Chances are, you get lied to multiple times on a daily basis. But the good news is, spotting a fib isn't as difficult as you might think — so long as you know the signs.

Behavioral analyst and body language expert Dr. Lillian Glass, who has worked with the FBI on unmasking signals of deception, says when trying to figure out if someone is being dishonest, you'll need to pay careful attention to their facial expressions, body language, and speech patterns, she writes in her book "The Body Language of Liars."

Here are the telltale signs:

SEE ALSO: 7 signs someone's not listening to you

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NOW WATCH: We asked Siri the most existential question ever and she had a lot to say

The way buyers buy has changed dramatically. Prospects no longer need to speak to a single human being in order to make an intelligent purchasing decision. So where do you fit in? According to Forrester Research, salespeople who can’t adapt to these changes in buyer behavior will become obsolete by 2020.

These quotes from sales experts shed light on what needs to change and how you can be a better salesperson to build trust, become your prospects’ consultant of choice, and close more deals.

1) “Stop selling. Start helping.” -Zig Ziglar, bestselling author, salesman, and motivational speaker

It’s timeless advice that applies now more than ever. Pushy salespeople who focus only on selling, not helping their prospects buy, will lose deals. The helpful rep shall inherit the earth.

2) "The single biggest reason salespeople don't do enough business is: They don't speak to enough people. They don't speak to enough people because they fear rejection. They fear rejection because they don't know how much rejection they need. And they don't know how much rejection they need, because they don't know what they personally need: they have no goals, plans or direction for their lives or careers." -Warren Greshes, serial entrepreneur and bestselling author

With over 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur, Greshes understands the pain of rejection. However, if you want to succeed in sales, you can’t let rejection deter you.

3) “Internalize the Golden Rule of sales that says: All things being equal, people will do business with, and refer business to, those people they know, like and trust.” -Bob Burg, bestselling author of The Go-Giver and Endless Referrals

Buyers can find all the information they need online. As a salesperson, your goal is to build trust and rapport and help them find the solution that best fits their needs.

4) “Selling breaks rapport, educating builds it. Stop selling and start educating!” -Chet Holmes, founder and former CEO of Chet Holmes International

5) “The world has had enough of pushy sales tactics. When you come from a place of service with your prospect’s best interest in mind, your whole business improves. Your customers become raving fans, they walk around like billboards bringing you business, and they stick with you forever. Ultimately it’s about serving, not selling." -Amanda Holmes, CEO of Chet Holmes International

6) "To become a great sales professional, I had to first change my daily routine. I stopped checking emails in the morning, which were other people's priorities, and started being customer-centric. Start your day by thinking strategically on how you can help one customer better navigate their buying journey - what can you teach them today that they didn't understand yesterday?" -Jamie Shanks, CEO of Sales For Life

7) "Sales is really as simple as getting your leads to ask questions and focusing on answering them, while leading them to the best solution that you are currently aware of; even if that is not with your company." -Josh Harcus, author of A Closing Culture

8) “The best thing salespeople can do to get better is second-level research. Second-level research is researching the industry of their prospects, including the issues, challenges, players, regulations, its evolution, origins, end users, etc. We're not expert enough in the industries we sell to, so it makes it hard to be seen as credible. Less focus in, more focus out.” -Keenan, CEO of A Sales Guy, Inc.

9) "With all the free data that's available to us, salespeople are expected to do their due diligence about a prospect and have some familiarity before they ever starting writing an email or picking up the phone. The salespeople who can do this effectively will be the most successful. The lazy ones will become obsolete." -Max Altschuler, CEO of Sales Hacker

Inspired by these quotes? Hear these entrepreneurs and many more at Inbound Sales Day. Claim your seat today and get a full day of exclusive material on the selling tactics that built multi-million dollar companies.

 

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NOW WATCH: MALCOLM GLADWELL: ‘Anyone who gives a single dollar to Princeton has completely lost their mind'

You’ve probably heard that what you say is more important than how you say it. But that’s simply not true: According to the world’s leading conversation analysts, the way you frame your questions and statements can make a huge difference in how they're received.

So next time you’re trying to get a conversation with a buyer to go your way, try these five research-backed communication techniques.

1) Use Leading Questions

To get the information you need, you have to ask prospects the tough questions. But you’ll need to be careful if you don’t want to piss them off or make them shut down.

According to Elizabeth Stokoe, a social interaction professor at Loughborough University, the trick is phrasing your inquiry like you already know the answer.

To give you an idea, here’s the same question two different ways:

Wrong: “If you don’t fix this issue, what will happen to your company’s revenue?”“”

Right: “Would you say your company’s revenue will be impacted if you don’t fix this issue, or … ?”

“Burying the key question as a follow-up and leaving the sentence hanging softens the inquiry and keeps the conversation going,” Stokoe says.

2) Ask If They’d Be “Willing” to Do Something

To persuade prospects to speak with you, try out your product, or refer you to a decision-maker, lead with, “Would you be willing to [your request]?”

Stokoe analyzed hundreds of calls between mediators and potential clients -- and often, those clients were adamantly opposed to mediation.

“However, I found that when mediators asked people if they would be ‘willing’ to mediate, even resistant callers agreed to try the service,” Stokoe says.

Asking people if they were “willing” was significantly more effective than asking if they were “interested.” 

In fact, Stokoe says it’s the only word that can turn a hard no into a yes.

3) Don’t Say “Any”

When you want prospects to share their concerns, don’t ask if there’s “anything” they’d like to talk about.

Conversation analysts John Heritage and Jeffrey Robinson discovered 40% of patients didn’t tell their doctors about a health issue because their doctors asked if there was “anything else” to discuss. As it turns out, the word “any” generates negative responses.

Meanwhile, “Is there something else we need to take care of today?” made patients open up.

With this in mind, here’s how to set an agenda properly:

Wrong: “Is there anything else you’d like to cover today?”

Right: “Is there something else you’d like to cover today?”

4) Repeat Their Last Three Words

In a perfect world, you’d always be 100% engaged. But despite your best intentions, getting distracted sometimes is inevitable. Don’t panic if you realize you have no idea what the prospect’s been saying for the past two minutes -- just repeat their last few words.

“Parroting the last two or three words your companion said, in a sympathetic, questioning tone throws the conversational ball right back in your partner's court," explains social skills expert and author Leil Lowndes.

Here’s how that might look:

Prospect: And that’s why our projects backlog is out of control.

You: Out of control?

Prospect: Yeah. Actually, I’m worried my PM is on the verge of quitting.

You: That sounds tough. How have you tried to address this issue?

(Not sure what to ask in the first place? Check out these 25 essential discovery call questions.) 

5) Use Nouns Instead of Verbs

The need to belong is a powerful motivator. In fact, it’s so powerful that reminding prospects they belong to a group can dramatically influence their behavior. 

Stanford psychologist Gregory Walton found that asking, “How important is it to you to be a voter in tomorrow’s election?” made people far likelier to vote than asking, “How important is it to you to vote in tomorrow’s election?”

Along similar lines, those who said “I’m a chocolate eater” indulged far more in the dessert than participants who said, “I eat chocolate a lot.”

So next time you ask the prospect a question, swap out your verb for a noun.

Before: “How big of a priority is fixing your internal communication systems?"

After: “Are you the type of manager that prioritizes internal communication?”

Not only are these five strategies effective, but you can start using them straightaway. So, are you the type of salesperson who uses their words to get results?

What’s your best “say this, not that” example? Let us know in the comments!

There's truly nothing like travel when it comes to gaining perspective and exposing yourself to other cultures.

To get you in the adventuring mood, we asked Amazon Senior Editor Chris Schluep to help us come up with a list of books that transport readers to another time and place. 

Below, see his list of 11 books that will inspire you to travel the world. All blurbs are by Schluep.

SEE ALSO: 16 packing tips every business traveler should know

DON'T MISS OUT: Follow Business Insider's lifestyle page on Facebook!

ITALY: "Beautiful Ruins" by Jess Walter

"This book by the acclaimed author Jess Walters is a love story that begins on the Italian Coast in the early '60s and eventually concludes in contemporary Hollywood. As the settings shift from Italy to Edinburgh to Los Angeles, you will find yourself longing to go as well."

Buy it on Amazon »

SEATTLE: "Where You'd Go, Bernadette?" by Maria Semple

"Maria Semple's first novel is not exactly a love story to Seattle, but if you read it you just might want to come here to see if people are really as quirky and self-involved as the characters in her book. What really shines through is the whimsical storytelling and the laughs."

Buy it on Amazon »

ENGLAND: "Wolf Hall" by Hilary Mantel

"You can't travel to Thomas Cromwell's England without a time machine, but reading Mantel's prize-winning novel is the next best thing. It will make you long to see the ancient buildings and green grass of the English countryside, much of which is still there."

Buy it on Amazon »

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

Interest in using infographics for content marketing started to take off in early 2012 and has continued to grow ever since. While there are unquestionably some topics that really aren’t right for infographics, this format remains an entertaining and effective way to communicate statistical or quantitative information.

Infographics are in some cases the first choice for presenting research findings. But more often, blog posts, reports, and presentations that are heavy on numbers (provided the underlying information is actually interesting and informative) become prime candidates for repurposing as infographics.

The problem, when infographics first started to become popular, was that they had to be designed from scratch. That meant either a) paying a not-insignificant sum to have a professional designer create your inforgraphic, or 2) paying less to have an amateur create it (and ending up with an infographic that looked…amateurish).

Fortunately, there are now tools that allow even the design-challenged to produce professional-looking infographics. Here are four of the best such tools…plus services to call on if you have the budget and really want to make sure your infographics look original and great.

Infographic Creation Tools

1) Piktochart
Google Review Count: 3,600,000

Pick a template, edit the fonts and colors, and add your content. Optionally include charts and maps, your own photos and images, and icons.

Sample review: You don’t “have to go to great expense to create (an) infographic. There are some very good low price tools such as Piktochart which allow you to easily build infographics using a pre-defined templates.” — RazorSocial

Pricing: free to $29 per month

Showcase reviews: Online Marketing Institute, Small Business Trends, BuzzBlogger, Programming Graphics Resources & Reviews, RazorSocial, QuickSprout

2) Infogram
Google Review Count: 142,000

Choose a template and visualize your data with charts, maps, videos, images, and/or icons, then generate an embed code to post on your blog or website. Also enables creation of interactive visualizations.

Sample review: “Infogram is a visual content tool that focuses on helping you create infographics, charts, and data visualization. If you like to create charts using Microsoft Excel, you’re in luck — it also offers compatibility with Excel through Infogram Charts. Also, their infographics are responsive with mobile devices.” — HubSpot

Pricing: free to $67 per month plus enterprise pricing by quote

Showcase reviews: Small Business Trends, HubSpot, Programming Graphics Resources & Reviews, Cent Muruganandam, QuickSprout

3) easel.ly
Google Review Count: 112,000

Choose a template (or start with a blank one), add and customize elements and objects, input your data, and share the output.

Sample review: “Easel.ly is a really easy (no pun intended) to use tool that allows you to create infographics from a huge selection of templates.” — Marketing Insider Group

Pricing: free or $3 per month

Showcase reviews: Small Business Trends, BuzzBlogger, Programming Graphics Resources & Reviews, Marketing Insider Group

4) Venngage
Google Review Count: 19,700

Select a template from hundreds available, add charts, maps and icons, and customize fonts and colors—all for free. Venngage also offers a free infographic idea generator tool and a free chart maker. And for designers who need more options than what the free plan provides, Venngage offers a business plan with more templates, more prebuilt graphics, and customized branding.

Sample review: “Vennage is a social analytics and marketing company that offers infographics and other designs as part of its service package. The tool for creating infographics allows you to upload your own images and backgrounds, or choose from a selection of customizable themes.” — Small Business Trends

Pricing: free, premium ($19 per month), or business ($49 per month)

Showcase reviews: Small Business Trends, Programming Graphics Resources & Reviews

Infographic Creation Services

Visual.ly
Google Review Count: 7,030,000

Prefer to let someone else do the driving? Visual.ly connects marketers with freelance designers, writers, and developers to develop infographics or other types of visual content.

Sample review: “Why tell when you can show? Visually provides custom-made infographics that make your statistics pop. This is a great option for marketing teams strapped for graphic design resources. ” — SnapApp

Pricing: based on project quote; infographics start at $3,000

Showcase reviews: Online Marketing Institute, Small Business Trends, Cent Muruganandam, SnapApp

Showcase Reviews

BuzzBlogger
Cent Muruganandam
HubSpot
Marketing Insider Group
Online Marketing Institute
Programming Graphics Resources & Reviews
Quick Sprout
RazorSocial
Small Business Trends
SnapApp

Only a few years ago, most marketing automation vendors were sprinting to expand their cloud offerings.

It was an intense race: most major vendors wanted to be the first all-in-one, customer data platform to automate the entire customer experience — from initial prospect identification to post-purchase advocate creation.

They wanted to be the Salesforce of marketing.

They all failed. And this has been great for marketers.

MarTech Realities

In the past two years, all marketing automation vendors have shed ambitions for MarTech industry domination.

Instead, they’ve embraced a new reality, one based on the development of customizable ecosystems of tech vendors and data providers.

Consequently, innovative digital experiences have flourished through creative integrations.

Great Marketing Now Depends on Tech Specialization

When discussing a restaurant’s quality, have you ever heard the phrase: “The bigger the menu, the worse the food?”

This concept is pretty analogous to where marketing clouds were headed a few years ago.

While vendor offerings expanded, integrations between impulsively acquired systems left something to be desired. Moreover, such marketing cloud vendor acquisitions encumbered marketers’ tech investments and options, limiting their ability to build best-of-bread tech stacks.

Specialization begets better products, whether with food or technology. And while fewer logins and ease of use were once major selling points for marketing tech vendors, marketing automation’s rise itself is what (somewhat ironically) changed this.

Learning how to integrate marketing platforms with CRM systems, set up nurture tracks and scoring models, and customize reporting and analytics to the needs of various stakeholders transformed marketers into tech-savvy, data-driven professionals.

They became tech experts, priding themselves on their new set of skills.

Marketers Want Control, Customizability

As a result, marketers no longer wanted all-in-one marketing platforms.

Just like a racecar driver saddled with an automatic transmission, all-in-one marketing platforms limited control, innovation and performance.

Marketers wanted more control and customizability. This has led to marketers building customized MarTech ecosystems comprising numerous specialized systems, tools and data sources.

Marketing automation systems are now the hubs of expanding MarTech ecosystems.

3 MarTech Realities

The big marketing automation vendors haven’t been blind to these developments.

In fact, they’ve been very smart over recent years, highlighting partnerships with adjacent technologies and promoting innovative integrations.

This, in turn, has had further effects.

1. The MarTech landscape has exploded. As Scott Brinker’s Marketing Tech Supergraphic clearly illustrates, the marketing tech landscape has grown to nearly 4,000 offerings across categories ranging from back-office operations (data reporting and analytics, budgeting and finance, project management, etc.) to front-office digital experiences (advertising, content creation, social media, etc.). This unlikely would’ve happened if the large marketing automation platforms hadn’t changed course from all-inclusive offerings to liberal integrations.
2. Marketing automation platforms have become the must-have hub of the B2B MarTech stack. Almost every marketing system or tool is connected in some way to marketing automation platforms. It’s the first major tech investment any B2B marketing team makes (CRM is a sales technology). This wasn’t inevitable — it was a consequence of timing, a keen understanding of industry trends and market developments, and just great marketing.
3. MarTech has and continues to gradually consume the AdTech space. Advertising technology was once on an island of its own, far removed from the desktops of marketers. It was something B2B marketing orgs handed off to their agencies to deal with, which explains why the pricing model was usually based on media-spend rather than subscriptions. But as marketers’ MarTech skills have grown, their AdTech hesitation has abated, and AdTech vendors have seen this as a prime opportunity to rebrand themselves marketing technology (which garners them better valuations). This wasn’t trickery — marketers have welcomed this (if not fully encouraged it) because it further increases control of the customer’s digital experience. And as with all marketing tech, advertising and other digital experience solutions are fully integratable with marketing automation platforms.

All Digital Experience Roads Lead to Marketing Automation

Digital experiences used to be thought of in a very compartmentalized way. Ads were handled by agencies and were mostly used for brand lift, having little impact on marketers’ efforts. Social was a tangential concern as well — one that a millennial intern could deal with. SEO has always been important, but just as a source of website traffic.

Now all these external digital experiences and more are seen as demand-driving vehicles that also enable the acquisition of prospective-customer data. Digital experiences aren’t only coordinated but also tracked to inform the subsequent sequence of digital interactions, whether via website landing pages, email or further advertising and social channels.

And at the center of all these interactions is the marketing automation platform.

It’s for this reason that the next evolution of digital marketing will witness the rise of tech solutions that help marketing automation platforms orchestrate all these digital experiences in highly sophisticated, continuously evolving ways.

This story was delivered to BI Intelligence "Fintech Briefing" subscribers. To learn more and subscribe, please click here.

The equity research arm of the bank released a note last week that reiterated the potential benefits of blockchain technology for financial services and outlined which global banks are well positioned to take advantage of the technology.

Credit Suisse noted that blockchain technology can help banks cut costs, better manage risk, more cheaply and easily achieve compliance, and target new sources of revenue. 

• Goldman Sachs. The bank sees blockchain as one of the most important developments in technology, according to Credit Suisse. It is well positioned to benefit from blockchain thanks to a combination of significant investment in technology, an open minded approach to innovation, and select investments in blockchain startups, including payments firm Circle. Goldman Sachs was one of the founding members of the R3 consortium which aims to investigate and develop blockchain-based solutions for use in financial services. 
• JPMorgan. Like Goldman, JPMorgan's significant spend on technology and related talent put it in a good position to benefit from blockchain, according to Credit Suisse. It has been testing a blockchain based system to make USD transfers between London and Tokyo since February this year, which could start being used for live transactions later this year. JPMorgan is also a member of R3, the Hyperledger Project, an non-profit organization dedicated to blockchain based collaboration, and has invested blockchain startup Digital Asset Holdings. 
• Santander. The Spanish bank 's VC arm has invested in blockchain-based startups Ripple, Elliptic, and Digital Asset Holdings. It's currently testing a cross-border payments app based on the technology. However, Credit Suisse notes that the bank likely has more pressing concerns in the form of profitability issues.This means it will likely take longer for Santander to reap the benefits of its blockchain strategy. 

Blockchain technology, which is best known for powering Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, is gaining steam among finance firms because of its potential to streamline processes and increase efficiency. The technology could cut costs by up to $20 billion annually by 2022, according to Santander.

That's because blockchain, which operates as a distributed ledger, has the ability to allow multiple parties to transfer and store sensitive information in a space that’s secure, permanent, anonymous, and easily accessible. That could simplify paper-heavy, expensive, or logistically complicated financial systems, like remittances and cross-border transfer, shareholder management and ownership exchange, and securities trading, to name a few. And outside of finance, governments and the music industry are investigating the technology’s potential to simplify record-keeping.

As a result, venture capital firms and financial institutions alike are pouring investment into finding, developing, and testing blockchain use cases. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, have begun researching the technology in-house, or have helped fund startups with products rooted in blockchain. 

Jaime Toplin, research associate for BI Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service, has compiled a detailed report on blockchain technology that explains how blockchain works, why it has the potential to provide a watershed moment for the financial industry, and the different ways it could be put into practice in the coming years.

Here are some key takeaways from the report:

• Spending on capital markets applications of blockchain is expected to grow at a 52% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) through 2019, according to Aite Group, to reach $400 million that year.
• Banks and major financial institutions are working both collaboratively and independently to develop blockchain tech. Over 50 major financial institutions are involved with collaborative blockchain startups, like R3 CEV or Chain. And many are investing in the technology on their own as well.
• Putting blockchain to use for real-world transactions is likely not that far off. If working groups' tests are successful, firms could be using it to transact real value as early as the end of this year and we could see widespread industry application within the next few years. 

In full, the report:

• Examines the funding increases that are pouring into blockchain
• Assesses why blockchain is becoming so popular and what factors are driving up increased research and development
• Explains in full how blockchain technology work and what assets make it valuable and vulnerable
• Identifies pain points in the financial industry and profiles how various firms are using blockchain to solve them
• Demonstrates the challenges to mainstream adoption and their potential solutions

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

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

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

 

Join the conversation about this story »

Being book smart is good. The outcome of book smart is rarely better for analytics practitioners then folks trying to learn how to fly an airplane from how-to books.

Hence, I have been obsessed with encouraging you to get actual data to learn from. This is all the way from Aug 2009: Web Analytics Career Advice: Play In The Real World! Or a subsequent post about how to build a successful career: Web Analytics Career Guide: From Zero To Hero In Five Steps. Or compressing my experience into custom reports and advanced segments I've shared.

The problem for many new or experienced analysts has been that they either don't have access to any dataset (newbies) or the data they have access to is finite or from an incomplete or incorrect implementation (experienced). For our Market Motive Analytics training course, we provide students with access to one ecommerce and one non-ecommerce site because they simply can't learn well enough from my magnificent videos. The problem of course is that not everyone is enrolling our course! :)

All this context is the reason that I am really, really excited the team at Google has decided to make a real-world dataset available to everyone on planet Earth (and to all intelligent life forms in the universe that would like to learn digital analytics).

The data belongs to the Google Merchandise Store, where incredibly people buy Google branded stuff for large sums of money (average order value: $115.67, eat your heart out Amazon!). And, happily, it has almost all of the Google Analytics features implemented correctly. This gives Earth's residents almost all the reports we would like to look at, and hence do almost all the analysis you might want to do in your quest to become an Analysis Ninja. (Deepak, would you kindly add Goal Values for the Goals. Merci!) You'll also be able to create your own custom reports, advanced segments, filters, share with the world everything you create, and all kinds of fun stuff.

For consultants and opinion makers you no longer have to accept any baloney peddled to you about what analytics tool is the best or better fit for your company/client. Just get access to this data and play with the actual GA account along with Adobe and IBM and WebTrends et. al. and suddenly your voices/words will have 10x more confidence informed by real-world usage. No NDA's to sign, no software to install, no IT resources required. Awesome, right?

In this post I'll highlight some of my favourite things you can do, and learn from, in the Store dataset. Along the way I'll share some of my favourite metrics and analytics best practices that should accelerate your path to becoming a true Analysis Ninja. I've broken the post into these sections:

I'm sure you are as excited as I am to just get going. Let's go!

How to get Store Dataset Access?

It is brilliantly easy.

Go to the Analytics Help Demo Account page. Read the bit in the gray box titled Important. Digest it.

Then click on this text: ––>ACCESS DEMO ACCOUNT<––

Looks scary in the all caps, right? That is just how the Google Analytics team rolls. :)

You'll see a tab open, urls will flip around, in two seconds you'll see something like this on your Accounts page…

Click on 1 Master View and you are in business.

If you ever want to remove access to this real-world data, just go back to the page above and follow the five simple steps to self-remove access.

Jump-Start Your Learning.

You can start with all the standard reports, but perhaps the fastest way for you to start exploring the best features is to download some of the wonderful solutions in the Google Analytics Solutions Gallery.

You'll find my Occam's Razor Awesomeness bundle there as well.

It is a collection of advanced segments, custom reports, and dashboards. You'll have lots of features incorporated in them. You can customize them to suit your needs, or as you learn more, but you won't have to start with a blank slate.

You can also search for other stuff, like custom reports or attribution models.

Another tip. If you are a complete newbie (welcome to our world!), you probably want to start your journey by reading about each type of report, and then looking at the Overview report in each section in Google Analytics. At this point you'll be a little confused about some metric or the other. That's ok. Go, read one of the best pages in the Analytics help center: Understanding Dimensions and Metrics. Go back into GA, you'll understand a whole lot more.

This is a beginner's advanced guide, so I'm going to do something different. Through my favourite reports, often hard to find in your company's GA dataset, I'm going to push you beyond other beginner's guides. I'll also highlight frameworks, metrics, custom reports, and other elements I feel most Analyst's don't poke around enough.

1. Play with Enhanced Ecommerce Reports.

It is a source of great sadness for me that every single site is not taking advantage of Enhanced Ecommerce tracking and analysis . It is a complete rethink of ecommerce analysis. The kind of reports and metrics you'll get straight out of the box are really amazing.

Go to the Reporting section of our Store Demo account, click on Conversions in the left nav, then Ecommerce, and now Overview. You'll see in an instant the very cool things you can track and analyze…

With a little bit of smart tagging you can track your internal promotions (buy one Make America Great Again hat and get one Stronger Together hat free!), transactions with coupon codes, affiliate sales and more. Very nicely summarized above.

Next go to the report with new things that will help you drive smarter merchandizing on your mobile and desktop websites. Go to Shopping Analysis and click on Shopping Behavior…

I adore this report.

Most of the time when we do funnel analysis we start at the Cart stage (third bar above). We rarely hold people responsible for Traffic Acquisition accountable, we rarely hold people responsible for Site Design and Merchandizing accountable. The former are promoted on silly metrics like Visits or Visitors or (worse) Clicks. The latter are promoted based on silly metrics like PageViews.

The first bar to the second shows the number of visits during which people went from general pages on your website to product pages (places were there is stuff to be sold, add to cart buttons). A lame 26%. See what I mean. Insightful. How are you going to make money if 74% of the visits don't even see a product page!

The second bar the third is even more heart-breaking, as if that were possible. Of the sessions with pages with product views, how many added something to cart. A lousy 17%. One. Seven. Percent! On a site were you can do nothing except buy things.

See what I mean? Question time for your Acquisition, Design and Merchandizing team.

Do you know answers like these for your website? That is why you need Enhanced Ecommerce.

I won't cover the last two bars, most of you are likely over indexing on funnel analysis.

Practice segmentation while you are here. Click on + Add Segment on top of this report, choose Google (or whatever interests you)…

And you can analyze acquisition performance with a unique lens (remember you can't segment the funnel that exists in the old ecommerce reports which is still in your GA account!)…

A little better. Still. You spend money on SEO and PPC. It should be a lot better than this. If this were your data, start with questioning your PPC landing page strategy and then move to looking at your top SEO landing pages, and then look at bounce rates and next page analysis for those that stay.

I can honestly spend hours on just this report digging using segmentation (geo, media, new and loyal customers, all kinds of traffic, product page types and so on). It has been a great way to immediately influence revenue for my ecommerce engagements.

While you are here, you can play and learn to use the new funnel report… it is called Checkout Behavior Analysis…

Much simpler, so much easier to understand.

You can also, FINALLY, segment this report as well. Try it when you are in the Store demo account.

Take a break. A couple days later come back and checkout the new Product Performance and Product List Performance reports. The latter is particularly useful as an aggregated view for senior executives. In case of the Store data, the first report has 500 rows of data, the second just 45. Nice.

I wanted to flag three metrics to look at in the Product Performance report.

Product Refund Amount is $0.00 in this dataset, but for your company this is a great way to track refunds you might have issued and track were more of that is happening.

I love Cart-To-Detail Rate (product adds divided by views of product details) and Buy-to-Detail Rate (unique purchases divided by views of product-detail pages). Remember I was so upset above about the poor merchandizing. Using the sorting option on these two columns I identify where the problem is worse and where I can learn lessons from. Very cool, try it.

I could keep going on about more lovely things you'll find in the Enhanced Ecommerce reports, but let me stop here and have you bump into those cool things as, and I can say this now, you have access to this data as well!

Bonus: If you are a newbie, in your interview you'll be expected to know a lot about Goals (I call the micro-outcomes). Explore that section. Look the Overview, Goal URLs and Smart Goals. Ignore the eminently useless Reverse Goal Path report (I don't even know why this is still in GA after years of uselessness) and Funnel Visualization (almost totally useless in context of almost all Goals).

2. Gain Attribution Modeling Savvy.

My profound disdain for last-click reporting/analysis is well known. If you are using last-click anything, you want your company to make bad decisions. See. Strong feelings.

Yet, many don't have access to a well set-up account to build attribution modeling savvy and take their company's analytics the year 2013. Now, you can!

I am big believer in evolution (hence my marketing and analytics ladders of awesomeness). Hence, start by looking at the Assisted Conversions report (Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels)…

Then metric you want to get your company used to first, to get them ready for savvier attribution anything, is the metric Assisted Conversions. The last column.

Here's the official definition: A value close to 0 indicates that this channel functioned primarily as the final conversion interaction. A value close to 1 indicates that this channel functioned equally in an assist role and as the final conversion interaction. The more this value exceeds 1, the more this channel functioned in an assist role .

Now scroll just a bit back up, stare at that column, what would your strategy be for Organic Search if it is at 0.46? What about Display advertising driving which plays primarily an "upper funnel" introducing your brand to prospects 1.58?

The change required based on this data is not just your marketing portfolio re-allocation, that is almost trivial, what' bigger, huger, crazy-harder is changing how your company thinks. It is painful. Largely because it quickly becomes about how people's budgets/egos/bonuses. But, hundreds of conversions are on the line as well on insights you'll get from this data. Learn how to use this metric to drive those two changes: marketing portfolio – people thinking.

Couple bonus learnings on this report.

On top of the table you'll see text called Primary Dimension. In that row click on Source/Medium. This is such a simple step, yet brings you next layer of actionable insights so quickly. You'll see some surprises there.

Second, look at the top of the report, you'll see a graph. On to top right of the graph you'll see three buttons, click on the one called Days before Conversion…

I love this report because it helps me understand the distribution of purchase behavior much better. I profoundly dislike averages, they hide insights. This report is the only place you can see distribution of days to purchase for Assisted Conversions.

If you've changed the think in your company with Assisted Conversions… You are ready for the thing that gets a lot of press… Attribution Modeling!

You'll find the report here: Conversions > Attribution > Model Comparison.

You'll see text called Select Model next to Last Interaction. Click on the drop down, ignore all the other models, they are all value deficient, click on the only one with decent-enough value, Time Decay, this is what you'll see…

Half of you reading this post are wondering why I don't like your bff First-Interaction (it is likely the worst one on the list btw) or your bff Linear (the laziest one on the list)… worry not, checkout this post: Multi-Channel Attribution Modeling: The Good, Bad and Ugly Models .

The column you are of course looking at is % Change in Conversions. The GA team is also helping you out by helping you understand where the results are significant, green and red arrows, and where it is directional, up or down gray arrows.

This is the data you'll use to drive discussions about a change in your marketing $$$ allocations.

Where you have CPA, it is is an even more valuable signal. And, such a blessing that the Store demo account has that data for you.

You'll need all your brain power to understand the report above (make sure you read the models post above), and then some more to drive the change in how your company thinks. Attribution model is not a software or math problem, it is an entrenched human minds problem.

And because I'm the author of the quote all data in aggregate is crap I recommend scrolling up a bit in the attribution modeling report and clicking on the down arrow under the word Conversion….

This is admittedly an advanced thing to learn because even understanding marketing dollars plus user behavior overall is hard, this just makes it a bit more complicated because you can actually understand those two things for every goal you have individually or just ecommerce all by itself.

It is incredibly awesome to be able to do that because now you are this super-data-intelligent-genius that can move every variable in a complex regression equation very finely to have max impact on your company.

If you can master this, and IF you can evolve how your company does marketing portfolio allocation and how it thinks, then you are ready for the max you can do in Google Analytics when it comes to attribution… custom attribution modeling.

On top of the table, click on Select Model, then Create New Custom Model.

To get you going, here's one of my models for a client…

Custom attribution models are called custom because they are custom to every company. It requires an understanding for everything I've requested you to do above, business priorities (what the business values), and business strategy.

Creating a couple different custom attribution models, seeing how it affects the data, what decisions GA recommends, helps you have an intelligent argument with all your stake holders. Again, the decisions from this analysis will flow into changes to your marketing portfolio and how people in your company think.

Once you get into custom attribution modeling, and you spend serious amount of money on marketing online (a few million dollars at least), you are ready for the thing that actually will drive the best changes: Controlled Experiments (aka media mix modeling). Hence, it is critical that you approach your learnings in the precise steps above, don't jump steps if at one of them you have not changed how your company thinks.

Bonus 1: You might think the above is plenty advanced. It is not. For the higher order bits, when you are all grown up, read this post and internalize the implications of it: Multi-Channel Attribution: Definitions, Models and a Reality Check

Bonus 2: The Time Lag and Path Length reports in your Multi-Channel Funnels folder are extremely worth learning about. I like Path Length more, more insightful. When you analyze the data, be sure to play with the options under Conversion, Type (click AdWords), Interaction Type and Lookback Window. With each step absorb the patterns that'll emerge in the data. Priceless.

3. Learn Event Tracking's Immense Value

I'm very fond of Event Tracking for one simple reason. You have to create it from scratch. When you open GA, there is no data in these reports. It can only get there if you spend time trying to understand what's important to the business (Digital Marketing and Measurement Model FTW!), what is really worth tracking, and then through intelligent thought implementing the tracking.

I love the fact that you have to literally create data from scratch. For any beginner who is trying to get to advanced, Event Tracking will teach you a lot not just about Event Tracking but creating smart data.

Lucky for us the GA team has created some data for us to play with. Go to Behavior in the left nav, then Events, and then Top Events… This is what you'll see…

The Store team is capturing four events, you can drill down into any one of them to get a deeper peek into user behavior.

I choose Contact Us to analyze the Event Labels, I get all these strategies that people…

It would be valuable if the Event Value had been populated, which would also give us Avg. Value in the table above. Still. Understand that data, how it is collected, what it implies about user behavior is incredibly valuable.

You can also create an advanced segment for any of the events above, example Email. Then, you can apply that segment to any of other reports in Google Analytics and really get deep insights. What cities originate people who call is on the phone? What sites did they come from? How many visits have they made to the site before calling? So on and so forth.

The event tracking reports have three options on top of the report. Event, Site Usage, Ecommerce.

Try the Ecommerce tab…

While we did not see any event values, you can tie the sessions where the events were fired with outcomes on the site. Really useful in so many cases where you invest in special content, rich media, interactive elements, outbound links, merchandizing strategies etc. This report, in those cases, will have data you need to make smarter decisions faster.

Bonus: While you are in the Behavior section of Analytics, familiarize yourself with the Site Speed report. Start with the scorecard in the overview report. Move on to Page Timings to find the pages that might be having issues. One cool and helpful visual is Map Overlap, click the link on top of the graph on the Page Timings report. Close with the Speed Suggestions report. Your IT team needs this data for getting things fixed. Your SEO team can do the begging, if required. :)

4. Obsess, Absolutely Obsess, About Content

It is a source of intense distress for me that there's an extraordinary obsession about traffic acquisition (PPC! Affiliates! Cheat Sheet for Video Ads!), and there is huge obsession with outcomes (Conversion Rate! Revenue!), there is such little attention paid to the thing that sits in the middle of those two things: Content!!

Very few people deeply look at content. Yes, there will be a top pages report or top landing pages report. But, that is barely scratching the surface.

Look. If you suck at content, the greatest acquisition strategy will deliver no outcomes.

Obsess about content dimensions and content metrics.

Since you know some of the normal reports already, let me share with you a report that works on many sites (sadly not all), that not many of you are using.

The Content Drilldown report uses the natural folder structure you are using on your website (if you are) and then aggregates content on those folders to show you performance. Here is what you'll see in the Store demo account you are using…

Nice, right? You are pretty much seeing all of the content consumption behavior in the top ten rows!

A pause though. This report is sub-optimally constructed. It shows Pageviews (good), Unique Pageviews (great) and then three metrics that don't quite work as well: Average Time on Page, Bounce Rate, % Exit (worst metric in GA btw if anyone asks in an interview)…

At a folder level these really help provide any decent insights, and might not even make any sense. Think about it. Bounce Rate for a folder?

Good time for you to learn simple custom reporting.

On top of the report, right under the report title, you'll see a button called Customize. Press it. Choose more optimal metrics, and in a few seconds you'll have a report that you like.

This is the one I created for my use with valu-added content metrics that work better: Average Session Duration, Cart-to-Detail Rate (as it is an ecommerce site) and Page Value (to capture both ecom and goal values at a page level)…

Much better, right? Would you choose a different metric? Please share it via comments below.

Ok. Unpause.

Even a quick eyeballing of the report above already raises great questions related to overall content consumption (Unique Pageviews), merchandizing (Cart-to-Detail Rate) and of course money.

You can now easily drill-down to other more valuable bits of content and user experience.

I click on the first one, most content consumption, to reveal the next level of detail. I can see that Apparel is the biggest cluster of content, with pretty decent Cart-to-Detail Rate…

Depending on the business priorities I can ask questions like how come the summer olympic games stuff no one seems to want (and we spent $140 mil on an Olympics sponsorship, kidding).

At the moment the company has a huge investment in Google Maps branding, so we can look at how various brands are doing… YouTube FTW!

Maps is not doing so well. You can see how this data might make you curious if this list is what your business strategy is expecting will happen? Or, is this how we prioritize content creation? I mean, Go! People are interested in something esoteric like Go (programming language in case you are curious) rather than Nest! What a surprise.

That is what this type of content analysis is so good at.

You can continue to follow the rabbit hole by the way and get down to the individual pages in any folder, like so…

Ten percent Cart-to-Detail Rate is pretty poor, compared to some of the others above. Time to rethink if we should even be selling this combo! If not that, definitely time to look at the page and rethink copy, images, design, and other elements to improve this key metric.

The above custom report is really easy to create, for Subscribers of my newsletter I'll also email a downloadable link for this and other custom reports below.

Bonus: Most people stop at what the reports show in the default view. The GA team does a great job of adding good think and express it all over the standard reports. For example, in context of our discussion here, try the Content Grouping primary dimension. Here you see what happens to the report when I switch to Brands (Content Group)…

Even more useful than what was there before, right? So, how does GA get this data? As in the case of Event Tracking above, the Analyst and business decision making combination are thoughtfully manufacturing data. In this case using the immensely valuable Content Groupings feature. Invest in learning how to use it in the Store demo account, learn how to create content groupings to manufacture useful data. When you interview for higher level Analytics role, or for a first time Analyst role, you'll stand out in the interview because this is hard and requires a lot of business savvy (ironic right, you stand out because of your business savvy in a Data Analyst interview!).

5. SEO & PPC, Because You Should!

Ok, you've waited long enough, time to talk about the thing you likely spend a ton of time on: Acquisition.

Since you likely already know how to report Traffic Source and how to find the Referring URLs and Sessions and… all the normal stuff. Let me focus on two things that are a bit more advanced, and will encourage you to learn things most people likely ignoring.

The first one I want you to immerse yourself in when you are in the Store data is Search Engine Optimization. You know that this is hard because when you go to Acquisition > Campaigns (what!) > Organic Keywords you will see that 95% are labeled "(not provided)". This report is completely useless.

You do have other options to analyze SEO performance. Here's the advanced, advanced, lesson: Search: Not Provided: What Remains, Keyword Data Options, the Future.

But, you also have some ability in Google Analytics itself to do keyword level analysis for Google's organic search traffic. Go to Acquisition > Search Console > Queries. This report shows you the top thousands of keywords (4,974 precisely today in the Store report today). The data is available because the team has configured the Search Console data to connect with GA.

Here's what you'll see…

I sort the data by Clicks, because Impressions is a lot less valuable, and with Clicks I get something closer to Sessions (though they are very different metrics). I immediately value CTR as a metric in this context, you can see the variations above. This is perfect immediate data for SEO discussions.

Average Position is also interesting, perhaps more so for my peers in the SEO team. As a Business Analyst I value Average Position a lot less in a world of hyper-personalized search.

My next data analysis step is to take this data out of GA (click Export on top of the report) and play with it to find macro patterns in the data. I'll start with something simple as creating tag clouds, using Clicks or CTR as contextual metrics. I'll classify each keyword by intent or other clusters to look for insights.

Try these strategies, can you find weaknesses in the Google Store's SEO strategy? How do your insights compare to what you just discovered in the content analysis in terms of what site visitors actually want? Really valuable stuff.

What you cannot do with this data is tie it to the rest of the data in GA for these visitors. You cannot get conversions for example, or Page Depth etc. This is heart-breaking. But, see the not provided post I've linked to above for more strategies and meanwhile you can do some cool things in Google Analytics when it comes to SEO.

Bonus: In the Search Console reports, I also find the Landing Pages report is also helpful because you can flip the center of universe, for the same metrics as above, to landing pages rather than keywords. The insights you get will be helpful for your SEO team but more than that it will be critical for your site content team.

A quick note on the above… for the current data you'll see the Landing Pages report looks a little weird with no data in the Behavior and Conversion columns. Something weird is going on, on my other accounts there is data. The team can fix this in the very near future.

Next, spend a lot of time in the AdWords section.

Both because Paid Search if often a very important part of any company's acquisition strategy, and because at the moment there are few digital acquisition channels as sophisticated and complex as AdWords. When you are getting ready for your interviews, being good at this, really good, is a great way to blow your interviewer away because most people will know only superficial stuff about AdWords.

As if those reasons were not enough, in Google Analytics AdWords is a great place to get used to the complexity that naturally arises from mixing two data sources. In almost all GA AdWords reports the first cluster of data (pink below) will come from AdWords and the second cluster (green brace) is the normal collection of metrics you see in GA…

This will naturally prod you into trying to understand why are Clicks different from Sessions? After-all it is a click that kicks off a session in GA when the person arrives. It is internalizing these subtle nuances that separate a Reporting Squirrel from an Analysis Ninja.

Above view is from the Campaigns report. I usually start there as it gives me great insights into the overall PPC strategy for the company.

While you are learning from this report, here's a little smart tip… Click on the Clicks link on top of the graph you see (you'll see it along with Summary, Site Usage, Goal Set 1, and Ecommerce), you'll get a different set of metrics you should know intimately as well…

The combination of CPC and RPC is very important. It is nice that they are right next to each other in this view.

When you look at Store data I also want you to live-see why ROAS not even remotely a useful metric. It looks alluring. Return On Ad Spend. That sounds so awesome, surely it is in some holy books! No. It is not.

For now, invest in understanding what is is measuring, what the data shows, is that good or bad, and what's missing. When you already to move to advanced-advanced stage, read this post: Excellent Analytics Tip #24: Obsess About Real Business Profitability

Once I've exhausted the value in Campaign reports (drilling-up, drilling-down, drilling-around), it is time to shift into detail. While it might seem that the very next step will be the AdWords Keyword report, it is not. I like going to the Search Query report first.

In AdWords context, Keyword is what you buy from Google. Search Query on the other hand is what people are actually typing into Google when your search ad shows up (triggered by the Keyword of course).

Here are the two reports from the Store account, you can clearly see why I like starting with the Search Query report….

I would much rather learn to anchor on what people are typing and then go into the Keyword view to see what I can learn there. The Search Query performance report helps me re-think my AdGroups, Match Types, bidding strategies and more. It also helps me optimize the landing pages, both from a content they contain and what ads I recommend send traffic there.

You could spend three months in these reports just learning and finessing your PPS savvy, so I'll leave you to that. :)

Bonus: Shopping Campaigns are incredibly successful for most ecommerce properties. Spend time in that report in the AdWords section, drilling-down and segmenting, to learn what makes these campaigns distinct and if you were tasked to identify insights how would you go about it.

6. Develop a Smarter Understanding of Your Audiences

Having grown up on cookies, we have typically have had a finite understanding of our audiences. This has slowly changed over time, most recently with the awesomeness of User-ID override empowering us to understand a person. Still, most of the time we are not great at digging into Audiences, and their associated behavior.

Hence, to assist with your evolution from beginner to advanced, three often hidden areas of Google Analytics for you to explore now that you have access to real data.

Go to Audience > Interests > In-Market Segments.

Here's the official definition of what you are looking at: Users in these segments are more likely to be ready to purchase products or services in the specified category. These are users lower in the purchase funnel, near the end of the process.

I've developed an appreciation of this report as I think of my performance marketing strategies, especially the ones tied to Display advertising. Far too often we rely on just PPC or email and don't use Display in all of the clever ways possible. This repor, leveraging insights from my users, help me understand how to do smarter Display.

You can drill down to Age by clicking on the in-market segment you are interested in, and from there for each Age group you can drill-down to gender.

Per normal your goal is to identify the most valuable ones using micro and macro-outcomes for your business.

After I've mastered in-market segments by adding near term revenue to my company and helping shift the thinking about Display in my company, I move to leverage the data in the Affinity Categories. Also a report in this section. Affinity categories are great for any display or video advertising strategies you have to build audiences around See Intent (See – Think – Do – Care Business Framework). A bit more advanced from a marketing perspective (you would have had to master strategy #2, attribution, above).

For the second hidden area, go to Audience > User Explorer.

This lovely beast shows something you think you are dying to see. It is also something I really don't want you to obsess about (except if you are a tech support representative). But you want it. So. Here it is…

What you are looking at is a report that shows you the behavior of an individual user on your website, as identified by an anonymous Client-ID. You can loosely think of it as a person, though it is more complicated that. If you have implemented User-ID override (congratulations, you deserve a gold star!), then you areas close to a person as you'll ever be.

Because this is everyone on your website, there is no wrong place to start and a hundred thousand terrible places to waste time. You can literally watch each person! See, what I mean when I say I don't want you to get obsessed about this?

On the rarest of rare occasions I look at this report, my strategy is to understand the behavior of "Whales", people who spend loads of money on our website (why!). I sort the above report by Revenue, and then look over the users who form the first few rows. The data, fi you do it in the Store account for the person who's at the top at the moment, looks like this…

The report is sorted from the last hit (08:16 above) to the first hit (which you don't see above, the person browsed a lot!). You can quite literally watch the behavior, over just five minutes, that lead to an order of $2,211.38! You surely want to know what this person purchased (Men's Cotton Shifts FTW!), what pages did they see, where did they come from, how did they go back and forth (this person did) and so on and so forth.

Looking at the top few of these Whales might help know something about a product merchandizing strategy, a unique source, or how to change your influence with your acquisition strategy to get a few more of these people. There will always only be handful of folks.

The higher order bit is that the best analytical strategy is to analyze micro-segments rather than individuals. Small groups with shared attributes. You can action these, at scale. Nothing in your marketing, site content delivery, servicing at the moment has the capacity to react to an individual's behavior in real time. And if you can, you don't have enough visitors. Hence, obsess about micro-segments. That is a profitable strategy.

The spirit above is also the reason why I don't mention real-time reporting in this guide. Simply not worth it. (For more, see #4: A Big Data Imperative: Driving Big Action)

For the third hidden area, ok, not so hidden but to expose all your analytical talent, go to Audience > Mobile > Devices.

With greater than 50% of your site traffic coming from mobile platforms, this audience report obviously deserves a lot of attention (in addition to segmenting every single report for Mobile, Desktop, Tablet).

The problem is that the report actually looks like this…

It is poorly constructed with repetitive metrics, and an under-appreciation for mobile user behavior (why the emphasis on Do outcomes when Mobile has primarily a See-Think intent clusters?). It makes for poor decision making.

So. Time to practice your custom reporting skills. (Oh, if you as an Analyst only use custom reports, you are closer to being an Analysis Ninja.)

Scroll back to the top of the Mobile Devices report and click on the Customize button. On the subsequent page, pick the metrics you best feel will give you insights into Acquisition, Behavior and Outcomes. While you are at it, you'll see just one dimension in this report, Mobile Device Info, you can add other drill-down dimensions you might find to be of value. I added Screen Resolution (matters so much) and then Page (to analyze each Page's performance by resolution).

Here's what the report's Summary view looks like for me…

Nice, right? Smarter, tighter, more powerful.

My obsession is with people on mobile devices and not just the visits. Hence Users come first. Then, paying homage to See and Think intent, my focus is on Pages/Session. For the same reason, my choice for success is goals and Per Session Value (ideally I would use Per Session Goal Value, but as you saw in the opening this account does not have Goal Values). I would delete the Revenue, it is there mostly in case your boss harassed you. Delete it later.

Depending on the role, Acquisition, Behavior or Outcomes, I have everything I need to start my mobile analysis journey.

As I recommended with AdWords analysis above, the tabs on top of the report hold more analytical insights for you…

You will discover that you'll have to go and practice your custom reporting skills on all these tabs as there are sub-optimal elements on all three of them. For example with Site Usage, I added Think intent metrics. For Goals and Ecommerce tabs there are fewer and more focused metrics. Now almost all of the stuff I need to make smarter decisions from my mobile data is in one place.

This exercise requires a lot of introspection and understanding business needs as well as what analysis makes sense. That is how we all move from Reporting Squirrels to Analysis Ninjas! :)

As with the above custom report, I'll email a downloadable link to the Subscribers of my newsletter The Marketing – analytics Intersect. You can contrast your choices with my choice of metrics and dimensions.

Bonus: If you present screenshots from GA to your management team, make sure you take advantage of the option to show two BFF trends. In my case above you can see I choose to pair mobile Sessions with Goal Completions (again to put the stress on See – Think intent).

7. Icing on the Cake: Benchmarking!

One final beginner's advanced recommendation.

You just finished looking at a whole bunch of mobile metrics. How do you know if the performance of the Google Merchandizing Store is good or bad? Yes, you do see trends of past performance. But, how about with others in your industry? Others who have your type and size of website?

I've convinced that most of the time without that competitive / ecosystem context, Analysis Ninjas are making incomplete decisions.

The cool thing is, you can get benchmarking data in Google Analytics.

Audience > Benchmarking > Devices.

And now you have a really strong sense for what is good performance and what is non-good performance…

You might have come to one set of conclusions doing the analysis in the mobile section above, and I suspect that now you have very different priorities with the lens pulled back to how the ecosystem is doing.

And, that's the beauty.

There's a lot more you can do with benchmarking. You can explore the advanced-advanced version here when you are ready: Benchmarking Performance: Your Options, Dos, Don'ts and To-Die-Fors!

I hope you have fun.

That is it. A beginner's advanced guide that hopefully accelerates your journey to become an Analysis Ninja.

As always, it is your turn now.

Have already gotten access to the Store demo account? What elements recommended above had you not explored yet? Which ones do you find most easy/frustrating to get actionable insights from? Are there strategies that you use as an Analysis Ninja that are not covered above?

Please share your recommendations, frustrations, :), joyous strategies and guidance with all of us via comments below.

Thank you.

Be Real-World Smart: A Beginner's Advanced Google Analytics Guide is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

A look at marketing through the lens of economics

I wouldn't call Mark Ritson a hero of mine, that'd be far too lame and I'm sure he'd laugh at me if he found out. But I think he makes some rather important points and I tend to sit up and listen whenever he has something to say.

Recently he has been bemoaning the 'tactification of marketing', which I think is an important enough issue to warrant making up the word 'tactification'. Marketers are increasingly distracted by the latest 'shiny object', and go chasing after it. This leaves them with less time, inclination and ability to sit down and think long and hard about the things which really make marketing campaigns successful; proper research, segmentation, positioning and strategy. The result is to dumb down the discipline and open the door to a whole host of people who are great communicators to call themselves marketers, but wouldn't know their brand equity from their market orientation. This has recently led Ritson to bemoan not just the tactification of marketing, but also the fact most alleged 'marketing experts' have no formal marketing qualifications. His fairly reasonable point was that you wouldn't expect expert economists or historians not to have degrees in the subjects of their purported expertise, it's strange we don't apply the same standards to 'expert marketers' who usually don't have formal marketing qualifications.

This point has stirred up plenty of controversy online, with a healthy and lively debate about whether marketing qualifications are really worth all that much. Whilst this debate is interesting, and I personally tend to think if you're good enough at marketing it doesn't really matter what qualification you've got, I sympathise with Ritson's position that the trend towards referring to people like Rand Fishkin (an SEO boffin), Gary Vannerchuck (A gobby guy with a camera) and Guy Kawasaki (A bloke who wrote a get rich quick book) as the best marketers around points to a tactification of marketing which is lamentable.

But the night is always darkest before the dawn, and as someone with a Masters degree in Economics (yep that's right, not marketing, shock horror), I wanted to start a bit of a cross-disciple love fest and show how economics can both explain the funk marketing currently find's itself in and shows how it will soon reach an inflection point and begin to change.

Why tactification?

It's one thing to criticise the tactification of marketing, or wistfully pine for the supposedly better days when marketers knew the 4Cs and the 6Ps and how to properly define their target market. But I think it's important to understand why it came about. Ritson explains it by basically saying marketers are being idiots being distracted by new tech, and would get better results if they listened to him and did marketing properly. I'm not so sure. I'm going to develop an alternative explanation.

Economics is concerned with building models of human behaviour relating to production and consumption. These ideas can be applied to the production and consumption of content. Once we understand why the tactification came about, we can build models to understand how the process will develop and predict it's future development.

Economics simplified the infinitely complex nature of human behaviour by thinking about people as 'homo economicus'. This essentially means we think of people as utility maximising rationalists. What does utility maximising mean? It means they will always take the route which requires the least effort to get the greatest possible gains. Whilst you can find plenty of people who aren't rational or don't always take the easiest route, when looking at human behaviour at large scale in economic models this conception of humans is fairly accurate and is needed to provide the foundation for building models of human behaviour.

Let's apply this concept to marketing. In the 'good old days' marketers had to reach people via print, outdoor ads, TV or if they were lucky a bit of PR. If their target audience was people working in financial services, they had to sit down and work out how to reach people in financial services. This meant market research, segmentation, positioning and executing a strategy to appeal to those people. Once it had all been worked out, you could place your ads in the FT or Telegraph and sit back and tot up the results. This required a fair bit of work, but there simply wasn't any other way to target people working in financial services. You didn't know their addresses, so couldn't direct mail them, you could take out TV ads but they wouldn't be well targeted so they'd be expensive, and billboards would suffer from the same problem. In short, this way of doing marketing offered the greatest returns for the least input at the time. In this model it was irrelevant the number of people reading the ad, the only metric which mattered was the number who then went to buy the product. This is an obvious point, but you'll see why it becomes important to the theory later.

How Google turned the world upside down

Google turned this on its head by bringing about the age of 'earned media'. Where once your only options were print, outdoor, TV or direct mail (all expensive) now you could do marketing for free! Not just do it for free, but get millions of views for free.

For almost all businesses (except FMCG) the most effective way of marketing your product suddenly became SEO. If you are going to change banks, get a mortgage, buy a car, buy a phone, book a holiday, what do you do? You Google it. Ranking top of keywords like say 'Ibiza holidays' organically suddenly meant you had an incredibly valuable source of leads that you would have to pay thousands of pounds a week for if it was a paid ad.

So the model changes. The utility maximising agent suddenly sees that SEO is the way to the greatest ROI, and so goes about trying everything they can do to boost their SEO. The nature of SEO itself means this completely changes the rules of the game. I'm sure Ritson disagrees about how important SEO is, and for FMCG brands he is probably right. But for a whole range of businesses it's hard to state just how critical it is. For Smart Insights we get over 80% of our traffic and revenue from organic search, this is absolutely enormous. The next biggest driver (be it social, PPC or any other tactic) just pales into comparison. It doesn't even drive 10% of the revenue as organic search.

'Good SEO' means ranking at the top of pages for certain keywords. The key metrics which decide where your site ranks for these keywords are links pointing to your site and the number of people visiting your site and for how long. The best way to cheaply get lots of links to your site? Encourage lots of visitors, that way people will see your site and if they then go and write something they're more likely to link to it. So the best way to rank is to attract more visitors, both because visits are a ranking factor, and because they indirectly lead to links, the most crucial ranking factor.

This means the best way to get more visitors is to get more visitors. Make sense?

Signalling and information a-symmetry

Now let me introduce another key concept from economics. Until the 70s, economics didn't really have anything to say about information a-symmetry. That all changed with the publication of what became one of the most important economics papers this century; 'The Market for Lemons' by George Akerlof, who went on to win a Noble prize.

The paper makes a simple point about information a-symmetry by looking at the used car market. Good used cars or 'peaches' are valuable to car dealers, who are willing to buy them for £1000. Used cars with hidden faults or 'lemons' are far less valued to car dealers, who would only buy them for £500. If a dealer can tell a lemon from a peach, then no problem. But a dealer can't always do this. The owner of the car knows every little thing wrong with the car because they drive it, but the dealer can't know for sure if there are certain defects or not. Assuming half of the cars on the market are lemons, a dealer should pay £750 for a car to hedge his or her bets. Sounds like a solution right? Except thanks to information a-symmetry it's not. If dealers offered £750 they would only end up with lemons, because the sellers who know they have a peach wouldn't accept £750 for a car they know is worth £1000, whilst the sellers with a lemon would happily sell a car worth £500 for £750. The concept of information a-sysmmetry turned the study of economics on it's head, and led economists how the problem of economics a-symmetry is countered in the real world. The answer is 'signalling'.

Signalling involves using certain things to prove worth so as to counter information a-symmetry. A worker knows if they're lazy or hardworking and self-motivated. But they can tell a prospective employer they're hardworking regardless of whether they really are or not. For an employer to choose between a line up of people all claiming they are hardworking and self-motivated, she turns to signals which might provide clues as to the real state of affairs. A good degree from a top university in history might show that a person is hardworking and self-motivated, because how else would they have got the degree? Knowing about history isn't remotely useful for the job, but it does signal a degree of worth to the employer because the employer knows getting the degree isn't easy. The qualification is thus a signal. It is not directly synonymous with the quality of the worker, but it is usually indicative of it.

Google works in the same way. Content creators know if their content is good or not, but because they are utility maximising agents they would always report their content to be the best, if Google let people rank content themselves. Therefore Google can't possibly use how good people say their content be a ranking factor, as it wouldn't help distinguish good from bad as all people would give their content the maximum possible score. Just like job applicants saying they are hardworking or car sellers claiming the gearbox works just fine. So like employers with job seekers, Google has to rely on signals. The signals Google use are links and visits, because they usually indicate good content. The content isn't necessarily good, it just has a better chance of being good if it displays those signals than content that doesn't. Just like how an employee with a good degree in history might still be a lazy sod, but generally if they managed to get the degree there probably less likely to be lazy than someone without one.

So what does this have to do with tactification? Well, in the old marketing, there was no point attracting people that were never going to buy your product. They might read your print ad or even enjoy your TV slot, but they didn't matter. In the new marketing attracting loads of people to your site who have nothing to do with your product still means you will rank higher for keywords which are searched by people who do see your product. Coming back to basic economic theory and applying the notion of utility maximising agents, the best way to attract more traffic (which will lead to higher positions in SERPs and thus more leads/sales) is to create content which appeals to the widest possible audience. Or as we also call it, the lowest common denominator. This creates a cycle where sites compete by creating content to appeal to the broadest possible audience. They do this because of the signals Google has to rely on to rank content.

I'm not saying all this 'lowest common denominator content' is always crap content. Far from it. Because SEO relies on visits (which are real humans, most of the time at least), writing crap content is always going to be a bad tactic. What I'm saying is the fact Google see's the value of every visitor as equal when using visits as a metric to assign a pages rank for a given keyword means marketers have to write content that appeals to lots of people, rather than just the exact few they actually want to buy stuff.

This rule applies within the discipline of marketing. If you're promoting your marketing consultancy or agency or whatever, you want to rank at the top of searches for 'marketing agency' etc. The best way to do this is to get lots of traffic. The best way to get lots of traffic is not to go and write amazingly detailed articles about marketing strategy which will be very useful and interesting to the CMOs of the top 500 companies in your country.

The best way is to write articles about tactics, like how to use Facebook, Twitter or the latest fad like Pokemon Go. These appeal to the millions of people with micro businesses or the thousands of  people working as junior execs in marketing departments up and down the country.

I experience this first hand every day as SmartInsights' blog editor. A brilliant article on applying behavioural economics to marketing might get shared a handful of times and not really be worth the time (hours and hours) spent researching and writing it. Where as a cheap and cheerful article with a clickbaity headline about 'Hacks to boost your Facebook engagement' or some other such nonsense that took 30 minutes to bash out gets shared 500 times. Marketers love of analytics then means we treat the cheap and cheerful options as far more valuable than the thoughtful and well researched one, and then as rational utility maximisers we stop bothering to research long thought pieces and instead focus on getting results by writing blogs called '34 mind blowing stats about memes'. I realise by taking my time to write this long thought piece I've just technically proven myself wrong, but I think it's indicative of a personal masochistic streak rather than anything wider.

Why this will change

Another key concept of economics is Schumpeterian 'creative destruction', where old business models are superseded by newer ones. This destroys the companies and jobs of old businesses, but creates new jobs and new companies, slowly building a more efficient economy and causing growth. Creative destruction is the key to understanding how developed economies grow. People often wrongly think of creative destruction as a new process synonymous with the digital revolution. But it's happened many many times throughout history. In 1800s America the vast majority of Americans were employed in agriculture. The industrial revolution destroyed 95% of those jobs, but unemployment didn't increase; the employment shifted to new jobs in industry. Similarly in many Western economies industry has been mostly automated, destroying the manual jobs which used to employ a big chunk of the workforce. Despite the destruction of these jobs Employment in the  UK and US is low, and near or at what economists call it's 'natural rate'.  My dad grew up wanting to be a coal miner. I make my living writing about digital marketing. We reinvent the world every generation.

Innovation is a constant and will continue to change business models. If you told someone  in rich and bustling 1950s Detroit the place would be a ghost town in 30 years, they'd have laughed you out of the room. It's like me saying in 30 years the rich hipsters of Silicon Valley will all be queuing for food stamps. We've established in this article a major flaw in how Google works to assign an article's relevance to users. It currently works using links and visitors as signals to establish the worth of an article (other things like keywords are also important). This is a flawed way of doing it, but the best available for now. I don't know how this will change in the future, if I did I'd be making the next Google right now. But I do know that change is a constant. Someone will find a way to make the quality of the information itself the key factor in searching for that information, rather than just factors which indirectly signal that the information is quality, like links and visits. Maybe it will use amazing powerful AI. Maybe it will have something to do with quantum computing. Maybe it'll be Google that will do it, maybe it will be a new start up. I don't know, but the change is coming. It's already beginning to happen with the increasing personalisation of content and factors like RankBrain being baked into the Google algorithm. It's only a matter of time before Google starts showing personalised results so the SERPs for a given keyword are different for every person based on what would be relevant to them.

Once it does, they'll be no need to create the lowest common dominator content to appeal to the largest possible audience. The rules of the game will change. The utility maximising rational agent will see there is no point writing articles about using Snapchat filters to get traffic and social shares, and will have to start doing proper research, defining their audiences and properly targeting them with content strategized to appeal just to them.

And when it does the people endlessly cranking out easy pieces on tactics are going to be in for a shock.

In June 2015, Margaret Magnarelli took the helm as managing editor of Monster, one of the most-visited career websites in the world. She was tasked with reestablishing the brand’s voice and reconnecting with its core audience of job seekers. To make that happen, she shifted resources and budget from outsourced agency relationships to in-house talent, and grew her staff from three to seven.

The results? So far, efforts have paid off in many ways:

• A 29% increase in page views per month over last year
• A nomination by Digiday as a finalist for Best In-House Content Brand Studio 2016
• A win in the best content marketing program from the Content Marketing Awards
• Strong support within her organization

Margaret is also one of CMI’s finalists for Content Marketer of the Year.

Margaret shares the top lessons she learned in her first year with Monster. These great ideas can work for anyone new to an organization or trying to build a new content marketing practice at an established company.

Be focused with your strategy, but leave room for flexibility

Covering something like the ever-changing labor market requires your content marketing strategy to be adaptable. In today’s job climate, for example, there’s a talent gap in certain sectors like technology and healthcare, says Margaret. For these industries, “There are more jobs available than people applying for those jobs, so it’s very hard for employers to find talent. We have to engage with audiences in those industries where the talent gap is the tightest,” she explains.

Of course, that example is only one small segment of the job-seeker audience. Margaret knew that Monster needed content broad enough to appeal to anyone looking for a job, as well as passive job seekers who are employed. At the same time, the site had to cater to groups segmented based on level of experience (i.e., new graduates, entry level, executive) and by industry.

As such, Margaret developed three pillars of content (and put an editor to lead each) to simultaneously rebrand Monster as a career-industry thought leader, while attracting qualified job seekers to connect them with relevant employment opportunities. Here’s how she breaks down the three pillars:

How – straightforward utility content used for search purposes and to fuel the company’s newsletters. “It’s the bread and butter of what we do. The stories come down to ‘how do I find a job,’ but we have to do it fresher and newer and different every time,” she says.

This pillar’s editor also works with an SEO agency (360i) to update and refresh the huge inventory of existing content on the site to boost rankings or have it qualify for Google’s quick-answers feature.

Now – thought leadership, focusing on news- and data-driven stories. Its editor and two staff writers focus on creating daily content. “The Now pillar shows that Monster has its finger on the pulse; that we know what’s happening right now in every aspect of the labor market,” says Margaret.

Writers scan headlines and look at what’s trending to see what they should be covering that relates to the job market. This team also uses Monster data and research to create articles about the companies, industries, and cities where hiring is happening. Monster’s syndication partners, including Fast Company and Fortune.com, tend to favor this sort of content, too.

Wow – where the fun happens. These pieces are meant to entertain and engage and are created with social sharing in mind. From infographics to quizzes, as well as a more recent push for video content, the Wow editor works closely with social and design teams to develop assets with viral-like qualities.

As for how it all comes together, Margaret runs a twice-weekly meeting with the whole team to figure out what should run, with the goal of delivering a diversified mix of the above pillars to satisfy newsletter needs, social media demand, PR campaigns, the news cycle, and reader interest. All told, her team churns out about 20 original pieces per week that are published on the Monster site. Everything published is promoted via Monster’s social channels, and then made available to syndication partners so regular discussions around distribution happen as well.

Serve one audience but help other business aspects

Although Margaret’s focus is on educating the job-seeker audience, she understands that Monster’s clients are the employers who list their jobs on the site. “The best content is what serves both the gods: the utility our consumers want and something that gets our company’s B2B message out.” As such, when there’s an opportunity to both attract job seekers and spotlight top-notch employer brands, it’s a win-win.

One good example of content that served the dual purpose of engaging the audience and satisfying Monster’s clients was the Best Companies for Veterans content package they created to run near Veterans Day last year. “We took a panel of experts in the field and had them nominate 100 companies,” she says. Her team reached out to those companies and asked for a few data points that showcased their veteran-hiring practices. They then sorted that information and came up with a list of best hiring practices, and the companies that best exemplified them.

Another example is the Monster 100, which is a list of the top companies hiring on Monster each month by number of jobs. Not only is it popular with their audience and a new piece of content each month, but it is also resulting in great conversions to job searches and applications.

Creating this data from scratch and the related content packages that followed proved to be a successful team effort, she says. “This did very well for us. Companies were sharing it. It increased the feelings of positivity around the brand. And it serviced the audience of veterans looking for jobs, so it was useful to our audience,” she says.

Seek alliances within the organization

When Margaret came on board, in addition to wrapping her head around a content marketing strategy, her biggest objective was to earn the trust of her organization. “My 90-day plan was getting on the calendars of as many people as I could and understanding what everyone does and what they want to accomplish,” she says. “That buys you a lot of goodwill and resources. I feel like I begged, borrowed, and stole my way to resources because I found common goals with people.”

How she did it:

• Find out how you can help others. Often, departmental goals overlap, so by identifying common ground, you can pool your efforts. For example, Margaret saw great value in bringing the SEO director into her trust circle. “Utilizing his resources to create content for my team was a no-brainer. It works for both of us,” she says.

• Be an internal content marketer. Getting people inside the organization to understand what it is you do is key. “I make sure I’m speaking at every cross-team meeting. I’m getting into the employee newsletter,” Margaret says.

• Collaborate with other teams on fun projects. Margaret says she’s fortunate that her team operates under the communications umbrella because it creates a natural relationship with PR and social. For instance, an infographic titled, A Superhero’s Guide to Career Victory, which was timed to run to the release of the movie, Captain America: Civil War, was a true collaboration. A designer and copywriter within the UX team created it. Then PR helped garner a lot of media coverage for the guide, including a pickup on blackenterprise.com, among others. Afterward, Margaret ran the guide on the site with an accompanying article, and within the newsletter. And Monster’s video producer created a video to push out via a paid-media campaign.

Hold yourself to a high standard

Although Margaret isn’t tasked with achieving any specific KPIs, she holds herself accountable to business objectives. “I make sure I know what the CMO’s goals are. We have to prove that this is working, and part of that is showing that we are contributing to the business,” she says.

However, that means accepting and explaining that some of her team’s work will not have immediate or clearly identifiable results. “There’s no way to show that some people are looking at our content and then filing away Monster in their brain as a place to go when they’re looking for a job,” she says.

So here’s what she does measure:

• Page views – “That tells me if people are engaging with the content and coming to the pages. Whether they’re coming through social, newsletters, our syndication partners, or direct on-site traffic, it’s the first thing I look at from the brand-building perspective,” Margaret says.

• Job views/job searches from the content pages – “Some of our pages more directly link to job searches within the stories,” she says. (One example of this is the Monster 100 post mentioned above that links to the job descriptions for these companies.) Tracking people who come to the site through content and begin job search activity is the kind of result that Margaret loves to show to management. Job searches initiated from content pages on the site were up 29% in the first quarter of 2016 compared to the first quarter of 2015.

• Applications and resume uploads – Margaret says it’s more difficult to show content’s direct influence on these important metrics since there’s not always a straight line between someone looking for a job and applying for one. Still, watching these stats grow helps demonstrate that content is valuable in driving the right kinds of leads, she says.

One metric that may seem glaringly absent from this list is social shares. While Margaret cares about this number, she doesn’t prioritize it because the audience often hesitates to share content. “People may like the articles we publish but don’t want to let on that they were spending time on a job site. They might not want their bosses/friends to know,” says Margaret, admitting this isn’t a challenge she initially anticipated.

Looking ahead

Margaret has gotten into a good rhythm as far as content production goes, but there’s one learning curve she’s still navigating. “I did not understand how much of the content experience is about UX and site design,” she says. That’s why the next six months will be all about site refinement and improving conversions via content.

And in the next year, “We want to make sure CTAs are dynamic. And, I’d love to see us have a more personalized content experience where you come to the site and it knows your industry and what phase of the job search you’re in,” Margaret says.

In the meantime, the team keeps working to ensure that they are “hired” as the job-search solution of choice by both content-craving job seekers and employers.

Monster’s Margaret Magnarelli is a finalist for 2016 Content Marketer of the Year – and she is also presenting two sessions at Content Marketing World. To see the live announcement of the Content Marketer of the Year during the event and hear Margaret’s talk, register today with code BLOG100 to save $100.

Editor’s note: A special thanks to Ardath Albee who scoured the planet looking for the best of the best content marketers. She was instrumental in helping us find our 2016 Content Marketer of the Year finalists. 

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post How to Build a Content Marketing Practice in a Year: Lessons From Monster appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

Building a professional LinkedIn profile to reach the level of All-Star is good (but not good enough). This blog post explains why you should go All-In with social sharing to amplify your personal brand to important others.

I recently answered a question on Quora about LinkedIn.

The question was:

Why should I share content on LinkedIn?

After posting my response, I began to think about my marketing students and the course requirements for their use of LinkedIn.

My answer on Quora should have been longer.

Much longer.

Yes, my students define their career focus and personal branding strategy.

Yes, they write a Headline using career focused keywords.

Yes, they create a Summary that tells their brand story with a call-to-action.

Yes, they optimize their LinkedIn profile to reach the level of All-Star.

Yes, they connect with targeted career stakeholders and other professionals they meet through physical and social media networking.

And….

Yes, they go All-In and social share content about their career focus.

So, what is the problem?

Unfortunately, when the semester has ended, I have noticed that very few students continue with their social sharing on LinkedIn.

Their activity stops.

It dies.

In fact, of the 500+ professional connections I have on LinkedIn, fewer than 10% are active in social sharing.

Leaving the remaining 90% inactive.

Out of sight.

Out of mind.

And, easily forgotten.

“Don’t let LinkedIn be a place where your resume goes to die.”

Inactivity on LinkedIn is a Missed Opportunity.

Here is why you should regularly social share content on LinkedIn:

1. To be quickly recognized and easily remembered.

It is easy to be forgotten on LinkedIn.

While some of your connections may have checked out your profile as a precursor to the connection process, why would they remember you afterwards?

Your regular social activity on LinkedIn can remind your connections of your existence.

What you social share as an update to your connections is what your connections see in their LinkedIn Updates stream.

What you social share to a LinkedIn Group is what other group members (even non-connections) see in their Conversations stream and is repeated for your connections to see in their LinkedIn Updates stream.

Eventually, through social activity your personal name and thumbnail photo will be quickly recognized and remembered in your LinkedIn Updates and your Groups activity.

If consistent and authentic, you may also be more easily recognized across other social media and when physical networking.

Why important: out of sight is out of mind and potentially out of luck for referrals and job and client opportunities.

As a professor, when potential employers ask me for student or recent grad referrals or recommendations for internships or jobs, my first thoughts go to current and former students that remain visible in my LinkedIn Updates stream. Rarely do I search through all my connections to find someone to recommend.

2. To amplify the visibility of your personal brand and confirm your career focus.

Equally important to being remembered, is to be remembered for something.

That something is your personal brand identity (or how you want others to see you).

If done with career focus and interesting or helpful content, each social share can reinforce and social sell your personal brand.

You are what you social share.

If you primarily share the minutia of your life, then you are a narcissist.

If you primarily share about you (self-promote), then you are an egotist.

If you primarily share about your company (sales pitches), then you are anti-social.

If you primarily share random career related content, then you are a generalist.

However:

If you primarily share content on your career focus, then you are making a strong impressionable confirmation of your personal brand identity and how you want others to see you.

This also strengthens your personal SEO for when a potential connection or employer is doing a keyword search on LinkedIn.

For example, on LinkedIn I primarily share content that is more about the use of social media marketing for personal branding, job search, and career development. I make lots of new connections with those I do not personally know but whom share a career-interest and found me with a LinkedIn search.

Why important: social sharing of career focused content confirms your career focus to potential employers, adds value for your connections, and gives others a reason to connect with you (especially those that find you in a LinkedIn or Google search).

“Strive to social share the career relevant and not the personal random.”

3. To show others what you are learning.

Continuing your career education and self-learning is essential for career advancement.

LinkedIn can play an important role in your on-going education as a personal learning network (PLN).

When setting up their LinkedIn profiles, my students are required to begin with: (1) a minimum of 20 connections; (2) follow 5 influencers, 5 news, and 5 companies; and (3) join 5 career focused groups.

This requirement jumpstarts their LinkedIn PLN by filling their Updates stream with industry news and trends, career focused content, and an audience for their own social sharing.

More importantly, it shows connections, career stakeholders, and potential employers of their career interests, willingness to learn and grow and better themselves.

To supplement their LinkedIn PLN, my students are required to use Feedly and subscribe to the RSS feeds of career focused blogs and publications. This gives them access to even more resources for learning and more content to social share on LinkedIn.

Why important: while a resume shows what you have learned and experienced, the content that you social share and engage with shows important others what you continue to learn and want to know more about.

It may also prompt further review of your LinkedIn profile and qualifications.

“Demonstrating to others your willingness to learn and desire to grow makes a noticeable and memorable impression to important others.”

4. To show others what you are thinking.

Among the 10% of my LinkedIn connections that are socially active, even fewer present themselves as human, alive, and worthy of engagement or conversation.

It is easy to automate social sharing on LinkedIn.

Just set it and forget it.

But don’t.

Be a human.

Not a robot.

Automate your personal brand and suffer the risk of losing authenticity and the opportunity to connect with others as a human.

“Don’t be a lazy content curator.”

To overcome this negative aspect of social sharing and to present yourself as an authentic human simply requires that you add relevant comment to your share. This is called social share annotation.

Tell your connections why they should read your social share and specifically why you liked it.

Yes, this takes extra time.

And, thought.

However, quality beats quantity.

Repeating the content title or saying “this is a good read” or “you’ll like this” adds little to the social share, adds little to your personal brand, and does not show others what you are thinking.

Instead, just sell it.

Sell your social shared content, while selling your personal brand.

Give others a reason to notice your shared content and to notice and remember you and your growing authority on the career-focused content you are sharing.

Then with each social share you are sharing what you are learning, sharing what you are thinking, and inviting a human conversation or engagement.

Why important: it shows others of your growing knowledge, authority, and expertise.

More importantly, for students or recent graduates, it shows potential employers and bosses your active commitment to lifelong learning, inquiry, and career advancement.

When potential employers follow your LI profile link from your resume, they gain greater insight about you as a potential employee based on your continued learning and thinking.

“Adding valuable content and personal insight to the Updates streams of your LinkedIn connections, builds authoritative value to your personal brand.”

5. To encourage engagement and build relationships.

However, you don’t always have to share content on LinkedIn to remind others of your existence or your thought processes.

You can easily and regularly join the conversation started by others, your connections, or those in the career-focused LinkedIn groups you have (or should have) joined.

When you press the like button for others content, this sends that content to the update streams of your LinkedIn connections and a notification to the original poster.

Good, but not good enough.

Even a robot or a half asleep connection can jump into their LinkedIn Updates stream and start liking things, and with little thought or interest in what was shared.

You make the wrong impression if all you do is like things, especially when you do so without vetting what you social share.

It is much better to click the share button and add relevant comment, along with thanks to the original sharer of that content.

Show your connections and others that you actually read what you social share and recommend to others. Then sincerely thank the source of your read.

Why important: social engagement shows your connections that you are human and seeking a relevant online conversation that could potentially continue in the physical at a potential client meeting, job interview, or a networking event.

The Take-Away.

LinkedIn is a great place for professional networking to make connections, to make a promising digital first impression, build relationships, expand career-related knowledge, and advance careers.

It takes minimal effort to amplify your personal brand on LinkedIn.

Just one social activity a day during business hours at varying times is enough to keep your personal brand alive and remembered.

Just once a day.

Don’t let LinkedIn be a place where your resume goes to die.

Keep it alive.

Share content. Add comment. Engage. Be human.

And, not forgotten.

What are your best recommendations for social sharing on LinkedIn?

Image credit: Denny McCorkle

This article originally appeared on Digital Self Marketing Advantage and has been republished with permission.

If you’ve been following SEO for more than 15 years like I have, you’ve seen the ongoing debates about ranking factors go on seemingly forever. One of the latest themes is the decline of links as a ranking factor. Many theories have been offered about what’s replaced them, such as:

1. Social Media Signals
2. Clickthrough Rate in the Search Results
3. User Engagement
4. RankBrain

But links remain a very powerful ranking factor. Read on for data from three different sources that backs this up, including data from our newly published extensive study on how links impact rankings.

Moz Ranking Factors Survey

Every two years, Moz does a ranking factors survey of the top SEO practitioners, asking them to identify the most important factors. This survey gathers input from those that perform SEO work day in and day out. As a result, this is one of the best sources of empirical evidence. After all, these people are trying to drive rankings for their clients every single day. Here are the top few results shown in the last survey, which published in 2015:

As you can see, this pegs links as the top two factors, and by a decent margin to boot.

Stone Temple Consulting Case Studies

As a participant in that survey, I can tell you that I certainly ranked links as being among the very top factors as well. One reason for this is the experiences we have at Stone Temple Consulting, where over and over again, links drive rankings. We typically help clients get these links via high-end content marketing campaigns which focus on helping drive their reputation and visibility.

The results are stunning. Here is a sample of results from a wide mix of clients:

As you can see, the results are pretty powerful!

Our Link Study

These results already tell a compelling story, but we wanted to dig into this deeper. To do that, we did a detailed correlation study. We took 6,000 search queries and gathered data across the top 50 search results. We captured the rankings for each of the SERPs and used Open Site Explorer to capture the link data related to each of the ranking URLs. (Thanks also to Moz for providing us access to their awesome API for use in the study).

We looked at the data several different ways. In one view, we normalized the total number of links for each search result, so that the search position with the most links had a link count score of 1, and a search result with half the links would get a link score of 0.5, and so forth. We then summed the link scores across, so that we could see the total link scores for all the number 1 results, the total link scores for all the number 2 result, all the way through all 50 results.

We then calculated Pearson and Spearman correlations for those totals. Pearson and Spearman correlations provide a measurement of the strength of the relationship between two variables. Here are the resulting scores we obtained:

If you’re not familiar with correlations, those numbers mean there is an extremely strong correlation between links and rankings. (highlight to tweet) Just to spot check the conclusion, we also took a look at the correlations by ranking positions in blocks of 10. We once again normalized the link totals, but this time looked at the total number of links to all of the top 10 positions, then the number of links to all the second 10 positions, then the third 10, and so forth. Here is what that correlation showed:

That is still a very strong Pearson correlation value, and a perfect Spearman correlation. Wow!

What Did We Learn About the Power of Links?

So now we have it three different ways, and they all tell us the same thing: Links remain a very powerful ranking factor. But this doesn’t mean they are the only thing. Content relevance and quality are huge factors as well. If the content isn’t relevant, it shouldn’t matter how many links it has—it shouldn’t rank. If it’s relevant but of really poor quality, it shouldn’t rank, either.

There are other aspects of SEO that you can’t ignore, either, such as your overall information architecture, your site usability, how users engage with your content, and whether you need to be using SEO tags, such as rel=canonical, noindex, rel prev/next, and others.

That said, links remain a very important ranking factor, so promote your business in a way that will get it lots of recognition (and links) in the process. Stay away from the link schemes, of course, and focus on attracting the most high quality links that will stand the test of time.

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With over 3 million active Australian LinkedIn accounts, LinkedIn is a powerful social media channel. When used effectively, LinkedIn can give your business authenticity and credibility, and provide a space for you to engage in communities outside of your immediate circle of connections.

While having an active profile is necessary, you’re not going to see any leads or huge networking opportunities if you don’t have an interactive profile. Like on any other social media platform, the ongoing interaction you have with your network is what keeps your audience engaged.

Leveraging the power of LinkedIn Groups

LinkedIn Groups provide a place for professionals in the same industry or with similar interests to share content, find answers, post and view jobs, make business contacts, and establish themselves as industry experts.

Identify and join

Start by short-listing groups relevant to your clients and potential clients.

Narrow the list by identifying groups with the most recent activity.

LinkedIn has a “groups you may like” function that suggests groups based on your current profile and connections.

Top tip: If you join lots of groups, make sure you turn off the daily digest e-mails in the settings section.

Share your own content

Be sure to provide value and context to your post when sharing.

If you know of an external source that fits a discussion, share it with others.

Establish yourself

Strengthen connections by contributing to a discussion that will make either your profile or Company Page more visible helping you to establish you as a thought leader among other participants.

Look for active members and add relevant replies to posts. But don’t SPAM! As your replies are publicly available to all group members, by using this technique you are showing people what you have to offer.

Have you seen positive results with LinkedIn Groups? Tell us about it in the comments below.

A great deal has been written about whether in the internet age, your business should have a phone number on your website or not.

On one hand, having a phone number can increase the trustworthiness of your website, help sell potential customers who aren’t comfortable buying online, and allow customers to easily contact support.

The flip side? Phone support costs money.

Many anecdotes support both strategies, but we should be asking, “where’s the data?”

A Tale of Two Different Approaches

Zappos – a company that built its brand on customer service – drew a line in the sand by featuring its phone number on the top of their website, all the time.

Here’s what Zappos founder and CEO has to say about their stance on their phone number:

Tony Hseih:

“On many websites the contact information is buried at least five links deep, because the company doesn’t really want to hear from you. And when you find it, it’s a form or an e-mail address.

We take the exact opposite approach.

We put our phone number (it’s 800-927-7671, in case you’d like to call) at the top of every single page of our website, because we actually want to talk to our customers. And we staff our call center 24/7.”

Rackspace is another example of a company that built its brand on customer service, or “fanatical support.”

In the post “A Letter to Our Customers Announcing Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure,” Rackspace CEO says, “We will be available to you by phone or ticket, 24/7 — within minutes. We won’t send you to FAQs or message boards for support. We will be there for your team, backing you up with Fanatical Support.”

Jeff Bezos, CEO and co-founder of Amazon, has a very different take: “The best customer service is if the customer doesn’t need to call you, doesn’t need to talk to you. It just works.”

And if it couldn’t be more apparent…

Rackspace (two phone numbers):

Amazon Web Services Web Page (no phone number in sight):

What does this show?

Not much. These are a handful of anecdotes which prove nothing other than that you can build a successful business with or without having a phone number featured on the page.

This post is about how you can use testing and data to determine if having a phone number is right for you and your business.

How to Use Testing and Data to Decide Whether to Use a Phone Number

Here’s the exact method we used to decide whether or not putting a phone number on our site was effective and efficient.

Step 0 – Gather Qualitative Data

At my company, LawnStarter, we allow people to easily book lawn service online.

Both my co-founder and I were inspired early on by Zappos, so we always featured a phone number on the page.

But as we got better at CRO, built up our A/B testing cadence and saw more conversion online, we asked ourselves if we should still include our number on the page.

We follow the ConversionXL process, so we ran the following poll.

The results:

Booking lawn care online is fairly new in the grand scheme of things, so it was a pleasant suprise that a majority of responders seemed somewhat comfortable booking lawn care online.

Plus, we could probably use some of the tactics described in the article “What Do You Do When Your Customers Are Afraid To Shop Online?” to combat this.

But with a strong 10% clearly terrified of the prospect of booking lawn care online, it’s very clear that we should at least test having a phone number on the page.

Running the initial test

Conceptually, it’s quite simple to figure out. You run an A/B test with version A featuring no phone and version B having the phone prominently displayed.

The tricky part is attribution. While I strongly recommend connecting all your company’s data together in once place, there’s no need to invest in an elaborate call tracking setup before you even know if having a phone on your site is worthwhile.

This method will use a forwarding number and a little bit of excel work to do the test.

Step 1 -Set Up a Tracking Number

The first step is setting up a tracking number. Fortunately this is very easy with most VOIP systems.

Please note: you should use a tracking number specific to this experiment – not just your existing phone number. The reason being that phone numbers get scraped by Google and other directories. Phone calls made to your main number may not have originated on your landing page.

Make sure your phone records can be exported to a CSV. Talkdesk and most other VOIP providers allow for this.

For purposes of this tutorial, we’ll use Twilio. This video walks you through the steps of setting up a forwarding number.

Step 2 – Run Your Test

This part is pretty straightforward. Simply take your tracking number, and put it in the desired spot in your preferred A/B testing tool.

Version A – Leave phone blank (or remove it)

Version B – Insert your tracking number

Once you have this setup, go ahead and integrate the test with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Segment, or however you’re used to tracking conversions.

Now your test is ready to be run.

Step 3 – Link Your Inbound Calls With Customer Signups

Once you’ve run the test long enough, it’s time to look at the results…

1 – Export your online conversion data from whichever tool you use, put into one tab like this.

2 – Download your customer account data into a CSV

In the previous step, we made sure we were capturing our customers’ phone numbers. Download these from your database, and put them in their own tab.

3 – Clean your phone numbers

If your phone numbers look like this – perfectly formatted – then good on you.

In many cases, the phone numbers look like they do in the formula above.

Not to worry, first, you’ll just have to remove spaces and erroneous characters with the following statement:

=SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(SUBSTITUTE(I2,”(“,””),”)”,””),”-“,””),” “,””),”.”,””)

And if you have 1s preceding your number, you’ll need to take it a step further using a statement like this:

=if(left(J2,1)*1=1,right(J2,10),J2)*1

(Note: I like to always multiply string operations on numbers by 1 to keep the data formatted as a number rather than a string.)

4 – Download your call data, put into a google doc

Fortunately, Twilio keeps call data clean, so you shouldn’t have to do too much formatting.

Simply import the incoming calls associated with your tracking number, and paste them into a third tab in your spreadsheet.

5 – Use a vlookup to get your call conversions

Now we’re going to use the trusty ole VLOOKUP function to get call conversions.

For those unfamiliar, here’s what Microsoft has to say about a VLOOKUP:

Use VLOOKUP, one of the lookup and reference functions, when you need to find things in a table or a range by row. For example, look up a price of an automotive part by the part number.

=VLOOKUP(Value you want to look up, range where you want to lookup the value, the column number in the range containing the return value, Exact Match or Approximate Match – indicated as 0/FALSE or 1/TRUE).

We’re going to use VLOOKUP to check whether the incoming caller number is also found in our customers list.

See all those cells with phone numbers in column C? Those are customers. The error cells, indicate incoming calls that did not result in conversions.

Let’s make it a little cleaner using an an IF() and ISERROR() statement.

Much cleaner.

Now let’s go ahead and get a few data points out of here. We want:

• Total Number of Calls: Number of incoming calls we received
• Total Number of Callers: Number of distinct/unique incoming numbers that called us
• Caller Conversion Rate: Converted Customers / Total Number of Callers

You can see the formulas here:

We’ll go ahead and cut and paste these formulas into the ‘Summary’ tab.

Step 4 – Combine and Check Your Results

Now, modify your original summary tab as follows to combine the results and compare conversion rates:

In this fictitious example, we saw a significantly lower online conversion (having the phone number), but a higher overall conversion.

But the test isn’t yet finished.

Step 5 – Account for Revenue

Phone sales aren’t free – you need to pay a human to make the sale, and you can’t exclude this in your analysis.

In order to get a general sense of how much of a true win this test was, we’re going to incorporate a few more data points:

• Lifetime Value of a Customer (LTV) – for our purposes, this is net of all marketing & support costs
• Number of sales reps required
• Monthly cost per rep – their salary
• Test period – for simplicity, we’ll assume it’s one month

The calculations we did are as follows:

• Unadjusted total LTV = LTV per customer * total conversions
• Sale cost = sales reps * monthly cost per rep * test period
• Adjusted total LTV = unadjusted total LTV – sale cost

As you can see in the spreadsheet, we got a 9% increase in conversion, while we only got 2% increase in total LTV.

Next Steps – It’s Not Just a Conversion Rate Problem

If we were making a simple tweak to the UI, it wouldn’t be a complicated decision to execute. However, phone support requires people, time, resources, and costs. Here are some next steps to help you hone in on a data-driven decision.

Sensitivity Analysis

You could do a significance test on revenue and call it quits.

But that isn’t the point. The point of testing phone vs no phone is to get a general sense of whether having a phone can be a large enough opportunity to account for the overhead involved.

Sensitivity analyses can help evaluate the real opportunity.

Investopedia defines sensitivity analysis as “A sensitivity analysis is a technique used to determine how different values of an independent variable will impact a particular dependent variable under a given set of assumptions.”

Here are some of the “what if” scenarios you’ll want to evaluate:

• Increase in phone conversion: Your phone conversion probably wasn’t optimal for the first go around – what does total LTV look like if you can increase it?
• Decrease in rep cost: What does it look like if you decide to have your sales reps overseas at a fraction of the cost?
• Hiding the phone number: Suppose you hide the phone number at the bottom of the page, hoping to maintain your online conversion, but allow those super-luddites to still all in.

Device Testing

Many businesses report significantly lower conversion on mobile.

A popular solution is click to call, and you might want to test that. This would involve using a bit of javascript to include a different tracking number on mobile than desktop.

The result could be that you only include a phone number on mobile, but none on desktop.

True cost of human sales

You’re probably thinking, “Ryan, you made some pretty simple assumptions there with that analysis.”

And you’re right. Hiring a sales rep costs time and money.

There’s turnover. You have to train them. While a rep may be able to handle 30 calls per day on average, it’s very likely you’ll have to increase the number of reps to handle peak time. As the team scales you have to do call reviews, and eventually hire management. Scaling a sales team and maintaining, not to mention improving your conversion rate is no easy task.

You’ll have to account for this in your financial plan, but that’s another post.

Accounting for increased support costs

If you currently don’t offer phone support, and suddenly put a phone number on your site, you’re going to get phone calls. You have two options:

• Start offering phone support – this changes your business model and associated costs
• Tell these customers you can’t help them – this creates a bad experience

If you currently have phone support and remove the number, you’ll want to make sure your customers can still get their problems solved.

Testing infrastructure

The method I presented is quick, dirty, and requires no overhead.

But should you decide that having a phone number is right for your business, it will inevitably be part of every A/B test you do going forward. You’ll want to make sure you create the systems to track on an ongoing basis.

For more info on this, check out the following resources:

• Google Analytics Phone Tracking Partners
• Kissmetrics Call Tracking Integrations
• Integrating Call Tracking with Convert.com

Personally, I hate being slave to the limitations of out-of-the-box analytics tools. So at LawnStarter, we simply set up a MySQL table that contains all of our tracking numbers. We put all of our internal data as well as data from 3rd party tools into one Redshift database, then join it up and visualize in Tableau.

Your core brand identity

Finally, you have to think about the type of brand you want to build. Do you want to be Zappos, Amazon, or something in-between? The phone number goes a long way to making this determination.

Conclusion

A phone number on a website can be a game changing opportunity, a huge cost center, or simply inconsequential. And with most things in digital marketing, you can’t rely on other companies’ case studies or “best practices”; you have to test it yourself.

Have you used data to make the phone – no phone decision for your business? Share your experience in the comments below!

If you haven’t already heard, Rank Brain recently made headlines as one of the three main ranking factors that Google looks at. Of course it is worth mentioning that this claim was made by a Google senior scientist, who may have just been overzealous. Or, it may just be Google’s shiny new toy. Truthfully, we really do not know exactly how much it effects Google’s algorithm. However, we do know that there has been a good amount of fluctuations, which have been mostly positive for our clients, and therefore can decipher that it is effecting the SERPs. We won’t know how much until they get done tweaking it, but for the time being it is a major player. Now that it is out, it is important that we understand it and know how to leverage it to our benefit.

Rank Brain Overview

Before we get too far into how to leverage Rank Brain, we have to discuss the Google update. Generally, Google goes way overboard with their updates and tones them down after a big release, but here is what we have seen so far with the latest update. The biggest revelation was that it uses user behavior to determine search results. In short, if everyone searches for “black hat,” and no one clicks on websites that sell black hats or have “black hat” keywords on their pages, and instead people click on “charcoal hats” pages instead, then wouldn’t they want that page ranked higher? Wouldn’t Google want the page that is clicked on the most in the SERP and served first? It’s true – check out the example below. We searched for “women’s heels,” and received a bunch of results with “pumps” as a keyword. Google has determined through data and behavior that what the searcher really wants is “heels” or “pumps.”

Also, doesn’t it make sense that Google would only want websites that users actually interact with? So, if users are clicking away from a site, wouldn’t they want to push that page down the SERPs? In a nutshell, that is Rank Brain. This really effects long tailed phrases, as Google doesn’t have enough link data to judge results, so it uses Rank Brain to figure out what people want, based on clicks and user behavior. In our opinion, this is a good thing because it gives the user a better experience, as they get served popular results based on human behavior rather than a “system” of links and keywords.

Don’t believe us? In the example below, we Googled “Garmin watches.” There are no combinations of “Garmin watches” in any of the search results that we were served. That’s enough to make old traditional SEO people lose their minds, right? Well, don’t fret. It really isn’t as hard to optimize for Rank Brain as it might sound. You just have to know how to do it properly.

Optimize for CTR and Usability

The first thing that you want to do is look at your on page efforts. If your websites looks like it was built in 2004, then you are probably way over due for a site redesign. A good way to check to see if you need a redesign or if your usability is suffering is to check out your bounce rate over time. If your bounce rate continues to rise, then most likely it is time for a redesign, with usability in mind. For example, if it looks like this, you need to immediately find a website design/UX partner.

Secondly, go check out your meta titles and descriptions. If they are bland, boring, short, or have nothing to catch your reader’s attention, you might be doomed and you need to fix them ASAP. Focus on call to actions, like “show now,” “free shipping,” “US made,” or other modifiers that will show value in your titles and descriptions. For example:

Old SEO Meta Title – Garmin Watches for Sale by runningcompany.com

Rank Brain Meta Title – Garmin Watches get Free Shipping at runningcompany.com

I’m not a betting man, but I would wager that the second example is going to produce higher click-throughs. And even if you wouldn’t dare put your main keywords in the middle of your title, you could do “Free Shipping on Garmin Watches at runningcompany.com” The same goes for descriptions. You want good call to actions on your descriptions so that people will click on them and you will boost up in the rankings.

Using the example above, we can see that almost all of the top results for “women’s heels” have the keyword on the left hand side most. However, some do not and in the future, we should see where this tactic is less and less important.

Focus on Keywords in Links and Social Signals

I bet you haven’t seen that subject line! Let’s go back to our original example where we Googled “women’s heels.” How does Google know that people really want pumps as well? Is it an assimilated keyword? Well, the answer is that Rank Brain can use the languages and gap the keywords to understand that heels and pumps are the same thing. BUT, Google can also use social media data and links to know that a page might be about pumps, but people consider them to be heels. Wait, what? What does that mean? Let’s look at one example which ranked for “women’s heels:” http://shop.nordstrom.com/c/womens-pumps.

When you look at their meta information, which by the way is ranked #6 in Google, and their page, you can see that they don’t’ ever use the words “women’s heels.” They only say “heels” one time in their meta description. In fact, the entire web page is ALL about pumps. So, why would Google rank them that high for “women’s heels?” In looking at their backlink profile, we can see that this page individually had 10% of its anchor texts with the word “heels” in it.

When you explore even further into these links, you find they all have a single commonality. They all use the keyword heels in their main phrases like titles, anchor text, and more. They also are shared on social media. Google can crawl these links, pages, and then say the shop.nordstrom.com/c/womens-pumps is not only about “women’s pumps” but also “women’s heels.” The way that humans interact with websites links to us, and what keywords that they use in the titles, articles, and anchor text affects the way that we are showing up in the rankings.

How do you optimize for this?

When focusing on your link efforts, do not spam your anchor text, but if you have the liberty of choosing, make sure that the keywords that you want pages to be assimilated with are there, and the title of the page, and lastly, within the first paragraph of the backlink. You also want people sharing your backlinks on social media and using various keywords within their social media posts.

Having a keyword matrix of each of the pages that what keywords you want focused on helps when you are creating your link building efforts and interlinking to your different pages.

The retail landscape is more competitive than ever as consumers spend on experiences like restaurants and vacations more than material possessions. 

This shift in consumer habits has led to a wave of discounting from retailers. 

Aron Ezra, CEO of marketing software company OfferCraft, recently published a list of common psychological tricks retailers use to drive sales. 

His piece, first published on industry newsletter Retail Touch Points, offers a glimpse into how brands get you to spend more money. 

1. The "decoy effect"

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: Chick-fil-A is giving out free entrées today — here's how to get one

Between 2002 and 2011, the Verizon brand spent billions in ad media accomplishing two things quite well: Keeping it in a competitive horse race with rival AT&T and burning the question “can you hear me now?” as well as the likeness and voice of their iconic horned-rim glasses “test man” Paul Marcarelli, into the national psyche. For nine years, the “can you hear me now” guy and the Verizon brand became one in the same.

Back when Verizon launched their campaign, cell phone coverage was a real issue (and still is to a certain extent), so the brand’s approach had definite consumer resonance. As a consequence, Verizon successfully positioned its brand as superior in coverage and, as of last year, was neck and neck with larger AT&T in market share (34% vs 32%) according to MarketRealist.com.

After the retirement of the “Can you hear me now?” Campaign and with his contractual obligations to Verizon concluded, the ever determined and roaming “test man” Marcarelli did the unthinkable … he roamed right into a Sprint store. This was just too good to pass up for the much smaller and distant third-place player. As a result, Sprint launched their “Yep, I switched” campaign a couple of months ago and an aggressive 50% off promotional incentive.

By using Marcarelli, Sprint is saying they are as good as his former brand (Verizon) and for less money. That’s why he switched and why you should, too.

This isn’t the first time a brand has appropriated the competitor’s assets to do battle in the marketplace, and it likely won’t be the last. Consider a few other examples …

• Taco Bell launches its breakfast menu by taking on fast food giant McDonalds. It films real customers (who happened to be named Ronald McDonald) providing glowing testimonials about the upstart’s new offering, waffle tacos.

• Regional burger chain Krystal actually portrays Ronald McDonald and the Burger King rushing to its restaurant in TV spots that aired in 2012.

• Pepsi airs its memorable BBDO “Delivery Man” spot during the 1995 Super Bowl, telling the story of a chance encounter of Coke and Pepsi delivery men at a diner, sampling each other’s product and the ensuing fracas when the Coke delivery man refuses to surrender the Pepsi that he is now in love with. In a brilliant move, Pepsi reprised the story, updated for 2010 by TBWA/Chiat/Day, complete with threatened cell phone video of the Coke deliveryman drinking a Pepsi Max instead of his Coke Zero. And the predictable fracas ensued once more.

In each of these examples, we’re asked as brand specialists is this a good idea? For the sake of “disruptive marketing,” are we not violating a cardinal rule by reminding our customer of the competition and giving the competing brand some free advertising … at our expense? What is the legal exposure for using someone’s trademark or brand assets without permission? And, do we do harm to our own brand in the process?

Respect For Trademarks

First a quick note regarding the legality of using your competitor’s trademark, brand assets or anything else that would be construed as part of the brand identification. In “fair use” instances, unauthorized use of trademarks can be allowable when making comparisons, references or assurances. We would always advise you consult your legal counsel before doing anything, however.

Comparison Strategy

All of this falls under the heading of the popular strategy of “comparison advertising.” According to a study conducted back in 2012, roughly half of all TV spots struck a competitive comparison to some degree, and out of those, about 5% called out the competitor by name. Obviously, political ads will routinely call out the competition, but so do many others, such as automotive, insurance, foods, beverages, credit cards, etc. And one can only guess that the comparison ad percentage is greater today than four years ago.

Using The Competition’s Brand Assets

The Sprint example as well as the others we’ve listed goes beyond mere comparison when they appropriate competitor’s brand assets to gain our attention. When this is done, it’s always the smaller brand that does the appropriating. You will never see the larger, dominant brand comparing itself to the smaller, weaker rival, much less using the smaller rival’s brand assets against them. Rarely, if ever, will you see the larger brand counter-attacking the smaller brand for the comparison campaign launched against it, in any large scale, meaningful way. By doing that, the larger brand would be giving legitimacy to the smaller brand, and allowing the smaller brand to essentially dictate the advertising strategy of the larger brand. Not smart. Wise, leading brands always play defense and must never play offense. On that note, this is how leading brands — including Verizon– should respond to a challenger brand like Sprint.

Pros And Cons

It is true; brands that use their competitor’s assets in marketing will gain some degree of attention. And yes, it will have a disruptive effect on the marketplace much like a sales promotion (which Sprint is doing) spiking interest and sales for a time. But this isn’t a long-term brand building strategy. And in fact, it can be an ongoing subtle reminder of the competitor. It is also a reminder that you are not the leading brand. Only solid, original brand building will hold and grow the short term gains that a promotion of this type will create. Over-reliance on using borrowed brand equity from your competitor runs the risk of diminishing the value of your own brand and forever type-casting it as the next best thing. And who wants to buy that?

Many years ago, Xerox ran a TV spot that beautifully illustrated the fallacy of this approach. In it, a succession of copier salesmen are shown pitching their copiers and each time saying “It’s as good as a Xerox” to which the announcer finally asks “Why not choose Xerox?” Good question.

If you’re considering comparison marketing and going so far as using your competitor’s brand assets first ask…

1. Have you explored alternatives that are just as effective?
2. How does your brand excel over your larger competitor and what are you doing to tell that story?
3. Have you researched the exposure with your legal counsel?
4. Can you build brand insistence without the reliance of this approach?
5. Have you weighed the possible repercussions?
6. Are your comparisons water-tight and documented by a third party?
7. Is the asset and creative context strong enough to work more for you than for them?

The Blake Project Can Help: The Brand Storytelling Workshop

Branding Strategy Insider is a service of The Blake Project: A strategic brand consultancy specializing in Brand Research, Brand Strategy, Brand Licensing and Brand Education

FREE Publications And Resources For Marketers

Close your eyes. No really, close your eyes and let your fingers dance across your keyboard. Open your eyes. Now, break up the jumble of text with a few haphazard bullets, lists, and stats. Then, log in to your dashboard and publish your improvised masterpiece on your company blog. You can blast the email list while you’re at it too. Before you hit send, make sure that there are a few words underlined in blue to give your helpless clients an escape route to the nearest website. Congratulations, you’ve just written your first piece of bland business content.

Ok, maybe B2B content isn’t that horrible, but it has earned a bad reputation. Sirius Decisions reports that, “60 to 70 percent of content churned out by B2B marketing departments today sits unused.” Just imagine if you could do the same dust-collecting work with your budget! Oh that’s right, when money sits, it’s called savings. When content sits? That’s just a waste of time.

It’s time to crash your bland B2B content marketing strategy and introduce ideas that will appeal to the eyes that drive the clicks and views that today’s companies value so much. Yes, we’re talking about humans, those advanced machines who have the power to push your business forward and actually close deals.

A groundbreaking B2B presence can’t be built in a day. It’s built campaign after campaign, as each piece of content pushes prospects closer and closer to being buyers. Successful companies understand that it takes some oomph to give prospects the necessary tools to make an informed decision in their favor.

“There is infinitely more content generated than we can ever hope to individually consume. The most important strategy for B2B content marketers is making creativity and data analytics a priority in the content generation and distribution process, to combat building content machines that churn out more of the sameness.” – Shahed Ahmed, Partner and SVP at Merritt Group

Let’s start by highlighting a few eye-opening B2B content examples that break the mold.

Blackboard Teaches Twitter

It’s easy to assume that an academic B2B company would have a pencils and crayons approach to marketing their product, but one visit to Blackboard’s website and you’ll see their Grade A branding efforts. From the eye-catching colors to the thought-provoking opinion pieces, Blackboard, an innovative technology and solutions platform for schools, has devised a great content formula. The brand caters to school districts while appealing to teachers and even students. Their Twitter page (and its 35.7K followers) especially caught our eye. The colorful, quote-based page presents sage advice from thought leaders, well-known educators, and recently published resources in the same way. In an effort to maintain a clean and consistent aesthetic, the brand directs user questions to a dedicated support page. The more objective, interesting, and educational the content, the more successful it is going to be.

Salesforce Explores Instagram

Salesforce, a leading CRM software provider, provides a useful example of avoiding self-serving content in favor of topics that clients will find genuinely interesting. The above Instagram advertising infographic caters to the growing need for brands to build a multi-platform presence. The infographic’s crisp blue design echoes Salesforce’s overall brand and is inviting without being annoying. The content is concisely informative, alternating between number-crunching and advice-giving to provide readers with actionable tips. Expert yet approachable content pieces like this build your company’s reputation and encourage clients to seek further industry-leading news from your brand.

Square Goes Full Circle

Square, a financial services merchant, understood that they’d have to go deeper than point-of-sale transactions to get their point across to clients. With Square Stories, the brand zoomed in on a personal customer story then zoomed out to highlight Square’s contribution to business growth. This Square homepage does a great job of seamlessly featuring varied multimedia elements. This Woody Lovell feature offers readers a glimpse into a single customer story through rich images, quirky typography, storytelling, and a documentary-style video. B2B brands looking to break away from the mundane should direct their content marketing resources to highlight the most compelling aspects of their business.

Finding Your B2B Content Personality

According to OpenView Labs, 72% of marketers think that branded content is more effective than magazine advertisements and 69% say it’s superior to direct mail and PR. Take a second to think about the effectiveness of your current B2B content. Then, ask yourself these questions:

– Would our targeted audience read this when they’re not “on the clock?”

– Are readers likely to sign-up to receive new content based upon this piece?

– How many times has similar content been written?

– Can we present a freshly substantial or educational idea?

– Is this a piece that other departments would want to share in their next big meeting?

– What do the experts have to say?

– How can this topic be broadened or narrowed?

– Does this relate to an industry-wide trend or current event?

– Which emotions does this content invoke?

The B2B Content Marketing Breakthrough

Stellar B2B content will increase brand awareness, position your company as a thought leader, and ultimately convert readers into potential buyers of your product or service. Developing resonant and compelling B2B content will take time, just like any other business-altering approach that your company adopts. Don’t be afraid to think outside of the box and invest the proper time and resources in your B2B company’s content marketing vision.

In my 15-plus years of working with companies & teaching courses on pricing strategies to MBA students, I have found value-based pricing (also known as “value pricing”) to be the most commonly discussed concept that’s also the most misunderstood one. It creates more confusion among marketers, even many pricing experts, than any other pricing concept. What is more, these misconceptions often lead companies to shy away from using it, instead settling for cost-based or other pricing methods that leave money on the table.

What is Value-Based Pricing?

I like to use this definition: “Value-based pricing is the method of setting a price by which a company calculates and tries to earn the differentiated worth of its product for a particular customer segment when compared to its competitor.”

To understand how value-based pricing works, let’s take the example of Brand A that is about to launch a new LED television. It wants to figure out the price for its new 65-inch LED TV, the biggest screen size in the marketplace at the time. The company’s closest competitor, Brand B, recently introduced a 60-inch TV for $799. Both TVs have other features that are similar — both have built-in WiFi, the same level of definition, same number of HDMI inputs, same refresh rate, and so on.

Now let’s apply value-based pricing by considering each part of the definition carefully:

1) Focus on a single segment. The first thing to know about value-based pricing is that it always references one specific segment. (For B2B products, it can be a single customer). Brand A’s focus is only on big-screen TV buyers, not all TV buyers. Marketers can’t use value-based pricing unless they have a specific segment. If they have multiple segments, they must determine a suitable value-based price for each one.

2) Compare with next best alternative. This pricing method only works when the target segment has a specific competitor’s product they can buy instead. Value-based pricers always ask the question: “What would this segment buy if my product wasn’t available?” This “next best alternative” for the target is the essential point of comparison for calculating the value-based price. For products that are truly new, without peers, the value-based pricing methodology won’t work well.

3) Understand differentiated worth. The next task is to figure out which product features are unique, that is, differentiated, from the competitor’s offering. In our case, the only differentiated feature of Brand A is its larger screen size.

4) Place a dollar amount on the differentiation. The last, and arguably the most difficult, step in calculating value-based price is to estimate the dollar value of the differentiated features. For us, this boils down to: “How much will big-screen TV shoppers pay for an extra 5 inches of screen size?” and then add that amount (let’s say it is $150) to $799, Brand B’s price. The value-based price of Brand A’s TV is $949. To accomplish this step, marketers typically use research methods like conjoint analysis or qualitative customer interviewing.

One final point about value-based pricing is this. Just because the differentiated worth is $150 doesn’t mean the company will get it all. In many situations (buying or renting a house for example), there will be a negotiation process, and the marketer may have to share the differentiated worth with the customer.

Dispelling Key Misconceptions About Value-Based Pricing

Value-based pricing is used in virtually every industry, to price everything from TVs and drugs, to oil rigs and airplanes. Despite its popularity, marketers have significant misconceptions about the approach. Here are three of the most common ones.

Misconception 1: Value-based pricing requires the company to evaluate consumers’ willingness-to-pay for each and every product feature. Some marketers wrongly believe that when a company uses value-based pricing, it has to assess how much the customer values every single product feature, assign a dollar amount to each one, and then add them all up to calculate the product’s final price. Even the simplest products have dozens of features.  Imagine the difficulty of pulling this off for an oil rig or even a TV. This misconception turns many marketers off at the outset.

In reality, feature common with the next best alternative is captured by its price. In our TV example, the fact that both TVs have 3 HDMI inputs, built-in Wifi, and 4K Ultra HD is included in Brand B’s $799. We do not have to calculate each feature’s value separately. The only thing Brand A has to do is find the feature differences and assess customers’ valuation of these differentiated features. This is a lot easier to do.

Misconception 2: Even if competitors are not smart with pricing, using value-based pricing will lead to success. This is likely the most dangerous misperception about value-based pricing because it can create false, high expectations. Many marketers think that value-based pricing is a panacea. If they use it, they will make lots of money under any circumstances. Not true! The success of value-based pricing depends on how smartly competitors have priced their products. If they have set untenably low prices, value-based pricing can’t save you.

Just imagine what would happen if Brand B foolishly chose to sell its TV at $399 instead of $799. Brand A would still be only able to charge the $150 extra for its larger screen size, not any more. It would end up with a low price, and perhaps even lose money because of Brand B. Competitors have to practice “intelligent pricing” if value-based pricing is to work successfully.

Misconception 3: The brand’s value is part of the value-based pricing calculation. With value-based pricing, the marketer’s goal is to put a dollar amount on its differentiated features. The method’s focus is on features that add value to the customer and that can be converted into dollars and cents. Features such as “longer-lasting by X%,” “faster by Y hours,” “less likely to break down by Z%,” all work nicely because they can be easily converted into money.

But it’s much harder to deal with a brand’s value this way. This is why brand value is left out of the equation with value-based pricing. And it is one reason why the method is more popular in B2B settings that give less weight to the brand value.

Value-based pricing is an effective method to price products. On the one hand, it’s a lot easier in practice than it appears to be in theory. The marketer needs to identify and assess its products’ differentiated features only (except the brand’s value), not every feature.  And when competitors have priced their products foolishly, value-based pricing won’t help. With a stronger grasp of how this method works, marketers will be able to make smarter pricing decisions, and employ value-based pricing to increase profits.

Predictive analytics is, without a doubt, the new big thing in marketing. It’s how we marketers are putting so-called big data to work to help us find, target, and sell to the right customers at the right time. I’ve written about this before; any time we rely on technology or process to tell us about our customers’ preferences, habits, or needs, we run the risk of missing out on one critical element of our customers’ decision-making. Our customers are human and, therefore, somewhat unpredictable.

Many years ago, I worked with a company that created customized news feeds. Customers would select their areas of interest, and each day, the company would sort items from a range of newswires (yes, this is before social media!) and send each customer a custom collection of articles, press releases, and other news items.

A general concern others and I raised about the trend toward more personalization (which is still ongoing) is that people would miss out on items of general interest. In those days, when I read the newspaper, I would seek out sections of particular interest to me, but I would also read the front page and often catch other items on my way to my sections. This exposed me to news, information, and thinking outside my specific area of interest. In particular, reading the front page gave me a sense of what was collectively considered important (as filtered by an editor, granted, but one whose interest likely was matching the collective interest). This provided a common understanding of the world and important events of the day. With an entirely customized newswire (or, in today’s terms, a group of Facebook friends with whom you completely agree), you create your own unique understanding of the world around you, and you become less aware of what is outside your bubble (and in some cases, less able to understand it).

One of our goals as marketers is to influence behavior, particularly toward buying our products and services. One way to do this is to create some elements of a bubble around the target buyers so they see more of your offerings than anything else and more messages encouraging the lifestyle associated with your offerings. That creates stronger associations with the promise of the brand and results in brand loyalty.

We observe the actions customers take and focus on the ones that make them most likely to deepen their association with our brand and all of the things for which that brand stands. That creates the customer journey.

Once we know all that, we work hard to influence customers to take the next step on their journey toward becoming a brand loyalist and buying more and more from us.

Dealing with the myriad actions, possible paths, probable journeys, and the wide range of customer tastes and behaviors has been nearly impossible until technology stepped in to give us ways to store and analyze all that data. Enter big data and predictive analytics.

We now have computer systems that tell us—if a customer has a certain set of tastes and preferences, and then takes a given action (or a series of actions)—what the most effective way to get them to take the next action is. So we do that. Then we see many of those customers taking the hoped-for action.

Enhancing the Impact of Predictive Analytics

One of my favorite themes is to remind marketers that your instinct—your intuitive understanding—goes far beyond the analysis of any computer system. You will not always be right, but your intuition provides a strong sanity check.

For example, your predictive analytics might suggest prospects who end up buying from you always take a specified action several steps prior to purchasing. This might be true. But you might also notice there is a large drop-off rate right before that step—only a small number of prospects in your funnel move to that step. Your analytics don’t tell you this because you’ve told your systems to answer the question of what causes people to buy, so it looks at the outcome and works backward. It takes human powers of observation to look at the funnel from a different perspective.

I rely on my systems and the analyses they produce to tell me how my programs are working. I set them up to give me data-driven answers to a variety of questions, including the question of what actions are most influential in converting prospects to paying customers.

But I always look at the data myself. I look for anomalies. I look for things that might not be answered by my systems the way I’ve set them up. I look for things I’ve otherwise overlooked. Some of those insights have led to opportunities I would not have seen otherwise.

In short, I use my own experienced intuition to make the final call about what is working, what is not, and where I should look next to improve my efforts.

Don’t miss out on this one critical factor. Don’t let your predictive analytics and automation systems take over your marketing. There may come a day when intelligent systems can do this for us, but for now, this is your job. It’s where your value gets added. Using your own experienced intuition is what makes the difference between good marketing and great marketing. Don’t give that up.

If only it were that simple. As with most things in marketing these days, there’s much more to it than that. Yet so many marketers today refer to “nurturing” as something that happens only when a prospect doesn’t attain a certain score after one or two marketing touches instead of part of a broader Lead Management Framework. And that “nurture program” is merely a notion of emailing that prospect whatever one-off communications are sent to everyone else in the database – whenever everyone else receives them.

I would argue that instead, nurturing should be an ongoing two-way conversation used in order to build and maintain a relationship with your buyers. It’s not merely a score, but a way to do all of the following:

1. Establish yourself as a thought-leader who understands your buyers’ struggles, wants and needs-
Think of nurturing as a strategically orchestrated dialog that begins with building trust. We’d all love for 100% of our audience to receive a single email from us and immediately score as a hot lead, ready to be passed to sales.

However, the reality is that buyers today are savvy and skeptical. They require multiple touches, but not the kind of product-focused touches most marketers build today. Buyers don’t want to hear how wonderful our product is. After all, isn’t everyone’s? We must build Engage stage content that appeals to their needs and establishes our brand as a thought leader, building trust over time.

2. Gather data about your buyer….one step at a time-
We’ve all heard the saying, “Don’t propose marriage on a first date” by asking your prospects ten questions in your first communication or touch. Nurturing is the perfect opportunity to date your prospects and gather data gradually…before proposing marriage.

Build a progressive profiling strategy that captures the least threatening data you need first (i.e. name and email) and save the scary / heavy commitment questions like purchase time frame for later. Not only will nurturing allow you to capture the data you need for scoring, it will also allow you to tailor your content based on the answers and/or your buyers’ behavior in a well thought-out manner.

3. Keep your company/solution/product top-of-mind-
Nurturing isn’t just about prospects. Don’t close a deal and then forget about your new customers you’ve worked so hard to gain. Continue to nurture your customers, not because you’re necessarily aiming for a certain lead score this time around, but because you want to keep your brand top-of-mind. Odds are these customers will be in the market for additional solutions or products that your company offers in the near future.

Of course, the flavor of communications, as well as the frequency should be different for customers versus prospects. A monthly newsletter works well in this scenario.

4. Prevent non-sales-ready leads from growing cold-
Building what we call a “turnback” nurture program will prevent leads from falling into a black hole. A turnback strategy accounts for all the possible reasons a previously qualified lead turns out to be unqualified. It might be simply because they’re just not ready to buy. Maybe the prospect erroneously answered the progressive profiling questions. Or maybe he/she just doesn’t ever pick up the phone when a sales rep calls.

Think about all the reasons a sales rep wouldn’t want to waste their time following up on these leads and build your turnback program to do the follow-up. This can prevent the leads from becoming a total loss and often, drives real results in pipeline growth. Make sure the sales organization is clear on how to place leads into the proper turnback program once developed and establish criteria for what constitutes re-qualification. The results will be new sales-ready leads with minimum sales involvement.

When done correctly, nurturing will help Engage, Convert and retain buyers. Nurturing isn’t a score, and it’s not easy to develop an effective strategy without it. However,well-designed lead nurturing helps build a perpetual stream of sales-ready leads, increasing pipeline and driving revenue growth.

*This post first ran June 5, 2014 on ANNUITAS.com

What do you think of when you hear “Guided Selling?” If you’re a consumer, you might think of recommendations for other items you might like after you add something to your cart or make a purchase online. You might also think of a questionnaire when you’re choosing features for a new laptop or phone.

Salespeople might think of a similar questionnaire—a series of inputs that leads the salesperson to recommendations with pricing, specification, and margins that they should share with the customer. Guided selling offers more than automated product recommendations and proposals, however. Here are 2 critical questions modern sales companies can answer by implementing guided selling throughout the lengthening B2B sales cycle, and not just the last mile.

What does the buyer need?

No, not just which of your products does your buyer need. What problem are they seeking to solve? For a CPG company, the need might be simple: they need to fill shelves with high-selling products. For a software company, they might be seeking to solve a series of problems, and what those are might differ across roles or departments within a single company. This type of buying environment requires salespeople to act as consultants, helping buyers to determine what issue they’re solving and if your company is the best one to solve it.

If you’re selling a single product, that might not be something you would need guided selling for. But if you’re responsible for selling a suite of products that address different business challenges, you can use guided selling to help guide your conversation. Branching questions will help diagnose the problem or guide the salesperson along the process. For example, with software:

• Are your individual goals aligned with other corporate initiatives?
• What are shortcomings of what you use today?
• What level of customization are you looking for?
• Whose buy-in do you need to deploy the solution?

Determining what the buyer needs will be the first step for determining the path you’ll take for the sales process, including stakeholders to engage, which products you think address their needs, and if you are in fact the right provider the meet them.

How do you convince the buyer?

Before you plug in some data points to spit out a proposal, you need to give your prospect a reason to sign. Guided selling empowers salespeople to advise and provide compelling arguments to buy in several different forms.

Calculators and Data Visualization. Prospects don’t buy because of features—they buy because of benefits, and data makes those benefits concrete. Communicate the benefits by integrating data into your pitches and presentations. This data can take many forms, but here are two examples

• ROI calculators: Use information that the customer provides based on your own data to show them the return on investment they can see by purchasing your product. You can use data based on region, similar companies, volume, etc. and adjust based on different buying choices to help the prospect see what one works for him.
• Live data integration: You don’t have to use the data that you have in a calculator to show value to your prospect. With guided selling software, salespeople can pull data unique for a prospect’s situation into a more generic piece of content that personalizes content without the salesperson creating a brand new presentation.

Prescriptive Content. With more money invested in content development every year and the majority of sales content continuing to be unused, finding good content can be difficult enough for salespeople. Finding good and relevant content without any guidance? Forget about it. How salespeople are guided to content can be approached in several ways:

• Questionnaires: Similar to how to get at the buyer’s needs, salespeople can answer questions a step further that offer up content that might be appropriate (e.g., a case study for a company from the same industry, a testimonial from someone with the same role as the prospect).
• Content Metadata: Administrators, whether sales managers or marketers, can tag collateral with metadata to tie content to the topic they’re covering while a salesperson is with a prospect (or as they’re looking for content to follow up with after a meeting). Salespeople can then search using keywords to find the relevant content.
• CRM data: For a step further, track how content is used in past deals based on information from your customer relationship management software. Not only will this help determine what content best closes deal, but it deliver salespeople content based on what customer lifecycle stage a prospect is in (e.g., awareness content vs decision).

Companies without a lot of content or with a narrow audience can get away without implementing guided selling techniques, but forward-thinking enterprises who want to engage their customers should consider how they can guide both salespeople and their prospects throughout the sales cycle.

Want more insight into how sales content is getting used? Download our sales content audit worksheet to guide your salespeople to only the best collateral.

Boost Your Email Conversions With These Tips

How is your business email communication with your leads and customers?

89 percent of marketers increase their prospects with targeted campaigns. [Mailigen]

Given this statistic, it is clear that in order to be successful we need to communicate in a way that will stand out from the rest and add value to our target market.

With so many people using mobile to find information and make purchases it’s important to craft a campaign that will be eye-catching and easy to read. In fact, mobile email is at the top of the list according to eMailmonday in an article on Business 2 Community by Tom Pick:

There are several factors involved in grabbing the reader’s attention in your email as pointed out by Barbara Pachter in an article on Inc:

• An eye-catching subject line – In order to improve your open rates you need to address the needs and desires of your readers right off the bat. It’s important to be clear, concise and clever to stand out from the rest.

• Appear as a professional, trusted source – Avoid using anything but your own domain’s email in order to not be passed off as spam. A good email service provider will be able to also show you your “spam score” before your email goes out.

• Create an appealing signature – You can use services like Wisestamp, Hubspot, and Microsoft Office to create a professional email signature. A profile photo or logo should be included along with your important online links, telephone number, and fax number if necessary.

A high-quality design is another very important step if you want to increase your click-thru rates and responses. The key is to provide something of value that will benefit your readers without including too much information like this example from Copyblogger:

Now that your message is ready you can now prepare for converting your leads into valuable sales with these 5 tips:

1. Include just enough information to draw people in: Save the rest of your message for a sales page link or a ‘read more’ link to your blog post. In fact, Buzzfeed has reported a 23 percent increase in referral traffic from shorter messages.
2. Keep separate campaigns – As you create a new list with your email service such as MailChimp, Constant Contact or Aweber be specific This will help you create personalized messages based on your target market’s interests, which will increase your conversions.
3. Build relationships with email campaigns – It’s not enough to send just one follow-up email to your prospects. A series of emails that are exclusive to your subscribers can go a long way and introduce them more to how you can help them. A valuable eBook, video or invitation are some of the most well-received offers depending on your niche.
4. Set up a level of expectation – A clear message on a regular, set schedule will provide something consistent that your subscribers can trust and expect to receive. According to your own email marketing data, you will want to schedule your campaigns according to your target market’s time zone the typical times that you are seeing click-thru and open rates.
5. Present a creative and appealing design – An original and personalized message speaks more to your readers instead of a basic text email. Experian refers to these as “transactional emails,” which generate more sales than other email programs.

In order to turn your emails into sales your business needs to stay one step ahead of the competition with fresh, original messages that grab the attention of both mobile and desktop users. Including social media buttons will also help increase your opens rates along with video.

4 Social Media Tools You Can Use to Increase Your Sales

Today I have some social media sales resources that can truly increase your business bottom line. Here’s four links with tips and tricks to kick start your Monday.

Social media is a prime place to create an authentic community who can be drawn to your website for more conversions. Your business needs the best results with a minimal amount of time and expense. Do you need to improve your sales online? Take advantage of these great ad tools, and let me know how these work for you!

1) Engaging shopping experiences – AddShoppers

Turn your visitors and social media connections into buyers. AddShoppers is a great tool that allows you to automate and personalize your marketing messages. This smart resource includes an SaaS based platform with smart sharing buttons and trend tracking. Other features include shopper analytics, social media contests, and behavioral ad targeting.

2) Generate content and leads quickly – Fan Machine

If you would like to create more sales from your offers then you will enjoy this smart tool. Fan Machine provides customized options to create story contests, video contests, coupons, quizzes and more. Focus your campaigns to your target market with easy to use tests and measurement. This service will not only increase your conversion rates, but also helps you manage your sales campaigns on social media with ease.

3) Record, manage and share videos – ilos

Videos are on the rise when it comes to building leads through social media. ilos will help your business record high-quality video content in far less time than traditional recording. Edit and host your videos with one app, which can also be accessed on your desktop. Replace videos without having to change links or embed codes with smart tracking on performance.

4) People-centered targeting – Sightly

Would you like to maximize your video ad reach? Sightly is a powerful software tool that can help your ads have more impact and conversions. Their service includes creative personalization, audience targeting, optimization, and an audience targeting funnel. Taylor your campaigns according to demographics, trends, psychographic interests, ect. in order to attract a high level of visibility.

Hopefully you will find these social media sales tools helpful for your business. Are there any that you would like to add as well?

Have fun with these Monday Tips and Tools.

Wishing you a FAN-tastic week!

Even if your email marketing game is on point, there’s always more you could be doing. Companies use email as an avenue to promote a product, establish a relationship with leads and customers, and support overall productivity. While having good email marketing tactics can do a lot of positive things for a company, not having them can lead to the opposite result. Therefore, it’s important to always pay attention to new email marketing tricks that can help you.

These hacks might be unusual, but they work.

1. Resend Unopened Emails

It’s one of those obvious hacks that companies are sometimes unwilling to do. Usually, an unopened email can mean that the recipient wasn’t interested in reading the email at all. But other times, it can just mean that the recipient just didn’t see it. Try resending it at least one more time to make sure the recipient has another opportunity to read what you have to say.

2. Get Rid of the “Do Not Reply” Sentence

How many times have you wanted to reply to an email but you couldn’t because the email said, “Do not reply.” No matter what the point of your email campaign is, don’t assume people don’t have anything to say back. Sometimes a lead or customer will have questions or comments, that you don’t want to lose out on seeing. Be approachable. Keep the conversation open using hacks like this one.

3. Do a Split-Test Experiment

We don’t recommend trying this with every email, but if you’re looking to collect more information about your campaign, it’s definitely worth a try. The split-test is when you send one email type to one group of people, and another email type to another group. Typically, it should be split 50/50. The emails should have the same message, but should be designed differently. After the emails are received, analyze them to understand why one email worked better than the other.

4. Delete Unsubscribed Leads

Yeah, we know. It sounds crazy. Why would you ever delete a lead? Well, think about it this way. If you have leads you’ve tried to reach out to on numerous occasions, but they are still not interested, then it’s time to let them go. After all, they are just taking up time and space that another, more inclined lead, could be using. Keep your high-quality leads, and thin out the ones that aren’t engaged and costing you cash.

5. Utilize Unique Holidays Every Month

Customers like to feel like they are special. Around Christmas, Valentine’s Day, and maybe even Groundhog Day, companies find ways to use this time to reach out to leads. Do your research, find holidays or strange dates that actually exist, and find a way to use them in your email marketing strategy. Create a special promotion during these times. People will be keener to open emails when they know something special could be waiting for them in their inbox.

6. It’s Better to Come Overdressed Than Underdressed

No worries. No one needs to model for your email strategy. But, what we mean by this is, don’t hold yourself back from being creative with your emails. Be funny, be unique, be ridiculous. No matter what the topic is of your email, give the reader an opportunity to sit back, chuckle, and say, “Hey, you know what? These guys are actually kind of funny. Let me see what they got.” It could be as simple as sending a funny photo in an email, or an unsubscribe button that shows how sad you are to see them go (in a humorous way, of course).

It’s time to try some new approaches to your email marketing campaign. Request a demo with Mission Suite and understand how to use these hacks to the best of your advantage.

Since 2006, according to HubSpot, inbound marketing has been the most effective method for online business development. Just think of the semantics behind the term. “Outbound” implies pushing, repelling and moving activity away from an organization. “Inbound” evokes a sense of gathering, attracting and embracing. It’s personal and welcoming. It’s also the content-rich strategy that savvy recruiters are adopting to draw in exceptional candidates. The highest performing talent acquisition professionals are those who understand the importance of an inbound marketing approach to hiring. Yet even with vibrant blog posts and engaging social media interactions, how does one rise above the digital noise to stand out among a targeted audience? Well, just as inbound marketers have perfected the art of buyer personas, staffing experts can create equally effective talent personas.

Content is King in the Online Age

It’s ironic that the rise of the Internet led people in the publishing world to lament that “print is dead.” To a certain extent, electronic media has weaned us off our reliance on paper — and probably saved quite a few trees in the process. What it didn’t do, as print producers implied, was to destroy readership and the demand for writing. The Internet wouldn’t exist without content and an audience of voracious readers. In many ways, the World Wide Web is driving that demand. It’s also given people a platform to produce and distribute content in novel ways and new formats.

Regardless of the medium — videos, electronic articles, infographics, etc. — the success of inbound marketing springs from captivating storytelling and actionable intelligence. It’s no different in the world of recruitment marketing.

Recruiting through inbound channels has changed the hiring landscape dramatically. If fact, it’s improved the way candidates learn about recruiters, connect with them and interact with them. Where outbound marketing often requires buying ads, building email lists and hoping for leads, inbound marketing focuses on the creation of quality content that pulls candidates toward your organization — it explains to talent why they’ll want to be a part of your team. The secret lies in aligning the content you publish with the interests of candidates. When done right, this creates an inward flow that naturally attracts prospects who can be converted, hired and delighted over time.

In today’s workforce, the evolving role of recruiters is becoming even more pivotal. Candidates aren’t attracted, sourced and recruited the same way they were a decade ago. The transactional tactics of matching skills, work experience and compensation to job descriptions no longer bear the same fruits. Still, the issue that confronts the best recruitment partners is in casting a wide yet targeted net. That’s where talent personas leap in to save the day.

Understanding the Concept: What is a Buyer Persona?

As marketing leader HubSpot explains, “Buyer personas (sometimes referred to as marketing personas) are fictional, generalized representations of your ideal customers. Personas help us all — in marketing, sales, product, and services — internalize the ideal customer we’re trying to attract, and relate to our customers as real humans. Having a deep understanding of your buyer persona(s) is critical to driving content creation, product development, sales follow up, and really anything that relates to customer acquisition and retention.”

The most powerful buyer personas are based on market research and insights gathered from customer interactions, surveys and other communications. They empower a greater understanding of customers, as well as prospective customers, in marketing organizations. This makes it easier for them to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, motivators and concerns of different groups. So instead of sending everyone in the database the same messaging, buyers can be segmented and matched to specific pieces of content that are the most appropriate and appealing to their needs. If you follow the logic of buyer personas, you should begin to realize how relevant they would be for recruiters who are pursuing top candidates.

How to Build Talent Personas

Define the Business Culture

The first step in building talent personas is defining the culture of your staffing organization and the culture of each client you support. To paraphrase Sedef Buyukataman’s article in TLNT, you must take a “broad and unbiased view.”

“Leave bureaucracy and politics to one side, and look at your internal workflows and functions in relation to your market perception and goals,” Buyukataman writes. “Each persona is built from multiple internal and external data sources then compiled into a matrix of skills, aggregate trends in ‘ideal’ employee behaviors and attributes, and market research aligned to your company growth plans.”

“Thanks to HR technology platforms,” she adds, “we also have access to various dimensions of historical data on hiring success, employee performance, development, and turnover. Accessing data from online channels like your website or LinkedIn will enhance your traditional salary/market/industry research as well. Use what you have to build as focused a picture as you can.”

Document all the information you gather during phone interviews and social media interactions. Check out the LinkedIn connections of your candidates, and use all of this data to spot trends. Now, it’s time to flesh out the profile. The basic structure of your talent persona will be four sections with specific categories that address the fundamentals of Who, What, Why and How.

Section One: Who is Your Candidate?

For the first section of your talent persona, you want to list out critical details of the candidate’s background, demographics and identifying characteristics or behaviors.

Background

• Predominant job titles or roles.
• Level of education and majors.
• Skill sets.
• Relevant background data, such as educational level, hobbies, etc.
• Industries they have supported, excelled in or prefer.
• Size and type of the organizations they have worked in.
• What have the persona’s responsibilities typically included?
• How does the persona gain new information (e.g., online courses, conferences, etc.)?
• What publications or blogs does the persona read?
• What associations or social networks does the persona belong to?
• How does the persona prefer to communicate and interact with recruiters (e.g., email, social media, phone, SMS, face-to-face, etc.)?
• What are the primary tools or methods the persona uses to find job opportunities (e.g., job boards, online recruitment platforms, LinkedIn, etc.)?

Demographics

• Years of experience in the job market or in a certain function
• Salary history.
• Location: is the persona rural, urban, or suburban?
• Level in career path (e.g., entry level, returning to workforce, alumni, senior management, changing careers, etc.).

Identifiers

• Buzzwords that the talent uses or responds to.
• Mannerisms: how would you characterize the overall demeanor, attitude or behavior of the persona based on your interactions?
• How does the persona prefer to communicate? By phone, email, text, or other medium?

Section Two: What Motivates Your Candidate?

Goals

• Describe the persona’s primary career goal, aspiration or inspiration.
• Now, try list out the persona’s secondary goals or motivators.

Challenges

• What are the primary challenges the persona has encountered in his or her job searches?
• What are the secondary challenges this individual has faced?
• Do they differ based on job, industry or employer?

How Can You Help?

• How can you help solve the persona’s challenges in finding a great position?
• How can you help the persona achieve his or her goals?

Section Three: Why Has the Candidate Succeed or Faltered?

Real Quotes

During your conversations or correspondence with candidates, jot down a few actual quotes that represent the talent persona well. This will also help you establish veracity, create compelling messaging for similar profiles, and make the persona relatable to a wider audience.

Common Objections

• Identify the most common objections the persona might raise during the hiring process.
• Examples could include: “I’m afraid I’ll have to relocate,” “I worry about access to skills development and a real career path,” or “I want the flexibility to work remotely on occasion.”

Section Four: How Will You Communicate the Right Story to Similar Talent Personas?

Marketing Message

For each type of talent persona, you want to take all the intelligence you’ve collected and synthesize that information into a compelling message.

• What solutions can I offer this persona?
• How should I describe the solution to this persona?
• What message will the persona see as the most meaningful?
• What are the best media to reach candidates who fit this talent persona: blogs, tweets, InMail, Instagram, Facebook, phone calls, emails, or others?

Elevator Pitch

An elevator pitch is a succinct and persuasive sales message used by business development professionals. The idea is to come up with an engaging or intriguing pitch that explains a product or service and its value — in the amount of time it would take to ride an elevator. Recruitment marketers should develop a similarly punchy and powerful statement to describe their solutions, in a manner that’s direct, simple and consistent for each talent persona.

The Audience is Listening — Make Sure Your Voice is Heard

Content will continue to increase and permeate the digital world. In the next two years alone, analysts expect the amount of online content to double. Every company and every consumer seeking talent will become a media entity, enticing workers through content. Yet, it’s crucial that the message makes its way to the appropriate audience. If staffing professionals want to ensure that they’re reaching the right candidates with the right skills for the right clients, developing targeted talent personas can make all the difference.

As the name implies, Inbound Sales Development is on the opposite side of the sales prospecting gamut from Outbound Sales Development. Whether it be downloading a piece of content, signing up for a free trial, or calling into the sales line to learn more, inbound prospects are typically considered “warmer” leads, having expressed interest on their end in your company or product, rather than leads reached through cold sales activities.

That’s why the goal of an Inbound SDR is to play prospect cupid — to determine whether or not the inbound prospects are a good match for the product, and vice versa. If it’s a match on both ends, that’s when it’s time to set an appointment for the prospect to continue the conversation with an Account Executive.

But what do the sales activities of a day in the life of a SalesLoft Inbound SDR look like?

8:30 – 9:30 AM: There are 4 Inbound SDRs here at SalesLoft, and divided amongst us each morning are around 10 new assigned leads. These leads typically need to be scrubbed, so, to start, we fill in any additional information based off of the prospect’s LinkedIn profile, or company website.

9:30 – 10:30 AM: Next, our team uses a tiered approach when it comes to reaching out to prospects. So, after a lead is scrubbed, it’s then imported into the cadence that fits best with its lead source and tier:

Tier 1 – The prospect fits the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP).
Tier 2 – The prospect fits the ICP, but we may need more information.
Tier 3 – The prospect does not necessarily match the ICP however we will reach out a few times to continue adding value.

Then, once we’ve identified where each prospect falls, the next step is to add them to the appropriate cadence.

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Download the eBook, “Houston, We Have a Sales Problem,” Today!

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Sales activities for Tier 1 & 2 are very similar, but Tier 1 cadences should include more hyper-personalization in every email or social touch. Tier 1 or 2 prospects who are not the decision maker are added to a Discovery Cadence, designed to learn more about the prospect’s team, their process, and ultimately determine the decision maker at the company.

Tier 3 cadences are fully automated, with only email touches, allowing the SDR to spend more time crafting personalized messages for Tier 1 & 2 prospects. This process still adds value to the Tier 3 prospect, though, attaching content for a possible relationship in the future.

10:30 AM – 12:00 PM: We spend this time working to personalize our sales activities even further by mentioning prospects’ tweets, blog posts, or anything else we can find to establish a common bond with them. Now is also a great time to get in touch with anyone who is in the office, especially international prospects, and if there are any prospects who’ve asked to be contacted, they should be reached out to as quickly as possible during this time.

1:00 – 2:00 PM: Review and scrub any new leads that have come in throughout the morning, and reach out to them by, again, adding them to the appropriate tiered cadence.

2:00 – 5:00 PM: Throughout the rest of the afternoon, we’re focused on making outbound calls and emails to qualify our inbound prospects. If qualified, we do our best to move them to the next step by setting up a meeting with an Account Executive and providing the AE as much info about the prospect as possible.

While this might seem like a typical organization of sales activities, when it comes to Inbound Sales Development, there’s always more factors to consider. From live chats to incoming sales inquiries, there are a number of incoming distractions to be cognizant of throughout the day. That’s why our team of 4 uses a buddy system to trade off days and shifts to ensure that not just one person is responsible for the additional incoming leads.

The phrase teamwork makes the dreamwork may apply cross-functionally to a degree, but in the Inbound SDR’s case, it’s everything. From a pre-planned daily structure, to team-wide collaboration, a day in the life of an Inbound SDR is ever-flowing, but the ultimate goal is to create the most efficient lead home base for the sales organization.

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Download your copy of the eBook today to launch into greater detail on each of these issues, how deeply they impact a sales organization, and what using the right sales tools can do to solve them. Let’s get ready for take off!

The post Sales Activities: A Day in the Life of an Inbound SDR appeared first on SalesLoft.

Near-Term Opportunities are Important, But So is Keeping the Pipeline Full

Your sales team likes nothing better than getting leads with a high probability of closing soon. So much so that many reps often ignore every lead they don’t consider hot.

In reality, long-term leads often prove to be more valuable than those slated for a short-term decision. It may seem counter intuitive, but there are three key reasons why B2B companies need to pay more—not less—attention to opportunities not yet ready to close:

1. In many cases hot opportunities are already baked.

Often hot leads are really prospective buyers that have already been sold by another vendor. They’ve indicated they have a short buying cycle and they’re eager to talk, but what these buyers may be doing is validating a decision already made. They’re looking to you for what is frequently called column fodder, or price comparison after-the-fact, to justify the purchase of a competitive offering.

A longer-term lead may lack urgency, but it makes up for it by giving your team a very real chance to form relationships with decision makers, and in fact define and manage the buying process (including designing the RFP). This is an advantageous position to be in—and one that leads to more deals closing and a reputation as the go-to resource in your category.

2. Longer-term opportunities increase marketing ROI.

The numbers consistently show that organizations that pay proper sales attention to all leads are better stewards of their marketing budgets. They’re insuring money spent to generate leads isn’t wasted simply because the qualified prospect isn’t in a hurry.

Here’s an example: Marketing spends $60,000 to generate 80 leads. Forty are short term, and 40 are long term. If the 40 long-term leads are not followed up on simply because they’re a buying cycle or two out, $30,000 (half of the total spent) is wasted. If on the other hand, all 80 are worked appropriately, and sales closes 20% of the total at an average selling price of $250,000, revenue is doubled. Once they are identified, it costs only an incrementally small amount to nurture long-term leads to fruition.

3. Leads at every stage of the buying cycle are essential for a healthy pipeline.

For predictability and consistency in meeting your numbers, you can’t count on just one type of lead in the pipeline. Companies need a mix of short-term and longer-term opportunities to keep the quarterly scramble at bay, and they need for all involved to understand the significant value of the less-than-hot lead.

Weigh the cost, weigh the benefit. No company can begrudge the incremental dollars (in the example above, it’s less than $5,000) it takes to nurture long-term leads already generated and qualified, across additional cycles, into the opportunities that drive revenue growth over the long haul.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to effectively nurture your long-term opportunities to increase marketing ROI, click here to for a resource on that topic or send an email to mark.collura@pointclear.com.

Although almost everyone thinks they’re a good listener, studies show that’s far from true.

Case in point: 50% of adults can’t remember the content of a 10-minute presentation mere seconds after it ends. A staggering 75% will have forgotten everything after 48 hours.

Poor listening will hold you back in any profession, but it’s especially detrimental in sales. After all, if you’re only listening to prospects with one ear, there’s no way you can develop the best solution for their needs.

Ready to find out where your listening skills could be improved? Read on for the seven most harmful mistakes.

1) Overusing Affirmative Words

Do you demonstrate that you’re listening with words like “uh-huh,” “totally,” “yeah,” “right” and “okay”? 

If so, beware. These filler phrases drive some people crazy -- after all, it’s hard to stay focused when you’re listening to a soundtrack of “yeps.”

These phrases also betray your inattention if the buyer hasn't actually finished their thought. If she says, “I’m really looking for -- ” and you throw in a “definitely,” it’ll look like you’re only pretending to pay attention.

There’s a simple fix: Stay quiet while the prospect talks. Giving them a thoughtful answer that clearly responds to what they just said is the best way to show that you’re engaged.

2) Focusing On What You’ll Say Next

Most of us start thinking about what we’ll say next mere seconds after the other person starts talking. But when you find yourself going down this path, put on the mental brakes.

The more mental energy you spend mulling over your reply, the less effective it’ll be. Why? A great response connects to the end of the prospect’s thought -- not the beginning.

So unless you’re fully focused from start to finish, you won’t be able to deliver a reply that builds well off theirs.

3) Finishing Their Thoughts

You might finish the prospect's sentences or jump in when they lose their train of thought to show them you're on the same page. However, this strategy can easily backfire: If you’re completely off base, it’ll make you appear less in sync.

You’ll also seem impatient. Good luck having a productive conversation with someone who feels like you’re bored or frustrated with their pace!

For these reasons, resist the urge to interrupt -- even when you’re 99% sure you know what the speaker’s going to say.

4) Mentally Passing Judgment

Be honest: How often have you silently judged a prospect for making a bad business decision or not knowing something?

Sure, it might seem harmless to criticize the prospect in your head. But if you don’t respect him, it’ll seep into your real-life interactions with him -- and he definitely won’t want to work with you.

Plus, focusing on someone’s shortcomings makes it far harder to respond with empathy. 

Next time you’re tempted to judge a prospect, remember that you have more expertise in this specific field than h does -- and be grateful for that. If you didn’t know more, he wouldn’t need your help. 

5) Using Your Computer for Notes

Taking notes while you listen is a great strategy: You can jot down key info, keep track of your upcoming points, and prove that you’re engaged.

But if the prospect can see or hear you typing, they might assume you’re answering emails or messaging your coworkers instead of paying attention. You'll look less engaged, not more. 

To let the other person know what you’re doing, give them verbal signals like, “Hold on, I’m writing that down … ” or “Give me a sec, adding that to my notes … ” You can also mute the phone when your prospect’s speaking to cut out any background noise.

6) Using the Wrong Body Language

Your body language can make or break a conversation. Imagine that you were yawning, staringoff into space, or tapping your feet during your meeting with the prospect. Even if your replies were spot on, all they'll remember is that you seemed checked out.

To give the right impression, lean slightly toward your prospect, nod your head in agreement, make plenty of eye contact, and stay relatively still (i.e., no fidgeting).

You might think you’re off the hook for phone calls. However, your body language doesn’t just influence how others perceive you -- it also shapes how you feel. The buyer might not be able to see you sitting up straight, but they’ll notice you seem more focused on the conversation.

(Want more tips? Check out the seven ways body language can help you close deals.)

7) Focusing On the Details, Not the Big Picture

If you’re detail-oriented, you might find yourself getting hung up on the small things during conversations and consequently missing the bigger picture.

Suppose the prospect is describing their lead gen strategy. Their efforts aren’t panning out. Unfortunately, you can barely focus on their results, since you’re still dwelling on a minor detail they mentioned two minutes ago. It would’ve been a great opportunity to discuss your lead gen services … if only you’d been paying attention.

To kick this habit, write down whatever’s distracting you as soon as you notice it happening. With the thought out of your head, focusing on the high-level info will be easier.

Hearing your prospects is one thing -- listening to them is another. Once you’ve stopped making these seven mistakes, however, you’ll find it much easier to absorb what they’re saying.