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In March, Canada’s federal and provincial governments agreed to institute a framework for clean growth and climate change by 2017. A carbon-pricing mechanism is key to any future agreement: Taxing carbon both curbs emissions and produces revenue that can be reinvested in cleaner energy initiatives. British Columbia, Alberta and Quebec already have carbon-pricing programs; in June, Ontario announced an $8.3 billion plan to encourage consumers and businesses to switch to cleaner technologies. “There are huge business opportunities that are going to come from decarbonizing,” says Céline Bak, president of Analytica Advisors, an Ottawa-based firm that monitors and reports on Canada’s clean technology sector. “As we apply a price on carbon, we are going to create a business environment that requires firms to innovate. It may take some time, but it will create a far more dynamic [business] environment.”

This infographic provides a snapshot of Canada’s carbon economy now—and how it might change in the coming years:

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MORE ABOUT SUSTAINABILITY & CARBON PRICING:

• How Carbon Engineering plans to make a fortune out of thin air
• How might a carbon tax change Alberta? Just ask British Columbia
• Why the oilsands would still be economically viable under carbon pricing
• Canada’s cleantech industry is bigger than you think
• Naheed Nenshi on how Calgary can thrive in a low-carbon future
• 5 practical tips for greening your company
• Why natural gas is key to lowering Canada’s carbon footprint
• Why energy firms like Enbridge are hiring environmental activists

The post Why low-carbon cleantech is a huge opportunity in Canada now appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Successful digital influencer work is based on building deep relationships that matter. Whether it’s research and identification, creating value for both the influencer and the brand or execution and measurement – the path to truly mastering this art is laced with subtlety and nuance.

Think about your own personal relationships. You don’t make demands without considering the other person’s needs. You take their advice, especially on matters they know well. You say and do nice things without requiring anything in return. You remember things they’ve told you.  You use your intuition and are empathetic to their concerns. You permit the closeness and trust to develop organically over time.

If we carry these same principles into the way we manage our influencer relationships, we will earn – not buy – their trust and influence, which will be reflected in the way they communicate with their audience. By maintaining and respecting their authority and authenticity, we are better servicing the industry, our consumers and our brand. It may be difficult to get there, but the partnership will matter more and last longer; our work will be more impactful, more credible, and more persuasive.

Here are a few tangible examples of how this might come to life:

1) Research: We use research to find authentic, credible and relevant influencers with whom we can partner. The equally important reason, however, is to dive knee deep into the selected influencers’ life-happenings, interests, tensions, frustrations, passions and skills. This way, when you first conduct outreach, you will ask them about their family trip to California last weekend; you will express admiration for the last video they created; you will ask them to expand on their interests and passions. Just by asking the right questions and showing genuine interest, you will have quickly differentiated yourself from your competitors and will become someone they want to work with and help succeed.

2) Flexibility: Once you have a high-level concept, discuss it with the influencer. Explain what you are thinking but leave room for their input and suggestions. As a more integrated or even leading decision maker on the campaign, the influencer will be significantly more vested in its success. This is a much more impactful scenario than influencers showing up where and when they are told, simply fulfilling their contract for a paycheck. Their tone will be more passionate, their voice will be louder and more frequent, and you’ll have content that will break through the clutter.

3) Stay Connected: Once your influencer campaign is over, don’t simply stop contact. Share metrics and results with the influencer. Ask their advice on campaign optimization. Thank them for their partnership with a thoughtful memento of the experience (which could even warrant an additional post)! Periodically, reach out to update them on the brand, tailoring it to what they would find most interesting.  And, of course, don’t forget to wish them a happy birthday or congratulate them on their newborn! These efforts will deepen the relationship and increase the enthusiasm they bring to your next partnership.

Building meaningful relationships isn’t easy, nor are such relationships built over night. But with time, genuine interest, care, respect and humility, relationships with influencers can be more fruitful and persuasive than any other form of communication today.

This article originally appeared on OgilvyDO.com

Picture this, you’ve found a job you’re crazy excited about. In fact, you’re pretty sure this could be the kind of job where you would “love” going to work. And for the first time, you actually think maybe people like that aren’t completely nuts. In fact, you’re beginning to think that maybe it IS possible to have a job where you’re not depressed on Sunday night because you know Monday morning is right around the corner.

There’s just one small little problem. As you review the “required” and “preferred” skills for the position, you notice you’re a bit short on the requisites and lacking over half of those desired.

So do you chase “Super Job” with total vigor and commitment or do you sigh, bemoan that you don’t have everything they want and move on?

Tough decision for sure and one that’s full of ramifications to your income, sanity, success and yes even self-esteem. But the reality is you aren’t limited to just a yes or no option. In fact, there are four different ways to play this scenario (probably more!) and I’ve seen three of the four work countless times:

• Take a Pass and Plan to Beef Up. Make no mistake, the first and most conservative approach is to take a pass until you feel you’re more qualified for the position. At face value, this isn’t a horrible plan; however, few candidates actually take the steps after the “pass” to learn the skills and gain the experiences to be ready the next time. These lost souls (and yes I’ve been one in my career too!) remain entrenched in an unfulfilling position but never seem to create AND execute a plan to achieve their dreams. If you do take a pass, don’t be this guy!
• Take a Pass and ACTUALLY Beef Up! If you decide the job is just too big of leap for you, then taking a pass may be a great career move. If (and only if!) you make a plan AND execute it to be ready the next time. You may need to get some formal training to learn a new skill or perhaps locate a mentor to make some introductions. If you’re taking this path, never underestimate the potential to learn and perfect new skills through volunteering opportunities. Regardless of the specific approach, it doesn’t take long to see that while the first group is busy mumbling “why me?” into their beverage of choice, the second group is saying, “not today, but just watch me!” If you decide to pass on “Super Job,” this is the group you want to be in!
• Go for It and be Ready to Stretch! If you are so excited about this position that it literally consumes your thoughts and you have a healthy (but not obscene!) dose of confidence, then it may make sense to go for it. The safest way to play this scenario is to come clean during the interview process. Share that you haven’t tackled some of the desired skills but have always been a fast learner, know you can make an impact etc. Of course, the risk here is that you will be passed over for a more qualified candidate. The reward, however, is that if you get the job everyone fully understands what you do/don’t bring to the table on Day One.
• Land the job and then figure it out. The fourth scenario isn’t for the faint of heart. In fact, it’s reserved for the folks with nothing but guts and confidence that they can worry about all the stuff they don’t know after landing the job. This approach can lead to fantastic growth (hello, you have no choice!) and success or a train wreck with impacts to your personal and professional life.

Bottom line: Stretching your mind, body and soul are fantastic and offer rewards in all avenues of life. There’s certainly nothing wrong with small stretches in your career (in fact, they’re normally outstanding!) but those super-sized stretch opportunities carry some risk and are a completely different conversation. Only you can decide the path that’s right for you but before you walk away, consider the wise words from Lemony Snicket, “If we wait until we’re ready, we’ll be waiting the rest of our lives.”

What question should you ask every potential customer/client who is serious about using your service or buying your product?

1. What Results Do You Hope to See?

Ask your potential customer what they hope to gain from using your product and the results they want to see. This helps evaluate their expectations and can help you level-set, if need be. It can also help you ensure they’re going to use the product or service in a way that maximizes its value. If not, you can offer recommendations that will bring them even more value. – Andrew Thomas, SkyBell Doorbell

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2. What Are Your Key Success Metrics?

The definition of successful key metrics is different for everyone. By asking a client what do you consider a “successful measured purchase” when making the investment in our services, we are able to find out what specifically to sell and deliver. This can also help us understand whether the client is the right fit for us if their metrics don’t align with what we provide. – Kenny Nguyen, Big Fish Presentations

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3. Why Now?

It’s critical to ask the question “Why Now?” as a potential client is thinking about your services. Understanding why their project has become a priority at this particular moment can be quite revealing in terms of internal priorities, history with approaching the same problems, and how serious of an issue they’re facing (and likelihood of purchasing). – Ross Beyeler, Growth Spark

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4. Who Else Are You Considering?

Even if they are serious, your potential customer has or will be looking at your competition as a point of comparison. If you know who, you can make that final pitch that illustrates why you are better than those other companies. It also tells you what you might need to fix about your own marketing and messaging. – Drew Hendricks, Buttercup

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5. What Do You Want to Achieve?

My business offers a range of solutions, and to choose the best one for my clients, I need to know what their goal is and the scope of their need. There’s no point trying to sell a package that is either insufficient or massive overkill. Often, by asking this question, I discover faulty assumptions the client is making, and I can put them on a path that will better suit their requirements. – Vik Patel, Future Hosting

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6. What Made Our Brand Stand Out to You?

What allowed you to capture a sale is probably the most important information you could chase after and should become a part of your message and marketing. I like to ask clients what it was about my advertising or past work that gave them confidence in my ability to help them. – Matt Doyle, Excel Builders

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7. Is There Anything Standing in the Way of You Buying Right Now?

Find out if there is any hesitation left in their minds so you can address it and clear it out. They need to be reassured, so this is the perfect time to ask them what they need clarified. It’s a great way to close the deal. – Andrew O’Connor, American Addiction Centers

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8. How Did You Learn About Us?

This question is worth asking, even if you think you know the answer, and even if you have tons of data to back up your biases. You might be missing valuable marketing opportunities that are waiting to be exploited. For example, a customer might have learned about you in a magazine you haven’t even heard of. That’s valuable information for a marketing department to have. – Ismael Wrixen, FE International

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9. What’s Most Important to You?

For highly competitive industries like book publishing, we ask our prospects what is most important to them in deciding who is the right partner to work with. Then we can make sure our sales team specifically addresses how Motivational Press meets that priority. – Justin Sachs, Motivational Press

It’s 2016, and simply posting a new blog article every week may or may not help your brand stay on top. To truly stand out from the sheer volume of uploads that take place daily, brands need to diversify and optimize each piece of content. A properly developed and marketed ebook can take your content offerings above and beyond newsletters and blog posts.

Reasons to Invest in an Ebook

At first, you may think “Aren’t ebooks just a way for companies to trick their audience into sharing contact information?” or “I’ve never read an ebook of value, so why would I invest in one?” Some companies do take advantage of an ebook’s purpose. They use the format as a way to disguise the same information they’ve been peddling for years. However, valuable ebooks do exist. They can help you:

• Generate leads. Whether you choose to gate your content or not, simply creating and marketing valuable content will lead interested consumers to your door. If you focus on delivering value-driven content first, your audience will never walk away thinking of the experience as a waste of time.

• Build credibility and thought leadership. Ebooks allow companies to showcase their industry experience and expertise. As a general contractor, retail store owner, lawyer, or any other business owner, you have a reason for starting your business. You understand something that would help your customers in their own lives. An ebook is a perfect way to demonstrate your authority and build rapport with potential customers.

• Maintain competitiveness. While ebooks are popular in certain industries, you won’t find links or download forms on every website you access. If you’re willing to take the time to write a free, expertly written ebook for your customers, then you automatically have a leg up on competitors.

• Create value. Consumers appreciate when companies add value to the relationship in any way. Developing an ebook shows that you care about more than your profit—you genuinely want to help your clients reach their goals. When you find your niche for writing an ebook, consumers will thank you for your insights.

Types of Ebooks

Here are five kinds of ebooks that may help you narrow down your search for the perfect topic:

• Know something about industry trends, consumer insights, or new advancements? Publish your company’s findings in a research report to help readers understand and use data.

• The ultimate guide. Ultimate guides are designed to take a reader from A-Z on a topic. For a boutique website company, that might mean going through the steps of a redesign from a customer standpoint. For a construction firm, that might mean explaining the decision-making process a customer will need to understand for a new buildout. Find your niche, and include everything you know in this type of ebook.

• A beginner’s guide. If you don’t want to get too in-depth, go for a beginner’s guide. These are designed to cover the basics of any topic. For companies that focus on comprehensive product lines, such as perfumes or essential oils, a beginner’s guide may educate readers on the basic idea of aromatherapy and what popular fragrances can do.

• Product/service exploration. These are excellent for launching a new product or service. Use an ebook to delve into the new offering and offer some actionable information that companies can use today.

• Industry exploration. Explore your niche in the industry, past advancements, and future trends, or focus on the larger industry as a whole. If you have expertise in your field, use it to share insights—including what your company has learned over the years and what you think the future holds. People are always hungry to read about first-person experiences in the field.

In the world of ebooks, anything goes as long as you have a clear structure. Many feature a problem-solution structure. If you get stuck, do a simple search for ebooks in your field. Skim the titles and descriptions for some ideas about your own content.

Hammering Out the Details

After you decide to invest in an ebook, avoid rushing through the content production process. Take time to ensure the finished product meets your content goals. Consider these details to produce an ebook that serves you well:

• Don’t sell it unless you’re sure. Avoid asking for financial compensation for any ebook; readers will likely go elsewhere. If you plan to gate your ebook (e.g., ask for an email address or other contact information), make it worthwhile. Share only highly valuable content, and consider offering an additional promotion, like a discount or special.

• Length is good—to a point. Many companies think they need to create a textbook if they invest in an ebook. Ebooks come in all shapes and sizes. Some contain only 15-20 pages, while others may run upwards of 100. Let the content guide you to the correct length for the topic. You’ll know when you’ve sufficiently covered every point. Don’t belabor it.

• Work with content writers if you need to. You don’t have to be a writer to produce a great ebook that adds value to your brand. You just need access to a writer who can take your ideas and run with them. Partner with content writers who can transform your knowledge into an engaging and accessible piece. With a verbal interview or some handwritten notes, a capable writer can turn around an ebook in a short time.

• Producing the book is only half the battle. Think about your strategy for getting the word out. You may need a separate landing page, teaser content, targeted emails, and social media posts. Consider creating a short video to introduce the topic and your reason for writing. Ebooks often require their own marketing campaigns, but they also produce a better return than other types of content.

• Don’t forget to frame the content. Set the stage for why you’re writing the ebook, and include a paragraph about your organization in every ebook. While you shouldn’t use the content to directly sell your products or services, your audience needs to know who you are and why you have an interest in the topic. Don’t post generic boilerplate information, though. Include a blurb about how your brand connects with the topic at hand.

Ebooks sound like huge undertakings, but they don’t have to be. With the right goals and a solid strategy, you can start working on a brand-positioning ebook right now.

Imagine your typical trip to the grocery store.

Looking down at your shopping list, you think about the best way to navigate the store and gather your groceries.

As you walk down the aisles filled with hundreds of items, you’ll notice that you usually purchase the same products and brands over-and-over again.

The reality is that American families, on average, repeatedly buy the same 150 items, which represent as much as 85 percent of their household needs, according to Harvard Business Review. Consumers are creatures of habit and it is hard to get something new on their radar, which is why most product launches fail.

Most new product launches fail at gaining the attention of customers, which has the potential to negatively impact revenues. In fact, less than 3% of new consumer packaged goods exceed first-year sales of $50 million – considered to be the benchmark of a highly successful product launch.

So how can marketers assure that the conditions for success are in place for a product launch?

1. Focus on the development of a game-changer product

According to a Nielsen shoppers’ study, affordability, convenience, brand power, and novelty are the top drivers for purchasing new products.

If the new product has a good price, is related to a recognized brand, and placed in the right stores, it has a much greater chance of gaining the consumer’s attention and becoming a launch success. However, before thinking about the price, promotion, and distribution, a unique product needs to be created. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it needs to be a revolutionary product, but something that will make the customer’s life easier.

Create a new product that has a purpose; that will bring value to the personal or professional lives of consumers. Your product has to have a unique differentiator. The key is to focus on the consumer’s needs, in a way that gives them a reason to care, a reason to buy, a reason to advocate for your product and brand.

2. Create a compelling Story

As consumers, we certainly don’t know the whole truth about the things we buy, recommend, and use. What we do know, and what we talk about, is our Story: our story about why we choose a brand or advocate for it; our story about the origin of our buying decision, the personal utility gained, and the emotional impact of our purchase.

Companies seem almost defiant in their preference to stick with their current guesswork of what they think might work from a “brand strategy” or “product marketing” perspective vs. delving into the mind of their customers. Compelling stories resonate when the audience can put themselves at the center of the story. In other words, the customer is the hero, and the story is about their journey, with your brand as the guide to help them navigate that journey successfully because of what your product or service can do for them.

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Make the customer the hero of your story.

– Ann Handley, MarketingProfs

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3. Create winning strategies for profitable customer experiences

Creating a profitable customer experience means that marketing must develop the specific content, offers, and messages that are delivered at each touchpoint in the Customer BuyWay. Touchpoints include each and every customer interaction, from the first visit to your website to meeting with a salesperson to contacting customer service to renewing a contract to advocating for your brand.

The right strategy should ensure that your story reaches your customers – in formats that they consume and through channels that they use.

This is why it is really important to identify and define your target customers. This involves a segmentation of your target audience and the creation of ideal customer profiles, or buyer personas. These personas are based not only on customer and internal stakeholder interviews but also quantitative survey data and customer behavioral analytics.

4. Align the Systems to flawlessly execute the Strategy

It’s always important to educate consumers about the new product and help them understand the value that the new product will bring to their daily lives.

The next essential component in preparing for a new product launch is to align the systems in such a way that will enable you to flawlessly execute your strategy. Systems include the business processes, measurement systems, and organizational capabilities required to deliver, track, and manage the entire customer experience.

Let’s face it: new product development is risky business. Consumers demand product innovation and expect more options than ever before. However, it is harder than ever to win customers over. Today’s marketers need to assure that the conditions for product launch success are in place to position new products at the #TopRight corner of the market.

Learn how to integrate TopRight’s 3S methodology to bring simplicity, clarity, and alignment to your brand’s marketing efforts in our latest eBook Transformational Marketing: Moving to the TopRight.

Photo Credit: Flickr

One of our cultural values at Buffer, is to live smarter, not harder.

We like to think this extends into our workflows as well.

This is why marketing spreadsheets have been such a boon for us, helping us to track important social media metrics, see our blog growth, and get more work done in less time.

That being said, spreadsheets are not always easy. Finding or building the right ones and figuring out how best to use them can be time-consuming tasks. We’d love to help.

To give you a hand with managing spreadsheets in Excel and Google Sheets (and hopefully save a great deal of time), we’ve pulled together a list of essential spreadsheets, templates, formulas, and shortcuts that are handy for every marketer to have in their locker.

Let’s jump in…

10 Ready-made Marketing Spreadsheets to Boost Your Productivity

For many of the free spreadsheets linked below, you can download as an .xls file to use and customize in Excel or Google Docs. Google Doc users can also go to “File > Make a Copy …” to add the spreadsheet to their account, then edit.

1. A weekly social media report

Track your social media marketing with week-over-week data

This social media report is built in Google Sheets, and it works off of a data export from Buffer (though you can rig it to work with exports from other social media analytics tools as well).

The report will help you keep tabs on your engagement, top posts, and much more.

2. Waterfall chart

Monitor your progress to see if you’re on track

The waterfall spreadsheet template is extremely versatile for keeping pace with your goals. We use it to track many of our OKRs here at Buffer. (Thanks to the HubSpot team for turning us onto waterfalls.)

Here’s an example of it in use to keep tabs on the number of comments we received per post throughout Q2:

This spreadsheet can be used to track your progress on most any metric. Here are a few ideas to get you going:

• Follower growth on social media
• Newsletter subscribers
• Traffic growth
• Clicks from your social accounts

3. Blog post traffic tracker

Know which posts are seeing the most traffic, and when

This is one of my favorite spreadsheets we use at Buffer and I’m excited to share it with you. The blog post traffic spreadsheet enables us to keep an eye on which pieces of content are hitting our traffic goals and it’s also really great to keep an eye on what topics are performing best, too.

4. Social media marketing baselines

Know right away which social media posts are on track and which are taking off

How can you tell if a certain number of clicks, reshares, or reach is good?

It can be a bit of a puzzle to see your social media results in context. That’s why we’ve gone about trying to set benchmarks and baselines for our social media marketing, using the above spreadsheet as our starting point.

Simply enter your social media data into the spreadsheet (it works natively with a Buffer data export).

Then the formulas do the rest, highlighting any update that goes above and beyond your average.

5. Social media audit spreadsheet

Easily track all your social profiles in one place

Performing a social media audit on a monthly basis can be a good habit. Once you get in a good flow, it might only take 15 minutes or less, and you’ll gain tons of benefits with branding, consistency, and perspective.

Here are some of the things we track in the audit spreadsheet:

• Profiles on all social networks
• Active / dormant
• Posting frequency
• Followers and growth
• Engagement and growth

6. Moz’s One Metric

See at-a-glance which pieces of content are performing best

We’ve used the Moz One Metric spreadsheet to track the performance of our blog posts and even re-engineered it to work with social media updates.

It’s a powerfully simple way to measure performance. Here is Moz’s explanation for why they built it:

We need a way to quickly sift through the noise and figure out which pieces of content were really successful, and which didn’t go over nearly as well.

It works by weighing three different points of data and standardizing to make a single score. The data points can be anything you choose. By default, they’re:

1. Google Analytics traffic data
2. On-page data (comments, thumbs up)
3. Social shares

7. Google Analytics heatmap

Find out when your readers visit your site (so you know when to publish/promote)

The folks at Seer Interactive set about to recreate a Google Analytics mobile dashboard look from a desktop spreadsheet. The results are pretty nifty: You can see the times when your site receives its most organic traffic, which might help you plan when to publish new posts or promote content.

To get started, Seer published step-by-step instructions for setting up the spreadsheet with your own Google Analytics data.

8. Social media calendar

Manage and plan your social media marketing content weeks in advance

We were grateful to partner with HubSpot in creating the above calendar template. One of our favorite features: It includes a sheet to store your best evergreen content and updates so that you can quickly grab something to share in a pinch.

9. Social media metrics dashboard

Visualize (and share) all your social media marketing growth from one place

This is the spreadsheet we use at Buffer to track the performance of our social media marketing. It allows us to chart week-over-week growth and month-over-month growth, with sheets for the snapshot overview and each month’s performance.

10. Quotes to share

Easy-to-grab, inspiring quotes to share on social media

Some of our most highly engaged social media content is quotes. And when we’re looking for some fresh inspiration, we often turn to this spreadsheet. (Likewise, when we find some quotable inspiration, we add it to the sheet.)

These quotes work great as images also. You can build an image quote in 30 seconds or less using Pablo or other image-creation tools.

5 incredibly handy spreadsheet formulas

1. Tidy up spacing

Have you ever started working on a spreadsheet with some odd spacing going on? A few rogue spaces throughout a sheet can make it difficult to work with the data. Thankfully, there’s a nice, simple formula to help you remove unwanted spaces.

The Trim function works across both Google Sheets and Excel. To use it, simply type the following formula into the Formula Bar:

=TRIM(“Your Text Here”)

Here’s an example, to remove the unwanted spaces before a name in our spreadsheet. For this, we used the formula: TRIM(“Kevan Lee”)

2. Spilt

The following formula can help you to split values within your Google Sheets spreadsheet based on any given character (or delimiter) within the cell. In the below example we used the character ” ” (space) to split first names and surnames from the values listed in Column A.

The formula you need to do this is:

=split(string, delimiter)

And in the above example, we used “A2″ as the string and ” ” (space) as the delimiter, making our formula:

=split(A2, ” “)

If you’re using Excel, this handy guide from Microsoft will help you achieve the same outcome.

3. Percentage difference between two numbers

Back at the start of Q2 2016, we set a goal to boost the traffic to our new posts by 30% in the first 30 days after publishing. To measure this, I created a spreadsheet, and in one column had the target traffic for each post with the actual traffic in another and the percantage difference between the two figures displayed in a third column. This formula helped to me see whether we hit the goal on not at a glance, and how far over or under we were.

Here’s a snippet of the spreadsheet (you can see the % difference in the green / red figures in the furthest right column):

To work out the percetage difference you need to use the following formula:
=(-1) * (Cell 1-Cell 2)/Cell 2

For example, if we have a target of 3,315 page views and achieve 4,147 page views, this forumlua will tell you that you were 25.10% over your target:

Note: Ensure the cells you’re using this formula for are formatted as percentages to ensure this one works.

4. Autosum

Autosum can be a really neat time saver in Excel. To use it, simply select an empty cell to the right or below the cells you want to sum, and type Alt + = (or Command + Shift + T on Mac). Excel will then estimate the range of cells you’re trying to combine and in one step give you the total.

Note: If Excel’s estimation is a little off, you can edit the range of cells include in the sum within the formula bar.

In Google Sheets, Autosum works a little differently. First, you need to select the range of cells you wish to add up, then click the Functions button and select the SUM option. Google Sheets will then automatically add the sum of your selected cells directly in the cell below (or to the right if you’re combining data from rows).

Here’s that workflow in action:

5. Add up the sum of cells matching certain criteria

If you wanted to discover the page views on your blog generated by posts written a certain author or count only data from users in a specifc cohort, it could take a while to figure these out manually. This is where the SUMIF function comes into play.

SUMIF allows you to add up cells that meet a certain criteria. Here’s how a SUMIF works:

=SUMIF (range, criteria, [sum_range])

• =SUMIF: tells the formula it’ll be summing only cells that match the specified critera
• Range: the range of cells you’re going to add up
• Criteria: the criteria used to determine which cells to add
• Sum Range: The cells to add together

Here’s an example showing how we can breakdown page views generated by post type on the Buffer Social blog using a SUMIF:

In order to calculate the number of page views ‘News’ posts generated we used the formula:
=SUMIF(B2:B7,”*news*”,D2:D7)

This formula sums the amounts in column D (range) when a value in column B (sum range) contains “News” (critera).

More on the SUMIF function:

• SUMIF Function explained
• Using SUMIF if a cell contains text

Bonus: 9 Time-Saving Shortcuts and Tips Used by Spreadsheet Masters

1. Add borders to cells

When I work with spreadsheets, I love to use borders to help me break up the data and make a sheet easier to understand. Both Excel and Google Sheets have a button to add borders, but they also have some super-handy shortcuts:

Google Sheets:

• Apply top border: PC: Alt + Shift + 1 | Mac: Option + Shift + 1
• Apply right border: PC: Alt + Shift + 2 | Mac: Option + Shift + 2
• Apply bottom border: PC: Alt + Shift + 3 | Mac: Option + Shift + 3
• Apply left border: PC: Alt + Shift + 4 | Mac: Option + Shift + 4
• Remove borders: PC: Alt + Shift + 6 | Mac: Option + Shift + 6
• Apply outer border: PC: Alt + Shift + 7 | Mac: Option + Shift + 7

Excel:

PC and Mac (substitute Alt for the Option key on Mac):

2. Format numbers as currency

If you have same data you’d like to quickly turn into currency, there’s a super quick solution to help you out. This shortcut can be particularly useful when you’re working with budgets, revenues or even salaries.

To use this trick, simply highlight the cells you wish to update and press Control + Shift + 4. Thankfully, this shortcut is universal across Excel, Google Sheets, Mac and PC.

3. Format as a percentage

Much like formatting numbers as currency you can also format numbers as a percentage using a neat shortcut. To do this, simply select the cells you’d like to show as percentages and press Control + Shift + 5.

4. Copy formatting

Formatting spreadsheets to your liking can take quite some time. To help speed this process up, you can use the Paint Format button to copy and paste formatting from one bunch or cells to another.

To do this, highlight the formatting you’d like to copy, then click on the paint brush icon (on both Excel and Google Sheets) and then select the area you’d like to apply the formatting to and click the paint brush again. Your styling will now be applied to those cells.

5. Start a new line in the same cell

Adding multiple lines of text within the same cell is often a puzzle for spreadsheet users. I can’t even recall how many times I experimented and tried to figure this out before someone was gracious enough to teach me this amazingly simple keyboard command.

Here’s the answer, to add a new line of text in the same cell holding Alt + Enter on PC or Control + Option + Return on Mac, will add a new line inside a cell on both Google Sheets and Excel.

6. Insert date and time

Almost every spreadsheet will have a column for the date or time and the following shortcuts work across Excel, Google Sheets, Mac and PC:

To add the date, use Control + ;

To enter the current time, use Control + Shift +

7. Fill down / Fill right

These shortcuts allow you to quickly copy data from the cell above or the cell to the left, without having to copy and paste. In Excel, to copy a value from the cell above, use Control + D. To copy data from the cell to the left, use Control + R.

Google Sheets works a little differently here, but you can still use a shortcut to fill cells to the right and below. To do this on Google Sheets:

• Highlight the cells you’d like to fill with the top or furthest left cell being the one you’d like to copy
• Press Command + D

8. Show formulas

Occasionally, it can be useful to see all the formulas within your sheet, and what’s even better is being able to do this without having to manually click on each cell to see the formula behind the data. By holding Control + ‘ (on both Mac and PC and Google Sheets and Excel), you can display all formulas within your spreadsheet at once.

This shortcut is particularly useful to help ensure you’re using consistent formulas throughout your sheet.

9. Insert rows and columns

To insert a row above or column into a spreadsheet, you first need to select an entire row or column. The, on Excel, use Control + Shift and + (on Mac: Control + I) to insert a row or column (columns will be added to the right of the selected column).

On Google Sheets, the command is a little different:

Here are the shortcuts for Mac:

And on PC:

(via)

Over to you: What are your spreadsheet tips?

Thanks for reading! I hope you picked up one or two new tips and tricks for your spreadsheets here. Now, I’d love to open the floor up to you and ask for your favorite spreadsheet hacks.

What formulas do you use regularly? Any shortcuts you couldn’t be without? Feel free to leave a comment below. I’m excited to join the conversation and learn from you too.

The numbers are in, and they’re astounding.

According to the USDA’s June 2016 World Markets and Trade report, 2016/2017 global demand for coffee will amount to about 156 million bags. In other words, 10 million TONS of coffee beans picked, processed, and shipped.

Most will be consumed in Europe and the USA.

If you’re a coffee lover, you know how much sugar and cream to add (if any), which brands you like best, and how you prefer your coffee to be brewed… but that’s probably about all you know about coffee.

This article is going to fix that.

Hold on tight, though, you’re in for at least one big surprise.

10 Things You Don’t (but Should) Know About Coffee

Do you envision coffee being produced on huge plantations where the men all wear Panama hats, the ladies love iced tea, and everyone dresses in white?

Me too. But it turns out that representation isn’t quite accurate.

Our first three coffee insights will look at the hard reality behind the economics of coffee. Then, we’ll explain why you might not be drinking it much longer anyway…

1. Coffee prices aren’t set by the growers. Coffee is a commodity. Value is set by the markets in New York and London, and swings in price can make or break the economies of the many developing regions that produce bulk beans. The next time you feel like complaining about the cost of your morning brew, you’ll know who to blame.
2. About 25 million people are employed in the coffee-producing industry (worldwatch.org). The workers get very little of the income from coffee, though. Most of the money goes to wholesalers and commodity traders. Conditions are often deplorable – for both the people and the beans.
3. Cooperatives seek to improve working conditions and income for the people. They also monitor production methods to ensure coffee free from chemical contaminants (a huge concern). When you see a certification label (e.g. Rainforest Alliance) on your beans, that’s a good thing. The USA is way behind many European nations in the demand for certified coffee, but more Americans are waking up to the idea that drinking chemicals is sometimes not a good idea.
4. Coffee beans may become hard to find and really expensive by 2080. At least that’s what researchers at the Royal Botanic Gardens (Kew) and Coffee Forest Forum say. Climate change may destroy Arabica plants and severely impact world production of coffee. Predictions rage from a 65% decease (most favorable) to 99.7%. That won’t happen overnight. The destruction is underway now.
5. There are only two basic kinds of coffee beans under mass cultivation: Arabica and Robusta. Arabica makes up about 80% of world production (though climate change may be forcing that to change). Of course, there are many different flavors and brands of beans, but only the two main types. Arabica is generally considered the best-tasting of the two. Robusta beans are primarily grown in Asia and are bitter in comparison.
6. Most consumers think Colombia is the coffee-producing capital of the world, but it’s not. Brazil takes that honor, followed by Ethiopia (the birthplace of coffee), then Colombia. Tourists flock to the major plantations for close-up looks (and tastes) of their favorite beans.
7. Caffeine addiction and withdrawal are now formally recognized as mental disorders. The gold standard of psychiatry, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), says caffeine withdrawal may leave the sufferer with a headache, tired, and distracted. Check your insurance for coverage. Coffee, by the way, is the most commonly used drug on the planet.
8. Hard water beats distilled water, hands down, for bringing out the taste in your brew. That’s the word from an M.I.T. chemist who performed extensive tests on coffee preparation. The results, published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry also suggest that – contrary to the advice by most coffee aficionados – the beans should be frozen before they are ground.
9. You may soon become addicted to another coffee product: coffee flour. During production, the coffee bean is separated from the pulp (the “cherry”). Typically, that part of the plant is discarded and ends up in nearby streams where it leads to environmental problems (a complicated process). Entrepreneurs, though, are now endeavoring to turn the pulp into coffee flour – an absolutely edible, nutritious, and delicious innovation. Even Dr. Oz has hopped on the coffee flour bandwagon!
10. You may not believe this one, but it’s true. The most expensive coffee sold is actually poop! The luak, a Malaysian wild civet, loves to eat coffee berries. Natives discovered (don’t ask me how) that the excrement containing those beans could be brewed into a delicious coffee drink called “Kopi Luak.” The idea caught on, and you can now enjoy your own cup of luak poop for maybe $75, depending on the shop. Careful if you do imbibe, however, since animal rights activists are coming out enforce against the drink. Industrious farmers are keeping the little critters in cages, force-feeding coffee berries to them, and collecting the pooped-out gold for commercial gain.

How to Use Your Newly-Acquired Coffee Wisdom

In a way, coffee is just like every other product in the store. We think little about where it comes from or how it’s produced; all we really care about is package appeal and price. We hear the horror stories about sweatshop working conditions, political prisoners making Christmas decorations, and children laboring for pennies, but if the packaging looks good and the price is right, we buy it.

I don’t expect this article will change that. We don’t see and smell feedlots when we buy steak, and we don’t see or smell impoverished natives when we visit Starbucks. By the way, I’m just like you. This isn’t written from an academic hayloft or a sense of liberal snootiness.

There are some take-aways for me, though, and I hope you’ll join me in them – for health’s sake, if not for conscience.

• Look for coffee bearing Rainforest Alliance or another certification seal. It’s good for you and good for the producing community.
• Freeze your beans and use spring water to brew them. Get all the gusto you can muster.
• Try some coffee flour… I mean, why not?
• Either help fund a co-op, or tell Al Gore to put an end to climate change. Fight coffee extinction.
• Never pay top dollar for poop. Cut the crap. No more kopi luak for me!

By the way: I’m not addicted to coffee. It’s just that I get headaches and become so grouchy my family doesn’t want to be around me when I don’t drink it. How about you?

One of the realities you need to face as a business is the brutal competition that makes it so difficult to stand out. According to statistics, 90% of all startups fail because they have a team that overlooks details and fails to market a product effectively. Most startups also fall in love with their “game plan” and give up their versatility in the process. In turn, they fail to keep up with competitors that embrace innovation.

Remember that you need to think outside the box and be adaptive to the latest strategies that will win over customers. Below are tools you can use to set your business apart from the rest of the pack:

1. Again Studios

The content you offer online will directly reflect your brand’s identity. You can either be a generic competitor that copies whatever content strategy everyone has, or be a reputable provider of valuable information. First, you need a plan that will pique the interest of your target audience and make a compelling case for your brand.

Again Studios is a platform that will allow you to create explainer videos that will communicate what your brand is all about. Its focus is to create humorous and entertaining animated videos that will quickly highlight your brand’s value propositions. However, the best thing about Again Studios is that their services are not tied to packages. Rather, they treat each client differently and will offer a scalable and flexible solution for your proposed project.

2. TopBloggers

Although content is critical, it is worthless without an effective distribution strategy that will push it to the right audience. One of the best strategies you can implement is to do influencer marketing and let authoritative bloggers and trusted industry websites spread the word on your brand. Using the influencer’s authentic voice, you are essentially borrowing their credibility to put your brand in a positive light.

TopBloggers is a great platform for finding and reaching out to the best influencers that can get the job done. Its core advantage is that you can easily leverage high-traffic websites to reach more people with your content. It is also filled with features that will help you manage every facet of your campaign—from managing project proposals to tracking.

3. Quuu Promote

Another way to promote your brand is to leverage the social reach of individuals with an established following. Unlike popular blogs and websites, social media influencers are more relatable and approachable to the online audience. That is why you need a platform like Quuu Promote to tap into the incredible potential of social media influencers.

Just like most of the tools included in this list, Quuu Promote is very easy to learn and use. You only need to create your content for a particular social network, choose an appropriate category, and let the platform do the rest. Your content will then be promoted by real people that are trusted by thousands of social media followers so you can gain maximum exposure.

4. Meetingbird

One of the qualities that define successful brands is the willingness to branch out and access the global pool of talent. They also prioritize seamless communication between every team member to ensure the speedy accomplishment of business objectives. Meetingbird is an online meeting platform that will help you do both. It allows your team to collaborate in real-time and develop meeting notes and agendas.

Remember that every crucial decision must be decided and agreed upon by everyone in large-scale projects. You cannot afford to have anybody left out as it may have a rippling effect on everyone’s productivity. Meetingbird solves this problem and supercharges the team’s communication with functionalities such as messaging, file sharing, collaborative content editing, and a fully searchable index of past meetings.

5. Stripe: Atlas

With new technology, it is easy for a business to target the global market and set up a virtual storefront that can be accessed from anywhere. However, they still need to overcome geographic barriers to establishing a legitimate business. Stripe: Atlas ensures you are all set to operate in the US regardless of where you are in the world.

Keep in mind that founding an online startup remotely is not at all simple. Stripe: Atlas demystifies all the complexity and shows you the exact steps you need to take. You can take advantage of their tools and services to incorporate your company, set up a US bank account, and do your taxes right. Lastly, Stripe: Atlas offers legal consultancy to ensure a legitimate and secure future for your company.

Conclusion

The tools mentioned above should be more than enough to help you establish an online presence and expand the reach of your business. Just remember that the journey does not end here. Be prepared to embrace change and look for new strategies, tools, and ideas that will help you remain relevant in today’s competitive world.

Brands have come to a bit of a crossroads on social media. That crossroads came about mainly because the initial approach to social was firmly locked down into one area: brand amplification.

Marketing on Facebook and Twitter seemed to be just that, a way to get your message across and hopefully use the platforms to build a fanbase. But it has changed in recent times to become an arena that allows for a pretty effective lead generation.

Sure, you still have to pay your way through ads, but each social media platform has ways and means of boosting your lead generation efforts. This is good news for everyone.

Take Facebook. The hoary old behemoth has been the stuff of legend when it comes to lead generation, and it’s not all about paying for ads. Or Twitter, which has a lot more to offer in the lead generation stakes than you might think.

Before you do anything, though, make sure you are totally focused on the platforms that make sense for you. We still can’t think of any brand that has a place on all platforms (if you can, call us, we’re intrigued).

Find a platform or two that is perfect for your product, service and audience and use that as a springing point for your lead generation campaigns. This gives you a good chance of success from the outset because at least the people you want to reach will be there.

Twitter

Paid: Twitter Cards

Underappreciated by many for lead generation purposes, the Blue Bird has Twitter Cards, and that is one of the very best ways to use the platform if you want interested customers.

Keep your message on the cards short and sweet and always, always use high quality images when presenting your offer. The cards are inexpensive, and they allow for plenty of tracking through Twitter’s own tracking support. You can’t go wrong.

Everything you need to know about the Amazon Fire Phone http://t.co/uULA47di9M

— TechCrunch (@TechCrunch) July 23, 2014

Events

You can organise a tweet meet on Twitter and generally offer advice and information on subjects and topics that your audience will want to know more about. Do this right and you’ll bring a ton of people to your event on Twitter.

Ask Me Anything (AMA) is a prime example that is only now starting to hit its stride. And when the event is over, you bet people will want to find out more about you.

Tracking

Hit your analytics and metrics and watch to see who is talking about you. Because they are talking about you, this means they genuinely either like you or loathe you. You can win on both counts. With negative stuff, help out and apologise. This makes you human and possibly opens up the door to leads as people realise you’re not Satan and his followers.

By helping out and retweeting stuff that people say about you on a nice level, you’re showing that, yeah, you really are cool. This will bring leads over time. Okay, it’s not as big and as fast as Cards, but it certainly builds a powerful fan base over time. And that will turn into leads.

You can use Locowise Sentiment Analysis to identify tweets (whether positive or negative) that you should respond to or retweet.

Instagram

Let’s face it, you all jumped on Instagram because you heard about people getting new business off it. And you’re right about this, people can gain leads through Instagram, it’s entirely possible.

Comments and engagement

Engagement is key on Instagram for lead generation. If you respond to comments in your feed, this makes you approachable, and people will more likely think of you when they’re looking to buy their next beanie hat (if that’s what you sell).

Seriously, ramping up the engagement there on a regular level will gain you even more feedback, and a situation where people actually start to keep you top of mind the next time they want to make a purchase.

And it’s good old-fashioned slow-burn lead generation.

Hashtag with caution

Hashtags have not yet died the death that so many pundits thought they would. They’re tougher than that. And on Instagram they are a powerful force.

But get creative. Don’t just use your brand name, but focus on using the hashtag as micro-advertising. If you sell eggs, use something like #worldsbesteggs. Okay, you may not find this through search (even if you’re looking for half-decent eggs) but once people have found out about the hashtag, they’ll spread the word, and you’ll gain leads.

Take a look at Locowise Trending Hashtags to identify interesting and popular hashtags that people in your audience engage with.

Facebook

Paid: Facebook Ads

Okay, they can be very annoying if they are overused or just even badly written, but Facebook Ads are still better value than many other ad sources. They’re still cheaper than Adwords, for example.

Use the same principles as we stated with Twitter. Photos rule, as do short and engaging text elements. And sure, the audience is huge, but just make sure you know who you are targeting.

You can use the Locowise platform to add your Facebook ads account, and therefore receive data and analytics even quicker (and it’s a darn sight sexier too).

Use Facebook properly

The best piece of advice we can give outside of paid ads is to use Facebook as a one-stop shop for your lead generation. Don’t see it just as a simple page, but fill it to the brim (or as much as taste allows) with custom tabs and calls-to-action.

It’s more likely people will find you on Facebook first anyway these days. Give them every reason to stay there and make sure they can buy your stuff directly through your Facebook page. Use custom tags to encourage opt-ins and sign ups, and always link to your website so they can contact you there if they wish.

Guiding principles

With any kind of lead generation, anywhere, whether paid or free, you will always have to be fully aware of being in the right place. Your prospects will need to be there when you’re fishing for leads. If they’re somewhere else, you’re wasting your money and time.

Use the analytics and metrics at your disposal to find out how big your reach is, and how strong your engagement is on whichever platform you’re looking at. If both are looking strong (and to be honest, engagement is what you’re really looking for) then you have a place you can legitimately pay for leads, as well as mount long-term lead gen campaigns.

To get the very best metrics available on your social media (and we mean the very best) try Locowise free for 14 days. Nine out of ten fun and exciting brands (probably) prefer it.

With the right strategy, SEO can boost rankings and improve brand awareness. But many businesses make the mistake of assuming that hiring an SEO agency will solve all of their problems. Suddenly – overnight – they expect an influx of traffic and a spike in sales.

While SEO can certainly help, it isn’t the fix-all solution many businesses assume it to be. Here are 6 things SEO can’t do for your business:

1. Fix Bad Content

They say that content is king, but links are gold. While that may be true to some extent, bad content can really hurt your site – sometimes more so than SEO can help it.

Great content engages your audience and leads to more shares. Both of these play a role in where a website ranks.

If you’re not investing in good quality content that offers value and boosts engagement, you may be sabotaging your SEO efforts.

2. Guarantee Rankings

While a boost in rankings is typically the result of a well-thought-out SEO campaign, there is no guarantee that your rankings will improve.

It takes time for a solid strategy to produce results, and if other factors are at play, like a questionable site history, a boost in rankings may take even longer or require a different approach.

3. Fix a Poorly Designed Site

Visitors – and search engines – prefer websites that are easy to navigate, professionally designed and display properly on mobile devices.

If you’re losing visitors because they can’t figure out how to find what they want or your site still looks like it was designed in the 90s, all the SEO in the world won’t help your bounce rate. It may be time to hire a designer to fix the problem ASAP.

4. Guarantee Sales

SEO can indirectly lead to a boost in sales, but you still need convincing copy and an excellent product or service to convince potential buyers to bite.

Higher rankings and more traffic offers more opportunities for sales, but it’s up to you to make sure those leads convert.

5. Boost User Engagement

User engagement is important not only for SEO, but also for brand awareness and sales. When users are engaged, you have their attention (a rare thing), which gives you a unique opportunity to build trust and provide them with more valuable content.

User engagement can also boost shares and drive new people into the conversation.

SEO can certainly expose you to a larger audience, but you’ll need a separate strategy (e.g. active social media accounts and content marketing) to boost user engagement.

6. Fix a Bad Reputation

Businesses can use SEO to bury bad reviews and complaints, but they can’t use it to fix an inherently bad reputation.

If customers aren’t happy with your services or products, word will spread and your company’s reputation will be tarnished. Adjusting the quality of your service and/or products is likely a more cost-effective solution than constantly running SEO campaigns to cover up bad ratings.

SEO should be a part of every business’s online marketing strategy, but it’s important to have realistic expectations and take a multi-faceted approach to improving search engine rankings. Good content, audience engagement, great web design and a focus on offering exceptional services/products can work alongside SEO to help a business achieve their goals.

Does Hillary Clinton understand that the biggest divide in American politics is no longer between the right and the left, but between the anti-establishment and the establishment? I worry she doesn’t – at least not yet.  A Democratic operative I’ve known since the Bill Clinton administration told me “now that she’s won the nomination, Hillary is moving to the middle. She’s going after moderate swing voters.”

Presumably that’s why she tapped Tim Kaine to be her vice president. Kaine is as vanilla middle as you can get. In fairness, Hillary is only doing what she knows best. Moving to the putative center is what Bill Clinton did after the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994 – signing legislation on welfare reform, crime, trade, and financial deregulation that enabled him to win reelection in 1996 and declare “the era of big government” over.

In those days a general election was like a competition between two hot-dog vendors on a boardwalk extending from right to left. Each had to move to the middle to maximize sales. (If one strayed too far left or right, the other would move beside him and take all sales on rest of the boardwalk.) But this view is outdated. Nowadays, it’s the boardwalk versus the private jets on their way to the Hamptons.

The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a system rigged by big corporations, Wall Street, and the super-wealthy. This is a big reason why Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. It’s also why Bernie Sanders took 22 states in the Democratic primaries, including a majority of Democratic primary voters under age 45. There are no longer “moderates.” There’s no longer a “center.” There’s authoritarian populism (Trump) or democratic populism (which had been Bernie’s “political revolution,” and is now up for grabs). And then there’s the Republican establishment (now scattered to the winds), and the Democratic establishment.

If Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party don’t recognize this realignment, they’re in for a rude shock – as, I’m afraid, is the nation. Because Donald Trump does recognize it. His authoritarian (“I’ am your voice”) populism is premised on it. “In five, ten years from now,” Trump says, “you’re going to have a worker’s party. A party of people that haven’t had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry.” Speaking at a factory in Pennsylvania in June, he decried politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by “taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families.”

Worries about free trade used to be confined to the political left. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, people who say free-trade deals are bad for America are more likely to lean Republican. The problem isn’t trade itself. It’s a political-economic system that won’t cushion working people against trade’s downsides or share trade’s upsides. In other words, a system that’s rigged. Most basically, the anti-establishment wants big money out of politics. This was the premise of Bernie Sanders’s campaign. It’s also been central to Donald (“I’m so rich I can’t be bought off”) Trump’s appeal, although he’s now trolling for big money.

A recent YouGov/Economist poll found that 80 percent of GOP primary voters who preferred Donald Trump as the nominee listed money in politics as an important issue, and a Bloomberg Politics poll shows a similar percentage of Republicans opposed to the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision. Getting big money out of politics is of growing importance to voters in both major parties. A June New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 84 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans want to fundamentally change or completely rebuild our campaign finance system. Last January, a DeMoines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus-goers found 91 percent of Republicans and 94 percent of Democrats unsatisfied or “mad as hell” about money in politics.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t need to move toward the “middle.” In fact, such a move could hurt her if it’s perceived to be compromising the stances she took in the primaries in order to be more acceptable to Democratic movers and shakers. She needs to move instead toward the anti-establishment – forcefully committing herself to getting big money out of politics, and making the system work for the many rather than a privileged few. She must make clear Donald Trump’s authoritarian populism is a dangerous gambit, and the best way to end crony capitalism and make America work for the many is to strengthen American democracy.

This article originally appeared on the author’s blog.

Sales metrics may be a new trend for departments like marketing and service, but measuring analytics is nothing new to data-driven sales teams. They’re no stranger to the importance of capturing and analyzing the effectiveness of their daily actions and activities.

Everything from time spent on the phone a day to the size of that most-wanted whale opportunity, sales metrics are to sales teams as vitals are to a surgeon.

They provide a vivid picture of a sales pipeline’s health, and can indicate with a tremendous degree of accuracy whether a positive outcome will be achieved or goals will be missed. But while other departments play catch-up, sales metrics have continued to evolve.

But building a team driven by sales metrics requires buy-in from every role throughout the process on which these sales metrics are being tracked and why. It’s only when everyone is on the same page that a sales team can begin to actively track, assess, and predict success. That’s why we created our newest eBook, “The Essential Guide to Sales Analytics.”

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Download the eBook today

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Just like in surgery, it all starts with basic anatomy. In this case, those basics are the beginner analytics: the easiest sales metrics to track, and the heartbeat you absolutely must be monitoring at all times. Get your pencils ready, beginners, here are the sales metrics you should be tracking:

Prospecting Sales Metrics

Dials per Day. This is the total number of calls, successful or not, that an SDR makes in a given day.
The Value? This metric shows you how productive reps are at dialing prospects. Since there is a strong correlation between dials and meaningful sales conversations, many companies will have dialing quotas for their development reps.

Emails per Day. This is the total number of emails that an individual rep sends to prospects each day.
The Value? Much like dials per day, this metric can show you how productive reps are at emailing prospects. Keeping a regular cadence of sales emails is important to generating responses and scheduling follow-ups.

Conversations per Day. This is the number of times a rep has an actual conversation with a lead in a given day.
The Value? This is an important metric to focus on, as there is a very strong correlation between conversations each day and quota attainment. While the number of conversations SDRs have is not entirely within their control, increasing dials and emails per day, as well as dialing technology like Salesloft, can maximize the chances of having meaningful conversations.

Sales Metrics for Closing Deals

Opportunity Revenue. This is the amount of revenue in a rep’s opportunity pipeline if all open opportunities closed.
The Value? This metric is the best way to quantify the potential of a rep’s pipeline. Comparing opportunity revenue to the actual amount of revenue that a rep closes gives you an accurate way to calculate success and ROI of that rep’s efforts.

Number of Open Opportunities. This is the amount of leads that are converted to open opportunities.
The Value? Knowing how many leads are converting into opportunities is crucial to predicting revenue and growth. It’s also a good indication of where your team stands in a given period. Without enough open opportunities, it’s impossible to hit quota.

Performance Analysis Sales Metrics

Average Deal Size. This is the average amount of your closed deals.
The Value? This number is crucial to making revenue projections. While you can estimate the number of deals that will close each month, you need the average deal size to predict how much revenue will close.

Pipeline Value. This is the total amount of revenue gained if every opportunity in the pipeline were to close.
The Value? This tells you the total amount of revenue that could potentially be closed by your sales team. Tracking this metric over time allows you to make accurate revenue projections and approximate growth over time.

Closed Lost Percentage. This is the percentage of opportunities that are lost.
The Value? Understanding the percentage of deals that your sales team losing allows managers to delve into why those deals are getting lost and identify coaching opportunities and areas of improvement.

Win Rate. This is the percentage of opportunities that are won by your sales team.
The Value? The value of this metric is simple: it tells you how effective a rep is at selling your product. If a rep has a low win rate, it could indicate that they need additional coaching. A rep with a high win rate may have understanding or strategies that can benefit the entire team.

In the beginning stages of analytics, it may seem as if sales metrics are placing value on quantity above quality, but that’s not necessarily the case. If your sales reps are performing repeatable and predictable behaviors — ones that are continually optimized based on performance sales metrics — quantity and quality can finally go hand in hand.

Download your free copy of the guide today!

The post The Easiest Sales Metrics You Should be Tracking appeared first on SalesLoft.

Most companies admit to generating only a 10-25% follow-up of their sales inquiries. With so little follow-up, they’re reaching, on average, only 25% of available buyers. This means that 75% of the marketing dollars spent on lead generation are wasted.

Why it’s Important

“If your company is average, you are only following up 10-25% of the leads you give your salespeople which means you are wasting 75% of your lead generation budget!”

Sales Lead Management Association

But what if we have a world where:

• Sales follows up 100% of the inquiries (all inquiries, not just leads).

• Marketing measures the sales contribution value of every campaign.

I can tell you what will happen: 

1. Sales will increase in 90 days.

2. Sales expenses will drop as average closure rates increase. Salespeople will make quota consistently when sales inquiries are followed up. 

3. Sales force turnover will be reduced.

4. Marketing will be stronger and proud of its contributions to the wealth of the company. 

5. Marketing will no longer be a variable but a fixed expense for lead generation.

6. Marketing management will become a builder of wealth, not a spender of revenue. 

This is already a reality for many companies.  Maybe they are small in number, and they are secretive, because who wants to empower competitors when the solution to increasing sales is so simple?

To become like them, you need business rules for follow-up and measurement, and a system to report on results.  There is a requirement for enlightened sales managers who have control over their salespeople.  And, you need a marketing manager who doesn’t mind being measured for his or her contributions. 

It really is simpler than you think, but you have to think and act to make it happen.

Then again, Henry Ford said “Thinking is the hardest thing we do, which is why so few people do it.”

 

About the Author:

James Obermayer is publisher of Funnel Media Group, LLC, which owns the Sales Lead Management Association, and the Funnel Radio Channel for streaming live internet radio programs and podcast replays. Obermayer hosts two weekly internet radio interview programs: SLMA Radio and CRMRadio.today. He can be reached at jobermayer@funnelmediagroupllc.com.

Analog Devices has struck a deal to acquire chipmaker Linear Technology, the companies announced Tuesday. 

The deal values Linear Technology at $14.8 billion, or $60 per share. The value of the combined enterprise will be $30 billion. 

Shares of Linear Technology were halted for trade up about 29% at $62 per share after the deal was broken by Bloomberg. Analog Devices shares were up about 4%. 

Stocks across the semiconductor space were broadly higher on Tuesday, with notable gainers including Maxim Integrated (+5%), NSP Semiconductor (+4%), Microsemi (+4%), and Semtech (+3%). 

Texas Instruments shares were also up more than 9%. On Monday after the market close Texas Instruments reported earnings that beat expectations. 

Last year, there was a frenzy of multi-billion dollar deals in the tech industry, including Intel's takeover of Altera, Avago's acquisition of Broadcom, and Dell's $67 billion takeover of EMC.  

What's driving these deals

What's behind many of these transactions are huge shifts in the way we capture and store data — be it cell phone data, e-commerce data, or any other computer data.

For years, computer data was stored on hard disk drives, which have a CD-like rotating disk. Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba all make these. But that technology is being displaced, and companies that pioneered it are watching sales struggle as less-bulky flash memory chips, like those used in phones, become the norm.  

One type of flash memory chip is called a NAND chip, and you can find it today in memory cards, USB drives, and "solid state" drives (which look a bit like disk drives on the outside but have no disk or other moving parts on the inside).

SanDisk makes these, so Western Digital went out and bought its way into the flash memory market by acquiring SanDisk.

Companies are looking to buy what they don't already build, and the changes mean big tech deals are going to keep coming.

Dell's megadeal has a similar rationale behind it. By acquiring EMC, a data storage company, Dell is taking a big step toward cutting its reliance on personal computers — not to mention moving into the smarter data storage market.

What about 'the cloud'?

You may have heard that "cloud computing" is disrupting traditional data storage.

Yes, the cloud — meaning a network of servers that provide data storage and processing hosted on the internet instead of on local servers or computers — is part of the story. Public cloud providers like Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure are also moving towards solid state technologies for their own facilities, and it all leads to tech company mergers.

As we reported last year, we may see more flash memory chip makers — like Micron, Hynix, or even Samsung or Intel — coming together with companies like Seagate. The shift is driven by the need to continue capturing, storing and analyzing a growing amount of data.

Seen in that light, this story is not just about old technology coming together with newer technology. It's about finding ways to continue providing cheap data services that we all use.

SEE ALSO: How your iMessages and Amazon purchases are driving the tech megadeal frenzy

Join the conversation about this story »

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We often talk about the importance of user intent. However, these discussions are typically framed within a PPC or SEO/content marketing context; we talk a great deal about assessing user intent with regard to the audiences we’re targeting with our paid search campaigns, our content, or our keywords.

But what about email marketing?

Illustration via Frank Ramspott

Far less is said about the importance of considering user intent for email marketing campaigns, but this doesn’t mean intent is any less crucial to the success of your email marketing efforts. In fact, it’s arguably as important – if not more so – than it is in PPC.

That’s why, in today’s post, we’ll be taking a look at how to leverage user intent to make your email marketing campaigns even more effective. We’ll talk about how user intent changes depending on where prospects are in the typical conversion funnel, as well as how to frame your emails to capitalize on user intent depending on what you’re offering or the actions you want email recipients to take.

User Intent and the Conversion Funnel

Before we talk about how to leverage user intent in your email campaigns, let’s take a quick refresher on how user intent changes depending on at which point a prospect is within the typical conversion funnel.

What Is a Conversion Funnel?

A conversion funnel is a concept used to represent the typical pathway or flow that a user takes to become a prospective customer into an actual customer or viable lead. It’s referred to as a funnel because, at each stage, the number of people that progress through the funnel becomes smaller, essentially “funneling” a large number of people down into a progressively smaller and smaller sample size.

Although there are many different types of conversion funnel, we’ll focus on a simple funnel representing a typical sales process to illustrate the various stages and how user intent changes at each stage.

The Awareness Stage

The awareness stage is where all prospects and users begin their journey. In the awareness stage, the prospect becomes aware of your business and/or products and services.

Image via Sanjay Shetty

Unlike later stages of the funnel, user intent during the awareness phase can be tricky to pin down. However, one thing we can agree upon is that the prospective customer is at least casually looking for a product or service such as those offered by your business – if they weren’t, they may not even enter the awareness stage. It’s also worth noting that, even if prospects do progress further down the funnel, actually moving from awareness to the next stage may take weeks or even months.

In terms of user intent, prospects in the awareness stage may be unlikely to take action immediately; it’s more probable that users are in an exploratory mindset when evaluating your business alongside your competitors. As such, think of users in this stage as curious, potentially interested prospects that are at least somewhat open to hearing about what you have to offer.

The Interest Stage

The interest stage is, unsurprisingly, the part of the funnel during which prospects become interested in what you’re selling. To clarify, in many sales funnels, the interest stage is the phase during which prospects become interested in your business specifically, not merely exhibiting a casual interest in products and services sold by businesses like yours.

There are many reasons why a user might go from the awareness to the interest stage of the funnel. Perhaps your unique selling proposition is strongly persuasive compared to your competitors. Maybe your competitiveness on pricing piqued their interest. It could even be something as simple as a user’s preference for your website over a competing site. Whatever the reason, the user has gone from being aware of your services to actively interested in your business.

During the interest stage, many customers begin to evaluate how doing business with you could improve their lives and solve their problems – both of which are what customers really want. From an intent perspective, they are likely willing to investigate your business in greater depth as part of the evaluation process. They’re still far from a guaranteed sale or lead, but they’re getting there.

The Desire Stage

Once prospects move from the interest to the desire stage, something about your business has stirred the heart of your visitor and made them want something – a crucial part of the conversion process.

Almost… there…

In the desire stage, users are much more likely to act on their impulses. They want something – potentially very badly – and now all you have to do is convince them to cross the finish line and convert. However, just because a prospect wants something you’ve got doesn’t mean they’ll do whatever you want them to in order to get it. Your products or services might indeed be exactly what your prospects want, but there’s still every chance you’ll lose them anyway, especially at such a critical juncture.

Remember that in addition to whatever you’re selling, prospects also want a rewarding, easy, intuitive experience on your website. Even though they want what you’ve got, they may also want additional incentives to sweeten the deal, such as free shipping or a no-obligation free trial. There will always be obstacles to the consumer that you can’t preemptively counter, but there are also plenty of ways you can make your products or services even more appealing.

The Action Stage

This is the final (and smallest) stage of the funnel, because far fewer of the potential customers you began with in the discovery stage make it all the way to the action stage.

The action stage is the point in the customer journey at which the prospect has decided to take definitive action and commit to doing something. They’ve evaluated your offering, possibly weighed it up in comparison to your competition, and decided that your business meets their needs the best. Congratulations!

Although the action stage is certainly the strongest in terms of intent, it’s still not a given that nothing could go wrong. For e-commerce retailers, adding items to a shopping cart could be perceived as a powerfully strong buying signal during the action stage, and yet shopping cart abandonment rates can be as high as 80% in some verticals – a significant loss, to say the least. Similarly, users who genuinely want to download your latest guide or white paper may be reluctant to do so if they’re asked for too much information; they were emotionally committed to doing something, only to be dissuaded at the last moment.

Image via KISSmetrics

For many businesses, the action stage is when a prospective customer becomes an actual customer by buying something. This makes sense. However, although we’re talking about the funnel in the context of sales, each stage can be applied to other offers, such as webinars or content downloads. In this context, the action stage could be whatever your call to action happens to be: sign up for a newsletter, download a white paper, start a free trial etc. That’s why it’s called the action stage, not the buying stage.

Three User Intent and Email Marketing Case Studies

Now we know more about how user intent changes greatly depending on at which stage of the funnel they are, let’s take a look at how to leverage this intent in email marketing.

Each of the following emails was sent to various segmentations of WordStream’s email database. Due to the size of the database, the intent and conversion funnel stage of these individuals varies widely. The larger your database, the more tightly you have to segment it in order to provide timely, useful, compelling offers to your audience – whether your audience is made up of loyal brand evangelists or newcomers who barely know who you are.

1. Content Download – Interest Stage

The email below was sent to an audience segment offering a content download.

The purpose of this campaign was to further qualify potential leads in our database as sales-qualified leads, or SQLs. This is based on a number of factors, and ensures that our campaigns are going to the right people, at the right time, with the right offer.

Where do we stand in terms of user intent, though? At which stage of the typical conversion funnel are most of the recipients of the email above? Well, most of them are in the Interest stage. They’re already familiar with our brand (they wouldn’t be in our email database otherwise), so they’re not in the Awareness stage. However, we’re still not even close to the Desire stage, which answers that particular question.

The Holy Trinity.

It also has major implications for how we positioned the messaging and tone. For example, we know that the recipients of this email aren’t ready to do business with us yet, so there’s no promotional copy, no sales pitch, not even a mention of a product – it’s all about what the guide has to offer them, which in this case is 15 tips for improving landing pages.

As with any content project, we want to give this audience information that’s so valuable that they’re amazed we’re not charging for it. We want to become a trusted source for reliable, actionable content so that, if and when they’re ever in need of what WordStream offers, we’ll be at top-of-mind. That’s the essence of content marketing in a nutshell, including this email marketing example.

2. Webinar Invite – Interest Stage

In this campaign, we emailed another segment of our database with an invitation to attend a forthcoming webinar focusing on the productivity benefits and tools within the 20-Minute PPC Work Week, a core feature of our software product, WordStream Advisor.

Again, segmentation was crucial to the success of this campaign. Without going into too much detail, we knew that the recipients of this email were more than familiar with the WordStream brand, had already gone through the sales qualification process to determine them as viable leads, and had expressed interest in similar offers in the past.

In terms of intent, this is an interesting example. It could be argued that recipients of this email straddled two stages of the typical conversion funnel simultaneously – the Interest stage and the Desire stage. In fact, the primary purpose of the webinar is to nudge attendees from the Interest stage into the Desire stage; the audience is already potentially interested in what WordStream has to offer as a brand and a product, and we want the webinar to spur a desire within the recipient, namely a desire to make their lives easier by using our software to manage their paid search and paid social campaigns.

Many emails you may find yourself sending to your subscribers probably fall into this category. We know that email marketing remains an extraordinarily effective way to reach prospective customers, so it follows that many of the emails we send to our databases are sent with the intention of advancing the recipient from one stage of the funnel to another, with the ultimate goal of increasing conversions.

3. Product Announcement – Awareness Stage

In our next example, an email announcing a new product, we can see how user intent and the typical conversion funnel are (or should be) prime considerations for marketers.

This email was sent to a very large segment of our database to announce the launch of WordStream’s Facebook Opportunity Calculator, a completely free tool that tells advertisers how potentially lucrative Facebook advertising could be for their business based on a range of factors. As the tool is completely free to use, the email encouraged recipients to give the tool a shot to see what they thought.

Emails announcing new products and services are among the most common of all marketing emails. Although product announcements are similar in style, tone, and purpose as promotional emails offering incentives such as discounts or seasonal sales, the potential user intent varies widely between the two.

In this campaign, we wanted to focus exclusively on raising awareness about the Calculator, and as such a large segment of our audience was in the Awareness stage; they had heard about our brand in the past, but hadn’t yet crossed into the Interest stage. As before, this email served a dual purpose: raise awareness of the Calculator and help recipients progress from the Awareness to Interest stages of the conversion funnel.

Of course, since this particular email blast was so large – understandable, given how awesome the Facebook Opportunity Calculator is and how proud we are of it – it was inevitable that we’d also send the email to recipients at other stages of the funnel, including those in the Desire stage (even if what they desire isn’t even necessarily the topic of the email). Generally speaking, though, we wanted this email to raise awareness of a specific product and subsequently stimulate interest in that product.

Think Before You Hit Send

Gauging and matching user intent in email marketing is definitely possible, and may help you increase your open and conversion rates. That said, there’s obviously a lot to consider when preparing your next campaign, especially if your audience segments are comprised of individuals in various stages of the conversion funnel.

Hopefully, this post has given you some things to think about for your next email marketing campaign. If you have any comments or suggestions on how to leverage user intent in emails, let me know below.

They say that practice makes perfect, and it is true not only with anything creative but also with the working world. Training is an integral part of making any company efficient and profitable. Training done poorly, however, can result in a major decrease in productivity and a loss of investment dollars. Training done well will have the reverse impact, helping a company gain more money from its investment in training, while also increasing efficiency and even the safety of the employees that work for you.

Over the course of this piece, we will address how training programmes can have a huge return on investment, while at the same time showing you how to measure that investment return.

We will begin with finding the right training programme.

Define It

You need to define the need for your business for the training. This training can come in many forms, from training new employees to training veteran employees on a new system. Once you define the need for the training programme, you can begin to assess which one is going to give you the best return on investment. For example, a training programme that has been designed to show new employees how to use a new system is going to be a waste of time for a veteran employee. That will translate into a poor return on investment for you.

Is it right for you?

The next step in this process is to determine if the training is what your company needs. It is common to address issues within an organization through training, but this doesn’t mean you will get a large return on investment. You want to make sure that training is going to be the right solution for your company in this regard. You can determine if your company needs this training by asking yourself if your employees know their job and the product or service that you are selling. If they do, then training would be a waste of time for you and the return on investment would not be very large. If they do not know how then training is the best solution.

What do you want in the end?

Having a clear goal in mind is extremely important when it comes to any return on investment scenario. For this reason, you want to know what you want to come of the training. You want to make sure that the training achieves exactly what you want it to. You should make sure to ask yourself what the training will achieve for the person being trained, and for the company, and what the outcome from it will be. Knowing that will help you make the most efficient choice.

The Program Itself

The program you want for your company will address several key factors. There are several things to determine about the program to make sure that it is the program that works best for you. Remember, this is all about return on investment for you or your company.

Questions to ask include:

1. Is this for a single employee or a group of employees?
2. Is this for new employees or veteran employees, or is it for both sets?
3. Is this training best one-on-one, in a classroom environment, or in an online course?
4. How long does the training need to be to be most efficient, with the shortest amount of downtime for employees?
5. Is there a training program that can accomplish this now, or does one need to be designed specifically for the company?
6. Is there a support system in place to ensure that the employees have learned new skills and applied those skills to their roles?

Answering these questions will give you a higher return on investment with your training programme.

The Metrics

This is what it is all about. You won’t know your return on investment without knowing the metrics of your training regime. You need to determine how you are going to measure the success of the training. This can be done in a number of ways, including through software, customer feedback and more. There are several things to consider with your metrics system.

1. How often do you want to measure metrics? Is this a daily, weekly or monthly measurement?
2. What metrics are already being tracked?
3. Are there metrics that can be added into this to get a higher degree of accuracy?
4. How will the metrics themselves to tracked?

The Return on Investment

Now we get to the nitty-gritty aspect of training metrics. It is all about the return on investment, but how do you determine that return on investment? Well, there are several ways to do this. If you are a restaurant and your employees have not been providing customers with Customer Loyalty Cards, you can easily measure this without software. Train your employees to push the Customer Loyalty Cards and look at the average number of Customer Loyalty Cards that customers have signed up for in the previous month or more. Once you have that, complete the training and then track how many cards are signed up for after the training. If the number increases, then you have achieved a return on investment with the training.

Often, it is not that easy to determine the return on investment, and that is where the metrics come in.

To determine the return on investment, which may not be evident immediately, do the following:

1. Create a benchmark for measuring the success before the training.
2. Monitor the measurements at regular intervals after the training.
3. Take the return on investment at regular intervals to determine the success.

The return on investment is done with the following calculation:

Return on Investment = Change in Cost of Activity/Total Cost of Training x 100%

You want your return on investment value to be above 100 percent.

So, if your training results in time savings of $7,000 based on your metrics, and the cost of the training itself was $3,250, then the calculation is going to be:

ROI = 7,000/3,250 x 100%

ROI = 2.15 x 100%

ROI = 215%

This means that you have had a huge return on investment. That shows you that the training program has been a big success, and the efficiency of your business has increased immensely.

The Stats

It is all well and good to talk about return on investment, but we want to show you just how other companies have seen a success with training programs to increase efficiency.

In 2015, according to Tauber, tech firms spent $150 billion on training employees, averaging $1,847 per year per employee. It was found that these companies had 65 percent less voluntary turnover than other companies in the industry.

A big success story with training programs was the Cheesecake Factory, which spends $2,000 per year per employee to help train them. As a result of this, the company enjoys a sales figure of $1,000 per square foot, which is well above the $500 per square foot seen by other restaurants and the industry average itself.

Companies that used training personnel from ADP, for things like managing virtual teams and proper time management, found a seven percent growth in sales.

Discover Financial, one of the largest companies in the world, began using e-learning, videos, and self-study for 70 per cent of its training. What they found was that there was 42 percent less attrition, and a six percent increase in employee satisfaction overall.

Hyatt, a huge hotel chain, creating a Changing the Conversation training programmed for their employees to show the opportunities in the company for professional growth. As a result of this training programme, the company sees housekeepers stay with the company for an average of 12 years, well above the 3.8 years that is the average in the industry.

Oakfield Software, a company dealing in visual planning software for organisations, has shown that companies that invest in training can see huge returns, and when those returns are proven, this leads to a culture of continuous improvement.

Culture is important

Training isn’t a simple matter of sending people on courses and then hoping they do their job better, it’s much more matter of instilling a culture with the workplace that strives for continuous improvement.

When training not only provides a return on investment, but that return can be proven with solid metrics, you then get a company that is ready for visible and steady growth, lower staff turnover and increased profits.

This post was co-written by CMI’s Chief Content Adviser Robert Rose.

In both our speeches and workshops to audiences not familiar with content marketing, we generally spend the first part of the presentation on what content marketing looks like, and how it can provide multiple ways to create value.

In particular, while I talk about “sales, savings, and sunshine” as the three core reasons why enterprises engage in a content marketing approach, Robert talks about a model called “subscribe, win, and grow.” We can address examples of each.

Goal of sales or win

A sales goal within a content marketing approach is all about driving demand for products and services by first creating subscribers who know, like, and trust your brand, who then convert into customers. As Robert describes it in his workshop, this is simply spending some of your marketing effort in building a group of people who are engaged with your approach but aren’t ready to purchase. When they are — your brand will be top of mind.

A great example of this is Brian Clark’s Copyblogger. In 2006, Brian started the content brand and created consistent content around SEO and online copywriting. Before long, Brian amassed over 100,000 opt-in subscribers. Today, the majority of revenue coming into the company (now known as Rainmaker Digital), a software-as-a-service (SaaS) enterprise, comes from its database of subscribers.

Goal of savings or subscribe

A cost-savings goal leverages a content marketing approach to see results similar to another program running in the organization (ultimately, it enhances or replaces the traditional initiative with the content initiative). From a “subscribe” perspective this is utilizing the power of an opt-in audience to deliver better or more effective performance from other business activities.

Jyske Bank has created one of the most high-tech in-house television production studios in Denmark. In fact, the company refers to itself as both a bank and a media company. Jyskebank.tv produces amazing financial programming, as well as compelling stories that the bank believes are relevant to its core audience of younger consumers and small enterprises.

Instead of paying for multiple traditional sponsorships like most banks and corporate brands do, Jyske works with businesses interested in leveraging its media expertise. Instead of outlaying cash to outside opportunities, Jyske receives proposals for media partnerships from other organizations — an attractive option made possible by the credibility and reach the bank’s content program has helped it to build.

Both the World Mobile Congress and the Cannes Lions Festival have approached Jyske about forming this unique relationship, offering Jyske access to logo placements and exclusive interviews once reserved for media companies — strong evidence that with reach and a loyal audience comes great opportunity.

Whereas, in the past, Jyske Bank had to pay for opportunities like these, it can save that money because so many traditional organizations want access to Jyske’s audience.

Another example of this is Kraft’s Food & Family magazine and online recipes database program. By leveraging the rich data gleaned from its millions of subscribers to both the print and online platforms, Kraft created content four times more effective than most targeted traditional media buys.

Goal of sunshine or grow

Sunshine, or what sunshine helps with most — growth — is all about creating better customers for our business. In essence, this goal focuses on creating more loyalty and retention with customers or, at minimum, more positive customer behaviors like cross-selling or up-selling.

Print and digital magazine thinkMoney is produced by TD Ameritrade for active customers who trade sometimes hundreds of times a day. In the early days, the program was under ongoing review to determine whether it was worth spending money on the magazine.

But the leaders persevered and, after approximately two years, received the information they needed: Subscribers and readers of the magazine traded five times more than non-subscribers. Simply put, those who subscribe to this magazine become better customers for TD Ameritrade.

Fourth model: Content marketing as a profit center

I recently had an opportunity to hear Robert Sperl, editorial director of Red Bull’s magazine, explain its origin. In 2005, Red Bull was a major sponsor of Formula One racing. The company wanted to deliver a printed guide with the race results immediately after the event.

Prior to each race, they gathered inside stories about the drivers and fun facts about the history of each race and assembled and printed the bulk of each magazine ahead of time. They brought a Heidelberg press to the track. As soon as the race was over, they quickly printed the results and distributed the magazines to attendees as they were leaving the race — an astounding feat.

In 2007, Red Bull decided to evolve this publication into a men’s lifestyle magazine. It launched Red Bulletin in five countries, with 70% international and 30% localized content. Today, Red Bulletin magazine is published in five languages and is distributed in 10 countries. It prints and distributes 2.3 million copies each month, including 550,000 mailed to paid subscribers.

Image source

However, the most interesting aspect of the editorial director’s presentation on Red Bull Media House was how success is measured — and it’s not on how it helps drive more can sales. It is measured just like a media company — Red Bull Media House enters into initiatives that are profitable on their own merit.

All these years we’ve been holding up Red Bull Media House as one of the leading examples of content marketing. But truthfully, it’s a media organization inside Red Bull.

Examples abound

As we see content marketing maturing, and now that we’ve begun to look at this model more closely, it’s easy for us to see smaller examples in multiple industries.

In marketing, both Salesforce (with Dreamforce) and Marketo (Marketo Summit) create immensely valuable events that are profitable in their own right.

Cuisine Solutions, in conjunction with the Ad Agency HZDG just launched Sous-Vide, a $9.99-per-issue cooking magazine selling on the Cuisine Solutions website as well as at stores including Trader Joe’s, Whole Foods, and Costco.

Johnson & Johnson operates BabyCenter.com as a completely separate division.

LEGO’s The LEGO Movie was created as a for-profit initiative. Sure, they wanted to sell more bricks, but the movie itself was to be measured just like any other movie — on ticket/DVD sales and merchandise.

All these examples are great, but they are nothing new. Enterprises have launched money-making initiatives ad-hoc for decades (if not longer). Why is now any different?

Tide is turning

I gave a presentation three weeks ago to a global manufacturing company. This was the first presentation where I cited not three, but four models for content marketing.

In just the past month, we’ve covered in our podcast, This Old Marketing, the announcements by both Pepsi marketing and Mondelez marketing about their new content marketing models. In both cases, the marketing leaders at these organizations talked about a portion of their marketing being self-sustaining or even profitable.

Soon after that, as Robert presents in his master class, Fortune 150 company Arrow Electronics announced the purchase of a number of B2B media brands from events company UBM (parent company of Content Marketing Institute). Not only has Arrow purchased amazingly valuable subscriber lists (made up of prospects and customers for its product) and editorial talent, but it has also purchased standalone marketing that is profitable by itself.

Future of marketing + media

Let’s take another look at Red Bull Media House and its suite of brands. Red Bull Media House is the umbrella over a number of sub-brands, including Red Bull Content Pool, Speedweek, and Red Bull Records.

While Red Bull still markets its products like other organizations, including advertising and traditional public relations, Red Bull Media House drives value, for the most part, outside the products that Red Bull sells. To do that, it has created a model similar to most media companies, logging dozens of content brands in the process.

This group makes money. The side benefit is that it aligns with the goals of Red Bull marketing … selling more cans. And getting this close to so many readers gives Red Bull customer insight unlike most other brands. This type of insight feeds upon itself into new products and new content brands (helping both the marketing and the media arms of Red Bull).

This is the future of IBM, of General Motors, of Cisco Systems.

Yes, in many ways we will still market the way we’ve marketed for decades. This includes large amounts of advertising and interruptive marketing.

Yes, we will also market specifically around the buyer’s journey, driving leads and certain behaviors with specific pieces of content. This is how most enterprises currently employ content marketing.

And yes, these large B2B and B2C enterprises will own a number of content brands as part of their content studios. Marriott has just started this, with its Marriott Traveler brand and Two Bellmen movie series. We can see Marriott in the near future owning and running 50 to 100 content brands targeting different audiences. Most of these will be self-sustaining or even profit-producing.

Initially, the money to create or purchase these brands will come from marketing or R&D. After that, the profit coming from the media brand will help buy or invest in more content brands.

In 20 years, the largest media companies on the planet may be the IBMs and GMs of the world, and, outside of hybrid companies like Disney, there won’t be many standalone media companies on the list of large media conglomerates.

In time, many smaller enterprises will just opt to create a media brand as their go-to-market strategy. (HubSpot anyone?)

Now we’ve been wrong before (many times), but this feels like the new direction we are seeing in content marketing. What say you?

Want to hear more from Joe and Robert, and about the fourth content marketing model? Register today for Content Marketing World Sept. 6-9. Use code BLOG100 to save $100.

Cover image by Joseph Kalinowski/Content Marketing Institute

The post The 4th Reason for Content Marketing: A Profit Center appeared first on Content Marketing Institute.

As a business, you are likely to be signing up for a number of third party software and services – be it for accounting, marketing, HR, finance or just web hosting. Back in the day, these business software tools were available to download for a lifetime license fee. Users simply paid a few hundred dollars to download the software and it was theirs for a lifetime. Many other developers sold an annual renewal fee which gave its users access to periodic software updates and technical support as well. From a user’s perspective, this often meant large capital investment in software tools which could all be down the drain if the developers folded or stopped updating their software.

But with SaaS gaining ground over the past decade, a large chunk of software makers have migrated to the cloud. This has given rise to a subscription model where the service provider hosts all the tools and data on their servers and users pay a monthly fee to access them. This has been a pretty popular option compared to licensing fee primarily because of the cheaper monthly costs and also because you only paid for as long as you need the service. Established service providers also provide annual subscription for a cheaper cost from users who prefer this option.

While the subscription based billing model is definitely an improvement over lifetime licensing, it still has its flaws. These subscriptions often come in a tiered structure where lower priced subscription plans offer fewer resources and features which expand with every higher tier. Most SaaS services come with an ‘Enterprise’ plan which is often the highest tier of subscription – here the pricing is custom quoted for power users based on their specific usage requirements.

At the outset, this seems like a fair pricing model where you are only billed for what you need. But that is not always the case. An alternate pricing model that has been getting popular in recent times is Pay-As-You-Go. Similar to the model followed on the PAYG phones, these services let users add “credits” to their account which get used up based on your consumption. For services where consumption could change quite drastically, you also have metered billing where you are invoiced at the end of a billing cycle based on your consumption.

Predictable Pricing

One of the arguments made for subscription billing is that your expenses are predictable each month and you do not get rude shocks at the end of the month. While this is true, it also means that your consumption levels are limited to what your plan provides. For instance, if your hosting plan limits your monthly bandwidth consumption, you are likely to miss out on additional revenue if you have a great month with a higher than planned web traffic. Most services do allow you to upgrade or downgrade your plans each month, but then, this defeats the purpose of subscription billing which is to make expenses predictable.

Charging For Unconsumed Resources

The biggest problem with subscription plans is that you are always charged for resources you did not consume. To take the same hosting plan example, let us say the starter plan offers 10 GB of bandwidth at $10 a month while the upper tier offers 100 GB at $30 a month. For a business to enjoy the $10/month subscription, they need to always consume less than 10 GB of bandwidth. Thus, a business that only consumes 2 GB a month continues to pay for 8 GB of unconsumed bandwidth. Worse, if you are a business that consumes 12 GB of bandwidth, you are essentially paying for 88 GB of unconsumed resources.

Compare this with a credit or metered billing structure. A business that consumes 12 GB is only billed for the resources consumed. Subscription billing is fantastic as a service provider but terrible for users.

Money Getting Locked

There are instances where a credits based system does not work well. Service providers that offer credits based billing often have a ‘minimum refill’ amount and it is not possible to add credits fewer than this amount. Some providers require a high minimum refill which could lock your money into their system for a long period. For instance, if you use $10 worth of credits each month and the minimum refill is $100, your credits would not be used completely for ten months. And in case you are not happy with the provider, the money you have already paid for can be hard to retrieve.

Where Subscriptions Make Sense

There are certainly instances where subscriptions do make sense. Internet service providers typically provide an “all you can use” pricing that is billed monthly or yearly. Here, users are billed one amount every month regardless of how much they consume. Here too, heavy users get their consumption subsidized by light users whose consumption does not justify their monthly billing. But the pricing still makes sense because the provider often has operational expenses that are incurred regardless of usage. That is, it takes the internet service provider resources to keep the traffic flowing regardless of how many users use their service and the bandwidth they consume. But for these subscriptions to make sense, there is only one pricing for all consumers with only the outlying very heavy consumers priced differently.

As a consumer, this begets the question – does it make sense to pay a monthly subscription for all the SaaS tools you use – be it for accounting, marketing or anything else. The answer is mostly no. If you have alternate providers who offer all the features you need with a credits system or metered billing model, always go with them. This not only saves your business a lot of cash, but can also protect you from instances where you subscribe to try a new service but forget to sign out before the end of trial period.

THIS ARTICLE ORIGINALLY APPEARED ON THE HUBBION BLOG

Here's straightforward guidance on how to identify what your customers value, understand how value motivates B2B buying, break through the price barrier, and use value (i.e., create it) to justify your pricing. Read the full article at MarketingProfs

Difficult prospects are a fact of sales life, and dealing with a difficult buyer who makes a sale harder than it needs to will always suck — and from time to time, you're bound to deal with an especially difficult buyer who makes a sale especially harder than it needs to be, and that experience will especially suck.

So to help you get a sense of the kinds of buyers you need to look out for (and what to do when you‘re dealing with them), we asked some sales leaders for their takes on the most difficult types of prospects to work with and how to engage with them effectively. Let’s hear what they had to say!

8 of the Most Difficult Types of Prospects (& How to Deal With Them)

1. The “Always Too Busy” Prospect

Baidhurya Mani, Founder of SellCoursesOnline, suggests that particularly preoccupied prospects can pose real challenges for salespeople. She says, “Prospects who are always too busy are some of the most frustrating to deal with. These are prospects who are genuinely interested in the product and really want to talk to you, but just have so many things going on that they can't seem to spare time for you. As a result, meetings are always either postponed or no-shows.”

How to Handle Them: Create urgency.

Mani suggests that “[the] best way to deal with prospects like this is to enforce a sense of urgency. Offer them an exclusive discount that's time-based or on a first-come, first-served basis. Put a deadline on your offering so that they will make it a priority to close the deal with you on or before the said date. Without a deadline, they get too comfortable postponing things because there's no urgency.”

2. The Prospect Who's Afraid to “Sell in”

When we asked Patty Radford Henderson, CEO & Founder of Annum, about some of the most frustrating prospects she deals with, she referenced buyers who were a little sheepish about bringing potential offerings to company leadership.

She says, “It's challenging when a potential user of your solution sees the value, wants to implement it, but is intimidated by the idea of having to sell it in — both to their boss and the head of finance.”

How to Handle Them: Guide them on how to present a business case.

Henderson suggests that salespeople offer some additional guidance to these kinds of prospects. She says, "We've found success by guiding them on how to present a business case. To ensure clarity, persuasiveness, and alignment, we recommend tailoring the presentation to the priorities of your audience. Senior executives are often more interested in high-level strategic implications and financial outcomes, while operational managers prioritize feasibility and implementation details.

“Or, tell a compelling story. Clearly articulate the problem or opportunity, the proposed solution, and the expected benefits and outcomes. You can also present evidence-based insights. Support your recommendations with firsthand or industry data that demonstrates the feasibility and potential impact of the investment.”

3. The Overly Demanding Prospect

Jason Hunt, CMO and Co-founder of Merged Media, referenced running into trouble with buyers who ask too much of salespeople. According to him, “The most difficult type of prospect to deal with has always been the overly demanding buyer who seems impossible to please. In my experience, these prospects ask for the moon — customized solutions, deep discounts, unlimited revisions — often before establishing any relationship or value provided.”

How to Handle Them: Address them diplomatically.

Hunt says, “It's tempting to simply avoid them, but I've found the best approach is to address concerns directly yet diplomatically, clearly explain standard offerings, and try to find some common ground. If that fails, walking away may be the wisest path to maintain trust with other, more reasonable clients in the long run.”

4. The People Pleaser

Michael Alexis, CEO of teambuilding.com, suggests that sometimes, buyers who falsely present as a little too enthusiastic can be the toughest to deal with. He says, "As a sales leader, I think one of the most difficult types of prospects is the people pleaser. Sales reps might shudder at the thought of an outwardly challenging lead who shares unfiltered honesty, but the opposite is more insidious.

"Some potential customers respond positively to your pitches and outreaches not out of genuine interest or product fit, but out of politeness, aversion to conflict, and a desire to be amenable. It can be tricky to tell when these folks are truly considering your solution, and when they are giving lip service out of a need to appear nice or avoid uncomfortable reactions.

"However, no matter how agreeable your prospect might be, there are still warning signs. For instance, the customer may avoid answering your questions directly or giving concrete timelines. They may also agree with everything you say and fail to ask any questions of substance.

How to Handle Them: Discern genuine interest from politeness.

According to Alexis, perceptiveness is key when handling these kinds of prospects. He says, "A key to dealing with this type of prospect is to engage in active listening and read between the lines of their responses.

“Watch body language, and stay alert for signs like lack of eye contact or fidgeting. During discovery, ask thoughtful questions that elicit a more thorough response (avoid yes-or-no questions), and be sure to listen to interpret the client's most pressing needs. Also, give these prospects an easy way to opt out if they're not interested so that you're not wasting either of your time.”

5. The Tire-Kicker

Gauri Manglik, CEO and Co-founder of Instrumentl, says salespeople should be wary of prospects that might not be serious about buying. She says, "In my experience, the most difficult prospects to deal with are the tire-kickers — those who seem interested but never actually commit or sign a contract. They ask thoughtful questions and get you to invest time preparing proposals and estimates, but then disappear or continually make excuses to delay actually moving forward.

“These prospects are challenging because they seem so promising at first. But after several rounds of follow-up, you realize they were never truly serious buyers in the first place. They were just gathering information or comparing options with no real intention to buy.”

How to Handle Them: Qualify them early on.

Manglik suggests that salespeople should try to catch these potential time-wasters preemptively with sound qualification. She says, "The key is to qualify these prospects early by asking targeted questions about their budget, timeline, and key decision-makers. Look for concrete signs that they are motivated to act, not just gather data.

“If those signs aren't there, don't invest too much time or resources until you see real commitment. Have an honest conversation about their intentions and let them know you need to see progress before providing more details. The best approach is to remain professional but cautious, rather than wasting effort on prospects who were never genuinely interested at all.”

6. The “Price Shopper”

Mark Damsgaard, Founder of Global Residence Index, says salespeople should be mindful of overly cost-centric buyers. By his account, “Some of the toughest prospects to deal with are those who don't want to pay premium rates. Some call them 'the price shoppers' because they're laser-focused on getting the cheapest deal possible.”

How to Handle Them: Shift the focus from price to value.

According to Damsgaard, “My tip is to avoid getting into a price war with them. Instead, do your best to shift the conversation toward value. Help them understand the return on investment they'll get from putting their money into your solution. Help them see whether they'll benefit through increased efficiency, cost savings, or revenue growth. Trust me, when people understand the true value of your offer, they won't see your price as expensive.”

7. The Indecisive One

Johannes Larsson, Founder and CEO of JohannesLarsson.com, says buyers who can‘t pick a lane are tougher to deal with than most. He says, "Indecisive prospects are some of the trickiest to handle. They’re the ones who seem interested but just can't seem to make up their minds. This can be frustrating because you can spend a lot of time and effort trying to close the deal — only to have them waffle or back out at the last minute."

How to Handle Them: Guide them with patience.

“The key to dealing with these prospects is patience and persistence. You need to gently guide them through the decision-making process, making sure to address any concerns they may have along the way. It would also help to offer a little extra reassurance or incentives to nudge them toward a decision.”

8. The “Back-and-Forth-er”

Beryl Krinsky, Founder and CEO of B.Komplete, says wishy-washy prospects have a tendency to give salespeople trouble. She says, “Following the pandemic, we have been dealing with prospects and clients who have gone back and forth with confirmed events, canceled confirmed programs, and asked for last-minute changes. This creates additional work, time, energy, and stress for our team, not to mention loss of revenue (and fulfilling our mission!).”

How to Handle Them: Implement cancellation policies with empathy.

According to Krinsky, “We have made a few changes. First, we try to be as accommodating as possible with clients, demonstrating our empathy, and allowing for one change or cancellation without a penalty. After this happens more than once, we do implement a small cancellation fee. I do recommend always having a service agreement in place prior to scheduling services, to help mitigate a future issue.”

Like I said at the beginning of this post (when I blew your mind with the kind of mind-blowing insight that blows people's minds), prospects aren't always easy to deal with — and the prospects listed here fit that bill and then some. So hopefully, this guide will help you identify the kinds of prospects that will give you trouble and help inform more focused, effective strategies for dealing with them.

Cost cutting is a necessary part of running a successful business in the long term. When we cut costs intelligently, we make the company more profitable without sacrificing future growth.

But often it is difficult to determine what costs we should cut first. In order to prioritize the right costs, it is important to take a look at all the costs your company has today.

Rank them from highest dollar amount to lowest, then go through them line by line. For each line item, ask yourself a couple of questions:

1. What impact does this activity have on current performance?
2. What impact does this activity have on future performance?
3. What impact would it have to remove this cost or make it smaller?

More often than not, you will find costs on your books that have little to no impact on current or future performance, which can be trimmed or cut out entirely without any loss in value for the customer.

Here is an example based on a recent client story:

An online seller of baked goods was seeing strong organic growth, and began spending some of their profits on Facebook ads. The ads effectively grew the number of new customers but the margins were so small that every dollar in new revenue went right back into the business. The owners were unable to take the kind of salary they wanted and had trouble paying to scale their baking operation.

It might have been easy to say use cheaper ingredients or stop investing in marketing. But both of those changes would likely have negative impacts on performance.

On analyzing the business, one thing that stood out was the cost of each shipment. The packaging they were using was expensive to buy and more expensive to ship than something smaller/simpler would have been. It was determined that a packaging change would have little impact on performance, so they shifted to something lighter and cheaper.

Margins increased overnight and over time the added profit was used to finance a new kitchen and added staff.

Selling is easier and harder than ever.

And while I am not a fan of the term “social selling,” and prefer “smart selling,” it’s on trend, at the moment. Someday it will just be “selling,” again.

There are many definitions for social selling, including Hubspot’s:

And LinkedIn’s:

Marketers broadcast, and salespeople connect, one-to-one. Marketing lays the foundation and sets the stage and sales people cross the finish line.

Buyers tap into their preferred channels to get information, insight, and recommendations. The days of the phone and even email being the most relevant channels are over. 90% of cold calls go unanswered and people, strapped for time and attention, aren’t interested in talking to salespeople before they are ready to buy.

Knowing the channels that your buyer prefers is challenging, but it does deserve your attention. If you think you’re just fine without figuring out how to use professional and social networks to start, nurture or further your sales cycles, you are missing more opportunities than you may realize.

If you are someone calling on or managing enterprise accounts, beware. Their marketing departments are producing vast amounts of content, and their social enablement team is teaching them how to use the content to further their sales efforts. Companies who are engaged socially don’t want to work with companies who are light years behind. Would you?

Wouldn’t you benefit if you could converse with them in the channels they use to communicate with their customers?

Wouldn’t you benefit from looking smart, interested and engaged in their business?

Think of the information you could glean about your customers and prospects, their products and services, their customers and their employees. It’s all there on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Snap Chat. You don’t need to be on all of these channels, but you do need to be on their main channels.

Saying you look at your point of contact or prospect on LinkedIn before a meeting is not social selling. Sending them a friend request on Facebook when you don’t know them is not social selling either. Social selling is a long-term strategy and focused on a SMART plan, (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound).

Specific: determine the most important professional and social networks.

Measurable: set goals for starting conversations, connecting, arranging a call, downloading something from a website or first-time appointment.

Achievable: focus on current customers and develop more relationships and business with those accounts first. Add your top prospects next.

Relevant: Be current with your own professional and social networks, know what’s trending and what works.

Time-bound: Dedicate at least 30-minutes every day for 45 days. Track successes and setbacks. Review at the end of each week.

12 Things You Must Do to be an Awesome Social Salesperson

1. Determine your preferred channels. Yes, they should line up with your current and potential customers.

2. Define your personal brand and value proposition. What differentiates you as a sales professional? Why should someone want to do business with you?

3. Think research, not stalking. Learning is not stalking and researching so that you are informed and smart is not creepy.

4. Follow your customers on at least the big three networks, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter.

5. Know what’s on their blogs and in their posts. Read their content and use it in your conversations, presentations, and market research.

6. Like, comment and share their content with your network and among their followers.

7. Spend a defined amount of time learning and engaging on these channels every day or at least three times a week. Put this time on your calendar and consider it as important to keep as you would the first meeting with a prospect.

8. Share content even if you and your company are not creating original content. There is no excuse for not posting content today. Curating content, if selected thoughtfully, can add a good deal of value to your network and customers. Adding your voice to the content you’re creating does add an element of originality to the article, post, video.

9. Find others who are further along in the social selling journey. Get good coaching and training. Learn as much as you can as quickly as possible. Understand, these channels are continually changing so there will be a need for ongoing learning, strategic and creative thinking.

10. Upgrade your LinkedIn membership for greater access. When you’ve maxed out your LinkedIn.com account, move over to Sales Navigator. Learning LinkedIn.com and Sales Navigator at the same time can be confusing.

11. Pay attention to where you see traction. If you do not see any progress, step back and try to figure out why and tweak, as needed. If you see traction, keep track and do more of those activities.

12. Know this is a marathon, and will be how you will grow your business moving forward. Don’t stop using professional and social network activities because you do not see immediate gains.

Selling this way does work, and you need to know either you or your competitor will gain access, insight and opportunity this way. I hope it’s you.

Every startup in Silicon Valley wants to be the next Facebook, with its one billion users, or LinkedIn, which just sold to Microsoft for $26 billion. And why not? Their business model is a beautiful thing: platforms (also known as two- or multi-sided markets) are asset-light and make money by sitting between different parties, controlling the market and taking a piece of every transaction. Consider Care.com, which connects parents and babysitters who would otherwise have trouble finding one another, and just as importantly, ensuring the reliability of the other party. If Care.com’s owners earn a hefty commission, they’re doing so by making the world a better place, one babysitter match at a time.

But a platform isn’t simply a matter of connecting brick-and-mortar businesses to consumers via the web. You need to do something to make it so that your platform actually makes the buyer-seller relationship work notably better – or even creating markets where none could have existed without the platform’s nurturing hand. Which means that not every industry is susceptible to takeover by platforms.

You wouldn’t know that from looking at Silicon Valley, where platforms have been funded to solve any and all problems, including some where traditional markets are working just fine, and others where the platform doesn’t make things work all that much better. Consider, for instance, the startup that promises to do your laundry by connecting you to local Laundromats or get you food in real time by connecting you with local chefs. Laundry and cooking may be tasks that software engineers would rather not do themselves, but platforms haven’t made these chores any easier to deal with. They’re what our friend Pierre Azoulay, an economist at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, calls “the internet of things your mom won’t do for you anymore.”

Why aren’t these “platforms” valuable? Because a valuable platform is a “place” where groups meet to trade or otherwise transact in ways that would be difficult without the mediating hand of the platform. This includes ensuring that the right types of participants show up: Care.com, for example, allows sitters to provide third-party verification of their bona fides and – like so many other online platforms – enlists users themselves to maintain quality control. Parents rate sitters, and vice-versa, with the hope that a five-star rating provides at least some peace of mind to anxious parents.

Insight Center

What makes the platform model desirable is that once the market maker has inserted itself in the middle to create trade that wouldn’t exist in its absence, a cut of each transaction is theirs for the taking. If you think of a platform as a playing field, the owner is selling tickets to any player who wants to get onto the field, no matter which side he or she is playing on, or how many teammates have already joined. A company running a platform probably doesn’t care which team wins (in the sense of one side, or player, benefitting the most from the platform). It just wants to sell tickets to a lot of players and make sure the game is played on its turf. To do so, you have to ensure that the players you let onto the field actually enhance the platform’s value, so both sides stick around to play. (Your local little league team versus the New York Yankees isn’t a matchup that anyone really wants to see.) This service becomes more valuable with market “thickness,” so the bigger you get, the more indispensable you become and the less feasible it is for competitors to muscle in on your business.

As for the “things your mom won’t do for you anymore” startups, what problem are they trying to solve? What friction are they reducing? It’s really not much trouble to drop off your laundry or dry-cleaning at the place down the street, and then pick it up yourself. If you don’t like the hassle, it’s not much work to find one that delivers. That is, information costs, search costs, and transaction costs are all pretty modest. As for services that connect hungry consumers with nearby chefs, those entrepreneurs discovered that while customers are relatively easy to sign up, the other side of the market – the chefs – are much more expensive. So expensive in fact, that it makes more sense for them to hire chefs to work in the companies’ kitchens. Which means that it’s not a platform anymore; it’s a vertically integrated firm, with all of the associated costs.

So what’s a hard problem that platforms should work on solving? Consider an example ripped from the history of economic thought: buying and selling used cars. As anyone knows who’s been through the process, one party has a lot more information than the other. Sellers can put one over on an unaware buyer for lots of reasons: they know if they’ve driven the car hard over dirt roads and gotten oil changes only occasionally. They know if they’ve had an accident that they repaired without reporting it. And so on.

Buying a used car from someone you don’t know and who makes no guarantees is already fraught. There’s a reason that authorized dealers who do eight-point inspections can charge more: they’re charging for trust and peace of mind. This is why George Akerlof, a Nobel Prize winning economist, focused on the market for used cars when he wrote his groundbreaking 1970 paper, “The Market for ‘Lemons,’” on asymmetric information: the differences in what buyers and sellers know about what’s being sold is so very obvious.

Solving this problem was exactly what eBay, the auction site, had in mind when it launched eBay Motors under the entrepreneurial eye of Simon Rothman. eBay used the now-familiar mechanisms of seller and buyer ratings, as well as an outside evaluation of the cars by services like Carfax. But its real advantage was serving as a clearing house for rare and hard-to-find collector models.

It’s still too early to tell whether platforms like eBay Motors will solve the larger problem of information asymmetry in the wider used car market. Many of its sales are simply used car dealers advertising the cars that you’d find on the lot, replacing the classified section of your local newspaper or Craigslist with a better interface. And many of the fixes they’ve employed bring them closer to pre-internet (in-person) used car transactions. Beepi, an eBay Motors competitor, allows buyers to inspect vehicles on delivery – and reject them within 10 days at the company’s expense if not fully satisfied.

But, at least, if the used car entrepreneurs of cyberspace succeed, they will in fact be solving a real problem. Dwell on that the next time an entrepreneur tells you how they’re going to hit it big with Dogwalkers.com.

There is no real authority to concretely distinguish what birth date range signifies a “millennial”, or most other generations for that matter, as discussed in this 2014 article in The Atlantic. Though, most resources will say that Millennials were born between sometime in the early 1980s and the early 2000s.

Despite the lack of specificity around the exact date range, it’s safe to say that many millennials are entering the stage of life where they are beginning to “adult”; meaning they are starting to buy their own insurance, buy houses, and maybe—because millennials are typically eco-friendly—considering purchasing solar panels for their new houses.

In fact, mortgage industry software company Ellie Mae just launched its Ellie Mae Millennial Tracker^TM in May—a new interactive online tool on millennial loan trends in the United States. In the press release, Joe Tyrrell, executive vice president of corporate strategy at Ellie Mae, states, “There are roughly 87 million would-be homebuyers in the millennial generation and 91 percent of them say they intend to own a home one day. Lenders must prepare today to meet their needs.”

For performance marketers in those industries that are now beginning to experience this influx of millennial consumers, this is a very different persona to understand how to market to effectively. And, it is crucial for brands to get up to speed quickly on how to win the business of new Millennial consumers. As the National Chamber Foundation states in its Millennial Generation Research Review paper, “Tapping into the millennial generation as they begin their adult lives, as with previous generations, is important for brands hoping to establish lifelong relationships with their customers. This is also important with millennials because they help set trends through social media.”

What do performance marketers need to consider when marketing to this segment?

It’s not surprising that now, more than ever, every generation is using mobile devices to do things that used to only be done on desktops 10 years ago. In certain industries, such as mortgage, it’s easy to see that millennials especially—who are now young professionals and ready to take the next step of purchasing a home—have grown up with mobile and do everything on their phones. It’s natural that they want to keep doing things on their phone.

In fact, an April 2016 survey by Forbes of nearly 500 millennial nominees for the magazine’s 30 Under 30 list revealed that only 1 percent of the blue-ribbon millennials prefer to handle their banking by phone and only 8 percent prefer to handle banking in person. Meanwhile, 52 percent prefer using a smartphone app and 38 percent prefer using the bank’s website to handle their banking.

When prior generations were at this same stage in life, it wasn’t even possible to do on a phone what can be done now. Generation Xers and the generations before them had to call a realtor and rely on that realtor to show them houses in person. And, through the realtor or their bank, they would sit down and talk with a loan officer to explore financing options.

Now consumers can do all their research online with sites like Zillow, Trulia, Realtor.com, and Redfin to see the homes that are on the market, easily filtering on the features that matter to you. And, it’s expected to expand this concept into looking at your mortgage options online, as well.

What You Need to Address Immediately

There are several specific things that need to be addressed when marketing to millennial consumers:

1. Be aware that this is a real and growing trend that you must tackle. This generation needs to be treated with very different strategies and approaches than what was effective with prior generations. You should leverage data to gain an in-depth understanding of the millennial persona and his buying behaviors.

2. Once you have a deep understanding of the millennial persona, you need to think about how to design your messaging and advertising strategies accordingly. You need to consider where this segment will be and be there. For example, millennials will be more likely than baby boomers to be on social media and on mobile, so it makes sense to put more spend toward digital and mobile marketing strategies.

3. Understand how this segment prefers to communicate. As with any demographic, you can’t just assume, so you should leverage data tools to determine your consumers’ preferred method of contact. If it’s an existing customer, you can ask in a survey. If it is a prospect, there are ways to use behavioral data to determine this. Based on their past behaviors, you can predict such things as whether or not they are more likely to respond to a phone call than an email.

Of course, there are some assumptions you can make and act on, based on the wealth of research and surveys available, such as that millennials are less likely to make phone calls as an early means of gathering information. So, having a chat tool on your website might be important to consider. Knowing they are using their mobile phones, be sure to have click-to-call capability on your website, to make it easy for them to decide to call you while they are looking at your site.

4. Where to find this target market is also important to your strategy. If you are putting ads in newspapers, you will not find millennials, because that’s not where they are. In fact, it only takes one ride on the subway to see that, 90% of people are looking at their phone, not a newspaper, millennial or not.

So, you know they are on their cell phone. But, next ask where are they going on that device? If they are on FB or Twitter or Instagram, that is where you should be putting your ads. Promoted social posts and listings are potential options that you should try, test, and measure to see what works to see what is most effective.

5. Like most consumers of any generation these days, millennials are more informed consumers. By the time they are at the buying decision stage, they have much more self-acquired information than buyers would have had 20 years ago, thanks to that newfangled thing known as the Internet. So, it’s important to know what resources they are turning to online.

Are they visiting your site to do their research? Are they visiting your competitors’ sites? How much time do they spend on these sites?

Are they visiting third-party lead generator sites? If you aren’t working with companies who can provide third party leads, you miss chances to reach those consumers using those sites for their research.

As it is true of any generation, what matters most is where the millennial consumer is in their journey. When you combine your knowledge of where your consumer is on his journey with knowledge of how to best communicate with and message to that consumer, you have a winning combination.

Getting introduced to the mobile app monetization world can be quite difficult and confusing nowadays with the overflow of terminologies that a new app publisher may has to get familiar with. Going back to the beginning, we will try to list some basic terminologies widely used in mobile monetization and mobile advertising in general, in order to provide a better understanding to newcomers.

Types of networks

In the monetization landscape you will meet different type of networks that get involved at different parts of the monetization process.

Mobile Ad network

An ad network connects advertisers with app publishers who wish to host ads within their apps. Its key functionality is to match advertising space provided by a publisher, to advertising demand. An ad network usually gets access to a publisher’s ad space through an SDK, an API integration.

Mobile Survey network

A survey network connects market research companies and brands with app publishers who wish to host surveys within their apps. Its key functionality is to find the right respondents for surveys on the platform, as provided by the publisher. A survey network usually gets access to a publisher’s app through an SDK, or an API integration.

Mobile Affiliate network

An affiliate network acts as a middleman. It sells or buys mobile ad space on behalf of other third parties. They are mainly aggregators of different types of traffic that they try to optimise and work on a performance base.

Mobile Mediation network

A mediation network allows the organisation of ad networks by providing transparency on the available demand sources through a centralized platform. With the use of mediation, publishers can optimize networks within their apps based on different data like fill rate, eCPM, CTR and filter out using different options like geos, device types etc in order to optimize to highest paying ad demand for their ad space.

Types of integration

There are different ways an app publisher can integrate a monetization network. Below we list the 3 most widely used.

SDK

A Software Development Kit (SDK) is a set of software development tools that help developers create new software. An SDK by a monetization network usually allows the allocation of ad or survey space for an app, or enriches its functionality to allow monetization of the relevant app.

API

An Application Programming Interface (API) defines how software components should interact with each other. This kind of integration is usually used by ad networks to establish a communication of a server side software component with a publisher’s ad space.

Tag

A tag integration is a piece of code that is placed by app publishers to their mobile websites or webviews in order to be able to sell their ad space. It consists of url and a piece of html or javascript code and is partially defined by an API.

Types of Monetization Units

When a publisher decides to integrate a monetization network he is usually presented with several different types of monetization units. Below you can see some of the most popular ones.

Banner

Banners are ads placed in rectangle units of predefined dimensions.

Interstitial

Interstitials are full screen or big popup ads that are usually placed between transition points within or while entering or exiting a mobile app (e.g. the change of a game level, app launch, app exit and others)

Offer Wall

An offer wall is a monetization format where users are prompted with a full screen landing page wall of targeted offers that provide users with virtual items/credits/features or levels unlocks in exchange for registration, downloads or others.

Lock-screen ads

Lock screen ads are ads rendered on the lock screen of an app. Usually a user may decide whether or not to engage with that ad or unlock his/her phone.

Videos Ads

Video ads (Skippable or Non-Skippable) are usually full screen video ads that are rendered in a similar approach to interstitials.

Rewarded Video Ads

With rewarded video ads, users are incentivised with a reward for watching a video until the end.

Surveys

Surveys are a monetization unit where users are shown a survey and asked to share their opinion.

Rewarded surveys

With rewarded surveys, users are incentivised with a reward for completing a survey until the end.

Native Ads

Ads blended with app’s native user experience to match feel and flow of an app, minimising user interruption.

House Ads

Ads created by a publisher to promote another app of the same publisher.

Rich Media Ads

Rich media ad units are interactive or animated ad components (like a mini game, or a video)

Monetization Strategies

When deciding to monetize an app, a publisher has to choose between a variety of monetization strategies.

Paid

Used to refer to a monetization strategy where an app is provided as a paid app.

Freemium

Is the combination of “free” and “premium” and is used in apps world to refer to a strategy where an app is provided for free but offers also in-app paid options like virtual goodies, ad removal etc.

In-app advertising

In-app advertising model refers to the strategy where an app is provided for free but includes advertisement in order to generate revenue for the publisher. It is usually included in the general freemium category.

Paidmium

Is the combination of “paid” and “freemium”. This blended model refers to a monetization strategy where an app is provided as a paid app but also provides in-app purchase options and/or ads to increase revenue streams for the publisher.

Subscription

The subscription model provides an app for free, however users are allowed to login and use that app and its full functionality by paying a monthly fee.

User Identifiers

In mobile advertising users can be tracked in several different ways. Some of them include:

Advertising Identifier or IDFA

An advertising identifier (Android) or IDFA (iOS) is a temporary/ resettable device identifier that identifies a user across apps, mainly used for delivering interest based ads (as enforced by Google and Apple policies).

Cookies

Cookies are a small piece of data (text file) stored in a user’s web browser, while the user is browsing. That data is used to recall information about the user in future sessions.

Payment terms

Net X

The amounts of days (X) that must pass by, until the monetization network sends the payment to the publisher for his previous month’s earnings(can be week, day etc – depends on network’s payment cycle) .

Campaign revenue models

There are several revenue performance metrics/models out there that define the relationship of a publisher with a monetization network. Each monetization network follows a different model and publishers usually choose their networks depending on which model best works for them, based on the context of their app.

CPC

Cost-per-click (CPC) is a payment metric describing the amount of revenue paid to a publisher for each ad unit that is being clicked. This amount is specified by the advertiser.

CPA

Cost-per-acquisition or cost-per-action (CPA) is a model where a publisher gets paid for a completed action. This action can be anything like a form submit, install of an app, completion of a survey etc. Price to be paid for each action is predefined by the advertiser.

CPM

Cost-per-mile (CPM) is a model where a publisher gets paid per thousand ad impressions.

CPI

Cost-per-install (CPI) is a model where a publisher gets paid if a user installs and uses an app through an advertisement from the publisher’s app.

CPV

Cost-per-View (CPV) is a model where publisher gets paid after viewing an ad (for example a video).

CPCV

Cost-per-Completed-View (CPCV) is a model where publisher gets paid after a successful view of an ad (for example watching a video until the end).

App metrics

K factor

K factor is a metric to measure the virality of an app.

Formula: No. of invites X Percentage of conversions from invites

Active user

A user is considered active if he has opened the app within a provided timeframe.

DAU

Daily-Active-Users (DAU) refers to the number of users per day. This metric is used to measure user engagement and retention.

UDAU

Unique-Daily-Active-Users (UDAU) refers to unique number of users per day. This metric is used to measure user engagement and retention.

MAU

Monthly-Active-Users (MAU) refers to number of users per month. This metric is used to measure user engagement and retention.

UMAU

Unique-Monthly-Active-Users (UMAU) refers to the number of unique users per month. This metric is used to measure user engagement and retention.

ARPU

Average-Revenue-Per-User (ARPU), as its name states, is a really good metric to measure the performance of a monetization strategy.

Formula: Total revenue / No of users

ARPDAU or ARPU-DAU

Average-Revenue-Per-Daily-Active-Users (ARPDAU), as its name states, calculates average revenue per daily active user.

Formula: Total revenue / No of daily active users

ARPPU

Average-Revenue-Per-Paying-Active-Users (ARPPU) calculates the average revenue per user after users have been converted to paying customers.

Formula: Total revenue / No of paying users

LTV

Life-Time-Value of a user in an app reflects the revenue accumulated by a single user while staying and interacting with the app during a predefined period of time.

Network Metrics

Several metrics are used to calculate a network’s performance. Some of them include:

Fill rate

Refers to the number of times an ad was available compared to the number of times it was requested.

Formula(%): No of ads received/ No of ads requested X 100

eCPM

estimated-Cost-Per-Mile (eCPM). In advertising it refers to the estimated cost per thousand ad impressions.

Formula(%): Total revenue/ No of ad impressions X 1000

Conversion rate

Refers to the number of users performing a desired action (for example installing an app or completing a survey).

Formula(%): No of users that took an action/ No of ad impressions X 100

Geos

Usually used along with fill rate metric to refer to top geographical areas where the network has good fill rates in terms of ad inventory.

Campaign Metrics

There are several ways to measure the effectiveness of a campaign. Below are some key metrics used.

CTR

Click-Through-Rate (CTR) refers to the ratio of clicks on ad impressions. Used to determine the performance of an ad campaign.

Formula (%): Total clicks/ No of ad impressions X 100

ROI

Return-Of-Investment (ROI) describes the eventual benefits of an ad campaign compared to its cost.

Impression

A metric defining of how many times an ad was shown.

Conversion Tracking

Conversion tracking is the tracking of specific events or actions though an app and is used by advertisers to measure the performance of their campaigns. These events or actions are defined by the advertiser as the campaign goals.

Other terms

Latency

Latency describes the delay (time difference) between a request for an ad and the response time for that. In general, it refers to the lag for displaying an ad.

Frequency capping

Is the process of limiting ad serving to a user based on a specific number of views, clicks or other actions.

Mediation

Is the management and optimization of ad serving from different ad networks through a single interface.

Retargeting

Is the process of targeting a user based on his previous actions/history.

In-app purchase

Is the process of buying enchased functionality, virtual goods or something else within an app.

Inventory

Inventory is the available advertising space provided by a publisher. It can also be used by advertisers to describe the available ads they have from clients.

User acquisition

User acquisition is the process of getting users to download an app or get/read or use a publisher’s content.

Bot farm

Bot farms in mobile advertising refer to fake mobile accounts that are used to drive big number of downloads of an app in order to affect the app’s ranking on relevant stores. This is a black hat practice and is banned from all major app stores.

Programmatic

Programmatic is the use of software to automate the process of negotiating, purchasing and selling of advertising.

DMP

A Data Management Platform (DMP) is a data warehouse responsible for collecting, analysing, managing and integrating large volumes of structured or unstructured data. DMPs are really useful for optimising ad campaigns by providing data needed to effectively target those campaigns.

DSP

A Demand Side Platform (DSP) is a system that allows marketers, advertisers or agencies, buy advertising inventory through multiple ad exchangers within one single interface. DSPs facilitate buyers with RTB access across multiple sources of ad inventory. With the help of DSPs, efficient buying and tracking of ad inventory takes place by utilisation of data that helps marketers reach the most relevant audience with their bids.

SSP

A Supply Side Platform (SSP) is a automated system that allows publishers to maximise their revenue by exposing and eventually selling their ad space to multiple potential buyers/bidders. An SSP is the equivalent of DSP on the publisher’s side. SSPs allow publishers to connect their ad inventory to multiple ad exchangers and sell their ad space at the highest price.

RTB

Real Time Bidding (RTB) is the process where ad inventory is bought and sold simultaneously in an automated way through programmatic means. During RTB, auctions take place where ad space provided by publishers is being sold to advertisers that offer the highest price during the automated action.

Ad Exchange

An ad exchange is a marketplace where publishers make available/publish their ad space inventory and marketers and advertisers bid and buy the most relevant space for them through real time auctions. DSPs decide automatically which of these impressions are most suitable for an advertiser to buy. The price of each impression is finalised through real time bidding. Ad exchange marketplaces provide efficiency and transparency, enabling advertisers to purchase ad impressions that are most cost-effective and relevant, while publishers are able to sell their ad space to the highest price.

Nowadays content marketers are generating too many inbound leads for sales.

The high number of leads results in sales not knowing which leads to prioritize and a lot of wasted effort as sales reaches out to many leads that are not a good fit, and miss some great leads hidden among the high inbound volume. An even bigger challenge is that content marketers don’t know which content is attracting the most valuable audience and they also can’t create tailored content to nurture these leads.

Content marketing and sales are inherently misaligned in their efforts from both sides:

1. Great leads engaging with content aren’t getting to sales fast enough, but sales is still getting bogged down with leads that aren’t a strong fit
2. There are no insights into which content is attracting the most valuable audiences

That’s where predictive scores come into play.

What Is A Predictive Score?

A predictive score for B2B marketers is an estimate of how likely a lead is to convert.

Marketing and sales set thresholds to determine when leads are qualified and use these scores to inform their decisions. The higher the score is for a lead, the more likely that lead is to convert.

Marketers can use predictive scores to prioritize the best inbound leads for their sales team. Whereas lead scores help marketers find the leads that are interacting with their content, predictive scores help marketers find the leads that are most similar in fit to existing customers.

How Predictive Scoring Can Help Content Marketers?

Most marketing processes are muddled with irrelevant leads, which get passed on to sales and result in a significant amount of wasted time for the sales team.

Only 30% of MQLs turn into SQLs [SiriusDecisions]

Using predictive, marketers can reduce the required number of leads their sales team must hit to reach their goals while also ensuring the right content is produced to help support their targeted efforts.

Predictive Use Case Example: Accelerate the best leads to sales

Let’s look at a basic predictive use case example:

Imagine your content marketing team publishes an amazing whitepaper. The content is rich with actionable insights, includes tips from top industry influencers, and even positions your company as a thought leader in the space.

At the end of the campaign, you find out that your white paper is projected to receive a whopping 10,000 downloads. That’s a content win, right? Well, not necessarily.

As you collect these prospects, you start sending them to your sales team for them to follow up and close. But with 10,000 downloads, your sales team is looking at an equally sizeable number of leads that they need to contact. Odds are your sales team will either start prioritizing certain leads based on their own judgment, which results in them potentially overlooking some of the best leads with the highest likelihood to convert. Or, they simply have to contact a larger number of leads in order to hit their target.

But what if your sales team knew which leads they should target first? And more importantly, what if the marketing team was able to create content that was highly personalized for these leads? With a predictive model, you can do exactly that.

Taking this example, let’s evaluate both scenarios: using a predictive model to prioritize inbound leads vs. not using a predictive model.

Without a predictive model (red line), to reach 60% of the prospects who will actually convert, your sales team will have to contact 60% of the total prospects. That’s 6,000 leads.

But with a predictive model (blue line), your marketing team can use scoring to identify and prioritize the top leads that are most likely to convert. This means you hand off more high-quality leads and your sales team can reach 60% of the prospects who will actually convert while only having to contact 40% of the total leads (or 4,000 leads).

The benefits of using predictive in this case are:

• Your marketing team is only sending the most qualified leads to the sales team
• Your sales team is more efficient because they don’t have to speak with a long list of lower quality leads in order to reach the high propensity prospects

From a content marketing perspective, you can use predictive to identify segments of these leads and surface key signals and attributes about them, which in turn enables you to create more personalized content that nurtures these leads through the buying cycle.

In addition, content marketers can also use predictive scoring to see how many top tier prospects were generated from your content, so you can optimize future content marketing efforts.

Wrapping It Up

If your content is helping attract, engage, and convert top-tier leads, then sales will love you if they can get in front of those quality leads right away without having to waste time on less qualified ones. But in order to do so, you need to be able to identify and prioritize the leads that are most likely to convert, while also supporting your sales team with the right content.

By using a basic predictive concept like scoring and grading, content marketers can find out which leads are interacting with their content and which ones are likely to become their customers.

Want to learn how to build a data-driven content strategy? Download this cheat sheet.