alchemist, his favourite book, to every new hire. It’s an allegorical tale written by Paulo Coelho about a young boy on a quest to fulfill his destiny. The Alchemist is chock full of inspirational quotes and life lessons, including a few any entrepreneur would do well to heed. “Everything that happens once can never happen again,” Coelho writes. “But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time.”

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MORE ABOUT DIGITAL RETAIL & E-COMMERCE:

• There’s no longer a difference between physical and digital retail
• Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke on how to maintain a startup culture at scale
• Shopify COO Harley Finkelstein on the future of digital retail
• Hybrid digital-physical stores will win the retail race in 2016
• Indigo CEO Heather Reisman on reimainging the 21st century bookstore
• How brick-and-mortar storefronts boost sales for online retailers
• Made-to-measure tailor Indochino focuses on scale with a new CEO
• After years in the slow lane, Canada’s e-commerce ecosystem is booming
• How Indochino is suiting up for a massive retail expansion
• How Klothed helps online shoppers try clothes with their smartphone

The post The inside story of Shop.ca’s failed e-commerce revolution appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

How well are your B2B organization’s sales and marketing behaviors, practices, and processes reliably and sustainably producing required outcomes? Are you mired in chaos, spending lots of time getting little done? Are you like most companies, achieving just average results and not knowing why? Or are you among the few that are kickin’ it?

No matter where you are now, there are specific steps you can take to get to a fully optimized condition. You can emerge from a chaotic state … you can rise above average … you can achieve a fully optimized state of prospect development. It takes just three steps to get there. Read on and learn how you can get better ROI on marketing, how you can let your sales people focus on what they do best, and how you can close significantly more deals than you did before. 

Here are three steps to follow to make your sales and marketing teams achieve kickass results. Not 50 things. Three things:

1. Agree on your market, media and message
2. Measure what matters
3. Deliver fewer, but better, leads to sales

Before we get into the details let me address a possible objection by readers. The more senior you are in your organization the more likely it is that you feel that these actions should be (whether or not they can be) handled by others in your organization. The reality is that not only are they not being managed by others in your organization, they are likely being mismanaged. It’s not that your people mean to screw up, it’s just that they are herded into a direction of ineffectiveness by the actions or inactions of others in your company. To make this a more valuable read and good use of your time, for each of the three actions I will provide a specific example of mismanagement and what you can do to fix it.

What is missing in most companies, from an execution standpoint, is the following:

1. A process to measure the quality and cost per REAL lead.
2. A judicial branch (that is, the c-level executive) that provides the checks and balances needed to keep the other branches (sales and marketing) honest by evaluating opportunities that are not worked by sales to see if there is a quality or an effectiveness problem.
3. A group to nurture leads until they are sales-ready; and to take opportunities back if sales cannot gain traction for one reason or another. Right now these opportunities are disappearing into a black hole.

Click here for ungated access to the whitepaper “From Chaos to Kickass”.

Want to talk about how I can help? Email me at dan.mcdade@pointclear.com.

LinkedIn can count on a smaller user base compared to Facebook and Twitter, but the numbers are still relevant for bloggers and social media managers, especially if the niche or industry is B2B. According to Statista, LinkedIn boasted 450 million users in the 2nd quarter of 2016, and the platform is growing.

Numbers of LinkedIn members from 1st quarter 2009 to 3rd quarter 2016 (in millions)

Besides the numbers, though, it’s the community that counts. LinkedIn is more than an online resume and the wealth of user groups, messaging features and the Pulse publishing platform make it a great marketing opportunity.

Building traction to your content

As Sean Martin, content marketing manager at Directive Consulting, states:

LinkedIn is a great platform to promote your different pieces of content to a relevant audience. It’s also great for advertising your services because of its ability to target interests, demographics, and job categories.

You want to make the most out of LinkedIn’s targeting capabilities, as well as optimize your ads to generate the type of traffic you’re looking for.

This is by itself a good motivator to give LinkedIn a try, but Oren Greenberg, digital marketer and managing director at Kurve.co.uk, adds a bit more context. He observes that “[after] all the test campaigns run by us and other digital agencies, the results are pretty much the same across the board – LinkedIn drives the most B2B sales and LinkedIn leads have a higher conversion rate.”

Also, according to Greenberg, LinkedIn performed better and gave good results when compared with Medium and Blogging (unless you already have an audience on these platforms), because LinkedIn “instantly notifies your network and, if your article is share-worthy, you will see your invites grow and [even] shares on other channels.”

The 10 essential marketing rules in this post will help you make the most out of LinkedIn in three areas:

• Build and establish a presence on the platform
• Boost traffic and engagement
• Promote and boost sales and networking opportunities

1. Put Relationships First

The basics work on LinkedIn like they do on every other social media platform – you have to spend time on LinkedIn to build a presence. And, you have to nurture connections to eventually build a network around your name and business.

I wrote a social media marketing basics guide in 2014 that you may want to read to get started, and I suggest that you also look at KeriLynn’s post on 6 ways marketing is just like dating.

To be specific:

• Focus on building relationships before trying to generate traffic via promotion
• Engage with others on their content before sharing yours
• Use your expertise to help wherever you see a need

A note of caution: the fact that LinkedIn was created for professional relationships does not authorize users to think of the platform as a spamming board, and unfortunately LinkedIn still doesn’t seem to have a strong policy against shady practices.

So, make a great LinkedIn experience start with you, and be very selective of the contacts you request or accept.

“Position yourself as a thought leader in your industry.”

Alayna Frankenberry, manager of content strategy for BlueSky ETO, suggests four ways that you can build a successful LinkedIn presence and make a name for yourself as one of the go-to persons in your niche or industry:

1. “Build your own presence before your client’s.

It’s a lot easier to get people to listen to an industry expert than it is to get them to engage with a faceless corporate account,” Frankenberry explains. “If you position yourself as a thought leader in your industry, other leaders and decision makers will notice – and they’ll be much more likely to check out your company, clients and posts.”

Frankenberry adds that you should still share posts and regularly update your brand’s account, but that you shouldn’t neglect your own profile in the process.

2. “Get active in the morning.

Schedule 20 minutes every day to check out your personal LinkedIn notifications and interact with the posts on your feed. See what’s happening in your communities and visit a few profiles from others who work in your industry.” Frankenberry assures this is a small time investment, but the habit will “pay off in the long run as you build and maintain a strong presence on LinkedIn.”

3. “Be generous.”

Frankenberry encourages you to “endorse your colleagues in the skills where they’re proficient,” and to “write recommendations for your employees, clients and managers, without being asked. This won’t just earn you some of the same props,” but it will also improve your LinkedIn presence and “lead to more visits to your profile and clicks on your posts.”

4. “Give people what they want.

Most people are using LinkedIn because they care about things like professional development and business growth. Share posts that provide solutions to common business issues and give actionable advice on how to achieve goals.” Frankenberry reminds you to “focus on solutions instead of self-promotion,” so you’ll see users “coming back again and again to interact with you and share your posts.”

2. Use Messages/Chat to Network and Promote

Use the integrated chat and messaging system LinkedIn provides to build a personal rapport with your connections before venturing out to contact other people in your niche (via InMail if you are a Premium user, or via the person’s email displayed on their LinkedIn profile under the Contacts tab).

LinkedIn’s integrated messaging/chat system

Messaging (and chatting, since it was integrated in 2015) immediately after creating a connection – and showing a genuine interest in them and what they do – can also help create a first rapport and trigger immediate trust.

It’s crucial to not send any spammy-looking messages in this first, delicate phase. Concentrate on the human factor:

• Comment on anything you found interesting from the connection’s profile.
• Ask questions about their latest project.
• Get them talking.

A chance for promoting your own work will come naturally as the other person develops an interest in you.

Carole Lieberman, M.D, highlights the importance of creating a relationship over sending out a promotional message and the risk you run by ignoring the human factor:

When you [ask] to connect with someone, do not do it if your sole purpose is to try to exploit their connections to promote something. When someone does this to me, I unlink with them.

LinkedIn is indeed much more than a platform where professionals and companies trade interests. It’s a place to build relationships, which will eventually turn into good opportunities for both parties.

Using InMail

Eric Brantner, founder of Scribblrs.com, advises to not underestimate the effectiveness of LinkedIn’s own premium messaging tool (InMail), especially with blogger and influencer outreach.

The key is to make sure you have a concise, well-crafted pitch. You also need to ensure that your target is the right audience for your pitch.

I think InMail can actually have higher response rates than cold emailing, as blogger’s email boxes are so often filled with spam. Going out of your way to hunt down a LinkedIn profile and send an email may be looked at as going the extra mile.

Also read Dan Virgillito’s 4 Ways to Generate Leads with a Premium LinkedIn Profile for more tips and context.

3. Publish on LinkedIn Pulse

LinkedIn’s own publishing platform (Pulse) can help you build your authority if you put out content that your network wants (and needs) to see.

As an example, see what copywriter and business owner Ed Gandia did in the post below:

Ed Gandia’s LinkedIn Pulse

Gandia used the platform to promote his blog, of course, but he did so by publishing quality posts that address his target audience’s pain points.

So, you see, Pulse content can’t afford to be shabby to be effective.

Carole Lieberman says, “When you post an article, it is important to spend some time picking out a picture and creating a headline that are attention-getting. You want people to stop their scrolling and land on your post.”

In other words, you want your Pulse posts to be as outstanding as your blog posts – just a tad shorter, maybe.

Sean Hall, owner of TekBoost, agrees that “providing industry related blog content on LinkedIn is an excellent strategy for gaining exposure from new audiences, while catering to your existing network,” and that “the goal is to provide shareable content.”

You want to publish “something that your followers would be genuinely interested in seeing, and would consider sharing to their own followers. The result is exposure that increases exponentially, particularly when a piece of content goes viral.”

Why Publishing on Pulse Is Important

Teajai Kimsey, marketing director at Crystal Structures Glazing, thinks that the secret to success on LinkedIn is to be engaged.

It’s not enough to put up a well-written profile and by-line. You have to post content on a regular basis that engages the people who are connected to you; things that are out of the ordinary but business minded. When I post good content, I see more people looking at my profile, requesting connections and the likes, and comment[ing] on what I have put out there.

Engagement is where every effort you put forward on LinkedIn pays off, and Pulse is a wonderful platform to do it.

Unlike group threads and comments, you can grow an authority in your niche when you start publishing Pulse articles that bring food for thought to big and small names in your community on LinkedIn, and to platform users in general.

Promotion and Reputation

Keep in mind that your Pulse posts must exist to promote your blog’s content, not just to share industry knowledge with the LinkedIn community. This is important because you want to boost engagement on both your profile and your blog, not just one of the two, so you’ll want to post only content that is relevant to what you already do and write on your blog.

Kristin Viola, marketing director at TheMLS.com, noticed: “[There was] an uptick in requests when we linked to our original blog content as well as articles on which our CEO is quoted. One article we posted (CEO was quoted) received more than 1,200 views. Since we are an MLS system, we always try to post relevant real estate content which pertains to our audience.”

4. Leverage Group Discussions

It might sound trite to repeat here, but do take advantage of group discussions on LinkedIn, not just by starting your own, but by responding to as many existing threads as possible.

Henry Butler, marketing consultant at CanIRank, suggests that you get involved with relevant LinkedIn groups that can drive targeted traffic to your profile and blog:

One advantage of LinkedIn over other social media channels is you can acquire more targeted traffic by joining and promoting your content in community groups related to your industry. This allows you to get your company name in front of people who are likely to be interested in the product or service you offer.

With LinkedIn removing the Promotion tab from groups, it’s now even more important to go where your audience is and avoid self-promotion until you’ve made a name for yourself.

Julie Graff, social content liaison at Pole Position Marketing, advises that you “find and join Groups that attract your target audience” and “engage actively, answering questions posed and providing helpful information within the conversations.”

You can also (carefully) post links to your own content, provided it is valuable to the group and not self-promotional. Using Groups in this way can help build brand awareness, establish you as an authority, and help you build true relationships with members of your target audience.

Another idea is to join promotional groups where all members are there to help promote each other’s work. One example is the Blog Promotion Mastermind Group currently on LinkedIn, that you can join if your blog already gets some traffic.

Grow Your Network

Group discussions are beneficial to growing your network. As Doug McIsaac, international marketing consultant at TheLinkedCoach.com, comments, “Size matters — when someone searches on LinkedIn, they see results from within their network first. If you want to show up in more searches, you need to work on growing your network. This is even more important if you have a solution that people search for within a specific industry.”

Sean Hall recommends interactively participating in industry-related Q&A sessions as “a powerful way to build stronger connections and put your industry expertise on display. The key is to make sure you’re adding value to the conversation, and not just blatantly pitching your company or product.”

To sum it up, create relevant discussions in your niche and involve the community, touching upon topics and angles that connect with the core of your blog or business message and content.

When you reach an audience in the hundred or thousands, you may also consider creating your own group and use it to cross-promote your posts.

5. Write a Smart Profile Headline and Summary

You want to catch the right attention from the right people and give a definite image of yourself, what you do and what drives you to do it.

The place to do that is your profile’s Headline and Summary fields.

Doug McIsaac advises making your headline “say something about what product or service you deliver. ‘I help my ideal clients achieve their ideal results’ or ‘I deliver ideal results for my ideal clients’.”

Your headline can also be more concise than that: Neil Patel uses ‘Co-Founder at Crazy Egg & Hello Bar’ and I chose ‘Result-Oriented Freelance Blogger, Copywriter, Cartoonist’ for myself.

What’s important is that “you don’t [make it] seem too much like click-bait,” says Chelsea Hewitt, marketing specialist at Unlimited Sotheby’s International Realty. “The text should have some substance to garner [visitors’] click and make them interested in coming back to your page or website in the future.”

For the summary, McIsaac makes it clear that:

It’s not about you – your summary is your chance to sell your potential customers on why they should do business with you. It should explain who you work with, what solution you provide and how they can work with you.

At the same time, though, you also want to make your summary at least somewhat personal, because the person reading it will want to know your voice and mindset.

My summary begins with a few personal sentences to set the moods before going on with my what I can offer:

Take a person with a boundless curiosity and multiple interests.

Combine that with a kid-like personality.

You have me. :-)

Like me, Sarah Boutwell, inbound marketer at Geek Powered Studios, is of the opinion that you should use first-person if writing your own profile.

It makes you sound more human and like you actually put thought and effort into writing your profile. Your profile isn’t just a resume, it’s more of a personal peek into who you are as a professional. Don’t forget to add what makes you a great person to work with, not just for.

Ultimately, how personal your summary will be is up to you, but remember this is a selling tool and not an autobiography.

6. Leverage the Other 4 Most Important Profile Fields

Each of these fields lets you add specific information to your profile that will help attract the right leads.

So, in addition to your headline and summary (Rule #5), you can create a better impression.

1. Profile Photo

First impressions count, so when you upload your profile photo, make sure this is friendly, clean and professional-looking.

“LinkedIn’s main demographic is 30-50 years,” says Chelsea Hewitt. “This age group often features individuals with fast-paced lives revolving around work, social activities, family events and more! The key to getting their attention during a quick scroll of their LinkedIn news feed is to have a stunning photo followed with short but interesting headline/text that makes them want to stop and learn more.”

That means your profile photo should work well together with your headline and look as lively as possible for good results.

2. Publication Links

Showcase your best blog posts, guest posts and free ebooks as Publication links on your LinkedIn profile.

This section makes for a short portfolio that your visitors can look at to “sample” your expertise and competencies.

3. File Upload Feature

The screenshot above shows how I added my illustrations done for Creative Writing Institute to the related work experience in the “resume” section of my profile.

You can upload files to your profile Summary, Experience and Education sections. These are your clips, the first-hand proof of your experience and expertise.

4. Integration with SlideShare

Since LinkedIn acquired SlideShare in 2012, the platform is easily accessible from the social network, and you can easily add your slides and presentations to your profile for everybody to read.

Why It’s Important to Make it Visual

“Visuals are one of the most eye-catching things to put on a LinkedIn profile or business page,” says Sarah Boutwell. These can be videos, photos, logos, links, infographics, screenshots and slides.

LinkedIn has so many extra features that are free to add to your page or profile now. It’s a shame if you don’t take advantage of them.

Boutwell especially recommends that you use SlideShare, “which allows you to create information slideshows.” See Rule #6 for tips if you haven’t read it already.

Finally, you can add visuals to LinkedIn’s professional portfolio, “which allows you to organize and design all of your visual and interactive content.”

7. The Power of Introduction Messages

When you request a new connection, LinkedIn allows you to write a small intro message:

Many users often overlook this feature, and limit themselves to using the default message LinkedIn inserts in the field – “I’d like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn” – but when used well, the feature turns into an incredibly powerful way to build trust and credibility.

The short intro should answer a fundamental question for the person receiving it:

“Who are you?”

Or even better:

“What made you want to connect to me in the first place?”

The intro message is your opportunity to let your connection-to-be know who you are, what you do and what made you want to get in touch – all in less than 300 characters.

An example intro message could look like this:

Hi! Luana Spinetti here. I’m an Italy-based freelance blogger with a passion for robots, like you. I’d LOVE to get into talking about our common hobby! Would you like to connect?

8. Seek (Honest) Recommendations

Recommendations are reviews, and reviews drive traffic, sales and reputation in the eyes of both prospects and fellow professionals.

Alexa Kurtz, marketing strategist at WebTek, understands very well what recommendations mean for business:

If you were ordering a product online that is offered by two companies, how would you decide which company to buy it from? Perhaps you’d compare Company A’s prices to Company B’s or find out how each company treats their employees, but most likely you’re going to look for online reviews or ask your friends for their opinions.

Kurtz says that the same happens with a LinkedIn profile:

“To stand out from the crowd online, it is highly recommended to build yourself a sense of dependability and reliability.”

The best way to do this is to ask past clients, coworkers and bloggers you guest posted for or collaborated with to recommend you on LinkedIn.

However, recommendations only work if they’re genuine (yes, someone might actually go and check if what is being said is true!). Keeping that in mind, I once offered a free illustration to my network in exchange for an honest recommendation for work done or from happy readers of my blogs.

The result? I had a few good responses and received top notch recommendations from happy readers, and one of my fellow bloggers actually claimed her free illustration (you can see it here).

9. Use @mentions and Updates

You can use @mentions in comments and threads, and they will get your network notified and involved in your content for almost no effort, like on Twitter.

Mentions are a great tool to “call” both your connections and other big or small names in the industry to participate in your threads, including influencers you wish to get feedback from.

You can “call” both profiles and company pages, so mentions actually cover a wide range of your network.

How @mentions work on LinkedIn

As of publication, you can’t use mentions in Pulse posts, but you can definitely comment your own post and add mentions there to “call” the sources you quoted in the piece.

You can also write updates from your LinkedIn dashboard and they are quite a helpful way to get people’s eyes on your content, and get rewarded with traffic, comments and likes, since they work like a combination of Facebook and Twitter.

Sean Hall extends this benefit even to employees’ accounts, if you have a staff. “Make sure your employees are regularly posting industry related content on their personal accounts, which are connected to your company page,” he says. “They should also be sharing your updates to their followers to increase reach and engagement.”

10. Don’t Forget the Company Page

Company pages are not less important than your profile. In the past, I thought they were and I wound up losing so much in terms of traffic and engagement back to my blogs.

It’s very important to build an online presence for your business or blog and company pages are a great free tool to get your fans and people in your niche or industry involved in the specific updates concerning your blog, not just yourself. (Use @mentions to make the process easier! See Rule #9.)

As Sean Hall puts it:

Having a company page allows you to engage with your followers, share potential job opportunities, and be a trusted resource in the community. It can also be another avenue to share any new products that you release and is a great way to provide links back to your website. LinkedIn can help you differentiate yourself from your competitors, while also helping you check up on what your competition may be doing.

Indeed, taking advantage of this targeted channel – that also comes with its own analytics to monitor how effective your updates are – can only benefit your overall LinkedIn marketing strategy.

However, Swapnil Bhagwat, senior manager at Orchestrate Technologies, LLC, warns that “having a LinkedIn company page and posting content on it as and when you like might not drive the desired engagement. The competition to grab the user’s [attention] on LinkedIn feed is quite intense, and to get your content visible needs extra efforts.”

It’s not enough, then, to have a company page. You have to keep it alive and kicking to involve your audience and get the most out of it. How? Bhagwat suggests:

Add your LinkedIn page to all types of social sharing such as Buffer or HootSuite. Also, [you can achieve] niche segmentation [with] the Targeting option, that allows firms to target a specific audience – based on demographics and other filters – with exclusive content.

Hall also adds that a LinkedIn company page “allows you to connect with potential customers by sharing industry related blog content, participating in Q&A sessions, or even displaying a call to action in your summary.”

That’s a lot more that you can achieve than your profile!

Kelvin Jiang, CFA, founder of Buyside Focus, uses LinkedIn to market his business and generate most of his traffic. Jiang’s tip is to “make your company updates clickable and conversion focused.”

Think about the topics relevant to your audience and post links to quality content on your company page. This would include relevant blog posts, infographics, videos, and round-up posts on your company website. Your followers will see links to your content directly on their LinkedIn front page, which results in high conversion. This is a great way to generate traffic to your website and to attract more followers to your company page.

As for the updates, Sarah Boutwell recommends you keep a “consistency with posting on your business page. If my social media community manager experience taught me anything, it’s that timing and consistency are two of the most important things to keep in mind when using social platforms.

LinkedIn is a more professional atmosphere for sure, but that doesn’t mean you can’t be social and tag members in your network if you think something you posted will be relevant to them. And posting often is great for engagement and just getting your brand out there. However, don’t spam everyone. Make sure to include variety, like mixing in a photo or a SlideShare presentation every now and then.

The bottom line for LinkedIn company pages, as Jiang puts it, is to:

Post relevant updates. Make them clickable and conversion focused. This generates traffic to your website and attracts more followers to your LinkedIn company page.

BONUS #1 – Advertise on LinkedIn

If you can’t allocate too much time and resources to inbound marketing, you can always advertise on LinkedIn.

Sean Martin recommends to “fine tune your targeted campaigns [and] try uploading a lead list or an email list to LinkedIn, so you can narrow your advertising audience even further. You can then use LinkedIn to send direct retargeting ads to these users as well as create similar audiences to replicate the demographics of users you have already been able to generate leads from. It’s sort of a recipe for repeating previous success in lead generation.”

You can also “use sponsored posts linked to landing pages instead of content pieces” and Martin explains how:

There are two types of LinkedIn ads you can use for your content or pages. The first is ordinary text ads, the second is sponsored ads. The second are larger and use images to advertise instead of just static ad text. They see a much higher click through rate than ordinary text ads, which makes sense.

Usually, people use these more successful sponsored ads to promote their new pieces of content. While this is a great way to promote your newer pieces, you could be spending that high click through rate on more optimal opportunities. For example, you can create specific landing pages and link to those with your sponsored ads to generate conversions instead of just leads. You want to capitalize on the most potent traffic you can where it matters most.

BONUS #2 – Two LinkedIn Strategies

Generic tips and advice can only take you so far, and nothing beats the credibility of detailed strategies that originate from the experience of marketing managers.

Carey Dodd, marketing manager at Siren Group, and Oren Greenberg, both shared their step-by-step strategies to get the most out of LinkedIn. You’ll find most of the advice given in the previous rules, plus some unique insight coming from their direct experience.

“The key to getting your content discovered is by going niche.”

Carey Dodd says that “the key to getting your content discovered is by going niche”, and to do that:

1. Define your company’s core verticals and create unique content for each

For example, Siren Group verticals include prospecting Life Insurance brokers, Fashion E-Commerce companies and Social Online Games developers.

2. Set up a LinkedIn showcase page for each of your verticals

Share related industry news – always creating an image for each post to get better engagement.

3. Share your company’s blog articles within this vertical to the showcase page

Using a small budget, use LinkedIn Ads to sponsor your blog posts to the showcase page (set up audience targeting for best results). This helps to grow your showcase page followers.

4. Publish unique, helpful LinkedIn Pulse articles

“Be sure to share [them] to your showcase page.

5. Send a Twitter message to @LinkedInPulse with a link to your Pulse article

Make sure your Pulse article gets shared, liked and people comment within the first 48 hours of publishing (ask friends/family/colleagues). This will give it a greater chance of getting featured by LinkedIn.

6. Set up a LinkedIn group for each vertical

Invite key prospects to take part in this group, share helpful and relatable articles. By setting up a group, you are then able to make contact and send a direct message to the group members.

Targeted Posts: A Step-by-Step Strategy

The second strategy, by Oren Greenberg, guides you step-by-step to find a target audience on LinkedIn and write a great post that is tailored to their needs:

1. Build a skyscraper post. Add visuals (images, videos, etc.) and even an element of entertainment, because “being funny and human adds a whole new level to the white collar network.

2. Find your targets – get a list of 50-100 people you want in your network (think post first – who is it relevant to, would they read it, is the information valuable to them?).

3. Send a personalized request to connect — tell them a bit about yourself in the connection message: it goes a long way to the other individual if they see you took some time with them. (See Rule#2)

4. Figure out 10-20 groups that are highly targeted and relevant to the article and, after you get at least 10 of your targeted new connections on your network, publish the post and also share it in those groups. You can even run a newsletter telling your audience you just published an article, and you don’t want to sell anything – if you prove your worth, people will come to you and you can build a relationship and maybe earn a customer for life.

“This may seem like a lot of work,” Greenberg says, “but the results speak for themselves – sometimes even 5k+ views on those articles and over 100 shares. Engage with your audience and finish with a question – ‘this was my insight on the matter, would love to hear yours’ – comments have a lot of power as they show up in people’s feeds, gathering, and amplifying views.”

On to you – what’s your secret recipe to effective LinkedIn marketing? Let us know on our social channels.

6 Tactics for Turning Your Website into a Lead Generating Machine written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Anybody can create a website, but not everybody can create a conversion machine. Your website should be a mechanism in your business that allows you to convert prospective visitors into interested leads who will later become customers and advocates for the products and services that you sell. All website owners want this dream, but they typically fail to implement the correct measures that will allow them to streamline their conversion process, which will benefit their business in terms of sales, engagement, inquiries and referrals.

My friends from Melbourne-based digital marketing agency Digital Next share their top 6 tactics that are guaranteed to improve a number of leads that you will receive from your website.

Pitch your product or service to your niche market.

Many people make the mistake of pitching one product or service to everybody. Even though it sounds good in theory, every person that visits your site has different motives, values, and desires.

Each step of the journey that they take on your site should add to their experience and take them a step closer to finding the result that they want. For example, the maker of athletic running spikes could try to sell the same product to athletes that compete in all of the track and field events that involve running. However, by targeting their audience at a micro-niche level, they should be able to tailor their content, products or services to cater for the website’s prospective visitor. Some of the ways this can be segmented includes:

• Whether the athlete male or female?
• The size of the athlete’s feet.
• The shape of the athlete’s feet.
• The running distance that the athlete needs to cover.
• The running style of the athlete.

By tailoring your site to appeal to the different micro-niche audience, you will increase the conversion rate. The more granular you make it, the higher the conversions should be.

Make sure your site has web pages that convert.

Before you commit to a web design, it’s important to test out web pages to see which ones provide the best conversions. There are many websites that opt to build a professional website but fail to focus on the conversion elements. It’s important to test different design layouts to find the difference in conversions, site engagement, and bounce rate. Investing in this at the beginning can earn your business thousands or millions of dollars in revenue over the long-term.

A good illustrative example is this landing page from Brian Dean’s site Backlinko.

Make sure the web pages get to communicate your exact intentions.

You want to inform and persuade visitors to your site so they will have the confidence to commit to the conversion. Before asking them for the sale or to submit an inquiry, the prospect needs to have enough trust in your business otherwise, their instincts will tell them to leave the website.

Some of the ways you can achieve this includes:

• Publishing a contact phone number for prospects to contact your business and speak to a representative who can answer any questions or queries that they might have.
• Publishing a compelling sales headline that addresses exactly what it is they are looking for.
• Publishing a high-resolution image that resonates with their current experience or the experience that they desire.
• Publish sales copy that informs and demonstrates value to the website visitor so that it will compel them to take action on the website.
• Use calls-to-action that tell them exactly what actions they need to take in order to get the outcome that they desire.

Focus on getting people to register on your database network.

This refers to getting qualified prospects to register their interest in your products or services by subscribing to your website’s email list or following your business on your social media networks. By getting them to register in your network, your business will be able to maintain communications with prospects and you can retarget them in the future so that they will gain more trust with your brand and commit to converting on your site in the future.

For example, Videofruit using the above-the-fold part of the homepage to get website subscribers.

Olivia Rose uses an ‘opt-in bribe’ to gain more subscribers to her email list.

Use pop-ups to get more engagement.

More often than not, people need a trigger that will make them convert. Pop-ups and welcome gates are great ways to increase the number of conversions on your website. Some of the leading pop-up software includes Opt-in Monster and SumoMe.

Example: Matthew Woodward uses the Opt-in Monster plugin to launch his pop-ups.

Note: Google has said that they will be releasing an algorithm that will target interstitials. You will need to be cautious when using pop-ups on your site in 2017 and beyond.

Implement retargeting tags.

You can implement retargeting tags that will enable you to promote your site’s content, products or services offering across different ad networks. It’s easier and cheaper to retarget a visitor that has been on your site before than to promote and convert a brand new visitor.

Simply add the retargeting code into your website, which will allow you to target previous visitors to your site and compel them to return so they will convert on your site in the future.

Publish testimonials and reviews.

What other people say about your business is more powerful than anything that you will communicate to your prospects. Get as many positive reviews and testimonials that will convince people to convert on your website.

Here is an example from Criminally Prolific, where the site uses video testimonials as well as quotes.

Once you have developed your website to be a conversion machine, you will be able to acquire an endless flow of qualified leads that will allow your web business to thrive. Start implementing the recommendations that have been provided and in the next 90 days, we guarantee that your business will see a substantial change in conversions.

Nathan Elly is the branch manager at Digital Next, a full-service digital agency based in South Melbourne specializing in responsive Web design, SEO, PPC and social media marketing. He’s a passionate digital marketer specializing in business development and long-term strategy, with experience from a multitude of SEO disciplines combined into a role which supports and progresses online businesses. https://www.digitalnext.com.au

 

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