If you’re injured and can’t work out, recovery can be frustrating. Without exercise, you’re also missing one of your best stress-relieving outlets. The P.O.W.E.R. technique gives you a road map to manage your mind and body during this difficult time.
You can read something and hope that it’ll all be beamed into your brain for future application. Or you can read it and write down what you just learned, as if you were teaching someone else, and actually retain it. This is called the Feynman Technique.
What are Jonny’s “4 Ds of Pristine Production?” You’ll find out in this week’s episode of The Showrunner.
We begin this episode by discussing the how and the what of podcasting — and more importantly, which one we place a greater emphasis on. (You probably won’t be surprised by our answers.)
Then we dive into Jonny’s 4 Ds, which cover:
And then Jerod adds a few Ds of his own. 
Listen, learn, enjoy …
Listen to this Episode NowThe post Professional Podcasting Tips for Pristine Production (and Hosting Hacks) appeared first on Copyblogger.
I’m sure you’ve heard this stat: more than two million blog posts go live every single day.
And that’s just talking about blogs. You don’t even want to start contemplating total online content including emails, landing pages, product pages, podcasts, and social media.
Standing out in the deluge is harder than ever. Even for established publishers it’s tough. For beginners … it’s a nightmare.
So, what’s the solution?
While there is no magic bullet for content marketers, there is one type of content that can cut through the noise and deliver long-term results.
It’s called evergreen content.
Evergreen content — like the name implies — is timeless.
These special resources are in-depth examinations of a problem, solution, trend, or topic. They can help your audience find tons of information on a subject that interests them, which adds value to your blog.
For example, Copyblogger used their original evergreen content to create a content library that produced historic results for the site. Visitors can register for a free My Copyblogger membership to get easy access to all of these materials.
Creating evergreen content does require additional time and money, but it’s worth those investments … if you want to rank higher in search engines, drive traffic for years, and help your audience find exactly what they need.
So, do you want to discover what types of evergreen content you could create — with more examples detailing exactly what success looks like?
Well, that’s what this post contains: 20 different evergreen content types, tips on how to make yours stand out, and examples all along the way.
Original research and data-driven posts are evergreen gold. Likewise, case studies help show off your expertise by promoting real-world results that attract new prospects.
Investing in your own original research is hard, but that’s why it’s at the top of this list. Primary research is unique, exclusive, and — therefore — powerful.
While you might not have the resources of Forrester or Mary Meeker, that doesn’t mean you can’t go mining on your own.
Andy Crestodina does this every year through a simple Google Form for his blogger research survey.
If you can’t create your own research, the next best thing is to collect stats. This can’t be an exercise in brevity though.
Instead, get exhaustive by assembling 100 or more data points from across your industry. Then either add original commentary that helps your audience make use of the stats or design an infographic to accompany and simplify the content.
Case studies are a great two-for-one:
Neil Patel’s How to Write a Perfect Case Study That Attracts High Paying Clients does both brilliantly. On top of that, it gets pretty meta: it’s a case-study guide that is a case study itself.
Even more than success, failure is an effective teacher.
In fact, people often connect with our failures far more than our successes. Failure humanizes us. It evokes empathy and builds trust.
So, muster up the courage to get honest about your biggest flop. In Case Study: 18 Tips to Destroy Your Own Webinar, Emily Hunt takes this track, revealing mistakes and pointing out lessons at every turn.
Another creative way to present data is to go small … really, really, really small.
Pick one shocking stat and build an entire article or ebook around it. Explain the stat’s backstory and draw out all the applications you can.
For instance, this article is essentially a response to the problem of content overload and how to overcome those two million blog posts that get published day after day … after day.
By breaking down a timeless issue into bite-sized steps, you educate your visitors and provide genuine value. The key is to solve a real problem with a real solution.
For evergreen content, ask yourself:
What hell am I saving my reader from and what heaven will I deliver them unto?
According to Chip and Dan Heath: “Once we know something … it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others.” Because of this, true beginner guides are few and far between.
For a model, check out How to Write First Blog Post (16,000-word Guide +63 Expert Tips) by Michael Pozdnev. It combines emotion, a free ebook, and advice all centered around taking your very first step into the world of blogging.
In many ways, advanced guides are easier to write than beginner guides. Why? Because you and your reader already share expertise and a common, technical language.
But how do you say something genuinely unique and deliver on your promise?
Jason Quey’s The Ultimate Guide to Influencer Marketing starts with data and a bit of groundwork. Then the content reveals Jason’s own templates along with high-level insights from other thought leaders in the space.
The challenge of producing both beginner and advanced guides is how to present a lot of information. Three thousand or more words on any topic is hard to take in.
Enter the checklist. Checklists can stand alone or be added to how-to posts as downloads or content upgrades.
Whichever method you choose, the non-negotiable principle is this: boil it down.
Copyblogger’s Ultimate Copy Checklist ends with a black-and-white poster that helps you easily work through all 51 questions from the article itself.
In addition to “do this now” advice, showing your reader how to accomplish long-term goals is vital. You can do this by breaking down your steps into days, weeks, months, or even an entire year.
How to Create a Social Media Content Calendar for a Year walks visitors through five steps to persevere at social media marketing by moving from the big picture — complete with spreadsheet examples — right down to individual posts.
Explaining how to pick the best product is a dangerous evergreen gambit. Most guides come across as transparently self-promotional.
To avoid that, make your product tutorial about teaching: provide definitions, collect advice from industry experts, and present impartial reviews from third-party sites.
While they certainly sell their own security software, Heimdal Security’s How to Find the Best Antivirus, the Ultimate Guide nails this tight-rope walk on every front.
To help readers navigate through all the content on the web, compile the very best information on a topic and create a list that’s easy to follow. Include detailed commentary that serves your specific niche.
Creativity is a fickle thing. Sometimes the muse strikes without warning, but rarely does she arrive exactly when we need her most.
Bringing ideas and resources together turns the creative lights back on. Check out Henneke’s 35 Blogging Tips to Woo Readers and Win Business.
Regardless of your niche, there are plenty of tools that help people be more productive and profitable.
But to be evergreen, you have to do more than just list them.
To make tool lists shine, try tutorials with screenshots, videos, tips on how to get started, usage hacks, and insightful commentary detailing pros and cons.
Set a periodic reminder in your editorial calendar to keep these posts up-to-date.
Most influencer lists are pretty superficial. Even on well-known media sites, they often aren’t more than surface-level comments taken directly from each name’s most prominent social media profile.
To stand out, connect your influencer list to practical applications and get original contributions. At the risk of sounding self-serving, that’s exactly what I did in 50 Best Social Media Tools From 50 Most Influential Marketers Online, which combines this approach with a tool list.
I love books. And I love lists. Turns out, so does the internet. Best-book lists are always a popular topic.
However, just like many of the other examples in this post, you can’t throw together blurbs from the back cover and call it good.
Dig in. Summarize each book. Call attention to its best lessons. Drop outstanding quotes into Click to Tweet boxes. Or even ask industry experts to share their favorite choices like The 10 Top Copywriting Books from the Top 10 Online Copywriters does with names like Brian Clark, Joanna Wiebe, and Demian Farnworth.
Every industry has its seven deadly sins. Some have more like 10 or 20. Outlining these common mistakes — and providing tips on avoiding and overcoming them — is evergreen paydirt.
As a model, consider Henneke’s 11 Common Blogging Mistakes that Waste Your Audience’s Time. True to her engaging and winsome form, Henneke presents a bite-sized breakdown of each issue and easy-to-follow corrections.
For an even more exhaustive example, check out Shanelle Mullin’s post on ConversionXL, Google Analytics Health Check: Is Your Configuration Broken?
You can create evergreen content around the history of your niche or product by building a glossary or producing an exhaustive “everything you need to know” post.
History doesn’t have to be boring. And it doesn’t just attract the “nerds” of your industry. However, it does have to be either visually or pragmatically engaging.
Beth Hayden and Rafal Tomal’s A History of Social Media [Infographic] has both of those two ingredients.
They kick things off with a secret — “There’s nothing new about ‘social media’ …” — and proceed to dispel that myth with a beautifully illustrated timeline.
It might seem like the old-school “what’s the best tip for blogging?” roundup has been done to death, but that doesn’t mean single-tip roundups can’t shine.
Ask an original, niche-specific question and present the answers creatively.
Case in point, Venngage’s 46 Expert Tips For Creating Addictive Content. “Addictive” content is far more enticing than “good” content, and it’s packaged as a post, ebook, and infographic.
As if that wasn’t enough, each and every tip is boiled down to a memorable and Tweetable nugget for easy sharing and retention.
Similar to the how-to guides above, best-or-worst-practice lists aim to add value by solving problems. Think of them as catch-alls, built on data and backed by examples.
While best-practice lists are low-hanging evergreen fruit, worst-practice lists give you the opportunity to be just as valuable — and have a lot more fun.
Beth Hayden combines both ideas in 7 Deadly Sins and 7 Virtues of Email Marketing.
Dictionary entries aren’t the sexiest type of content, but they are link-building dynamite.
Check out Copyblogger’s epic Content Marketing Glossary. The downloadable PDF, extensive cross-linking, and videos throughout make it compelling.
Complement your own glossary likewise to bring it to life.
Our final example is easily the most daunting.
Words like “definitive” and “ultimate” get tossed around a lot. And while the luster is wearing off, the need for all-in-one content hasn’t gone anywhere.
Lawn Care: The Ultimate Guide should be in the content marketing hall of fame.
After an opening quote from Michael Pollan — “A lawn is nature under totalitarian rule” — the rest of the article works through the complete history of lawn care, definitions of key terms, best and worst practices, and a host of visuals.
Oh, and how perfect is it to end a post on evergreen content with a lawn care guide? That’s just icing on the cake.
Now that you’re equipped with more types of evergreen content than you’d ever need, the temptation will be to start growing an entire nursery … all at once.
Don’t.
Evergreen content is powerful, insanely so. But remember creating it requires an investment. Pick one of the above templates and dig deep.
Above all, aim for originality and value. Being genuinely helpful never goes out of season.
The post 20 Types of Evergreen Content that Produce Lasting Results for Your Business appeared first on Copyblogger.
Welcome to the latest installation of our weekly blog series – Psychological Hacks for Marketers. Each week we will introduce a new shortcut that the consumer’s brand takes and how the crafty marketer can take advantage. Last week’s topic was Outcome Bias.
This week we are discussing:
Bandwagon Effect
The bandwagon effect in marketing is the increase in likelihood of purchase based on the number of other people who have already purchased (or their desire to purchase) the same item.
In its simplest form, it’s the “cool factor” – the tendency for consumers to want something because other people want it. It explains the trends and the fads, most popular colors and styles, the products that sell out on day 1.
But the bandwagon effect can also be seen in more basic forms of social proof. For example, this effect can help explain why companies show off testimonials and reviews and ratings on their sites. Other consumers are validating the claims that marketers make.
Take advantage of the bandwagon effect by:
If you can use your marketing to show potential customers how popular your products are, you’ll sell more of them.
Stay tuned next week for another installment of the Psychology Hacks series. Have a suggestion? Let us know.
After a nasty year of hacks and leaks, it's only natural to wonder how you can keep your own digital communication private.
One app promising to do just that is rapidly growing in popularity.
Signal is an encrypted messaging app that lets you send photos or text messages. You can also make secure voice calls over a data network. That means the only people who can see the messages you send are you and the person who receives them.
There's a lot of work that goes on in the background to make it all possible, but just know Signal is one of the best at keeping everything secure. In fact, Signal says it saw a 400% increase in sign ups in the week after the US presidential election in November.
You can download Signal for iPhone or Android for free. And keep reading to see how the app works. And listen for more about encryption in our lives in the latest episode of our podcast, Codebreaker, from Marketplace and Business Insider.
SEE ALSO: The first 13 apps you should download for your iPhone
“Calling it an experiment gives you permission to fail.”
– A.J. Jacobs
A.J. Jacobs (@ajjacobs) is a kindred guinea pig of self-experimentation who chronicles his shenanigans in books that seem to keep winding up as New York Times best sellers. The Know-It-All was about his quest to learn everything in the world. In The Year of Living Biblically, he tried to follow all the rules of the Bible as literally as possible. Drop Dead Healthy followed his well- (and ill-) advised experiments to become the healthiest person alive. My Life as an Experiment is about exactly what it sounds like, and It’s All Relative — which will be out in 2017 — will aim to connect all of humanity in one family tree.
A.J. is also the host of the new podcast Twice Removed, which takes a celebrity guest and introduces them to a surprise cousin they didn’t know they had. It could be one of their heroes, an old friend, a teacher, etc.
In this episode, we talk about:
I think you’ll have a blast with this one — I know I did. Please enjoy!
Want to hear another podcast with a human guinea pig? — Listen to my conversation with Morgan Spurlock. In this episode, we discuss how Morgan made his own luck, builds rapport with people and gets them to open up, gets people to care about important issues, and much more (stream below or right-click here to download):
This podcast is brought to you by Wealthfront. Wealthfront is a massively disruptive (in a good way) set-it-and-forget-it investing service, led by technologists from places like Apple and world-famous investors. It has exploded in popularity in the last 2 years and now has more than $2.5B under management. In fact, some of my good investor friends in Silicon Valley have millions of their own money in Wealthfront. Why? Because you can get services previously limited to the ultra-wealthy and only pay pennies on the dollar for them, and it’s all through smarter software instead of retail locations and bloated sales teams.
Check out wealthfront.com/tim, take their risk assessment quiz, which only takes 2-5 minutes, and they’ll show you for free exactly the portfolio they’d put you in. If you want to just take their advice and do it yourself, you can. Or, as I would, you can set it and forget it. Well worth a few minutes: wealthfront.com/tim.
This podcast is also brought to you by 99Designs, the world’s largest marketplace of graphic designers. I have used them for years to create some amazing designs. When your business needs a logo, website design, business card, or anything you can imagine, check out 99Designs.
I used them to rapid prototype the cover for The 4-Hour Body, and I’ve also had them help with display advertising and illustrations. If you want a more personalized approach, I recommend their 1-on-1 service. You get original designs from designers around the world. The best part? You provide your feedback, and then you end up with a product that you’re happy with or your money back. Click this link and get a free $99 upgrade. Give it a test run.
QUESTION(S) OF THE DAY: What was your favorite quote or lesson from this episode? Please let me know in the comments.
Scroll below for links and show notes…
Website | Twitter | Facebook | Twice Removed
Many organizations employ a wide variety of tactics when it comes to their marketing strategies. Thankfully, a modern marketing automation platform provides enough flexibility to achieve the same outcomes in many different ways.
That being said, while it is possible to take many paths to achieve your objectives, some configurations present a healthier approach than others.
Like most things in life, quality comes in many sizes, shapes, and formats. One team’s definition of healthy may look drastically different than another team’s as initiatives often are unique to a specific organization. Therefore, to define healthy, it is important to look at the principles or leading indicators that highlight whether the sales ends are justified by the marketing means.
As a general rule-of-thumb, healthy strategies leverage balanced communications to deliver results and maximize the use of everyone’s time, both the audience’s and brand’s. A healthy program is customer-appreciated–timely, value-adding, and relevant. Equally important, healthy initiatives are internally supported–efficient, repeatable, and sustainable.
Program health can be measured based on both qualitative and quantitative metrics. For example, a good quantitative metric to track is the amount of time being spent on each campaign or marketing activity compared to the overall ROI. Qualitative metrics include things like employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction.
In this blog, I’ll explain three ways that you can get the most of your marketing automation platform for a healthy, sustainable strategy and how you can measure them:
Your relationships with potential and existing customers are like muscles—properly exercised, they can lead to strong and powerful revenue outcomes. In the same way, overusing and straining them can lead to opt-outs and irritated customers.
As you’re assessing your campaigns, the first question you should ask is “Does this communication provide value to my audience?”
Many times, it can be tempting to overcommunicate when you’re leveraging a marketing automation platform due to the scale at which you can run programs. To overcome this temptation, it’s important to target specific outcomes and objectives within each program. Instead of aiming to send out a weekly or monthly message, define your relationship or education objectives–this is often supported by writing out a value-adding statement while planning your communications.
For example:
Applying this to real-world scenarios for a subscription management company:
By targeting specific outcomes and objectives, you’ll be able to clarify the value that you’ll deliver through automated communications. In the scenarios above, the subscription management company wants to educate their audience on available subscriptions and raise awareness about the information within various publications. The value-adding objective is to present relevant content to their audience and highlight information that the contact may not have otherwise known was available through these publications.
Adding value at each touch point is a great way to ultimately deliver on your goals for driving conversions and revenue. By linking together value-adding communication objectives, you can develop an overall nurturing path for each contact. In the example above, the subscription summary page could include a call-to-action to sign-up for the listed publication.
Ideas for measurement: Track unsubscribes, click-through activity, and program successes. The goal is to gauge whether your audience is interacting with your content or potentially avoiding communication. Qualitative customer surveys and internal discussions on content relevance can uncover areas for improvement.
Do your nurture streams or campaign workflows look like a bunch of spaghetti? Do they feel overly complex in their logic? If so, it may be time to take a look at the events, constraints, and logic being used to automate your communications.
With a marketing automation platform, you can leverage information in a number of ways. By listening for behaviors, rather than programming if/then statements for every interaction, you can simplify the process for placing the most relevant information in front of each audience segment based on their interests. This also increases the likelihood that your audience will see content that resonates the most with them.
One example of this is a welcome series for new customers. Rather than stringing together multiple send-wait-send emails and evaluation steps, you can set up a communication series that are based on whether customers exhibit a new or desired behavior. Not only is this a healthier approach, it’s also a great way to avoid overwhelming them and ensuring that your most important messages are consistently connecting with the right audiences.
Here are a few ways you can evaluate this aspect of your marketing automation:
Of course, if you are running up against a wall when it comes to the available triggers, filters, and logic within your current marketing automation platform, it may be time to consider more sophisticated systems. There is a big difference in design logic from platform-to-platform, and the right logic will make it far easier to implement campaigns based on the objectives and responses you hope to achieve.
Ideas for measurement: The average time spent building out nurturing workflows is a great metric to start with. Qualitative monitoring might include a discussion of daily workload, system ease-of-use, and best practices for automating customer interactions.
A final concept for getting the most of your marketing strategy is scalability. Many marketers have come to terms with the daily grind of developing programs, and as such, they may not realize that many repetitive activities can be consolidated. The right marketing automation platform will reduce the number of times that any type of program or content needs to be produced from scratch.
Common examples of repetitive activities:
Features like dynamic content and the ability to clone whole campaigns (with all associated assets) can free up the much-needed time to support your strategic initiatives. Efficiencies designing, implementing, and executing campaigns will allow you to focus more on monitoring results and optimizing.
Another common area where repetitive activities are abound is reporting. If you’re spending hours and hours compiling data to deliver status updates, your marketing automation platform may have untapped, out-of-the-box settings that can visualize results without a heavy amount of manual intervention. Creating an inventory of your marketing reports and a process for delivering updates may result in greater efficiencies.
Ideas for measurement: Excellent quantitative measure include the number of hours spent building reports and reconfiguring or rebuilding previously developed workflows and content. Tying this information to a general survey that evaluates perspectives on the amount of repetitive work is a good way to track qualitative satisfaction with the current systems, processes, and tasks.
The new year is right around the corner, and many of us are planning out what it will look like for our organizations. One of the best things we can do is to pause and reflect on the items that are working and those that can be streamlined. A great way to rally your team to success in the new year is to ask them to participate in the evaluation process and help determine if there are any areas within your marketing strategy that could be streamlined going forward. Of course, it may time to consider a more advanced marketing automation platform if your current solution does not support these capabilities.
What other tips do you have for a healthier marketing strategy? As always, please feel free to share your comments below.
There may come a day when social selling replaces traditional methods of prospecting. That day, however, is not today. As things stand, it’s not tomorrow either.
Much of what passes for “social selling” is research and the equivalent of an email. What the Charlatans and Snake Oil Salesman have laid down as the new gospel has overpromised and under-delivered, all the while using cold calling as a straw man. “Buy what we sell and you’ll never have to make another cold call as long as you live.”
For brand building, there has never been a better toolkit—if you are a content creator. Digital has changed things: It’s a content creator’s world, and you are just living in it. For research, the social tools are simply unmatched. As a replacement for every other method of prospecting—including cold calling? Phooey.
The question isn’t whether or not you are going to need to use other mediums in the future. The question is “What mediums should you be using now?” Right now, cold calling is still the fastest, most effective method for getting in front of your dream clients.
Someday, you may be replaced by artificial intelligence. A chat bot may be your dream client’s trusted advisor. They could turn to it for advice on how to make complex, strategy, risky, strategic decisions. This is not happening right now. Right now, we are getting the weather, directions, and elementary instructions for our new products via ‘chat boy.’
Certainly, we are going to use AI to augment our mental work, very much like we used electricity and machinery to augment physical labor. In fact, we have been leveraging the chip for quite some time now. The spreadsheet comes to mind, and now there are crude tools like Siri and Alexa, which gives us some idea about what the future is going to look like.
Right now, you have to be your dream client’s trusted advisor, just like you have to be a rainmaker and create new opportunities.
“What should you do now?” is a different question than “What you should do later?” Because at some point in the future commerce may include more interactions with artificial intelligence or something that looks a lot like a human being, does that mean that there is no need to do what is necessary to create value for your clients now?
A very different future is coming; much faster than we are going to be able to properly contend with, but much slower than many believe. That future isn’t here yet, and while you should be aware of what’s coming, you still have to do what is necessary to succeed now, and you still use the tools that work now, including the greatest technological innovation in the known universe, the human brain.
Be smart. Be practical. Do what works now. Do what works later when that’s what works.
The post Do What Works Now appeared first on The Sales Blog.
Will 2017 finally be the year your business reaches its full content marketing potential?
If you aren’t thinking about how you can gain ground in the upcoming year, you might end up losing some to your competition given that 63% of the B2B marketers in our annual Benchmarks, Budgets & Trends research report said their content marketing programs are more successful than they were the previous year.
63% B2B marketers say their #contentmarketing programs are more successful than previous year via @cmicontent.
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As we always say, a sound strategy should be at the center of your content efforts. But even the best-laid plans can’t drive your progress if you have trouble executing them. That’s why the CMI editorial team has gathered some of our most popular templates to help you manage the more tactical considerations involved in quality content marketing: content creation, distribution, and social amplification. If your New Year’s resolutions include amping up your creativity and productivity, increasing your brand’s reach and influence, or building a more loyal, engaged audience through social media, the following tools will help you keep your resolve.
Though the creative process is unique to every business, plenty of tools can help with the specific tasks that every content marketer must work through – generating new creative ideas, organizing them into resonant content pieces, and ensuring that the best light shines on your business with every effort you produce.
Your content can’t reflect your audience’s needs and interests if you don’t know what they are. Some simple research can go a long way toward closing that knowledge gap. One of the most direct ways to gather invaluable insights is to survey your existing customer base. Sending a customized outreach letter – like the one shared by Tom Whatley below – is one way to approach this task.
Team brainstorming (like the process described in this post from Jay Acunzo) is a great technique for getting the creative juices flowing to come up with new content ideas and angles. But you also need to filter the ideas that don’t fit your brand voice or won’t bring you closer to your business goals. For more focused brainstorms, follow Rand Fishkin’s lead by using a whiteboard to outline creative ideas as they emerge and then connect the dots until you have the framework for a compelling yet relevant story.
Outline creative ideas as they emerge; connect dots until you have framework for relevant story. @RandFishkin
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Audiences crave content that they can relate to on a personal level. By building your stories around the kinds of feelings and experiences people commonly identify with – like emotions they’ve felt, ideas that inspired or encouraged them, or life goals they may be pursuing – the content you share will be more resonant and engaging.
Audiences crave #content that they can relate to on a personal level says @joderama.
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Post Scott Aughtmon’s infographic near your desk to help you keep some of the most crave-worthy characteristics in mind as you craft your chosen topics into compelling stories.
What makes content ideas worthy of being produced? As Ahava Liebtag explains, good content needs to provide value to the audience, which means it must be findable, readable, understandable, actionable, and shareable. Use her checklist below as a guide for ensuring that your content efforts hit these key targets for achieving success.
Good #content needs to provide value to the audience says @ahaval.
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With such a diverse range of content formats available to today’s content creators – each with its own strengths and limitations – it’s not always easy to decide which ones to use. Since consistency is key, one way to narrow the field is to focus only on those formats that you have sufficient resources to produce on a predictable schedule over the long term. The checklist below outlines which formats require a strict output schedule and which ones might be a bit more flexible.
Headline writing is not as simple as it seems. Not only do you need a strong headline to grab your audience’s attention, it should be clear, relevant, and descriptive so readers find exactly what they expect when they click through to your content. This checklist, from our guide on cooking up a killer headline, outlines the rules every content creator should follow, along with some suggestions for spicing up your efforts once you master the basics.
Various formats have different standards for how much detail and dialogue your content marketing should provide. Consider following the best practices outlined in Orbit Media’s chart below to determine the ideal length for each of your conversations.
For additional inspiration and guidance on how content can be brought to life in creative, valuable, and actionable ways, check out our 2016 Content Marketing Playbook: Shoot, Score, and Win With 24 Epic Content Ideas.
Creating stellar content is only the first step in achieving success. If you aren’t distributing your efforts on the most appropriate channels, publishing them at the right velocity, or optimizing their ability to get discovered by the right audience, you are missing valuable marketing and customer engagement opportunities.
A channel plan will help your entire team understand how, when, and on what specific platforms you publish content, as well as the rules of engagement they are expected to follow when interacting on those channels. Get started by filling in the cheat sheet below for each channel you plan to leverage in your content marketing initiatives.
As our 2017 content marketing framework details, building an engaged audience of subscribers is critical if you want your content efforts to provide multiple lines of value for your business. Since a robust email list is a key component of achieving this goal, download the complete checklist shared by Aaron Orendorff to guide you through all the steps for building your own.
Building an engaged audience of subscribers is critical to provide value for your business via @Joderama.
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In terms of visibility, credibility, and impact, few content distribution techniques rival the power of influencer marketing. As you conduct your research on potential influencers to engage, you will want to track your efforts, so you know who you’ve contacted, who has agreed to participate, and what terms they’ve agreed to. CMI’s PR and media manager, Amanda Subler, uses a template like the one below, which you can download and customize to your needs (Go to “File > Download As >” and select the format you would like).
A sound SEO strategy is essential if you want your blog content efforts to rank well on search engines and get found by the right audience. Though search algorithms and techniques are constantly evolving, the checklist below, which outlines Mike Murray’s nine top SEO tips, will give you a solid search foundation that you can build on over time.
An #SEO strategy is essential if you want your blog content to rank well on search engines says @joderama.
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Social media is an essential tool for getting your content in front of your target consumers; it also can serve as a powerful engagement platform in its own right, enabling brands to conduct meaningful, two-way conversations that are more timely and relevant than other content formats might allow. Because it serves a dual purpose, working with social media often requires a distinct set of content marketing processes and procedures. The tools and templates below can help you manage some of the unique considerations involved.
Every social network has its own benefits, challenges, and communication styles, so which ones will work best for your business will depend on the audience you want to target, the types and topics of your content, and the goals you are looking to achieve. Our latest Social Media Survival Guide outlines the key characteristics of the top networks and offers guidelines for making the most of every social interaction you initiate.
Consumers can be protective of the social communities they’ve cultivated. If your brand forces its way into the conversation without first learning the rules and customs, you will never earn their trust or respect. Use this content review template created by James Prideaux to track relevant conversations happening on social networks and document any analysis you extract from your listening activities that can help you become a valuable contributor to the right groups. (Go to “File > Download As >” and select the format you would like).
Use a #content review template to track relevant conversations on social networks says @Joderama.
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Audiences rely heavily on visual imagery in their social media conversations – particularly on sites like Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook. Not only do you need to know the right tone and voice to use in your content, but you also need to understand the appropriate design specifications. Matt Banner’s cheat sheet below can help you keep track of all the technical details.
Credit: On Blast Blog
Another great way to create meaningful discussions on social media is to conduct regular Twitter chats on relevant topics. You’ll want to plan your topics, schedules, starter questions, and guest tweeters. The template used by the CMI team (which you can download and customize) is a great way to start that process. (Go to “File > Download As >” and select the format you would like).
No matter what your content marketing goals are, you need to master content creation, distribution, and social amplification if you expect to succeed. The various templates and guides shared here will get you started in the right direction. But if there are additional templates you would like to see us provide in the future, jot down your suggestions in the comments.
Are you truly committing to content marketing success in 2017? Enroll in Content Marketing University’s winter session by the Dec. 31.
Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute
The post Create, Distribute, and Share: 15 Essential Content Marketing Templates appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.
If you’ve ever received feedback that you “need to be more strategic,” you know how frustrating it can feel. To add insult to injury, the feedback rarely comes with any concrete guidance on what to do about it. One of my coaching clients, Lisa, a vice president of HR, was in this situation and explains, “I was just told to think bigger picture and to be more strategic. It felt like I had been given the definition of a word by using the same word. It just wasn’t helpful.”
So what specific steps can you take to be more strategic in your current role?
Start by changing your mindset. If you believe that strategic thinking is only for senior executives, think again. It can, and must, happen at every level of the organization; it’s one of those unwritten parts of all job descriptions. Ignore this fact and you risk getting passed over for a promotion, or having your budget cut because your department’s strategic contribution is unclear.
Once you’ve accepted that it’s part of your job, focus on developing four key abilities that demonstrate your strategic prowess.
Lisa wasn’t seeing the big picture. Because of the amount of work she had and the pace at which she needed to get it done, she often took a “heads down” approach to her job and failed to “lift up” and observe both internal and external trends. She was missing key information that could help her focus, prioritize, and be proactive in addressing talent issues for her fast-growing company. Because Lisa approached her job in a transactional manner, simply getting the next hire, she didn’t recognize that she needed a completely new approach to recruitment and retention.
In order to be strategic, you need a solid understanding of the industry context, trends, and business drivers. An intellectual appreciation of the importance of bringing in current data and seeking trends isn’t enough. You also have to:
With a fresh understanding of trends and issues, you can practice using strategic thinking by asking yourself, “How do I broaden what I consider?” Questions are the language of strategy. Lisa came to appreciate that her life and prior experience gave her a unique, yet myopic, strategic lens. So she pushed herself to ramp up her perspective-taking and inquiry skills. By becoming more curious, and looking at information from different points of view, she was able to reduce her myopia and see different possibilities, different approaches, and different potential outcomes.
For example, when working on an employee retention project she asked herself, “What does success look like in Year 1?” “What does it look like in Year 3?” “What could impact the outcome in a negative way?” “What are the early signs of success/failure?” “What do business partners need to understand to ensure its success?” and “Do the outcomes support the broader goals of the organization?” By asking these tough questions first, she recognized that she could better engage with colleagues and senior executives early on in ways that would benefit the project — and would help shape the perception that she was thoughtful and strategic.
Strategic thinkers also know how to speak the language. They prioritize and sequence their thoughts. They structure their verbal and written communication in a way that helps their audience focus on their core message. They challenge the status quo and get people talking about underlying assumptions. Those that are really skilled walk people through the process of identifying issues, shaping common understanding, and framing strategic choices.
If this sounds complex, that’s because it is. But there are ways you can start honing these skills:
Lisa didn’t realize that the way she spoke created the perception that she was not strategic. She set about changing that. First by focusing her one-on-ones with her CHRO on higher level discussions and leaving tactical issues to email. She chose one or two strategic areas to focus on. and made sure to frame issues in the context of the CHRO’s and the CEO’s top priorities.
In the early phase of our work together, Lisa kept a jam-packed schedule, running from meeting to meeting. She found it difficult to contribute strategically without the time to reflect on the issues and to ponder options. Recognizing that she was not bringing her full value to the table, she started to evaluate her tasks based on urgency and importance as outlined in Stephen Covey’s 2 x 2 matrix. She stopped going to meetings she didn’t need to be at. She blocked out thinking time on her calendar and honored it, just as she would for other meetings. And she fought back the initial guilt of “Am I doing real work when I’m just sitting at my desk thinking?”
Lisa also practiced other key skills. She learned to embrace debate and to invite challenge, without letting it get personal so that she could ask tough questions. To do this, she focused on issues, not people, and used neutral peers to challenge her thinking. To manage the inevitable ambiguity that arises when you ask more questions, Lisa also learned to clarify her decision-making criteria, allowing her to better act in the face of imperfect information.
The quest to build your strategic skills can be uncomfortable. At first, you might feel like you’re kicking up sand in the ocean. Your vision will be blurred as you manage through the unsettling feelings that come with challenging your own assumptions and gaining comfort with conflict and curiosity. Once the dust settles, however, and you’re able to contribute at a higher level, you’ll be glad you took the risk.
In July, leading consumer aviation website Skytrax, named AirAsia the best low-cost airline in the world for the eighth consecutive year.
The Sepang-based airline was presented with the award at a ceremony during the 2016 Farnborough Airshow.
"We just won world’s best low-cost Airline for the eighth time, which is pretty damn cool," AirAsia CEO Tony Fernandes told Skytrax. "I want to thank all my staff who ensure that low-cost doesn’t mean low quality."
"Even though we’ve won this award eight times, we know we can be better, we want to improve our customer service, we want to improve talking to you," Fernandes added.
The Skytrax rankings are based on the impressions of 19.2 million travelers from 104 different countries. The survey, which covered more than 280 airlines, measured 41 parameters ranging from boarding procedures to seat comfort to the quality of service.
Here are the 10 best low-cost airlines in the world, according to the results of the Skytrax survey.
SEE ALSO: The 10 airports in America people disliked the most
Previous rank: N/A
Why it's awesome: Azul Brazilian Airlines is the latest brainchild of JetBlue and WestJet co-founder David Neeleman. The Sao Paolo-based airline operates a fleet of new Airbus, ATR, and Embraer airliners mainly on routes within Brazil. Its Airbus fleet now operates to limited destinations in the US and Europe.
In addition to a top 10 finish, Azul also picked up the awards for Best Low-Cost Airline in South America and Best Airline Staff in South America.
See additional airline information at Skytrax.
Previous rank: 9
Why it's awesome: Founded in 2004, Jetstar Asia is a Singapore-based subsidiary of Jetstar Airways which itself is the low-cost offshoot of Australia's Qantas Group. Jetstar Asia operates a small fleet of Airbus A320 airliners to destinations in southeast Asia.
Reviewers on Skytrax praise the airline for its effective ground staff and great value for money.
See additional airline information at Skytrax.
Previous rank:7
Why it's awesome: The New Delhi-based airline burst on the scene in 2006 and quickly became one of the best low-cost carriers in Asia. The airline operates a brand new fleet of more than 100 Airbus A320 jets. With more than 400 Airbus jets on order, IndiGo is one of the quickest growing airlines in the region. Reviewers on Skytrax praised the airline for its great cabin service and good value for money.
For the seventh consecutive year, IndiGo has been named Best Low-Cost Airline in Central Asia / India.
See additional airline information at Skytrax.
Content marketing is an art, but I’m here to tell you that it is also a science!
This week, I want to take a bit of a psychological perspective and look at the way that our brains react to content. After all, content marketing is all about grabbing audience attention – but the type of content you should create depends on the type of response you want from them once you have it! This infographic from MainPath Marketing examines the ways that the brain responds to different types of content. Let’s check it out.
First things first – different ways of presenting content are processed by the brain in different ways. This changes the impact that your content can have, so it’s important to know what your goal is first – and then figure out how to present your information.
So, what are the different content types, and how can you use them to get your messaging across?
Written Content
Examples:
Written content is great for building the relationship between a brand and a customer. When people read written content, they tend to identify with what they are reading. When you read a book, you put yourself in the shoes of the narrator or hero, right? Written content is also great for emotional resonance because our brains react the same way to the things we read about as they do to the things we see in real life.
Written content is great for:
Growing trust in your customers, highlighting your experiences and expertise, sharing positive customer experiences with your product, and discussing the value of your offerings.
Graphic Content
Examples:
Graphic content helps people to understand and remember information, including complex ideas. Why is that? Well, our brains are incredibly good at dealing with visual input. That’s no surprise, considering up to 50% of our brains are set up to process it. It only takes about 1/10th of a second to understand a visual scene and 250 milliseconds to attach meaning to a symbol. Plus, images store very well in long-term memory, which works out pretty well for your message!
Graphic content is great for:
Making your content memorable, sharing complex ideas and data, making a persuasive argument, attracting attention.
Interactive Content
Examples:
Interactive content gets people directly involved with your information, which makes it easier for them to remember the key points. Since interactive content combines visuals, stories, and participation, it gets more parts of the brain involved than most other kinds of content.
Quizzes are an especially effective type of interactive content, in terms of sharing and engagement. Quizzes and quiz results are the most shared type of media on Facebook!
Interactive content is great for:
Creating shareable content, engaging with an audience, developing a memorable interactive experience.
Video Content
Examples:
Video content is the best way to build an emotional connection with your audience because you can use body language, tone of voice, expressions, and other behaviors in combination to shape your message. Video is also processed by the brain 60,000 times faster than text, and it doesn’t require as much energy to process.
Video content is great for:
Sharing personal stories about your brand, building an emotional connection, demonstrating how to do something or explaining how something works.
Hopefully, this helped to shed some light on why certain types of content are better for certain messages. Does your business experiment with different content delivery methods? Have you ever created quizzes or other interactive content that made a big splash with your audience? I’d like to hear about it in the comments.
Healthcare has become extraordinarily complex — the balance of quality against cost, and of technology against humanity, are placing ever-increasing demands on clinicians. These challenges require extraordinary leaders. Doctors were once viewed as ill-prepared for leadership roles because their selection and training led them to become “heroic lone healers.” But this is changing. The emphasis on patient-centered care and efficiency in the delivery of clinical outcomes means that physicians are now being prepared for leadership.
The Mayo Clinic is America’s best hospital, according to the 2016 US News and World Report (USNWR) ranking. Cleveland Clinic comes in second. The CEOs of both — John Noseworthy and Delos “Toby” Cosgrove — are highly skilled physicians. In fact, both institutions have been physician-led since their inception around a century ago. Might there be a general message here?
A study published in 2011 examined CEOs in the top-100 best hospitals in USNWR in three key medical specialties: cancer, digestive disorders, and cardiovascular care. A simple question was asked: are hospitals ranked more highly when they are led by medically trained doctors or non-MD professional managers? The analysis showed that hospital quality scores are approximately 25% higher in physician-run hospitals than in manager-run hospitals.
The findings of course do not prove that doctors make better leaders, though the results are surely consistent with that claim. Other studies also find this correlation. Research by Nick Bloom, Raffaella Sadun, and John Van Reenen revealed how important good management practices are to hospital performance. But they also found that it is the proportion of managers with a clinical degree that had the largest positive effect; in other words, the separation of clinical and managerial knowledge inside hospitals was associated with worse management.
Support for the idea that physician-leaders are advantaged in healthcare is consistent with observations from multiple other sectors. Domain experts – “expert leaders” (like physicians in hospitals) — have been linked with better organizational performance in settings as diverse as universities, where scholar-leaders enhance the research output of their organizations, to basketball teams, where former All Star players turned coaches are disproportionately linked to NBA success, and in Formula One racing where former drivers excel as team leaders.
What are the attributes of physician-leaders that might account for this association with enhanced organizational performance? As leaders, do physicians create a more sympathetic and productive work environment for other clinicians, because they are “one of them”? Does being a physician inform leadership through a shared understanding about the motivations and incentives of other clinicians? When asked this question, Dr. Toby Cosgrove, CEO of Cleveland Clinic, responded without hesitation, “credibility … peer-to-peer credibility.” In other words, when an outstanding physician heads a major hospital, it signals that they have “walked the walk,” and thus have earned credibility and insights into the needs of their fellow physicians. But we would argue that credibility may also be signaled to important external stakeholders — future employees, patients, the pharmaceutical industry, donors, and so on.
The Mayo website notes that it is physician-led because, “This helps ensure a continued focus on our primary value, the needs of the patient come first.” Having spent their careers looking through a patient-focused lens, physicians moving into executive positions might be expected to bring a patient-focused strategy.
In a recent study that matched random samples of U.S. and UK employees with employers, we found that having a boss who is an expert in the core business is associated with high levels of employee job satisfaction and low intentions of quitting. Similarly, physician-leaders may know how to raise the job satisfaction of other clinicians, thereby contributing to enhanced organizational performance.
Our research suggests that if a manager understands, through their own experience, what is needed to complete a job to the highest standard, then they may be more likely to create the right work environment, set appropriate goals and accurately evaluate others’ contributions. Having an expert leader at the helm, such as an exemplary physician, may also send a signal to external stakeholders, such as new hires or patients, about organizational priorities. These factors are revealed in new work soon to be released.
Finally, we might expect a highly talented physician to know what “good” looks like when hiring other physicians. Cosgrove suggests that physician-leaders are also more likely to “tolerate crazy ideas” (innovative ideas like the first coronary artery bypass, performed by René Favaloro at the Cleveland Clinic in the late ‘60s). Cosgrove believes that the Cleveland Clinic unlocks talent by giving safe space to people with extraordinary ideas and importantly, that leadership tolerates appropriate failure, which is a natural part of scientific endeavor and progress.
Physician-leaders appear to be the most effective leaders precisely because they are physicians. Yet, great leadership also takes social skills. Medical care is one of the few sectors where lack of teamwork might actually cost lives, yet physicians are not trained to be team players. Nor is there evidence that it is the team players who select into medicine. Indeed, the favored nature of physician leadership of hospitals is even more remarkable for the leadership and followership handicaps that physicians must overcome in becoming doctors. In view of this handicap, Dr. Victor Dzau, President of the National Academy of Medicine, considers those successful physician-leaders (who largely lack formal leadership training) as “accidental leaders.”
Physicians have traditionally been trained in “command and control” environments as “heroic lone healers” who are collaboratively challenged. In the context of this paradox, that medical training on the whole conspires against great leadership, there is a clear need to train physicians more systematically.
One model has been pioneered by Paul Taheri, CEO of Yale Medicine, who has been engaging doctors in management training for some time. He has focused on a two-tier approach: the first introduces physicians to the fundamental principles of business in the delivery of healthcare, and personal leadership development, through a day a month programme spread over a year. Taheri sends around 40 medical faculty annually. For those physicians who stand out as emergent leaders, the next step is an MBA. Taheri insists that in the executive programs physicians are always trained with other physicians, but by design they are taken away from their hospital environment into the safe learning environment of the business school.
The Cleveland Clinic has also been training physicians to lead for many years. For example, a cohort-based annual course, “Leading in Health Care,” began in the early 1990s and has invited nominated, high-potential physicians (and more recently nurses and administrators) to engage in 10 days of offsite training in leadership competencies which fall outside the domain of traditional medical training. Core to the curriculum is emotional intelligence (with 360-degree feedback and executive coaching), teambuilding, conflict resolution, and situational leadership. The course culminates in a team-based innovation project presented to hospital leadership. 61% of the proposed innovation projects have had a positive institutional impact. Moreover, in ten years of follow-up after the initial course, 43% of the physician participants have been promoted to leadership positions at Cleveland Clinic.
In-house programs have been developed in many healthcare institutions (including Virginia Mason, Hartford Healthcare, the University of Kentucky, etc.), by medical societies like the American Association of Physician Leadership, and by business schools (including Wharton, Harvard Business School, the Weatherhead School of Management, and soon at Cass Business School in London). There seems to be a widening consensus that training physicians for leadership matters. Such training promises to enhance the pipeline of physician-leaders so that the benefits of physician leadership can be more broadly realized.
Admit it.
You hate it.
There are only a few characters. It should only take a few seconds. Yet you cringe in pain every time you have to create new ad text to increase CTR’s or set up new campaigns.
There’s a lot on the line and you can’t get afford to get it wrong.
You’ve got to take all of this information into account, come up with a killer value prop, and then stuff it down into an impossibly low restricted character limit.
Thankfully, there are a few shortcuts available. Tried-and-true formulas from people who’ve already been there and done that.
Best of all, follow these seven AdWords headline formulas and you’ll never have to write another one from scratch again.
Picasso is often attributed to saying, “Great artists steal.” Whether or not he said it is beside the point.
The message is not to copy, but to regurgitate like a bird feeding its chick. (That was a gross analogy. Apologies if you’re eating while reading this.)
When starting with AdWords ad copy, keep it simple and direct, making it easier to go down initially—especially for bottom of the funnel queries where someone already has urgency and is expressing strong purchasing intent.
One of the better examples to rip off start with comes from Johnathan Dane at Klientboost:
Super simple and actionable. Keyword + benefit.
Your ad text is highly dependent on the keyword being searched, which is highly dependent on the stage of the buyer’s journey that searcher is in.
Now comes the next piece of the puzzle: congruency. Unsurprisingly, people want to see the same information on the landing page they hit that was just in the ad they clicked.
You know the deal: Visitor expectations + ad text + landing page = higher message match = lower CPC’s and CPA’s.
Larry already proved it. Marketing Experiments also has shown how a simple congruence between the AdWords headline copy and the landing page resulted in 2.5X more leads.
There’s one problem with this approach now though—the relatively new expanded headline.
Mark Irvine recommends that you go back and rewrite these new second headlines to make sure you’re not simply repeating or regurgitating what’s already there (the new format can actually decrease your CTR if you don’t).
Mark shares an example, with the old one that resembles the tried-and-true formula we’ve all come to know and love:
And here’s a newly rewritten one that attempts to re-emphasize the primary benefit or value prop they deliver:
The new ad reportedly saw a 400% CTR increase. Not too shabby.
What do plastic surgeons, attorneys, and pest control companies have in common?
They all compete locally for business. (And they’re all featured in this second formula.)
They’re competing against other companies with deep pocket books that want the same precious few clicks.
When ants take over. When you’ve been screwed. When the bags under your eyes look saggy and you’re trying to get on the next Housewives of Orange County. No? Just me?
What do you do? You Google: “[keyword] + [location]”.
The formula is the same meat-and-potatoes approach we just witnessed but with a twist. No need to overcomplicate things.
Now we can slice and dice this same formula a few different ways, with a combination of the (1) location, (2) keyword, and (3) value prop (in the extended headline). Bonus points to this Rodeo Dr. ad for leveraging social proof in the ad text under the headline.
Here’s another example in a wildly different industry.
“Pest Control San Bernadino.” “Pest Control Temecula.” All you gotta do is just switch out the location qualifier and repeat ad nauseum.
Also note the click-through rates in that last example. These are especially important for driving down costs (and tend to be higher for localized-keyphrases because of high intent and good execution). Larry wrote in detail on this subject an excellent Moz piece:
“And one final important point (and yet another reason to kill your donkeys!): low CTRs typically also lead to low conversion rates — this is true for both organic and paid search.”
Nowhere is that more true than highly competitive, hyper-local businesses. Like law.
You know… for all the peeps that do finally get on that Housewives show and need a good divorce attorney. (Speaking of which, I actually did video-bomb a Housewives of Los Angeles episode once. Don’t ask me how. California’s a weird place. Time to fire up that IMDb page.)
This last one is the same formula more-or-less, but this time with a much stronger value prop that ends up delivering an insanely high click-through rate.
Millennials are funny creatures. All consumed with chasing their passions and bringing back ugly 90’s fashion.
It’s hard not to chuckle at their goofy glasses when they’re making your Peppermint Mocha with almond (no whip, please).
Turns out, they also have some funny speaking habits. Like saying “like,” “dude,” and raising the inflection of their voice at the end of a sentence to make everything sound like a question.
In person, that’s not a good thing. In AdWords though, it is.
Marketing Experiments ran a test to see what impacted click through rates more: statements or questions.
They ran three statements against a single question ad, and guess which one won?
Their ad copy in this example is OK. But not great.
“Web content”, while highly important, isn’t always valued as such. Creating blog post after blog post is time-consuming and difficult for those who wake up early to slog through it every day, sure. But there’s not a whole lot of urgency behind “content.” What’s better, is to focus on the end result or outcome that web content delivers.
And if possible, try to capitalize on mistakes or threats people might be making or helping them avoid impending doom. Because negative messaging can outperform positive headlines by 60%.
Examples might include power words like “last minute” which pull in a stronger purchasing motivation:
(By the way – probably shouldn’t do a last minute proposal.)
Another way to spin the question formula is to incorporate storytelling. This CrazyEgg example is perfect:
The ad text is almost BuzzFeed-esque. But in a good way, because it creates a narrative and a cliffhanger that makes you want to find out more.
And that crazy number in the headline? That brings us to our next formula.
It starts innocently enough. It’s all smiles and games. Until you lose the next three hours to Buzzfeeding and you’re late picking up your kid at school (never happened, I swear).
In one AdWords test, a numbered headline outperformed one sans number with a 217% increase in CTR and 23% improvement in conversion rates.
One theory is that numbers signal simplicity in our minds (which we’re drawn to in an increasingly complex world).
But the number you use can make a huge impact.
If you have 30 minutes to kill, or you have to attend another one of your kid’s school friend’s birthday parties again this weekend, read this excellent in-depth article from Siege Media.
Interestingly, Ross Hudgens starts off the post by admitting that he reduced the number in the headline because he was concerned people wouldn’t believe it.
In Secrets of Great Salespeople, Jeremy Raymond writes:
“A research project showed that when a battery was claimed to last ‘up to two hours’ customers predicted that it would last, on average, 89 minutes; when the claim was presented as ‘up to 125 minutes’, customers’ predictions rose to 106 minutes.”
In other words, people don’t always believe big round numbers. They make people think the real number has just been rounded up.
Odd numbers also have been shown to outperform even ones by 20%, according to an Outbrain study.
Numbers, when done correctly, can also help you tell a story. Besides just emphasizing discounts or a great deal, they can be used to show vast quantities too (so many, that there’s no need to check another website). Take this Trivago ad:
They somehow manage to stuff a keyword + location and two different numbers all in the headline.
The “687 hotels” assures that you’re going to find what you’re looking for. The $64 is such a seemingly random number that you can’t help but think it must be real.
The ad text also does a great job emphasizing their value prop (“Never Pay Full Price on Hotels”) which brings us to our next formula…
Cialdini showed that the pain of loss is more powerful than potential gain in Influence.
Before we buy something online, we’re projecting that feeling. We’re worried or nervous, building anxiety about the potential for pain of loss.
That produces risk. Opting into that thing might spam us. Buying a toupee might not make me look like Clooney. (Holding out hope though.)
That’s why the best testimonials overcome objections. You ask leading questions that uncover what obstacles might have prevented someone from taking action (before showing the payoff that shows they’re glad they did).
Objection-overcoming headlines help simplify. They’re zen.
For example, what would prevent small business owners from buying and using any one of the popular email marketing services?
Technology hurdles, for one. Constant Contact does a great job here re-emphasizing that tech skills aren’t required for THEIR program.
You’ve got your direct key phrase in the primary headline, with “No [Objection]” in the extended headline to assure you that the thing in the back of your mind that possibly might prevent you from clicking is not a big deal. Same formula here:
You can also flip the switch here, placing the “No [Objection]” portion at the beginning (if length permits).
In keeping with the zen idea, “No-Stress” almost always works when describing something that’s seemingly complex or causes anxiety:
As always, promising a simple solution to a costly (negative) problem almost guarantees your ad jumps off the SERPs.
For example, you can tell people what they don’t need or shouldn’t be doing (but are probably already experiencing).
Don’t take my word for it. Take it from the people who do it best:
Marketing today doesn’t really look like the marketing of old.
In its theoretical heyday, marketing involved product feature decisions and customer support and packaging designs. Above and beyond the PR and distribution that all advertisers are well familiar with.
Today, marketing in most companies looks more like:
You can’t walk down a mall right now without being accosted by eager salespeople on the floor, chomping at the bit to explain how the latest discount gets added to the sale price which increases a certain percentage if you spend between these ranges.
Consumers have no idea what’s going on. Impossible to keep it all straight. All they know is that they’re getting a bargain.
And that’s the idea.
Incentives tick almost all of the persuasion boxes.
They manufacture urgency and scarcity. They play on our aversion to loss. And they use specific numbers.
Even Google tells you to use discounts and promos in your ads.
In one study, incorporating numbers (like “40%”) and overcoming objections (like “Free Shipping”) can give you a winning combination:
So first you hit ‘em with the keyphrase and the you get ‘em with the incentive (or [“Keyphrase”] – [“Incentive”]). The 1-2 punch we’ve seen repeatedly here so far, that KAYAK executes to a T:
Wanna see how hilariously common this formula is? Check out this SERP where THREE ads in a row use the extended headline to call attention to customer savings.
One variation to stand out in this crowded SERP?
Macy’s can make like Trivago (the ad from earlier) and squeeze in the quantity of available Chukka Boots that the competitors (Clarks and Nisolo) surely can’t match.
How can you upgrade this even more?
Add some scarcity. Peep at ConversionXL says there’s two kinds of scarcity:
The first might refer to the remaining amount of whatever it is somebody just searched. While the second refers to the specific date or time that this incentive expires. For. Ev. Er.
In the past ten years or so, the social commerce market has exploded.
It’s gone from virtually nonexistent to like $15 billion in just a few years.
So there’s a lot at stake.
There’s also an odd, borderline incestuous history within the group of largest competitors vying for profitable enterprise clients at the top of the heap.
Bazaarvoice, the big industry stalwart, actually acquired PowerReviews (the next in line) at one point in time…
… only for the Department of Justice to claim antitrust and force them to turn around and sell to another competitor afterward.
It’s fair to say that the competition is stiff.
So… how do people and consumers choose? They might start with generic searches to get a lay of the land. But when they’re using branded ones, they’re beginning to seriously evaluate their options to purchase.
Google’s Customer Journey to Online Purchase tool can help you see how this behavior plays out:
What better place to hijack a soon-to-be-customer then on your competitor’s branded search then?
While Bazaarvoice valiantly tries to make their case, they’re being sandwiched and outfoxed by PowerReviews and TurnTo Networks who kick off their headlines with the same “Why Choose [Our Brand]” formula.
However, my money here is on PowerReviews, who follows this up with a stronger value prop in the extended headline.
Another example beyond, “Why Choose ____?”, includes, “Alternative to ____”.
Ways to improve or test in the original ad?
You’d think it’d be easy. Just a few words, a couple dozen characters or so. And yet it takes all afternoon.
Crafting the perfect AdWords headline is tough cause you gotta take so many things into account. Like what they were searching for and if they have purchasing motivation or not and how do you get this stuff to link with what’s on your landing pages.
Fortunately, you can 80/20 the process if you know where to look.
These common AdWords headline formulas are ready for you to adopt, rehash, and re-use to not only save a ton of time but also increase performance (and your bottom line).
Today, Gen Z is rapidly becoming one of the largest marketing demographics to which companies should pay attention.
Because these young consumers defy traditional lifestyle demographics, companies often have trouble generating an approach through which they can successfully appeal to Gen Z buyers.
The only way to respond to their new approach in life is to adjust your own marketing strategies. Follow these points in order to successfully market your product toward the Gen Z.
Companies have to make Gen Z believe that they value their customers’ best interests. The more comfortable and relatable a business seems, the more likely the consumer is to invest in or buy the product.
Gen Z runs on trust. They aren’t interested in investing in a company that puts their agenda before the needs of the customer. If big businesses and companies can form a sense of trust between themselves and Gen Z, their products will stand out so much more above the competition.
Authenticity sits right at the heart of Gen Z. They do not seek to conform to a cookie cutter, superficial, average life. Therefore, larger businesses need to work on giving them the unique and inventive.
Building authenticity into your brand will make Gen Z consumers feel like the company has something different from the mindless din of the day to day. Once they have make this connection, they will feel the need to get a hold of this genuine product.
Like most age groups, Gen Z has developed some complex lingo, to which companies should conform if they want to successfully communicate with their target audience. This is nothing new. Slang has always been human cultures, and has frequently been used by different groups to establish a sense of trust and comfort.
Especially since this cohort relies so much on authenticity and trust, conforming to their language can be an excellent marketing strategy for establishing a connection with Gen Z. Companies suddenly appear more relatable and less alien.
But an important fact to remember is that businesses should try too hard to force the connection. Each and every company has to find its own unique way to communicate with this newer generation. Forcing in hardcore slang can actually backfire and seem unauthentic.
Authenticity thrives among Gen Z. While conforming to their language can create an attractive campaign, forcing unnecessary and unnatural lingo can also drive away those very same consumers.
Times have changed. The newer generation responds to marketing strategies different than those used in the past. Many older marketing strategies would target their consumers by a certain point or age in their life, but Gen Z does not want to accept the tradition but defy it instead.
Again, the traditional does not appeal to Gen Z. Instead they are attracted to lifestyles that allow them to grow on a more personal level. The choices that they make and the lives they choose typically go against the traditional choices expected of a “normal” consumer. Therefore adjusting your marketing strategy to fit to their new outlook can help draw in Gen Z.
Creating easy access to your company and products encompasses two different aspect: buying and learning. And unlike any other generation in the past, Generation Z spends an incredibly large amount of time on the internet.
Making your brand and product easily accessible online is one of the best ways to market towards these younger consumers.
The more accessible your product is to Gen Z consumers, the more likely they will be attracted to your campaign. This demographic’s short attention span and active lifestyle combines to make simple descriptions and navigation to products online a winning combination.
Outdated catalogs with difficult navigation can turn a Gen Z consumer off your product, even if there is already real interest. But with easily navigable websites that include all of the popular payment systems, from credit cards to PayPal, the younger consumers will more likely purchase your product.
Gen Z has a tendency to gravitate toward new and unique platforms. When newer tech comes out, this generation immediately flocks toward them.
Since this generation spends the majority of its time browsing through these platforms, it makes sense that they are constantly on the lookout for the latest developments.
Being always aware of the newest developments can allow businesses to place their advertisements in the places that are more likely to round up Gen Z consumers.
Gen Z is a complex cohort with its own unique traditions and demographics. Following these points will allow you to successfully market your brand to Gen Z consumers.
We talk to a lot of brands about their journey to 1-to-1 personalization. They realize the potential but tend to bring up a number of barriers. Here’s how we help them leap over those barriers and accelerate their journey to 1-to-1 personalization that drives results.
Barrier:
In the world of basic segmentation, you break your various audiences into a handful of buckets according to their location, device type, or demographic profile. Then you use those segments to build single-channel experiences (like your website). But the world of 1-to-1 personalization is infinitely larger. There are thousands of potential options for every individual: content, product recommendations and promotions, not to mention where and when you should interact with them. Where to start?
Solution:
The leading 1-to-1 personalization platforms use machine learning to leverage real-time models to determine what experience works for which individuals. If you want to benefit from the differentiation 1-to-1 personalization offers, you need to move beyond the rules-based approaches that just don’t scale. We advise our clients to start with a business objective (i.e. maximize profit per session), and let machine-driven models choose the best tactics to achieve that goal, first on the web and then across the entire marketing ecosystem.
Barrier:
1-to-1 personalization needs one thing: actionable customer data. That means the data needs to be captured and consolidated. Perhaps you already have a good bit of identifiable data from loyalty programs, transaction histories, or online check-ins. But even if you do, it’s often disaggregated in an unusable format.
Solution:
1-to-1 personalization can utilize all of your customer data, and use those insights to power each and every decision. Using cookie-based identifiers, a platform can quickly begin to recognize anonymous events and associate them with your customers, no matter what device they happen to be using. Then you can add third-party data from your DMP (or any other provider), supplementing your real-time 360º view of every customer. Best of all, it’s all data that you own and control.
When you start small, machine learning can become even more effective as you add more data. This means that you can get immediate value from online personalization, without complex rules, with the data you have. Then you can scale it up from there.
Barrier:
The ways people shop is changing, and the ways brands keep up with them need to change, too. Fast. But the move from specialized departments to cross-functional teams takes time and the path forward isn’t always obvious. Maybe your ecommerce team only thinks about website optimization, while the acquisition side of the house is focused solely entirely on advertising display. This means these teams can’t work towards a unified data and technology effort that will make all of them, and the organization, more successful.
Solution:
The organizational approach to 1-to-1 personalization usually takes one of two forms. The top-down approach starts at the top of the company, ideally with the CEO or a C-level exec taking responsibility for personalization as a corporate initiative, with Board-level KPIs. Then, a senior leader within the organization is appointed as the personalization or omnichannel lead. It’s their job to bring all of the silos together around a unified personalization strategy.
Then there’s the bottom-up approach. It usually starts with a less senior team, spurred by a director or VP-level champion who sees the potential of personalization to help them further their immediate goal along with the outsized impact to the rest of the company. The bottom-up approach is more lean and typically identifies one specific use that can get done quickly and address an immediate business need. This is often a cross-channel initiative between two teams, such as ecommerce and storefront, who want to create an integrated solution. For example, the teams might integrate digital into the store experience, addressing both their goals of enhanced customer loyalty and revenue lift.
Barrier:
If you want to deliver a personalized experience for each individual, you have to show everyone totally unique images and copy, right? But if that were the case, the creative department would never be able to keep up with the constant demand for new material.
Solution:
First, 1-to-1 personalization does NOT require unique content for every individual. You can get really far on a handful of creative elements that reflect the varied interests of your customers. What makes for a good 1-to-1 experience isn’t just the brand imagery, message, product recommendation, or promotions, but the combination of those elements, across a particular touchpoint (i.e. email vs. SMS vs. social messaging), at the right time for that individual.
Second, the future of personalization isn’t confined to automation around which experiences to serve up to which people, across which touch points, and at what time. It will also include elements of automated content creation. You may create automated content that auto-fills the first name of your customers. The not-so-distant future will involve platforms that bring all of this together to further automate the creative personalization process and drastically reduce the burden on all of us to keep up with the future demands of increasingly personalized algorithms.
You don’t need all your data integrated in a single system. You don’t need all the organizational incentives perfectly aligned. You don’t need hundreds of creative assets lined up and ready to go. The vast majority of brands have more than enough of all these things to get going on personalization projects and can start with one or two focused projects.
When brands attempt to build the technology and analytics infrastructures required for personalization in-house, most will fail. Why build it your own when there are technology platforms available that are 100% focused on some or all of the personalization stack? Given how fast this space changes, those platforms are the ones who are most likely to have the best-of-breed solutions that you can utilize at a fraction of the cost, with a higher success rate than doing it all on your own.
You have selected a target market, purchased an appropriate mailing list, and had a postcard mailer professionally designed. The mailer looks great; all it needs are some words, and you’ll be good to go.
Should you write the copy for your mailer yourself? After all, nobody knows your business better than you, and perhaps your spouse or a neighbor is an English teacher who can proofread it for you. And it’s not that much copy. How hard could it possibly be to come up with a few lines to fill up a postcard?
Writing sales copy that converts involves far more than coming up with a few catchy phrases and making sure everything is spelled correctly. Here are five reasons why it’s a good idea to hire a professional copywriter.
Think about the process you go through when you are sorting your mail. Be honest: Do you carefully examine every single piece, including the advertising mailers? Your postcard mailer has only a few seconds, at most, to catch a reader’s eye. While the design of the postcard is important – the reader will see the images before they read the words – the copy is what draws them into the mailer and prompts them to make the mental shift from “toss” to “keep.”
You don’t want readers to just look at your postcard. You need them to take action, whether it’s to call you, visit your website, or come into your physical store. Effective sales copy is all about persuasion. It zeroes in on the reader’s pain points, demonstrates how your product or service can relieve that pain, and makes them want to take the next step right away.
Sometimes, business owners think they can write their own copy for a postcard because “it isn’t that much, just a few lines.” However, because you have such limited space, every single word matters. In only those few lines, you must capture the reader’s attention, spark their interest in reading on, create a desire within them for your product or service, and prompt them to take action. It can be more difficult to write a few lines of copy for a postcard than to pen an 800-word “About Us” page for a website.
While it’s true that nobody understands your business as deeply as you do, that can be a double-edged sword. When business owners attempt to write their own sales copy, they often get bogged down in the details – and this is a particularly vexing problem in light of point number 3, the fact that space is at a premium on a postcard mailer. A professional copywriter is better able to take a step back, look at the big picture, and distill those elements of your business that are most important to your customers.
It’s true that anyone could come up with a few lines to fill the blank space on a postcard mailer and make sure everything’s spelled correctly. However, just filling your postcard with words will not capture readers’ attention and turn them into buyers. They must be the right words. A professional sales copywriter knows the difference, because that’s all they do; they craft words that drive sales.
You’re investing good money in your postcard mailer campaign, and you want to make sure you get results from it. Don’t make the mistake of trying to DIY the copy. Hire a professional so that your investment is protected, and you get the results you want.
You’re midway through a 45-minute demo, and it seems likely you’ll close in this meeting. The buyer is paying attention, asking some questions, and even taking notes.
After you’ve finished explaining how your solution addresses her pain points, you say, “Are you ready to move forward? I can send over the proposal today.”
Instead of saying yes, the buyer replies, “Actually, I’m going to need some time to think it over. Let me get back to you next week.”
She never contacts you or returns your calls or emails. You have no idea what went wrong. During the presentation, she seemed highly interested.
But was she? Many reps assume quiet, inquisitive prospects who seem eager to be educated are also eager to buy. But that’s usually a false assumption. Talking at -- rather than with -- the buyer makes it difficult to discover their needs, identify their reservations, and gauge their intent.
If you want a true sense of your prospect’s interest, you need to encourage them to communicate. I use this simple framework on every call to encourage my prospects to speak up.
Divide every sales conversation you have into three stages:
During the first 40% of the conversation, your prospect is the main speaker. Putting the spotlight on them helps them open up and become comfortable sharing details about their company and challenges.
Once you know these key facts, it’s far easier to present tailored suggestions and guidance during the next 40% of the meeting -- when you’re the primary one talking.
In the final 20%, answer any questions they might have and move the discussion to next steps. The speaking time should be split equally between you.
Many reps use this framework with the first two sections in the opposite order. First, they’ll present; then, they’ll ask their prospects for information. By that point in the call, however, prospects are accustomed to listening -- and time could have already been wasted on topics they don’t care about. Jolting them out of passivity is challenging.
In addition, they’re often bored by the product-centric beginning. To avoid this, don’t mention your product or space at all during the first 40%. It should be entirely devoted to the buyer.
A connect call serves a different purpose than a discovery call, which serves a different purpose than a demo. Each interaction has a different length as well.
Nonetheless, you can and should use this framework for all your calls. If you’re running a 30-minute demo, spend the first 12 minutes asking your prospect questions and listening, the next 12 minutes connecting their needs to your product’s capabilities, and the final six minutes closing.
Sometimes, buyers resist talking about themselves. They’re anticipating a presentation, so leading with a back-and-forth discussion confuses them. If your prospect balks at your questions, say, “I’m gathering more information around [topic] so I can give you a [better recommendation/more accurate response/more relevant data]. Are you open to spending X minutes talking about [topic] before switching gears to [product]?”
Prospects may also launch into questions of their own, such as, “We’re interested in Option A and Option B. Which product are you seeing similar companies go with?”
Reps usually take these openers as signs their prospect is going to buy and reply with long answers about the advantages and disadvantages of each. You’ll be more successful, however, if you say something like, “I can speak about both options in detail, [prospect name], but will you indulge me for a couple minutes first? After I’ve learned more about X and Y, I can give you a more helpful answer.”
Proper agenda-setting also helps your prospects understand the call’s structure. To get their buy-in, explain your rationale. For instance, you might say, “First, let’s explore your current employee complaint handling process. Once I understand the inefficiencies in the system, I’ll provide some suggestions for improving it. At the end of the call, if you’re interested in learning more, we’ll schedule a product walkthrough. Is there anything you’d like to add or change to that agenda?”
This brief overview shows prospects the logic behind starting with questions, rather than a pitch.
Using the 40-40-20 framework dramatically increases the quality of your meetings. Not only do buyers open up, but you learn essential information about their desires and challenges. Ultimately, everyone benefits.
For more advice on Jeff’s sales techniques, check out his Your SalesMBA™ blog.
As you’re checking off your list of holiday presents this week don’t forget someone important — your customer. Technology-enabled customers have high expectations. They are accustomed to seamless experiences across multiple devices, boundless amounts of information at their fingertips, and instant fulfillment of their needs. The first step to delighting your connected customers this holiday season is understanding their behaviors. Luckily, Salesforce Research surveyed more than 7,000 consumers and business buyers on customer expectations to help you do just that.
Here are five experiences your customers are looking for, based on the “State of the Connected Customer” report:
Today real time is no longer a commodity, it’s the norm. For most consumers, the technology-driven world has eliminated the concept of ‘waiting’. Whether it’s for a package, a service request, a sales quote or tweet — customers expect quick interactions without lag time. In fact, 64% of consumers expect companies to respond and interact with them in real time.
To understand the impact mobile has had on our daily lives, one only has to look around a typical morning commute to see a dizzying number of thumbs scrolling across portable screens. Put simply, customers expect the same mobile-first experiences from the companies they purchase from as they have with their personal lives. Fifty-seven percent of consumers say it’s absolutely critical or very important for companies to provide an easy-to-use mobile experience and half will actually switch brands if a company doesn’t provide one.
We now live in a world of many channels, one of the more dominant of these channels is social media. Today’s consumers spend a large portion of their day browsing across various channels. As a result, they look for businesses that actively engage with them on social and expect easily-available information about brands wherever they choose to look. Fifty-two percent of consumers say social media has given them more power as a consumer and 75% percent agree they expect companies to provide a consistent experience wherever they engage (website, social media, mobile, in person).
Perhaps the most prevalent trend is the customer’s desire for personalized experiences. Personalization has always been a desire of customers, but now they expect deeper recognition from brands across even more touch points. Customers don’t want to just feel like a data point, they want to continue to feel known and understood. Two-thirds of consumers say they’re likely to switch brands if they’re treated like a number instead of an individual and 51% agree they expect companies to recognize them wherever they engage (website, social media, mobile, in person).
Increasingly, customers want companies to go a step further than just understanding them. Many connected customers expect the businesses they purchase from to go a step further and predict their future needs — like a local pharmacist that has your prescription ready for you at the counter. Fifty percent of consumers say they’re likely to switch brands if a company doesn’t anticipate their needs. The smarter experience is the magic ingredient to truly delighting your customer better than your competitors this holiday season.
Is your company positioned to exceed customer expectations this holiday season and beyond? Learn more about the connected customer and how businesses can leverage experience as a key competitive advantage in the new year. Download the full “State of the Connected Customer” report.
“Content Marketing” may sound like just another marketing trend sweeping the marketing teams of large corporations across the nation. However, there’s more than meets the eye…as Google’s algorithms get smarter and better at finding the quality, non-spammy digital information people need on the internet, marketers everywhere have learned that if they are going to market in the digital space, what they are sharing must truly be useful and informative to potential buyers—no more one-sided harsh sales pitches—now it’s all about starting a dialogue with your potential (and current) customers, by sharing information that is valuable to them for growing their own businesses or that helps them personally in some way, and becoming a trusted advisor.
You may notice this shift matches what has already happened in the world of sales—people don’t necessarily like to be sold to, but they love to consume information and they love to buy, so being a winning salesperson became about handling objections by offering helpful information and becoming a trusted advisor to a potential and current client—it became about developing a relationship.
So, of course you want your content marketing and branding strategy to match the sentiments of your sales team, by sharing high quality information your potential clients search for and that show the personality and value of your business. Once your marketing team has that down, how do you get the message as far as possible? After all, it doesn’t matter how great your content is if no one is looking at it, or if they can’t find it! The answer? Enable your sales team, company leadership and any other influencers within reach to become brand champions. Here’s how…
Any good marketing team should have a strategy and tactical plan for creating and sharing relevant content to your company’s target market—and part of that plan should be having their sales team share it! Content such as posted articles, blog posts, press releases, and anything new or of interest on your company website is fantastic content for your sales teams to share on their LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook profiles.
Another key component of turning your sales team into brand champions is understanding that it’s not necessarily their first priority—they’re trying to always be closing, after all! So, the most successful way for including sales teams in killer content strategies is to make it incredibly easy for sales team members to find and share the content you’ve created. Email links to your content and a short, bulleted summary of the content to your sales teams. Perhaps even include suggested “blurbs” for them to use when sharing, tell them which social media outlets to use, and even suggest they mention it in their next email to prospects. Share a content calendar with them and stick to it, so they know what content to expect and can plan sharing it into their week.
The best way to keep your sales team engaged in your content strategy is to make them a part of it! Everyone likes having their opinion heard, especially if they’re helping out by sharing your marketing content. Sales teams can offer priceless insights on what the latest trends are with their customers and prospects, what issues they may be having, even what’s going on with the competition. This constant feedback loop will also help you keep offering them the most relevant content available for their prospects and clients, and your sales team will be glad to share content they had a hand in planning.
How else will you know how your content is doing and how to make adjustments? If you track your sales team’s content sharing and the incremental prospect and client interaction that goes along with it, you can better understand which content resonates with your target demographic. You can also create positive reinforcement by recognizing the sales team members that have gone above and beyond as brand champions, and work with the ones who haven’t to get them onboard.
Well, there you have it. If you want to strength your brand and broaden your brand footprint, enable your sales team to be content champions and brand ambassadors.
Heraclitus once said, “Change is the only constant in life.”
We move to a new neighborhood.
Meet new friends.
Find a better relationship.
Learn a new skill.
Gain weight – or lose some.
The same can be said with websites.
Soon, your business needs will outgrow your site’s capacity to serve.
Perhaps the design is outdated (FLASH player, anyone?).
Maybe some 404’s are already popping up. Worse, your site looks bizarre on your mobile device.
So today, I’m going to give you 5 obvious reasons why it’s time to redesign your site.
But before we proceed, I’d like to give you a quick reminder:
It’s important to think about the goals of a redesign. Based on my experience, not all websites are a lost cause. In fact, you may only need some tweaks and not a whole redo.
I’ll share how to nail this process down with you later.
In the meantime, let’s talk about the 5 reasons why it’s time for a website redesign.
Remember, your website is your #1 salesman.
However, your branding changes as well. And these changes should reflect on the way your website looks and feels; just like how a sales rep changes her sales presentations and product portfolio.
With that in mind, what’s your answer to these questions?
If your answer is “no”, then it’s time to make a move by introducing fresher content and design layouts – something that entices a new generation of buyers and visitors alike.
Ah, the almighty Google!
If you want to win, you’ve got to play by the rules.
And that means adhering to current search engine algorithms:
I know this list is quite a handful.
However, with the help of a designer who understands the best SEO practices, you should be able to launch a website search engines will fall in love with.
Imagine a thief who’s been planning a major museum heist for months.
He’s got everything at his disposal, including the museum layout and security codes.
A day before the heist, he decided to pay a visit for one last look …
… only to find out there’s an extra security officer on every floor, newly installed CCTVs and a pair of vicious security dogs watching his every move.
What would he probably say?
“Great, back to the drawing board!”
Your website is no different from an office building.
Sooner or later, you’ve got to fortify its defenses; otherwise, the bad guys will soon figure it all out.
And as much as we like to think of our website as eye candy, we shouldn’t forget about the safety and security of our business and our customers.
Certain plug-ins, although helpful, could potentially leave an opportunity for exploitation.
If you’ve been using the same set of plugins, themes or tools for at least 3 years, call your developer.
Make an audit of all the third party tools running under the site. Assess their worth and decide whether it’s time to look for a replacement or an upgrade.
Ask yourself these questions:
You can tell if your site is being hacked by looking for these signs:
So before this situation becomes a disaster, contact your consultant to address these threats.
Try this test: find your top 5 competitors for any search engine result. See it they’re outranking you. Visit each site. Study how each content is written.
Does it strike an emotional chord?
Were you impressed?
Can you hear yourself say, “Geez, I love this stuff?”
Does it have sharper images?
Do you find it easy to navigate from page to page?
If you answered, “Yes,” then it’s time to get back to the drawing board.
Find flaws in your design and work on how to upgrade your website to keep up with competitors.
Fortunately, you don’t have to do it alone. Work with your sales and marketing teams to figure out how to implement modern practices in your design.
Online Marketing Institute gave a quick overview of these principles.
Some of which are:
You can subscribe here for more details.
How do you feel when you think about your website?
Are you frustrated because making changes or keeping it updated is like having a Monday Morning Hangover?
Do you keep on getting leads who are freeloaders and tire kickers?
Is your sales team not proud of the website?
Remember, business sites are company assets, too.
And if you don’t feel excited reporting to your office, something must be done to bring that mojo back.
Offices and stores have regular makeovers.
So why not your website?
Earlier, I promised to share how to make changes on your site.
Here’s how you do it:
If the sheer amount of changes is mind-boggling (i.e. too many “must-haves”), it may be in your best interest to redo the whole site – top to bottom.
However, if the site is up to modern design standards and you’re just missing one or two things, maybe a redesign isn’t for you. All you have to do is find someone to add a few features.
If you’ve got one or two of these signs I just listed, it’s best to contact your web developer to work out a plan. Remember, prevention is better than cure. Don’t let your website compromise your business.
So how do you know when it’s time to do a website makeover?
Share your list in the comments section!
Not too long ago we did a post on 10 Simple Strategies to Boost Your B2B PR Campaign. We received such tremendous feedback that we decided to give you an even greater strategic advantage that will kick some serious B2B PR butt.
Would the limelight be the answer to your B2B PR prayers? Remember, like we discussed before, PR is not all about media coverage. It’s about the audience. A mention in The New York Times, while a prestigious placement, may not mean squat if the majority of your audience is based in Texas.
Instead, focus your efforts on where you will find the most results. Do a PR deep dive before simply hitting the PR media accelerator. That means understanding who your customers are and what media outlets matter to them. Are there certain killer trade publications that are prestigious in your industry? Will general business media be important to generating more B2B leads? How about regional media and social media? Determine what PR tactics will work the best for your business, and go for it.
A good deal of effective PR is not glamorous limelight — it’s doing basic things that nudge your company’s accomplishments into the public eye. The following are simple, but effective PR tactics that will get your company more of the success you desire.
1. Tweak and Refocus an Article, and Submit It to Multiple Outlets. Don’t submit an identical article to one you’ve already published. Adjust the quotes, the headline, even the slant of the article to make it more unique. An article on 5 Ways to Improve Your Customer Service may become, 5 Deadly Customer Service Mistakes. Same article, different slant.
2. Tell A Story About Your Business. Even the most practical, unsexy business can become interesting if your messaging tells a story. Tell your audience how your product or service makes a difference. A simple headline can have a huge impact on potential B2B leads.
Take, for example, this story-telling headline from Basecamp 3. It takes a traditionally boring organizational software, and transforms it into a familiar story of office chaos — with its solution poised at the ready.
3. Use Calls to Action. Take prospects down your sales funnel with alluring calls to action that bring them to an optimized landing page.
4. Track Your PR. Want to know what works, and what doesn’t? Use a service like Google Analytics to assign tracking codes to your links. You’ll be able to tell which links are most effective, and understand where your traffic is coming from.
5. Partner With Others. Use a service like Buzzsumo to see who is tweeting about a topic similar to yours. Reach out to them. Let them know in advance what you’re up to, and offer to brief them.
6. Get Happy Customers to Talk You Up With Testimonials and Case Studies. Spin these into press releases, articles, videos and Slideshares.
7. Create Compelling Visuals. Make your story come alive with colorful infographics, eye-popping charts, or stunning images.
8. Create Synergy. Partner with someone from a better-known brand, and propel off of their celebrity.
9. Speak Plain English. However complicated your business may be, communication is about clarity, not jargon.
10. Eliminate Hype. Avoid words like amazing, unique, or one of a kind. Let the success of your product or service stand proudly on its own merits, and speak for itself.
It’s essential to define how the brand should be known among a target group of customers.–Lee Odden
A Few Key Points to Keep in Mind…
There you have it — 10 simple methods that are proven to work. Whether your company is small or large, boring or sexy, you can give your PR campaign the boost it needs, and expand the scope of your success.
So you’ve made an explainer video. Congrats! You’ve even put it on your homepage. You’ve taken a huge first step in changing how customers find you and how your sales and marketing teams reach new clients.
The only question now is, “How are you going to promote your video on social media?”
Social Media Video Marketing
Make no mistake—creating a great video is only the first step in your new video marketing strategy. And FYI, the second step isn’t “Tweet video link then take a nap.” Getting a return on your investment with a quality video is all about a consistent, targeted video marketing plan built on tracking and metrics to learn which platforms work, and where your customers are coming from.
Ideally you want every step in this video marketing process to lead back to your homepage—that’s where your sales team can turn leads and into buyers. Luckily, social media is a cheap, easy to use, and absolutely perfect tool for funneling thousands of fresh eyes to your site.
But there’s a right way and a wrong way to promote your video on social media. So before you randomly plaster your video on Google+ and LinkedIn forums, here are 3 simple ways to promote your new video on social media. For free.
The first step in promoting your video is putting it where people can see it. Luckily, the internet is full of places for your new video to shine.
Almost every social media account lets you “pin” a favorite post in a static, highly visible place at the top of your profile. Pin your video to all of your social media accounts.
Twitter lets you pin your top tweet so visitors and new followers see it right away. Facebook business pages allow you to set a featured post at the top of your page. A featured video ensures that you’ll put your best foot forward no matter what your latest tweet is or what time-sensitive campaign you’re running. The best part; the link always directs leads straight to the video embedded on your website—not on social media.
Pinning a video, or a link to a video gives it evergreen value, not to mention that “pinned tweets lead to a tenfold conversion rate bump.” You’ve already paid to make a great animated explainer video for your business, so leverage the heck out of it on every brand page and account. Also, a dedicated “pinned” video link gives your brand redundancy and identity.
People need multiple contact with branded content before they begin the purchasing process. Your consistent use of video reminds users about your product every time they engage with you online.
Best Practices: Pin your video using a customized link from bit.ly or tiny url. These social media optimized links are short, and can even include the keyword you’re targeting as part of the link. Better yet, each unique link can track clicks and interaction over time, and you don’t have to use clunky, hard to share links full of alphanumeric characters.
You can customize short links to drive traffic to a specific video, like this title sequence opener we did for the HBO show Weeds:
http://bit.ly/WeedsShowOpener (see how the url has the keywords you want?)
You don’t even need to actually play your video to promote it on social media. Just show people the thumbnail.
A great way to stretch the shelf life of an animated explainer video is to carve it into sections via social media posts that only target one element of the video. Isolate several short clips or sections and treat them as stand alone videos on Twitter and Facebook. Take a screenshot of the relevant step or section, add text via a free graphics program like Canva, and viola, you have fresh relevant content that points back to your primary resource—your video embedded on your homepage.
The tweet, Instagram, or Facebook post will drive engagement via a snazzy image. And more views on your video means higher search engine ranking down the road (but more on that in a minute). Here’s a final strategy, and it’s great for targeting that most inscrutable of social media users—millennials.
Kids these days like video content, but they might like shorter video content even more. Take the strategy of breaking your content up even further by creating a short GIF—3-6 seconds—that highlights a particularly visual moment in one of your videos.
Giphy features a simple tool that allows you to copy YouTube links in and create a custom gif in seconds.
The gif can drive engagement on posts that link back to your video, as well as providing a bit of fun brand identity. It’s a way to leverage every ounce of marketing juice your video contains, but while the temptation to meme your GIF is strong, avoid diluting your brand with too much of this type of content. Remember, quality is the key to strong social media engagement.
Social Media Video Marketing SEO: The Boring Behind the Scenes Stuff
While Google SEO best practices change all the time (ask a copywriter about h1 keyword tags!) you can be sure of one thing—Google’s algorithms love video.
Actually, that’s misleading. People like videos, particularly high quality videos that serve a specific purpose or solve a specific problem, so people are more likely to click on search results that feature a video. Heck, they’re more and more likely to only search for content with video. And Google wants to give people what they want. So, in a roundabout way, Google loves video. So use your video liberally.
“If you’re consistently publishing good content, steadily acquiring backlinks, and adding rich media including images and video, you’re taking all the right steps to maintain a solid ranking,” says the Sherice Jacobs at Kissmetrics. SEO practices change every single year, but keep in mind that the whole point of search engine optimization is to deliver results that real people find useful. Video is exactly that.
Embed easy to share video content using links that you can track for a clear picture of what content is working, and where it’s working. The best part of a well executed social media video marketing campaign is the exponential feedback loop of higher search rankings.
Social media links lead to clicks, views, and shares, which leads to increased site traffic, which leads to higher search engine ranking, which leads to more traffic, better quality backlinks and social shares, which leads to higher ranking, more traffic, more links, more shares, higher traffic…
Quality video is the cornerstone of a successful social media marketing campaign. Position your video in the spotlight with these three simple tips and techniques and reap the benefits of your explainer video for years to come.
Sales professionals are often judged on the revenue they bring into their company, even when they’re searching for another job. They scramble each day to reach “top salesperson” status, tracking down leads and crafting the perfect pitch. As one day turns into the next, it can be easy to lose sight of the long-term career ramifications of the work they’re doing.
When it’s time to move on to the next phase of your career, sales figures don’t necessarily win over employers. Hiring managers review those numbers and take them into account, but they want to see more substantial operations experience for a senior sales executive or management position. In addition to on-the-job experience, professional certifications can help you stand out in a stack of resumes when you’re looking to make a career jump.
Here are a few certifications that can help:
The National Association of Sales Professionals (NASP) offers salespeople the Certified Professional Sales Person (CPSP) credential through a six-week online course. In addition to enhancing your resume, this course will help improve your own sales interactions. Once certified, you’ll have an arsenal of sales tactics you can use to close deals. Another certification you can acquire is the Certified Sales Executive (CSE), offered by the Sales and Marketing Executives International (SMEI). The certification process consists of self-study course that concludes with an exam.
If management is your career goal, some leadership certifications can take you a long way towards it. Cornell University’s online school has a well-regarded executive leadership certification that can be earned in four months. If you prefer an in-person option, check with your local college or university about certification opportunities. You may be able to combine online learning with the classroom experience and add a certification to your resume at the end of the course.
Often the most important education sales professionals can receive relates to the products they sell. Over time, many professionals develop a specialty, whether it’s selling healthcare products or software or insurance. The more mastery you develop over your specialty, the more valuable you’ll be to the businesses that hire you. Once you have your basic sales skills, a great next step is to seek a professional certification in your chosen industry. This will work in conjunction with your years of experience to show that you’re a sales leader in that field.
For medical sales professionals, the Health Industry Distributors Association (HIDA) offers Accredited in Medical Sales (AMS) programs designed to help those who work for healthcare distributors and manufacturers. Insurance agents already need a license, but they can also take specialized courses in topics like wealth management and financial planning to give their resumes some additional polish. One of the most valuable things a sales professional can do, which might be surprising, is to achieve a certification in an in-demand area such as information technology. Amazon Web Services certification training can help a tech-savvy salesperson move quickly up the pay scale, as can partner certifications in specialty areas offered by companies like IBM. Whether you’re a longtime technology salesperson or you’re thinking about a career in this domain, these courses can give you a push in the right direction.
Today’s rising sales professionals need a certain level of technical expertise. Almost every interaction is logged in a database, which is then used to generate reports. As you move into management, you’ll spend more time working with this software, pulling reports and reviewing users. This is why it’s essential that you’re adept with the tools that sales teams use every day.
Software-specific certifications are available for a variety of sales roles, including Salesforce. While you can’t possibly cover every piece of software a potential employer might use, the most popular sales software certifications are likely to capture the attention of potential employers. Even if a business doesn’t use a specific piece of software, your proficiency in one popular tool will show that you can master an application that sales teams use. That expertise can easily translate to a less popular tool with a minimal amount of training.
Sales can be a rewarding career, but eventually you’ll want to take the next step. By beginning the certification and learning process now, you’ll become stronger in your current position while also preparing for a more senior role in the near future.
Humans, by nature, love it when they receive something that has been tailor-made for them. Be it an exclusive birthday gift, a customized vacation, or simply a personalized email.
While the oldest, easiest, and most common form of personalization in emails is adding the general ‘Hi Jenny’, ‘Hello Peter’ greeting, the latest and more complicated version involves creating a customer persona in order to enable sending of highly personalized content in emails. A study states that approximately 58% of marketers are already using real-time personalization.
The other day, Monks came across a research stating that 92.6% people rate visual dimension as the main factor affecting their purchase decision. Now that’s a HUGE number; so huge that it triggered the Monks in the Monastery to write about personalized images in email.
From incorporating your subscriber’s name over any attractive image to sending images of products searched/abandoned by them, there is great scope here for email marketers.
1. Birthday Email
The easiest way to personalize an image is writing the name of your recipient over a beautiful image. This kind of personalization works exceptionally well while sending a birthday email, which itself is a personalized email.
Future Care sends good wishes to its subscribers on their birthday, writing ‘Happy Birthday, (name)’ on a birthday cake image. This certainly makes the subscriber feel special.
2. Product/service Announcement Email
Introducing your new product by personalizing the product image (by writing subscriber’s name on it) in an email is a great idea indeed! By choosing to introduce your new product to them first, you are actually giving your subscriber the feeling that they matter the most to you.
Lucozade Energy introduces its new cloudy lemonade through this email, which is personalized with subscriber’s name on the image.
3. Discount Announcement Email
Marketers can personalize images in emails that announce discounts. This kind of personalization goes a long way in enhancing conversions.
Thorntons sent out this email to announce its Christmas discounts using a different route to make subscribers feel special. Adding the subscriber’s name on ‘Santa’s nice list’, they have hit the nail on the head.
Marketers, to personalize their emails, can use profile photos of those subscribers who sign up for emails from social media platforms. This can be done because they have chosen to share their information with you. Educational institutes/ Universities too can use this way of personalization to make their emails more interesting. The photos of students in the institute’s database can be used in emails sent to the respective students to grab attention.
Incorporating a personalized ‘nearest store location’ map or a map with ‘location of stores in your city’ will not only grab eyeballs but also leave a good impression on the subscriber, who will feel happy about your help.
Charming Charlie’s sale promotion email encourages the subscriber to take advantage of the discounts and encourages them further by helping them with the store that is closest to their location.
Triggered emails are sent out when a particular subscriber searches for particular products/services on your website. Such emails can have images of those specific items. This helps in re-generating the subscriber’s interest. This email with personalized images can be coupled with recommended product images with a ‘you may also like’ title, again based on subscriber’s search history.
This email sent by Sur La Table makes best use of the points mentioned above.
Personalized images can best be used in cart abandonment emails – displaying pictures of the products left by the subscriber in their cart helps to urge them to buy the things they had liked. It becomes easier to convert the prospect into sales lead as these are the items which they themselves had decided to put in the cart.
Crate & Barrel’s cart abandonment email encourages the abandoner to go for the awesome item, and the image of the product makes a huge difference in reigniting their desire to buy.
Based on the reading history of a particular subscriber, you can send images of or from your latest blogs/whitepaper/e-book to get better views or downloads. For example, if a particular subscriber has downloaded one of your whitepapers on a specific topic, the next time you write a blog or any piece of content on a similar topic, you can send a recommendation with attractive images from that piece of content.
Using personalized images helps your emails get the attention that’s needed in order to make a campaign successful. This clever way of bringing novelty to every single email you send at your end is sure to take over the email marketing world by storm.
So why just restrict to personalizing content and not spice up your campaign with personalized images in email marketing templates?
"Nobody wants to be branded anymore," said Aaron Levine, head designer for Abercrombie & Fitch.
Well, if that line from the Wall Street Journal's article, Crocodiles (and Polo Ponies) Go Missing as Scalpel-Wielding Consumers Revolt, doesn't make your marketing brain stand up and take notice, who knows what will? There's nothing (really) new in this article. It's a meme that rises to the mass media every few years. There's this thought that human beings are becoming less and less concerned, interested and caring about brands. People want quality, and they no longer feel the need (at the same time) to be advertising for some business by flaunting their corporate animal in the upper quadrant of their polo shirt. Brands have (somehow) become less important, and individuals are more interested in buying clothes that are (somewhat) personalized, or that speak to them by allowing their own personalized style to flaunt.
Slow down there, just a second.
People confuse the power of a brand with the value of a brand. They are not the same thing. Brands are more important than ever. Brands are also a lot bigger than the fashion labels. The other week, I was complaining about my new Apple MacBook Pro. I was/still am in dongle and power cable hell. Everything that I had accumulated over the years became obsolete in one swoop. Many quipped (on Facebook, of course) that I could have purchased a much better equipped and speedier computer, had I just switched over to PC. I know. For decades, I was a hardcore PC user before switching over to Apple, about five years ago. Why pay a premium? Well, there are a lot of reasons, but it's not hard to admit that Apple is a premium brand. Period. Full stop. I like the Apple brand. Almost everything about it. If human beings were simply pragmatic, and only bought for functionality and longevity, there would be no automative industry, no computer industry, no fashion industry... in fact, there would probably not be that many products or services in the market. We would only buy the things we - as human beings - absolutely needed. We would only buy those things, if they were the lowest price possible with the best quality available.
Brands are an important part of our world.
Most people see brands as a nuisance. "Grab that scalpel and scrape off that crocodile from my shirt!" I don't. Most people don't. You probably don't, either. The Wall Street Journal (a brand unto itself), fails to deconstruct the immense value that brands bring to our culture, to our economy, and to our world. Who do you trust? Brands have (and will continue) to provide a level of trust, emotion and experience to consumers. Brands don't do this on the sole basis of creating a healthy environment for competition. Brands don't do this solely to differentiate themselves from one another. Brands don't do this just to charge a premium to consumers. Brands do this because there is a massive market demand. It's not perfect. There are many brands that are perceived to be luxurious, that are not of high quality. There are many brands that are perceived to be cheap, that provide an experience that is over-and-above their competition. There are brands that - sadly - lie and manipulate the public to simply increase revenues. Maybe the logo is obnoxious, but there's something about the brand. So, don't confuse people getting tired of a logo on a shirt for the brand's end of days
Still, brands matter.
In fact, I would argue that whatever happens in the economy, one of the main key performance indicators we can look towards, is the health, growth and adoption of brands (new and old) to see how our world is doing. Yes, brands make people do stupid things (like trample one another for a better price on Black Friday). Yes, brands keep more people employed than you can imagine (every company is a brand). Brands matter.
If there is a persistence of time, count on the persistence of brands.
Tags: aaron levine abercrombie and fitch advertising apple brand branded business blog competition computer consumer consumer experience consumer revolt culture digital marketing digital marketing agency digital marketing blog dongle economics economy facebook fashion j walter thompson jwt luxury brand macbook macbook pro market demand marketing marketing blog mass media mirum mirum agency mirum agency blog mirum blog mitch joel mitchjoel premium brand wall street journal wpp
The way Dr. Ed Hickey sees it, the cardiac surgery unit of Canada’s busiest children’s hospital is a bit like an airfield. Operations are flights, pre-op preparations flight plans and the interplay between staff in the OR “crew-resource management.”
Hickey and colleagues at Toronto’s SickKids have adopted a NASA-developed “threat and error” safety protocol meant for pilots, a unique experiment that has already produced some striking revelations.
When doctors applied the space agency’s model to more than 500 consecutive heart operations on children, they found that almost all the patients who died or suffered brain injury did so after sequences of error. Sequences that started in the operating room and often were amplified by problems in intensive care, a newly published study reveals.
“It’s when you’re in these chains of errors that things are very dangerous,” said Hickey, a cardiac surgeon and lead author of the study. “Usually these are very complicated patients and they are much more likely to have errors … (but) it was still very valuable for us to recognize this is the reality, that this is happening.”
The rate of deaths and complications for the challenging mix of heart surgeries done at SickKids is already “exceptionally low.” But the findings generated by the aviation-style reviews are being used to try to make those operations even safer, he said, while colleagues from as far away as the U.K. have asked about adopting some of the ideas.
There is no hard data yet, but the number of cardiac arrests among the team’s often tiny, very sick patients seems to be dropping, while a more collegial, open work environment has developed, “where nothing can be swept under the carpet,” Hickey said.
The SickKids project is part of a growing trend in health care to borrow from the aviation world’s safety culture to try to improve medicine’s own error problem, estimated to cause thousands of deaths in Canada yearly.
Cockpit-style checklists have become de rigueur in the OR, while a surgeon at another Toronto hospital invented a “black box” to record what goes on during operations.
How successful the measures have been is unclear.
Hickey cautioned that a “crucial” element of the airline-style safety mindset is to abandon the tendency — still common in health care — to blame individuals when things go wrong, and instead to see errors as a systemic ill.
The threat-and-error system developed by NASA in the 1970s is used by airlines to analyze pilot performance on both routine and risky flights, the lessons learned applied to make flying safer.
It revolves around the notion that flight crews will face threats — external factors — and commit errors, the two often related. Depending on how they handle the threats and what errors they make, there can be “unintended states,” like a jet’s mid-air stall, and possibly a permanent “outcome,” where the stall ends with a crash.
The SickKids initiative started with weekly meetings where everyone on the cardiac team openly discussed each surgery, good or bad, a contrast to the typical hospital practice of holding “morbidity and mortality” rounds, intense sessions that dissect only cases that went wrong.
Then Hickey and colleagues applied the NASA model, in which a threat could be an unusual feature of a patient’s heart condition or perhaps an equipment malfunction, an error something like a leaky valve repair or sutures that bleed.
The study just published in the Annals of Thoracic Surgery looked at 524 operations and related post-op care over several days — or “flights” as the paper described them.
They found that errors — which could include actual mistakes or procedures that simply didn’t produce the intended result — occurred in 49% of cases.
Just over 1.3 per cent of the children — seven patients — died, while 13 suffered brain injuries and 68 developed “hemodynamic lesions,” such as a weak heart muscle or abnormal heart rhythm.
In almost all the cases that ended in harmful outcomes, there had been chains of errors, one event leading to another, the study concluded.
Hickey said he’d now like to try another aspect of the threat-and-error model, and have trained observers watch surgeries and file anonymous reports on what they saw, good and bad.
tblackwell@nationalpost.com
When it comes to earning more money and growing your wealth, sometimes all it takes is establishing smart habits and making small lifestyle changes.
"Success is a learnable skill," writes T. Harv Eker in his book "Secrets of the Millionaire Mind." "If you want to be a great golfer, you can learn how to do it. If you want to be a great piano player, you can learn how to do it ... If you want to be rich, you can learn how to do it."
If you want to learn how to get rich — how to grow and master your money — consider these nine lifestyle changes:
Previous reporting by Kathleen Elkins.
SEE ALSO: A financial adviser shares a 5-step checklist to complete before the end of 2016
DON'T MISS: You can take the biggest step toward building wealth in 10 minutes at your computer
Andrew Carnegie, who started with nothing before becoming the richest man in the country, credits all of his riches to one principle: the Master Mind.
The idea is that you surround yourself with talented people who share your vision because the alignment of several smart and creative minds is exponentially more powerful than just one.
Plus, we become like the people we associate with, which is why the rich tend to associate with others who are rich.
"In most cases, your net worth mirrors the level of your closest friends," explains self-made millionaire and author Steve Siebold. "Exposure to people who are more successful than you are has the potential to expand your thinking and catapult your income. The reality is, millionaires think differently from the middle class about money, and there's much to be gained by being in their presence."
One of the most effective ways to earn more money is to invest it, and start as early as possible.
"The more you put in today, the much more you'll have later down the road because of the time value of money and the growth on investment returns," Michael Solari, a certified financial planner with Solari Financial Management, told Business Insider.
The simplest starting point is to invest in your employer's 401(k) plan. Next, consider contributing money toward a Roth IRA or traditional IRA, individual retirement accounts with different contribution limits and tax structures.
Another great option is to put any savings in a low-cost target date fund, a diversified retirement account that invests your money into a combination of stocks, bonds, and alternative assets. Though the market is impossible to predict, you're still going to get a better return on the money there than you would in a plain old savings account, with little to no work required.
If you want to earn more, a simple solution is to work more — and you'll get a lot more out of a second job than extra income.
You'll grow your skill set by working in a different field, put your brain to work in a different context, and expand your network. Plus, it's a great opportunity to monetize a specific interest of yours — such as photography, music, tutoring, or coaching — or turn your passion into a side hustle.
Check out high-paying jobs you can do on the side and read about how to start a side-hustle from a woman who earned up to $4,000 a month on the side.
I was recently asked “What do customers actually need to know?”. I paused before answering because I’m sure if you asked 20 of my company’s current customers, they would give you 20 different answers. I finally said, “You should ask them.”
One of the keys to effective communication, regardless of audience, is listening. As vendors we often talk more than we listen, I know I’m guilty of this, and we sometimes make assumptions that we shouldn’t, also guilty of this. Let’s be honest, we don’t always know what is best for our customers and sometimes we should just ask.
If your business model involves personalized onboarding, maybe ask the main contact(s) questions such as:
Then take note of these answers and ensure your team is doing their best to communicate in a way that matches preferences. The above approach definitely becomes much more challenging when customers onboard themselves (don’t require company intervention to get up and going) and/or in the case where there is a very high customer to CSM ratio. In these situations periodically surveying customers can come in handy to understand items such as:
You may not be able to create a customized communication plan per customer but can certainly begin to analyze trends and adjust accordingly. You can even segment your customers by preference. Another idea is to allow each customer to granularly opt into items they are personally interested in, say newsletters and best practice blog posts, and opt out of those that aren’t of interest, like upcoming webinars or face-to-face events.
I have found that most customers prefer to be informed ahead of time about upcoming software releases versus just waking one day to notice their beloved tool has changed, even if it is for the better. Change is often hard for people so the more time we can give folks to understand what is coming, ask questions, get training if applicable, and hopefully come to terms with things, the better!
In the case where there has been a hiccup or a change in plans for whatever reason, companies should update the affected customers as soon as possible, not wait for them to notice or question what is going on. In these scenarios even when there is no new updates, I always encourage CSMs to proactively communicate to customers on a regular basis in order to demonstrate that the CSM is actively following up on the issue at hand and will continue to do so until full resolution. No update is technically an update.
Another way to proactively communicate is based on what I call data driven reach outs such as “Hey, we haven’t seen you login in the past two weeks, something we can do to help?” or “It appears you haven’t yet had a chance to create your first (fill in the blank based on your software) – here are some resources that may assist you in getting started”. The great thing about these types of communications is many of them can be automated yet still highly personalized (aka not a time suck for CSMs but still leave your customers feeling like you are carefully monitoring their implementation progress).
“No update is technically an update.”
I strongly believe in transparency. Have a known issue with your software? Be honest with your customers. Most people react better to honesty than veiled attempts to sugarcoat situations. From time to time CSMs may have to fall on a “sword” on behalf of their company. In my experience it is better to do this and admit a company misstep versus attempt to pretend like there isn’t a problem or worst yet somehow blame the customer. Many companies have implemented “trust sites” that show real time system availability and performance information as well as current and historical incidents to further demonstrate transparency.
Another example of self-service communication is customers choosing to follow your company on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, LinkedIn, even Slack as a way to stay up to date about your product upgrades, upcoming tradeshows you plan to attend, and more.
“Be honest with your customers.”
And when it makes sense, throw something in the snail mail. I recently received some stickers from a vendor and thought, “Wow! Not only did I get mail at work, which I rarely do, I got stickers!” Better yet, write a handwritten (not a looks like it was handwritten but isn’t) but a real handwritten (pen on paper) note to your customers. Maybe you can take your account count and divide it by 52 to give you the number of handwritten notes needed to be crafted per week to ensure each customer receives at least one handwritten message from you per year. You may find you only need to write 2 or 4 per week to pull this off. A quick handwritten note (Happy Birthday wishes, congratulations on their implementation rollout, a simple note to let them know it is a pleasure working with them) often goes a long way in helping customers to feel valued!
Speaking of value, regardless of which of the above you are about to send, I always pause and ask, “Does this information create value, in some way, for the receiver?” (and I don’t just mean if they open your email they will notice you are having a BOGO event). Value can be created by sending a helpful tip about your software, sharing industry trends, providing free resources, or even by merely brightening someone’s day with a funny cartoon. The sky’s the limit but make sure that you aren’t just “spamming” customers. Each communication should somehow enhance the work they do with you.
As we head into the new year may we each set a goal to listen more than we speak and work hard to deliver what and when our clients need to hear from us. Happy communicating all!
