It takes an average of eight days for an organization to complete the quarterly financial closing process — a half-day longer than just nine years ago. However, a speedy but efficient close helps management understand its organization’s financial health and make important decisions in a timely manner.

Accurate financial statements are essential for all organizations, and it’s up to management to create processes that ensure accurate and timely reporting. Time is money, and shortening the closing process brings big advantages.

Why Early Closing Matters

A survey by SAP and Deloitte indicates that company leaders want to close their financials much faster than average. The reasons vary, but most revolve around time — 44 percent want more time for analysis and auditing before financial statements are published, 31 percent want to reduce the time and costs associated with closing, and 13 percent want to push management and financial information out as quickly as possible.

Companies often make better decisions during shorter closing processes. When financial statements are created in a timely manner, they can be used to build forecasts and accelerate innovation. An early close also makes the accounting team more analysis-driven instead of being held in a scorekeeper role. Plus, it reduces workload and creates more effective transaction processing.

Overcoming the Barriers to an Early Close

Company executives blame slower financial closing times on a variety of factors. According to the same survey, 40 percent of executives say it’s because of internal levels of review, 35 percent say it’s a growing need to identify and consolidate more detail for financial statements, and 20 percent say it’s because more time is needed to check for errors.

Financial analysts only spend about 23 percent of their time on value-added analysis. Speeding up the closing process can help analysts and others better utilize their time.

Efficiency and accuracy are essential in a closing, and many companies want to overcome these barriers and speed up their closings. The following three steps can increase the time, accuracy, and efficiency of a financial closing.

1. Use an Automated Process

Too many manual steps in a closing can slow down the process. Using an automated system is essential for speediness. Forty-three percent of the companies that complete their monthly close in four or fewer days use an automated process. Additionally, 27 percent use some automated processes, and 16 percent use little automation or none.

A highly automated system allows companies to close more than three days earlier than those not using automation. A consolidation software or enterprise resource planning system used to manage a close makes companies twice as satisfied as those using desktop spreadsheets as their primary tool for the closing process.

2. Make It a Company Priority

Making a speedy closing process a top priority for the company will ensure everyone involved has this in mind as they perform their daily tasks. Planning for a fast closing will also make the company run more efficiently.

When companies establish a clear program to reduce a closing timeframe, they accomplish their goal 77 percent of the time, according to SAP and Deloitte. A clearly stated objective to close more quickly usually results in meeting that goal.

3. Conduct a Post-Close Review

Assessing internal processes during the closing process and afterward identifies problems and areas that need improvement. The review can also identify any overlapping of duties or redundancies in the process, which will create efficiencies within the company and potentially save money.

Automation and making speed a priority are ways companies can eliminate barriers to timely closings. Time is money, and these solutions promote speed, leading to potential cost savings, efficiencies, and better financial decisions in the long run.

Join our webcast to learn more about streamlining the financial close, leveraging dynamic financials to drive operational business decisions, and reducing manual activities to allow for more robust analytics.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

As modern marketers, we’re all familiar with the lead generation funnel. You know, the one that hasn’t changed since the 90s, the one that shows up in every general marketing deck, created in Microsoft Paint with some sort of awful gradient. Like this one:

The image might be slightly antiquated, however, the concept behind the lead funnel remains crucial in understanding how your leads move from totally unaware of you to being a happy customer.

Understanding that path is the beginning of understanding life from your lead’s point of view, and that’s ground zero for the content you create for them, the offers you make, and the ways you invite them to engage with you. This story is sometimes told horizontally, but most often we see it as a vertical funnel, mouth at the top, narrowing to show how your pool of likely buyers gets smaller over time.

Top of funnel is the beginning of the buyer’s journey

Prospects enter your funnel at the top, where they express general interest in your field or your company. They may have discovered you on social media, seen an ad, or Googled a search term and found you on the search engine results page. They could be researching a problem and found your company listed on a review site, or perhaps a colleague recommended your company to them.

At this early stage, they’re learning, so they may move from page to page on your site, or start with a blog post and click to an internal page. These leads move down the funnel as they begin to show more refined interest in your product (they may download your eBooks, white papers, or attend a webinar). As the leads get close to the bottom of the funnel, they begin to be considered qualified, and perhaps even sales-ready. If a lead is willing to participate in a trial or to sit through a demo of your product, they are probably at the bottom of the funnel.

It’s critical to understand where your leads are in the process

While it isn’t an exact science, understanding which stage your leads are in helps you deliver the most appropriate, timely content to move leads more quickly through the funnel (and closer to purchasing!).

Successfully understanding your leads means you gain the knowledge to get them what they need, when they need it.

• Leads at the top of the funnel (ToFu) can be quickly turned off by offers of a demo or free trial because that might feel too pushy.
• Leads in the middle of the funnel (MoFu) are getting more sophisticated, so you don’t want to send them beginner content; that might feel patronizing.
• Those who are closer to the bottom of the funnel (BoFu) are usually interested in specific things that will help them make a decision (ROI calculators, competitive analyses, etc.) so they don’t need a thought-leader analysis of the problem they’re solving.

In order to cater to the needs of each prospect in your funnel, you must first be able to identify which stage in the buyer’s journey they’re at, and secondly be able to predict what kind of content or outreach they will be most receptive to. This is where the three defined buckets – ToFu, MoFu, BoFu – come in really handy.

ToFu, MoFu, BoFu is a simple breakdown of the lead funnel determined by the lead’s interest level, engagement activity, and potential fit as a customer. By segmenting your leads into these three buckets, your marketing efforts will be more targeted, and so you’ll be more successful readying those leads for sales to convert into customers.

ToFu – Top of Funnel: Provide Education

The “Top of Funnel” leads are first and foremost interested in learning. These leads might enter your funnel through doing general research about how to improve their performance as an individual or as a team.

In this portion of the funnel, your content should be focused on awareness and education. Your efforts during this phase should revolve around giving your prospects access to high quality content that helps THEM, not you. You do not want anything from your leads at this stage, you want only to interest them in the content that you have in relation to their needs. This is enlightened self-interest; your goal is to become a trusted friend.

Since these leads have just entered your funnel, it’s likely they are not ready to purchase, and won’t appreciate being treated as though they are. These leads often enter your funnel by searching for terms on the internet that relate to your product or service. In fact, 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic [not branded] search. Additionally, on average, B2B researchers do 12 searches prior to engaging on a specific brand’s site. This gives you a great opportunity to serve prospects high-level content that is intelligent, informative, and helpful.

Leads in this stage are most likely to be engaged with:

• Paid advertising
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Social media marketing
• Blogs

Remember, your goal during the ToFu stage is NOT to sell – it’s simply to educate.

When your ToFu lead is really a BoFu buyer

It’s also possible (if much less likely) that the lead has been searching similar products online for some time and looking at product reviews, comparisons, etc. They may have stumbled across your name relatively late in their exploration, and be almost ready to consider a purchase.

Watch for buyers who move through your funnel much more quickly than usual; they may be ready for the bottom of the funnel, where you speak specifically to what your organization can do for them. If you recognize this buyer, don’t make them wait; meet them where they are with advanced content.

MoFu – Middle of Funnel: Position Your Organization

As your leads move down the funnel, your opportunities to introduce your product or service increases. Leads in the MoFu stage are still mainly focused on education, but are more receptive to hearing about what you have to offer.

These leads may have moved from ToFu to MoFu by signing up for your newsletter, registering for a webinar, or downloading an eBook or datasheet. These leads have expressed some interest in hearing what you have to offer.

The most important thing to remember during this stage is that these leads are not ready to buy your product, and you shouldn’t try to force purchasing decisions. In fact, 50% of qualified leads are not ready to make a purchase – they need to be nurtured. And this is good for you. According to The Annuitas Group, nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. By continuing to offer your leads in the MoFu stage education and high-quality content, you will ultimately be increasing the value of your potential customer.

Email is a great way to nurture these leads and move them quickly down the funnel. Your email communications should be targeted and personalized to offer these prospects the most relevant content for their needs. A high performing email nurture program can be quite successful. In fact, according to McKinsey & Company email is almost 40x better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter.

The MoFu stage is an excellent time to nurture your leads with:

• Newsletters
• eBooks
• Whitepapers
• Datasheets
• Webinars

BoFu – Bottom of Funnel: Converting Leads into Customers

A lead should only be considered BoFu once they have shown considerable interest in your product or service. These leads have interacted significantly with your marketing efforts, and are (usually) ready to be contacted by your sales team. Ideally, these leads have also been deemed to be a good fit for your organization; they resemble your ideal customer profile, or they have similar characteristics of your high-performing customers.

Remember that lead generation is not about getting as many leads as possible, it’s about getting the BEST leads, and then making it easy and satisfying for them to move down the funnel. Poor quality customers – the ones who don’t use your product or service well; the ones who soak up lots of customer service resources; the ones who don’t pay or don’t renew their contract are ultimately a detriment to your company, your brand, and your revenue. Getting the right customers in the door is almost as important as keeping them there.

This is why it’s non-negotiable to understand what makes a good customer for your company, and what doesn’t. Don’t qualify leads as BoFu if you are uncertain whether they will be successful as a customer. The overall lifetime value of a customer is truly the most important revenue metric.

What comes after BoFu?

If you’ve successfully nurtured your leads through the funnel and they’ve joined your cohort as happy, paying customers, congrats! But your role as a marketer doesn’t stop there. While your sales and customer success teams now both have relationships with your new customers, marketing was the team that had the initial contact, and the one with continuity across the entire customer lifecycle. Make sure that marketing continues well into the retention and expansion zones.

Automate your onboarding process to make sure customers have access to all of your great content and resources, and that they get what they need at every step.

Continue to nurture your customers with communication through customer newsletters, meetups, and user groups. Continue email programs to notify customers of new products, features, or updates. Make sure they are connected with and supported by a great customer success team, and that they always have access to help when they need it.

If you do these things, you will be rewarded. According to Gleanster, top performers, on average, invest 30% of their budget and 25% of their time to expand existing customer relationships — and these investments yield 50% of their total revenue. Your customers are an incredible source of continued, predictable revenue. They are a well that most marketers don’t tap … but you can, by expanding your marketing practices through every stage of the customer lifecycle.

Focusing on the entire customer lifecycle really pays off. Top performing companies are beating their revenue goals and have higher levels of customer satisfaction. These results are a rallying cry for marketing leaders to seize the opportunity to own the end-to-end customer lifecycle. Download this comprehensive study from Gleanster and Act-On, “Rethinking the Role of Marketing” to learn about the state of customer lifecycle engagement and how top companies are taking control of the full customer lifecycle with new metrics, technology, and a refined focus.

Email marketing has been around for more than two decades now, and it’s here to stay.

In fact, its stake in the success and failure of an online business is growing larger every day. That’s why every online marketer is focusing on building a large email list. After all, the bigger the list, the more the conversions, given that you are not spamming your customers.

But adding new subscribers to your list won’t help if the old ones keep leaving your list quickly.

So here’re six brutal mistakes that are scaring away your subscribers.

1. Sending too many emails

It’s tempting to assume that sending more emails will increase the chances of subscribers buying from you but that’s actually not the case. The more, the merrier doesn’t always hold true.

According to a survey by Technology Advice, 43 percent of email subscribers want businesses to email them less frequently.

Source: Chadwick Martin Bailey

But to avoid over-mailing, you shouldn’t sacrifice your conversion rate by under-mailing either. The best way to decide the optimal number of emails your business should send is through A/B tests.

Further, you may find that different segments prefer emails at a different frequency, in that case, you can tailor your send volume for each segment accordingly.

Also, here are some specific questions to ask yourself before sending an email:

Is your email providing any real value to your subscribers?

Is it tailored to your subscriber’s email preferences?

How does the email response rate vary for your previous emails for different lists?

Another best practice to consider before implementing a frequency capping, is giving your subscribers an option to pick how many times they want to hear from you.

Remember, there’s no rule regarding the number you can send. Just be mindful of the customer journey and make sure your emails are enhancing the customer experience rather than hindering it.

2. Using clickbait subject lines

When it comes to email, subject lines play a crucial role in determining your open rates. No matter how good your emails are, if your subject lines are boring, your open rates will suffer. So, it goes without saying that they need to be catchy and creative to capture your recipient’s attention.

Now, don’t be tempted to over sensationalize your subject lines or add keywords that aren’t related to your message to induce more opens.

Why? Because catchy subject lines are good at grabbing your recipient’s attention and increasing your open rates, but they’ll only take the desired action if you offer them what they’ve been promised. Nobody likes to feel deceived.

So avoid using misleading subject lines to retain your subscribers on your list.

Here’s an example of a clickbait subject line:

Losing your subscribers trust to increase your email open rate isn’t worth the risk.

3. Treating every subscriber in the same way

One size never fits all, but when it comes to email marketing, most marketers are still sending the same messages to everyone on their list. Though batch and blast is the quickest and easiest way to earn money from your emails, it can erode your email marketing conversions very quickly, as too many generic emails force subscribers to jump off your ship.

Instead, send personalized emails based on a subscriber’s preferences and behavior on your site. Also, segment your list based on all the data you have about your subscribers.

Most marketers are only doing basic segmentation based on the geography, gender, or the acquisition source. To personalize effectively, you’ve got to segment on deeper levels. So leverage all the data you have about a user to craft hyper-personalized messages.

Given below is a study conducted by us. We sent 1000 plus emails, a non-personalized mailer to one batch and a personalized one to another batch, the personalized version received both better open and response rates.

4. Focusing only on promotion

Marketers consistently ranked email as the single most effective tactic for awareness, acquisition, conversion, and retention says a Gigaom Research.

Rather than using email marketing to increase your bottom line, use it as a medium to engage your customers and build customer loyalty. Yes, your ultimate goal is to promote and sell your product, but if you want to get better results from your email-marketing program then take a step back and focus on engaging your customers.

Why it matters?

When you keep your subscribers engaged, they’re much more likely to open each and every email (including promotional ones) they receive from your brand. And once a subscriber starts engaging with your emails they’re more likely to convert through them.

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage and ultimately convert prospects into customers and customers into repeat buyers. Provided you’re not taking it for granted by simply sending batch and blast emails.

5. Not giving subscribers what they wanted

People will join your list and they will unsubscribe too, some churn is unavoidable. But it’s your duty to ensure that they aren’t leaving because they are merely being treated as an email address.

In order to retain them with your business, you need to send them the right message at the right time and with the right content.

Give people what they’re looking for, or get ignored.

If you have a high unsubscribe rate, find ways to fix it. Here are some of the reasons, which are responsible for driving your subscribers away.

• Unmet expectations
• High email frequency
• Poor email design
• Lack of personalization
• Poor email copy

6. Lack of intelligent email remarketing

The quickest way to annoy customers is to ask them to do something, which they have already done. And, with remarketing emails, this happens most of the time. Why? Because today, your customer touch points are spread across multiple devices, and a lack of coordination between various marketing channels can sometimes lead to loss of marketing opportunities and customer churn.

At times, poor segmentation is the reason that leads to a higher churn rate. If you don’t get your segments right, then you will end up sending irrelevant emails to your subscriber base. For example, sending an email with a discount on a product that customer has just purchased. It happens all the time.

Email remarketing is very powerful. But if you are not using it strategically it’ll sink your boat. Invest in a marketing automation platform that gives you access to a single customer view so that you have a complete picture of your customers.

Email marketing wrap

Building a large email list takes a lot of time and resources. So, if you’re making any of these mistakes mentioned above, it’s time to fix your leaking funnel.

In a world where buyers have more choice than ever, it is increasingly important to develop meaningful business relationships with the right people. Your target audience wants to feel that you genuinely care about their specific needs and problems; they want to be treated like individuals rather than a mass market.

Therefore, when it comes to B2B email marketing, you need to carry out personalisation. This is what HubSpot says about this practice: “Personalisation is the practice of implementing tokens within your content (emails, landing pages, or website pages) to better engage with your audience and provide a personalized experience to a known contact. With this practice, you show your audience better engagement, making them feel special since their experience is personalized by a company who is looking to fulfill their service or product need. Such an experience makes a difference in how your audience perceives you and your company.”

But can personalisation really make a difference to the number of sales you achieve? According to research by VentureBeat, “over 90 percent of marketers see at least nominal, if not outright impressive, increases in open and click-through rates when employing some form of personalisation”. So here are three great reasons to personalize your B2B email marketing messages.

1. It creates a human touch

This can sound a little cheesy but it’s true – you are much more likely to evoke a response from people if you address them by their name in an email. Similarly, it’s better to sign off with your own name rather than your organization’s name.

Just because you’re interacting online doesn’t mean you have to behave like a robot. In fact, the rise in faceless communication means that it’s even more vital to create a human touch. It shows that you have a real interest in your recipients and, importantly, that there’s an actual person on the other side of the screen. It can be incredibly alienating to do business with a company that hides behind its corporate branding; by contrast, showing who you really are helps to build trust.

2. Personalisation adds relevance

If you have a database of 10,000 contacts, those people are going to be vastly different in a number of ways. So they won’t all want to receive the same email messages, in the same format, at the same time.

Clearly, you can’t send a uniquely tailored email to every one of your contacts. However, there will be groups of contacts that have similar interests, so you can segment your database accordingly. For instance, you might separate contacts according to industry or job title, or where they are in the buyer’s journey.

In this way, your email recipients will receive content that is relevant to them. For example, if someone has just downloaded one of your eBooks, you might send them a series of follow-up blog posts. Or you might send out the same email to several groups of contacts, but tweak certain parts of the copy to make it industry specific.

3. It creates long-lasting relationships

The end result of personalizing your B2B email marketing messages is stronger connections with your target audience – and, ultimately, more sales. People expect the marketing messages they receive from you to be consistent and relevant so that they can feel assured they are making a good decision when doing business with your company.

On the other hand, there’s a fine line between an authentic experience and a creepy one. You don’t want to get overly personal – after all, this is a business relationship. So using someone’s name is fine, but directly referring to their recent activity across your website is probably overstepping the mark.

Personalisation is about better meeting the needs of the people who will benefit from your product or service. For your prospects, it’s the difference between buying a standard dress or suit off the rack, and having the item of clothing tailored to exactly fit their body. So address them by name, send them relevant content and nurture the relationship.

Do you want to improve your sales team’s performance?

If not, stop reading now. (And maybe consider changing jobs.)

But if you do, and your sales team is lagging behind goals or not overachieving quite as much as you’d like them to, consider implementing a sales incentive program. This could be something as large-scale as President’s Club or as small as weekly SPIFs (sales performance incentive fund).

The type of program you implement all depends on the type of reaction you’re hoping to spark. Short-term rewards can key up competition and drive immediate results, while larger-scale incentives can raise overall performance by several points.

But the benefits of incentive programs aren’t short-lived -- or incremental. Implementing a consistent incentive program can increase sales performance by 22%, and having a program in place for a year or more can see a massive 44% increase in performance.

The infographic below from Xceleration outlines the benefits of sales incentive programs, as well as blockers you may run into -- and how to overcome them.

Nowadays, most digital-savvy start-ups have a presence on at least Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. However, further to that they are also popping up on alternative platforms such as Snapchat, Tumblr, and Periscope.

Having the ability to tell a story through the video medium is an incredibly powerful way to capture the attention of a newer, younger audience. Alternative platforms such as Periscope give start-ups the perfect opportunity to market themselves in a unique way and experience business growth in the process.

Here are our top tips on how your start-up can use Periscope for ultimate business growth:

1. Target millennials

A huge percentage of users on Periscope are millennials, who are not only watching in their millions but are also highly engaged.

Periscope is the ultimate live video streaming platform and is a superb resource if you are trying to target millennials. On top of that, there is currently little risk of the competition getting in the way, as despite its efficacy, not a lot of businesses have embraced the platform yet. For this reason, Periscope is an extremely powerful social platform that start-up brands should be taking advantage of.

2. Attract investors

Another fantastic way to use Periscope is to attract the attention of potential investors. Every start-up needs funding in some form or another, and with Periscope you can offer an intimate experience to a potential investor by walking them through the day-to-day life of your offices and enabling them to see your passion and commitment, first hand.

3. Showcase your company’s culture

If you want to give your customers a sneak peek into the life of your company, what better way to do so than by showcasing your company’s culture via Periscope. Periscope gives you the unique opportunity to show your audience what goes on behind-the-scenes at your business. This type of access helps consumers form a stronger bond with your brand, which quickly turns them into lifelong supporters, and lifelong supporters are the ultimate advocates who are always willing to spread the word about your brand.

4. Host tutorials and demonstrations

Periscope is incredibly powerful in that it gives you the perfect opportunity to host a tutorial or demonstration of your latest product or service. Having the ability to see first-hand how to use a products or services is a much more effective way to elevate your brand and inspire people to visit your website, take a look around and even make a purchase. This is something that an image or blog post simply cannot compete with.

As you can see, Periscope is an extremely robust app with fantastic capabilities for your brand. Give it a try to see the results for yourself!

Guess what I was doing at 11:15 p.m., last night? I wasn’t asleep or Netflix-binging like a normal human being. Instead, I was curled up in bed with my husband, Patrick, snoring quietly beside me as I basked in the glow of my iPhone screen.

I know, I know. There’s this whole nutso movement out there telling me I should be screen-free at bedtime, but I can’t help myself. When it’s sleep-o-clock at our apartment, my Type A creative brain doesn’t want to turn off. It screams for inspiration. So, that last hour of the day is my time to scroll through my LinkedIn feed, trolling for interesting articles that pertain to my professional passions.

But last night was different. As I was swiping my way through article after article, my inner content creator blurted out an unexpected question:

“We always talk about knowing who your buyer personas are, but do you know where your buyer personas are?”

At first glance, that probably seems like a wacky question, but bear with me. I promise this isn’t the ramblings of a late-night agency creative gone rogue.

Why You Need to Know “Where?”

Buyer personas are one of the most important – if not the most important – parts of any inbound marketing strategy. Every choice you make – from campaigns and conversion offers, to blog posts and keywords – all comes back to your personas. Who they are, what they care about, what keeps them up at night, what their goals are, etc. These are all important details about your personas that you absolutely must research and document, as they inform those critical marketing strategy decisions.

Unfortunately, it is at this point where many people end their personas conversations. Once the average marketing team figures out the pain points, the challenges and goals of their persona – and then slap a goofy name on them like “Account Manager Andy” – they high-five each other and call it a day.

But that’s only the beginning of the story. Once you know what content you need to create to attract your personas based on those details, you then need to have a long talk about where your personas are.

Are they congregating around specific social networks? Are they offline, skimming industry rags and magazines? Are they under their headphones at the gym listening to podcasts? Are they kicking around SlideShare? Are they at networking events connecting with other peers in their industry? Are they reading through blogs at home through their Pocket or Flipboard app on their tablet? Are they clicking their way through videos on YouTube?

“Where?” Helps You Shape Your Inbound Strategy

It’s these content-consuming behaviors captured by this sadly overlooked “Where?” question that are so important to understand. Because honing in on a persona’s top-level pain points through killer content is only half the battle. If you don’t know how to package it up or where you should be sending it, you’ll become the marketing equivalent of someone who writes a love letter to their crush and then sends it to the wrong mailing address.

For example, if you are unfortunate enough to have a persona like me – a picky content manager who is very set her in ways – you’ve got an uphill battle ahead of you.

I don’t like digesting video content. Seriously, if it’s in video form, there’s a good chance I’ll try to find the information I need elsewhere. On the other hand, I am that girl at the gym who listens to podcasts about what I do, instead of music. I’m my most active on LinkedIn at night, but I always feel like a grandmother learning how to poke on “The Facebook Thing” whenever I try to use Snapchat. I loathe eBooks for myself, because I think they’re big, fat timewasters. But I love research reports, whitepapers, checklists and other tactical conversion offers that help me do my job. And even though I spend most of my days on the computer for work, I do most of my content cruising on my iPhone or iPad after hours.

Lucky for most of you, I am not your persona. (In fact, most people love video content. And though I don’t like it for myself, I am a strong advocate for video as a marketer.) But that degree of idiosyncrasy and individuality around my habits is not unique to me. And if you do your homework and start thinking with that level detail around your personas, you’ll come to realize they have their own patterns of habits, as well.

This Isn’t Just About Personas, This Is Where Inbound Is Going

What’s interesting about adopting this more three-dimensional approach to your audience personas – where they actually become people with feelings (gross) – is that it’s very indicative of where inbound is moving as an industry overall. It used to be that you would just stand up a blog, write some content, publish an eBook and then celebrate, because you were nailing it.

That doesn’t cut it anymore.

More importantly, content that is only “good enough” – or worse, is thrown together with no consideration given to format and platform for distribution, at all – doesn’t cut it anymore either. It’s getting crowded out there, because inbound marketing isn’t some hip thing all the cool kids are doing. It’s a paradigm shift you must get on board with as a business, because the way people and other businesses make purchasing decisions changed when you weren’t looking.

So, if you’re not asking those “Where?” questions that help you make those essential decisions around content formatting, there is no time like the present to make that change in your strategy, and that’s a fantastic way to start. Because let’s say you are trying to reach someone like me. If you’re promoting the content I need through Snapchat around 4 p.m., you’re totally blowing it.

And if you aren’t trying to reach someone like me, well, don’t you owe it to your business to find out if you’re looking for your buyer personas in the right place before you create content and send it out into the great unknown?

Ah, the elusive subject line. Just when you thought you wrote something brilliant, you find that your open rates are less than impressive. How could writing 5-7 words be so hard? You used to write 2,000-word papers in college. You can form a sentence in your sleep. No really, you’re a sleep talker.

The truth is that subject lines are the doorway into your email campaigns. If that doorway isn’t enticing, no one will go on to click your emails, let alone buy your products. In fact, Convince and Convert reports that 33% of email recipients open email based on subject line alone. Even more challenging, your readers are inundated each and every day by a tidal wave of other emails vying for their attention. So how do you write email subject lines that cut through the noise?

Let me first reveal that subject lines are everywhere—on billboards, in songs and commercials, magazines, news articles, and even everyday conversations. To create your own, all it takes is knowing how to shape it, and the inspiration will start flooding in.

I’ve spent the last three years working in demand generation with one major goal in mind: crack the code on writing the perfect subject line. After hundreds, if not thousands, of subject lines tests, I have boiled it down to these five tips to improve your subject lines and increase your open rates:

1. Front-Load the Important Words

You know that one friend who’s horrible at telling stories? You know, where 15 minutes into telling their story, you begin thinking “Where is this even going? Are we ever going to hear the good part?” And by the time they finally get to the good part, you’ve already checked out. Yeah, some subject lines are just like that—don’t let it be yours.

People want to know why your email is more important than the thousands of others in their inbox, so put all the important, actionable words in the front of your subject line to entice opens. In other words, get to the point! In my experience, changing the structure of the sentence line to front-load the important keywords has increased open rates by 10-20%.

Let’s take a look at a recent email from Chase to their Sapphire Preferred cardholders. “Earn 10K bonus points” catches the eye, and it hooks you into wanting to learn how, perhaps by opening the email. Rather than asking their subscribers to do something first, they front-load the subject line with the benefit they’ll receive.

2. Ask a Question

I’ve been told several times that the most well-liked person in the room is the one who does nothing but ask folks questions, showing genuine interest in their lives and saying very little about their own. Why? Because people love to talk about themselves and their interests. Ask your subscribers questions and it’ll not only pique their curiosity, but they’ll respond positively by opening more of your emails. For example, imagine you’re sending out a new ebook on “The Holy Grail to Higher Revenue.” In your subject line, instead of just repeating the title, you could write “Looking for the Holy Grail to higher revenue? We have it!”

In this email from fitness instructor Cassey Ho, she phrases her subject line as a question to engage her subscribers. As you read the first part, it’s likely that you may answer it in your head, which she then responds to with the CTA to watch her video. This experience is much more interesting than passively reading: “Watch this if you need motivation to work out.”

3. Use Numbers

People love numbers and lists. They’re easy to read, help us make sense of more complex concepts by breaking it into smaller parts, and let us know exactly what to expect (e.g. 5 Things Your Subject Lines Are Missing). The New Yorker even published a piece on “A List of Reasons Why Our Brains Love Lists,” which goes into this in depth. Numbers can also be used to create a sense of urgency or emphasize a discount. For instance, Godiva uses numbers to do both in the example below.

4. Get Personal

There’s usually at least one person in every office who can’t seem to remember anyone’s first name. Mike is Matt, Joe is John, and Stacy is Stephanie. They might try to get around it by using nicknames like sport, bud, pal, dude, man, bro, and fella. For the record, no one likes that, especially not your email subscribers. Address your subscribers by their name or insert pronouns like “you” or “your” to give your subject lines a personalized touch. According to Experian, emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened (although it varies by industry), yet 70% of brands are not personalizing emails sent to subscribers. That’s a huge opportunity for your brand to stand out!

SiriusXM recently sent me this email about my free trial. Just by adding my name to the subject line, it made me feel like they see me as a person, not just a potential conversion, and that they’re truly interested in helping me achieve the best experience.

5. Use Rhymes, Alliteration, and Puns

This might seem weird, but I have always seen subject lines that use rhymes, alliteration, or puns do really well. Have you ever read a word or name over and over again until it either sounds weird or gets funnier each time? My word is “hullabaloo,” which means a great noise or excitement. Or have you ever read a subject line that was so clever it deserved to be opened?

If you can write a subject line that rolls off the tongue, you will get a higher open rate. It’s like music to the ears! It’s not easy to come up with these but when you do, they will perform exceedingly well. In fact, I’ve seen extraordinary subject line performance where I’ve beaten the control by 30-40%! For some inspiration, just take a look at some of the session names from SXSW. Some of my favorites from previous years? “Social Music Marketing: Bands, Brands and Fans” and “An Unusual Arsenal: Tech Tools to Topple a Tyrant.”

That’s it! 5 tips to improve your subject lines and get your emails opened. I hope that these tips inspire you to get out there and write subject lines like no one has ever seen before. Remember, subject lines exist everywhere. All you have to do is keep your eyes and ears open.

What other tips do you have for improving email subject lines! Share them below!

We all want people to trust us.

"Trust means that someone relies on you to do what you say you will do, or to act like the kind of person you say you are," Darlene Price, president of Well Said, Inc., and author of "Well Said! Presentations and Conversations That Get Results," previously told Business Insider.

That's why, as a professional, it's critical to earn the trust of those with whom you work.

When people trust you, they're far more likely to believe in you, bond with you, and buy from you, Price explained.

"Your actions ultimately determine whether or not you earn another person's trust," she said. However, your verbal communication and body language also play a huge part.

"Considering that studies show the vast majority of the messages we send are conveyed through our body language, it's imperative that you think about not just what you say, but also how you carry yourself and act," says Patrick King, a communications expert and business author.

"Body language can speak much louder than verbal communication. If someone shows slumping posture or crossed arms, for instance, we are conditioned to assume that they are tired or disinterested in speaking. If someone avoids eye contact, we're wired to think it's because they have something to hide. Neither of these are universal truths, yet we must make sure to pay attention to them otherwise people will perceive us negatively."

Here are eight simple body language tricks that can help make people trust you:

SEE ALSO: 11 signs someone is lying to you

Smile … genuinely

"This seems obvious, but the smiles most of us use on a daily basis are somewhat fake," says King. "The key to a genuine smile is to smile with your eyes, bare your teeth, and have a slow fade. Otherwise, you appear like a salesman."

A genuine smile will make you seem more sincere, and therefore more trustworthy.

Lean forward

"This applies mostly when you're sitting, but leaning forward towards someone shows attentiveness and engagement," King says. When people feel you're interested in them, it will make them more likely to trust you.

"Plus, the closer you are physically to someone, the more intimate an interaction feels," he says.

Look people in the eye

When you don't, they may assume you're not telling the truth ... or that you're not completely confident in yourself or what you're saying.

A former Business Insider intern looked through Leil Lowndes' book, "How To Talk To Anyone," which says you should "pretend your eyes are glued to your conversation partner's with sticky warm taffy," — and said research shows that "subjects reported significantly higher feelings of respect and fondness for their colleagues who used this technique."

When you’re giving a presentation, a little mystery goes a long way. If you want to grasp your audience’s attention, start off your presentation with some visuals that get them thinking.

Read more...

Who are the most important people in an industry? Some would say the CEOs of leading companies, but for me, it’s the authors, experts, and consultants.

These guys might not have staffs of thousands, but they’re the people with tribes, and their followers are loyal. My most important contacts are people like Shep Hyken, Hal Elrod, and Derek Coburn. These guys have fewer than 15 employees each, but their influence stretches way beyond those small circles. When they talk, people listen. Maintaining good relationships with them means being connected to all of their followers.

How do I do that? With well-chosen gifts.

A little Brooks Brotherly love

Western culture has done everything it can to take the human element out of business, but we still crave personal connections. The right gift can bring that back to the table and get an influencer interested. In my new book, Giftology, I tell the following story about the importance of choosing the right gift — and how it can lead to a lifelong friendship.

Back in 2007, I attended the 25th anniversary celebration for the Entrepreneurs Organization in Las Vegas. Nobody I knew was going, and I was worried I didn’t belong in that kind of celebrated company.

Then, while wandering through the corridors of the convention center, I passed a room crowded with people. I was intrigued, so I stepped inside, and at the center of everyone’s attention was Cameron Herold, the business guru who grew 1–800-Got-Junk? from $2 million to $126 million in six years without spending a cent on advertising.

He was a great speaker, and I hung around for an hour afterward to meet him. I mentioned I was from Cleveland, and he said he was flying out that way soon to give a talk.

Here was an opportunity. So I asked him what else he’d be doing in town. He said he’d probably just go pick up some new clothes from his favorite store: Brooks Brothers. We arranged to meet up his first night in town, but before I left, I asked for his shirt size because I wanted to send him a dress shirt to say thanks for helping me.

The day he arrived, I went over to Brooks Brothers and bought everything the store had in his size. I dashed over to his hotel, arranged for it all to be laid out in his room as it was in the store, and I waited for him to get there to choose what he wanted. His flight was delayed, and he was exhausted, but when he saw what I’d done, he was blown away.

Now, he invites me to meet every client he has. He’s a mentor and a friend. And all it took was a well-chosen gift.

How some people go too far

But it’s important to target gifts correctly. People love the extra mile, but if you run a marathon instead, you’ll only look desperate. Gifts shouldn’t cost more than a nice dinner or a round of golf.

It’s usually best to avoid clothes and jewelry, too. That might sound hypocritical given what I said about Cameron, but I knew for a fact that he liked Brooks Brothers, and I didn’t just buy him a gift; I bought a range for him to choose from. You never know what colors and styles people like wearing, so it’s best to play safe with clothing.

It’s also inadvisable to slap a picture on something. We all love to see our names monogrammed on shirts or slapped on the sides of buildings, but our faces? That’s just creepy.

The same goes for gifts for the kids. Assistants and spouses are fair game, but buying toys for the kids starts to look stalker-ish.

The gift-giving sweet spot

Here are three golden rules to help avoid those faux pas:

#1: Keep it practical

People like useful tools they would never dream of buying for themselves, and they love it when those things are personalized. The Code 38 wine knife is one of my favorites. It might cost $200 to $600 depending on extras and personalization, but it’s a world-class wine tool that regular entertainers will value for years.

#2. Keep it classy

A $20 sports sweatshirt from Walmart is a gift for the thrift store. Avoid cheesy gifts, and choose something that represents both you and the recipient.

We worked with a startup that was trying to get noticed by Target, but the president of the electronics division was impossible to reach. A little research told us he was a University of Minnesota guy through and through, so we took a giant slab of cherry wood, carved the Gopher logo and fight song lyrics onto the front, and sent it over to the office. A meeting was set for the very next week.

#3. Keep it in view

Don’t just assume your gift arrived. Packages get lost and stolen, so follow up to confirm arrival. It can be tacky to ask the recipient if he or she received it; contact the company that helped send it instead.

You’re looking for a gift that has impact, and a thank-you note is the first clue that it was appreciated. But look for the deeper signs, too. Did the recipient post about the gift on social media? Did he or she mention it in conversation months later? Those are the signs that you nailed it.

How can using well-chosen gifts help you connect with key people? Share in the comments.

Companies have dug deep in their pockets to buy other companies recently, raising the risk that they’ve overpaid. If true, investors will suffer. Companies would be forced to “write down” their goodwill, an asset on financial statements that represents the premiums paid in deals, and the losses would cut into earnings.

Here are some big acquisitions that didn’t pan out, and the billions of dollars lost:

____

AOL buys Time Warner

Price: $106 billion, 2000

Write-down: $45.5 billion, 2002

At the time, the goodwill write-down led to the largest annual loss for a U.S. company

____

Sprint buys Nextel

Price: $36 billion, 2005

Write-down: $30 billion, 2008

One of the biggest write-downs of goodwill ever as Sprint struggles with the wireless business

____

Microsoft buys aQuantive

Price: $6.3 billion, 2007

Write-down: $6.2 billion, 2012

Nearly all of the purchase price is written down, an admission that Microsoft wildly overestimated the value of the online ad company

____

Hewlett-Packard buys Autonomy

Price: $10 billion, 2011

Write-down: $8.8 billion, 2012

Deal blows up quickly amid allegations that Autonomy had misled HP about its sales

The post Some of the worst acquisitions ever, and the billions lost appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

Ecommerce can be a difficult entity to manage. There isn’t the personal interaction you get with other businesses where you see customers face to face or speak to them directly. Therefore, it can be hard to see the big picture for your business.

Yet help is at hand for ecommerce businesses.

There are numerous pieces of software that can help you get to grips with many aspects of your business.

With these insights into your business, you can plan changes and make improvements to processes and products, to grow your business in the future.

So what are the seven insights that the right software can give you?

1. Customer Purchasing Patterns

One of the most important aspects of your business is to know when to advertise as this is dependent on when the customer is ready to make a purchase.

When you get this right, then you will be able to adjust your marketing campaigns to be more aggressive during these periods and less so when customers aren’t looking to make a purchase.

Customer data mining can reveal profitable information that will add to your bottom line.

Tools like Catalina can help you know your customer’s buying behavior.

This will help you save costs on advertising and increase turnover, especially when you market the right message at the right time.

2. Where New Customers Come From

Knowing when to market is half the battle, you also need to know where to market.

By using the right software you can determine exactly where your customers found out about your brand and then concentrate advertising spending on those channels.

For instance, if you know that Twitter was a great referrer, then you can increase spending there.

Probably the most popular tracking tool for knowing how your customers found you is Google Analytics, which is free, but there are many other competitors on the market that may be easier to use or have aggregate data so you can figure out cross channel attribution.

3. Knowing Who Your Best Customers Are

It is much easier to sell to existing customers than to sell to new customers.

By determining who your repeat customers are, you can concentrate some of your marketing efforts to attracting them to come back more regularly and spend money on complementary or similar products.

This helps to increase profit margins as well.

Understanding the lifetime value of your customers allows you to get hyper aggressive on your ad spend.

If you aren’t familiar with the concept of customer lifetime value, Jay Abraham in the video below will show how powerful knowing this metric can be to your bottom line.

4. Know What Is Taking You Time

Everything you do in your business costs.

Every time you sit down to do an administrative task there is a cost associated to it. Yet it is hard to see these costs without a way to keep track of your time and the associated costs. There is software, like toggl, that can monitor this.

The information gathered can help you see what you are spending time on and therefore give you the nudge to improve processes and make them more cost effective.

Additionally, tracking your time will allow you to do more deep work and avoid the active yet unproductive business, or fauxductivity.

5. What Is Costing You Too Much?

Profits are all about maximising the difference between revenue and costs.

There isn’t always a lot you can do about product costs, however other costs can be changed but only if you know where the cost lies.

By having the right monitoring tools you can determine what is costing your business more than it should and perhaps why.

Then you can create new processes and systems in place that change your or your staff’s behaviours to reduce these costs and increase profit margins.

6. What Your Brand Name Value Is

It’s cliche but true, the internet has changed the way business is conducted a lot.

One of the changes it has made is how the consumer sees your business.

With a good reputation you can aspire to be the premium ecommerce business in your niche.

With a bad reputation you will struggle.

Get the best software, such as Brand Mentions (which is free, I use it), to find out what current customers are saying about you in forums, reviews, social media and other outlets and then deal directly with PR threats and promote good news that is said about you.

7. Product Satisfaction

When you are dealing with hundreds of products it is hard to know which are successful and which are not.

With the right software you can determine which products are the best sellers but you can also tell which products are being returned the most because customers are unhappy (for whatever reason).

This can allow you to make changes to their description, how they are advertised, where they are advertised or to pull the product completely – thus saving you costs and improving your reputation.

Doing a quarterly 80/20 analysis of your best performing products and your worst performing product will provide actionable insights.

For example, revenues are not profits, your best seller may have low margins and high delivery costs while the next best seller has high margins and minimal delivery costs–cutting the low margin item and its related overhead often results in greater profits all around.

Perry Marshall is the evangelist for 80/20 thinking when it comes to your business, he’s worth checking out here.

If you’ve never done a thorough 80/20 analysis, you’re sure to be surprised at what you find.

Bonus

If you are selling hard goods online and using a platform like Shopify, WooCommerce, or Magento then automating the fulfillment process using your fulfillment houses API, Amazon’s FBA or one of the many plugin offered by your shipper will take a load of hassle off your hands and allow you to focus on the growth of your store.

Most outsourced logistics operation will have smooth interfaces that let you choose how you want your orders fulfilled. Below is an example of one:

Example of Floship’s software for eCommerce fulfillment; many other plugins have similar options.

Conclusion

Software within your business can be extremely useful. It can help you see patterns and important areas for business change that can improve your profit margins and help you attract more customers to your ecommerce enterprise.

• What software do you use?
• What can it tell you about your ecommerce business?

Let us know in the comments below.

1. Back to Basics

To make lasting change in both your personal and corporate finances, you need to identify key areas where you can improve. I know, creating a list of “opportunities” isn’t exactly crazy or exciting. But, the resulting change can be.

If you can honestly assess your company’s strengths and weaknesses, you can attack those trouble areas with a vengeance. For example, when my company started struggling, I realized I was spending all of our revenue in order to keep the organization afloat. By switching to a budget that included a cash-flow component, I was able to save some of our proceeds and use the resulting fund to chase more opportunities.

2. Create Additional Value for your Customers

If you need access to cash quickly, the easiest thing to do is find a new way to service your existing customers. Google is infamous for this. They started with a humble search engine and have since expanded into Alphabet. This massive company provides consumers with internet service, search results, productivity tools, communication software and advertising opportunities.

Google didn’t just set out to make money. They set out to become a bigger and bigger part of their end-user’s daily life. In 2015 they set a record with more than 247 million U.S.-based unique visitors to their platform. If you’re in a bind, it’s time to figure out how your company can create something valuable and immediately leverage your existing user-base to generate revenue quickly.

3. Rebound from a Repossession or Other Negative Credit Action

There are few things in life more stressful than realizing that your property is about to be seized to fulfill a debt obligation. But, even if your property is repossessed by the bank, you can take quick action to bounce back stronger than before.

According to FastSaleToday, you can start recovering by “…repaying your repossession in full, but you must ensure that your lender writes off the debt and records that you paid it in full. It is possible to ask the lender to remove the account from your credit report so it doesn’t have a negative impact on your credit score.”

Forcing yourself to focus on generating money removes distractions from life and allows you to refocus how you spend your time and energy. Get mad at your debt. Treat it like the biggest obstacle in your life, whose removal will result in immediate happiness and a boost to your self-confident.

You’ve got this! Now get mad, get smart and do something about it! You’ll be surprised at how your habits change in a positive way.

4. Motivate Yourself to Network

If you’re anything like me, the thought of attending a networking event and making small-talk with people you barely know is a scary proposition. I’m a big-talk kind of person. I like to know what people think, debate ideas and find ways to solve real problems. If you want to talk about sports, the weather, or a party you attended this weekend, it’ll be hard for me to really maintain interest and contribute to the conversation.

None the less, I have been called one of the most social and effective networkers in my community. I’m shocked, considering how much I hate it. But, my theory is that since I have a mission when I network, I’m way more effective than someone that’s there because they love meeting new people and talking trash about a sports team.

If you force yourself to network in order to survive, you’ll learn very quickly. Your mind will focus on ways to be more efficient and generate more meaningful connections; you’ll find that you waste a lot less time on low-value connections. You’ll hyper-focus because your survival depends on it, and you’ll eventually outperform the rest of the room at parties and functions.

5. Increase Revenue Streams

As you add value to your existing product lines and focus on building connections with the people that can help you get things done, you’ll find yourself opening the door to more and more opportunities. While not every opportunity is a good bet, it’s important to find ways to increase and diversify the revenue streams in your life.

For example, I was working on building a strong presence online. After a local mixer, I found myself emailing more and more with someone that provided telecom services to small businesses. The more we discussed the market and the challenges small businesses faced, the more we realized that communication and marketing are closely related; especially online.

We eventually founded a company based here in Seattle that grossed more than 2 million dollars last year based on simply providing companies with a strong online presence. Without forcing myself to network, add value and leverage my existing work, I would have never been able to take advantage of the opportunity.

Get out of your shell. Don’t let temporary financial challenges define you. Instead, own the situation, use the pressure to sharpen your senses and start creating new habits that form the groundwork of your future success!

Ask five different people in PR to define public relations and you’ll probably receive five different answers. Now, narrow it down to the specialized field of B2B PR, and you may even receive a few blank stares.

Is B2B PR really that difficult to define?

No, it’s really not. In fact, there are just a few basic principles that encompass this niche, and I’m going to share them with you today.

By the end of this post, you’ll know:

• How to define B2B PR
• The difference between PR and advertising
• Whether or not it’s worth the investment
• What elements are critical to a PR campaign
• If PR results can be measured

So let’s get started!

1. The Definition of B2B PR Isn’t Nuclear Physics — It’s Easily Understood

I’ve been in the PR game for a long time — sometimes more than I care to admit (she says with a laugh). However, despite PR’s evolutionary — and even revolutionary changes — the truth is that I define PR very simply:

PR is the integration of earned, owned, shared, and paid media that focuses on the needs of the buyer while satisfying the media. Where it gets a little tricky, is that PR needs to straddle two sometimes opposing interests. The needs of your buyer don’t always align with the media’s interests. However, a sharp PR professional can weave the two strands together so your story appeals to both sides.

For more info on the difference between B2B and B2C PR, check out this post.

Let’s break our definition down into bite-sized pieces.

First, the beauty of public relations is that it focuses on the reality of customer need, not the perception of consumer desire (more about that below). That is, a qualified PR firm will help you tell your story so that it focuses on filling a need — sometimes even one your prospect didn’t know he had. Did you for example know you needed an iPhone before it was launched in 2007? But you certainly did the day after the launch? Perhaps that need is for a specialized piece of software, or a product that helps companies make better decisions, or a service that improves your company’s lead generation.

These are all very real needs that the right buyer is looking to fulfill. And a PR firm will not only help your audience to appreciate the value of what you’re offering but will tell a story that also appeals to their human side.

For instance, perhaps your startup was born as a result of your previous employer’s downsizing. Or perhaps your brand has a passion for charitable giving to a particular organization. Good PR combines the positive, feel-good points of your brand all the while showing how your company fills a real need in its customer’s day-to-day routine.

At the same time, you need to ensure that your story resonates with the media. That may mean expanding your story so it’s not just about you but part of a trend story. Or it may mean focusing on research behind your story so it has more heft. A good PR person can mold your story into a tale with meaning for both customers and the media.

2. PR and Advertising Are Not the Same Thing

It’s true that PR may include some paid opps, such as native advertising or paid social or Google ads. However, PR and advertising are not interchangeable.

Advertising always costs money. Even if you throw thousands, or even hundreds of thousands at an advertising campaign, you don’t always know if it will be effective.

“…both marketing and PR are at their best when used together.” ~ Heidi Cohen

PR capitalizes on the trust that media holds. To illustrate, if you see a banner ad for a new digital backup service, how likely are you to click on that ad after seeing it one time? For that matter, if you see a TV commercial or magazine ad encouraging you to check out the service, how likely are you to check it out? You might do so, but chances are, it will take several times seeing that advertisement before you venture to learn more about it. And then what will you do? You’ll search for reviews and testimonials legitimizing the product.

However, what if you learned that a reputable company uses and loves this backup service? Perhaps it was mentioned briefly in an article in the Wall Street Journal. Instantly, the credibility of this product goes up as does your likelihood of purchasing it.

3. PR is an Investment

PR firms often work on monthly retainers, or they may be hired for a short-term project, such as the release of a new product. Everyone wants to know: Is it worth the investment of time and money?

Well, of course, I’m going to tell you that it is. But, here’s why.

You’re not in the PR business. If I needed to upgrade my security system, I wouldn’t think of tackling it myself. It’s not my game — even though I know my office space inside and out, better than you do. I know my neighborhood, and I know what times of the day crime is more likely to occur. I know where all my valuables are stowed.

But, even if were to take the time to learn all about security systems, I have one fatal flaw — I’m a newbie. I have very little experience in security.

The same is true in PR. Yes, you know the ins and outs of your business. You know its ups and downs, strengths and weaknesses. However, you’re a newbie to PR. And when it comes to the public image of your company, you don’t want to throw caution to the wind. You want to get it right the first time.

4. There are 7 Crucial Elements to Nearly Every PR Campaign

While some elements vary based on the needs of a PR campaign, there are seven that are so essential consider them evergreen.

1. The timing must be spot-on

Not only should the timing be perfect in regards to season and demand for your product or service, but you must also consider world events. Is a major election occuring? Did a catastrophe just occur? If so, then even if you’ve poured hundreds of man hours into your initiative, you’d be better off waiting until a less news-flooded time.

2. Your press release needs to kick ass

Some press releases have all the thrills of a Bob Ross painting class. Sure, it’s interesting to some, but for goodness sake, can we get some life?

Rather, your press release should include stimulating visuals, backlinks, quotes, and contact info. Make it engaging, not brain-numbing. Create a draft, then edit, edit, and edit some more.

“Think of (your press release) as a valuable piece of marketing content.”

~ Hannah Fleishman for Hubspot

3. Use stimulating visual aids

We’re talking infographics, videos, as well as images.

4. A comprehensive fact sheet fuels your campaign

Think of statistics and noteworthy tidbits that support your initiative? What makes it more credible? These should be included in a comprehensive fact sheet that is media-ready.

5. Interactivity and engagement are essential

Does your product facilitate a demo? Can you get your industry community to buy into your product release on social media? By all means, do so.

6. Influencers are your best ally

Can you get an influencer on board with your product or service? Their endorsement can be the difference between a ho hum and stellar launch.

7. Include your release in your corporate newsroom

That may sound obvious but it never fails to amaze me how many people don’t do this.If you don’t already have a digital corporate newsroom, get one now. Check out this post on creating a sensational newsroom.

5. PR Can be Measured

Contrary to what some might say, PR can be measured. This wasn’t always the case. If you received a byline in a top-tier media outlet, you had no idea how many eyes actually viewed it, or even if they were the right eyes.

However, nowadays you can measure backlinks to your site, clicks on CTAs, press mentions, and site traffic. If you really want to know if the results of your PR campaign are effective, don’t do anything else out of the norm during your campaign that could cloud your results. Watch your traffic grow, and know that it’s as a result of your public relations.

Yes, while there are many moving parts to public relations, the gist of it remains simple: It’s using multiple channels to support your brand, boost your credibility while speaking to the needs of the media and your buyer.

Have questions about this post, or want to share your two cents about B2B PR? Leave your comment below and we’ll talk!

Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces that Shape Behavior by Jonah Berger, Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $26.99, Hardcover, June 2016, ISBN 9781476759692

Why do firstborn children tend to do better academically, while younger siblings are more likely to excel in athletics? What drives a bestseller, or a top 40 hit? Why do middle class consumers get annoyed when their neighbors or friends buy the same vehicles as them, while the working class consumer will be happy for their neighbors—perhaps suggesting they start a car club? Why did Abercrombie & Fitch pay “The Situation” not to wear their clothes on Jersey Shore? The answer to all of these questions, Jonah Berger tells us, boils down to social influence.

We are all defined by the choices we make, and because individuality is so valued in our culture, we like to think that those choices are mostly unaffected by others. We make decisions based on our personal preferences, our unique tastes, our individual ideas and opinions, right?

We all recognize that social influence affects other peoples’ behavior and choices. But when it comes to our own decisions and behavior, we are blind to the influence. We like to believe we are independent, unique, distinct. We will even change our decisions to prove it—say… changing our mind about our order at a restaurant if someone before us orders it, or dropping a band we once liked because they’ve become more popular. Both, of course, are instances of social influence, and ones that rob us of something we would have otherwise enjoyed.

“Distinction is valuable” to us, Berger writes, “because it provides definition.” It helps us define our very sense of self. Think about how embarrassed you were the last time you showed up to work or a social gathering wearing the same outfit as someone else. And yet we are more likely to pick up a bestseller, to go to a movie with a good rating on Rotten Tomatoes, to download a song that has a lot of previous downloads, and to park in a similar pattern to those who parked before us.

Berger’s first book, Contagious, examined how products and ideas catch on, take hold, and spread to become huge successes. And there is a lot in Invisible Influence that dives into adjacent territory. He tells us, for instance, how huge hits in the entertainment business are driven by “the luck of the herd,” rather than by virtue of being the very best. After all, if the most popular songs, books, and movies were also the very best, they should stand out to the people who work in the field everyday, those who publish and produce the work, and the experts who follow the industry—the “people whose job it is to be able to tell the good stuff from the bad.” And yet, the original manuscript for the first Harry Potter book was rejected by the first twelve publishers it was submitted to. And, as Berger notes, “it’s not just J.K. Rowling.”

Gone with the Wind was rejected thirty-eight times before it was published. Elvis was told he should go back to driving trucks. Walt Disney was fired early on because he “lacked imagination and had no good ideas.”

We use others’ opinions, and more importantly popular opinion (something early reviewers don't have access to yet), as a shortcut for sifting through “the thousands of books, movies, and songs vying for collective attention.” The fact that something is popular lends it credibility. Of course, the wisdom of crowds is a much-celebrated phenomenon these days, but it doesn’t always work out well. Large groups can also lead to groupthink if you’re not carful, which is especially important in how organizations make decisions.

People talk about the wisdom of crowds, but crowds are only wise when the group has access to everyone’s individual information. Aggregating these pieces can lead to better decisions than any person could have made alone. But if everyone just follows everyone else, or keeps information to themselves, the value of the group is lost.

The story of Opower provides a perfect example of how social influence can be put to use on a large scale, and is more effective than appealing to someone’s sense of responsibility, conscience, or even their pocketbook.  

Professors at Cal State San Marcos ran an experiment to study how different energy conservation appeals would affect energy consumption. They sent graduate students door-to-door with three different messages—one focused on saving money, one on helping the environment, and one on social responsibility. They then measured the test groups’ energy usage after the appeals were delivered compared them to before they were delivered. None of them worked. But there was a fourth appeal. This one simply stated that “When surveyed, 77% of their neighbors use fans instead of air conditioning to keep cool in the summer. Turn off your air conditioning and turn on your fans.” People that received that message decreased the energy use significantly.

Based on the San Marcos study findings, Dan Yates and Alex Lasky formed Opower, which “now works with more than one hundred utility companies worldwide” to send consumers “carefully targeted reports” on their energy usage—but not just their own energy usage:

Designed based on the San Marcos Study findings, the energy reports show consumers their consumption relative to similar households nearby. Whether they are using less or more than their peers.

They then pair that information with steps the consumer can take to reduce their own energy usage, which can be as simple as turning off lights and adjusting the settings on their television. And those small steps all add up:

These programs lead people to reduce their energy consumption by around 2 percent. For a given person, this decrease may nor seem huge, but aggregated across the country the impact is staggering. Since their launch, Opower’s programs have helped save more than 6 terawatt-hours of energy … or the equivalent to taking all the homes in Alaska and Hawaii, more than 2.1 million people, off the power grid for an entire year.

You’ll also find some great tricks in the book to influence others on a smaller scale. For instance, you are more likely to get a job, or close a deal, if you use the power of mimicry. If you lean back in there chair when the person across from you does, or touch your face when they do, you’re sending them a very subtle signal that increases the chance that they’ll think favorably of you and act in your favor.

Almost all of our decisions and behaviors, big and small, are affected by others. Only when we admit that, and discover how we are affected by others, are we able to navigate that influence, to make it more visible, and use that knowledge to make better decisions and influence others. Jonah Berger’s new book is the perfect place to start.

by Gregor Črešnar

The term, audience development, has become more ubiquitous in the world of marketing. A recognition of the growing importance of digital content marketing to overall marketing strategies today. For B2C CMOs, the concept of developing audiences and communities has been an essential core principle for some time.

For B2B CMOs, the idea of audience development and engagement can be perplexing. Fraught with confusion surrounding questions such as: exactly what constitutes an audience and is there really a difference between buyers and audiences? Questions I often receive when working with CMOs specific to B2B.

Investing in audience development remains a key goal for many B2B CMOs. Cultivating and connecting with an audience in the digital economy has become a must-do ingredient to successful B2B Marketing. How to invest and what to invest in becomes critical decisions for B2B CMOs.

There are several ways B2B CMOs can address the dilemma of investing in audience development and engagement:

1. Do Not Get Hung-up On The Term Audience

As the concept of content marketing has become more prominent in the B2B Marketing landscape, so have terms and compartmentalization. For example, some content marketing pundits believe you should separate out audience personas. Because these are different, in theory, from your buyer personas.

I believe this approach may only exacerbate the compartmentalization based on the faulty premise of making personas about the “who”. This is as opposed to understanding the behaviors of communities and buyers within communities.

My recommendations for B2B CMOs is to view their target markets and audiences as communities. And, to focus in on how to become relevant to the communities they serve. Whereby an audience is a community of people and organizations who share common, as well as, unique goals and yet may exhibit different behaviors when it comes to influencing, decision-making, and purchasing.

2. Invest In Understanding Goals And Behaviors

A key underpinning in being effective in connecting with today’s buyers is understanding the goals that drive their behaviors. Research has proven that goals can vary immensely. Including goals that have a direct influence on how buyers and the people they interact with engage with digital content.

A key principle for successful audience development then is in understanding which goals you must map back to in order to resonate. Which means you are addressing both common goals shared by a community making up an audience, as well as, unique specific goals. Just as well, you must then understand the behaviors of buyers and others as they attempt to fulfill these goals.

It is in such attempts to fulfill goals that buyers and others will seek to gain access to digital content.

3. Utilize The Right Buyer Persona Research Approach

To achieve such understanding, it is important for B2B CMOs to be able to distinguish between authentic goal-directed buyer persona research from that of faux buyer personas. Much of what is coined as buyer personas today are in fact still focused on how to define the “who” buyer profile as opposed to a true understanding of goals and behaviors. Key insights that can inform audience development and engagement are found in understanding goal-directed behaviors. Not in the rehashing of profiling-based rational facts.

To get at goals and behaviors requires qualitative research. With the right qualitative research techniques being essential. Often, buyer persona interviewing advice is skewed towards using a win-loss approach focused on the buying process. And, invariably asking the – “which water hole” do you prefer question. Such approaches reveal very little about the true goals driving and influencing behaviors related to how and why buying decisions are made, as well as, how content plays a role in such decisions.

4. Focus on Customer Scenarios

Let us face it. Most of us are very eager to tell the world about what we have to offer. And, it usually means that a majority of communications emanating from an organization starts with such. B2B CMOs should consider a different starting point. By understanding fully, the scenarios, which confront their buyers, they are in a better position to connect by demonstrating their understanding of goals and the scenarios in which these goals play out.

For example, a supply chain analytics provider I recently worked with shifted their communications to lead with scenarios. Their buyer persona research uncovered multiple goal-directed scenarios in multiple segments. Informing them on which scenarios were most important to customers. This ability allowed them to connect on a new level with customers, as well as, speak to the communities (audience) as a whole on how they were all affected by these scenarios.

5. Avoid Content Overload With Quality Versus Quantity

A given in the new reality of digital marketing today is the overwhelming production of content. Getting through the enormous amount of noise and clutter is paramount to gaining the attention of buyers today. One key principle in audience development and engagement today is that of content must be of high relevance to your audiences, communities, and buyers.

This is opposed to the faulty premise of the content quantity argument. Whereby it is believed that a high degree of content quantities means that you will gain mindshare and your brand will “stick” with buyers.

The path to quality is a well-mapped hike packed with overall deep understanding of the goals, behaviors, and scenarios influencing choices being made. And, make no mistake about the concept of choice. To engage with your content and communications is clearly a choice.

As many B2B marketers are finding out, done without quality, the choice is usually not to engage at all.

Improving

B2B CMOs can improve audience development and engagement by investing in attaining a deeper understanding of the goals, behaviors, and scenarios of their buyers and those they interact with. These types of deeper understandings are at the heart of buyer persona research.

As mentioned above, to engage is clearly a choice. As B2B CMOs may be finding out, clearly choosing and investing in the right approaches for understanding customers today can make or break their audience development efforts.

(What follows is a video consisting of interviews with three B2B CMOs that emphasizes the need for content to be grounded in overall brand strategy. And, they touch upon the importance of telling a good B2B story. To tell a good B2B story means truly understanding the goals and scenarios that reside in the world of your customers.)

South East Asia's third largest bank, United Overseas Bank, has stopped funding mortgages for UK properties, one of the first examples of investment in Britain drying up in the wake of the Brexit vote.

The Times quotes a spokesperson for the Singapore lender as saying: "As the aftermath of the UK referendum is still unfolding and given the uncertainties, we need to ensure our customers are cautious with their London property investments."

The Remain campaign argued prior to last week's referendum on the UK's membership of the EU that if we vote to leave investment in Britain could shrink. This is a concrete example of that — money sitting in a Singaporean bank that could have ended up London's property market is now staying put.

But while this will come as a blow to estate agents in the UK capital's most exclusive postcodes, for ordinary people this drying up of investment could actually be seen as a good thing.

Many political commentators have argued that the Brexit vote was less a vote against the EU specifically and more an expression of anger at the status quo from people who feel they've been let down and left behind by a system that only really caters to the rich and well-educated.

Most of this anger at the top is found in "Middle England" — the towns and rural areas across the country that aren't part of a big city. But even London, a Remain stronghold, has its share of anger at the system.

House prices have spiralled in the capital since the 2008 financial crash and this has led to anger among the young who feel they are being priced out of the market by wealthy foreign buyers who are crowding the market. The press has even dubbed this group "Generation Rent."

The average London property price passed £600,000 for the first time at the beginning of June, according to Land Registry data. Properties in London are now almost 60% more costly than they were prior to the 2008 financial crisis.

Many young Londoners may feel that stopping Singapore investors buying up properties in the capital might not be such a bad thing after all and the wider country will likely have sympathy for their grievances. While it is an example of "investment" drying up, too many properties in London are being bought as simply "investments" — empty homes just sitting their accruing value.

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Brands must understand why customers are motivated to buy in order for their products or services to be successful. This understanding will help you develop the product positioning, marketing campaigns and the brand’s image to craft a message that ties into one of these buyer motivations:

Fear

Everyone knows that sex sells, but some marketers believe that fear may actually be a bigger motivator. If you stop to think about it, fear influences a lot of purchasing decisions that you probably never think twice about. Why do people buy car insurance? Because they fear getting into an accident. Why do homeowners invest in a security system? Because they fear home intruders. But, the fear doesn’t have to be this serious. Any degree of fear can influence buyers to start spending money.

Vanity

Beauty supply distributors, cosmetic brands and fitness companies around the world know for a fact that vanity motivates people to buy. Everything from hair styling products to lipstick and cosmetic procedures are purchased because people are concerned with the way that they look.

Profit or Gain

Selling to people who are motivated by financial gain is common in the business-to-business world. If salespeople can prove to their clients that a product or service can increase productivity or reduce loss, the client will be motivated to purchase it to increase their own wealth. Brands who want to use this motivation should focus on a customer’s desire to make as much money as possible.

Acceptance

Sometimes, consumers can be motivated to purchase a product because everyone else has it. Take the Livestrong bracelet that was popular in the early 2000s. As soon as a few powerful sports influencers began to wear this bracelet, fans followed, and then, even people who had no interest in sports or no idea what cause the bracelet stood for began to wear it, too. This is a perfect example of a trend taking off and motivating customers to jump on the bandwagon or feel left out around their peers.

Pleasure

Customers will always be motivated to buy to satisfy their own desires. Do you love interior design and decorating? You may get pleasure out of purchasing new throw pillows or a decorative vase. Do you love to kick back and relax? Pleasure would be the motivator that drives you to book a weekend away at an exotic beach with your family. Brands have to identify their target audiences and determine what their pleasures are before they can decide whether this is one of the motivators that drives customers to purchase their products.

Problems

Customers often times do not think to buy a product or service until a problem occurs in their lives that creates the need for it. For example, customers will rarely consider purchasing new tires until they get a flat tire and have no other choice. If your product or service is designed to satisfy a need of your customers, make this very clear in marketing efforts.

Health

Customers are willing to invest in products that have a clear health benefit. How many people would buy toothpaste if your teeth did not hurt without proper dental hygiene? Advil and Tylenol would not sell millions of bottles if they didn’t relieve pain from headaches and other ailments. Customers need to clearly understand the health benefits that your product offers and see proof that the claims you make have been proven. Remember, today’s shoppers are more skeptical than ever before, so you have to build trust with customers by being transparent and straight forward.

Which of these seven motivators do you think influences your purchase behaviors the most? What about the least? Share your thoughts in the comments below!

A common criticism of inbound marketing is that it lacks the personalisation of other lead generation strategies.

However, with creativity and effective planning, you can incorporate a high degree of personal communication in your content marketing.

The following are some tips for personalising your content and benefits of doing so.

Use Data to See People

I’ve often spoken about data and how important it is to marketing teams. There is a tonne of information out there about “Big Data” and its importance.

Marketers can get bogged down in the detail regarding the best way to collate this data and how to use it to your best advantage.

Data and analytics are often viewed as contradictions to a personalised view of customers. However, when you apply analytics in the right way, as this post from Content Marketing Institute demonstrates, you get a much more in-depth view of your prospects as people than you ever could have before.

Data analysis enables you to look for common traits and behavioural trends that your target prospects share.

The more details you know about your target buyers, the greater your ability to communicate with people who care about your message.

Plus, when your marketing and sales teams formulate messages, they can integrate personal customisation.

Create and Deliver Engaging Content

Content marketing without engagement is just space filler on a website or blog.

When you define your audience and its needs, you can start to identify typical questions and problems buyers face.

A clear picture of your audience helps you weave content stories that attract interest, inform, educate and ultimately, intrigue prospects.

Delivering your content through the right channels at the right times is just as important. What channels are your audience frequenting, and when is the best time to reach them?

Content syndication is one of the core solutions Internal Results provides. We help you develop personalised content in a diverse array of formats, including whitepapers and cases studies and present them to your target audience.

Incorporate Visual – Into Everything!

Did you pause at the image above?

“A picture paints a thousand words” but “A minute of video is worth 1.8 million words” comes from a Forrester Research report by Dr. James McQuivey titled “How Video Will Take Over The World” dating back to June 2008.

Every marketer out there understands that emotional appeals strengthen your personalised message.

In addition to crafting stories that impact buyers, thoughtful visuals and effective demonstration tools help tap into primary interests and concerns.

Break down the potential revenue gains or cost savings for a B2B buyer using your type of solution, for instance. Incorporate characters and story elements that resonate with your audience.

We retain 80% of what we see, 20% of what we read, and 10% of what we hear.

Cisco has forecast that by 2019 as much as 80% of consumer internet traffic will be devoted to watching video online.

Visual content is the biggest driver of engaging content, so use it as much as you can.

Step-by-step pictorials and videos are among popular content formats for demonstrating a solution or spelling out its benefits.

Evaluate and Adapt

Listening is as important as delivering messages in personalized lead generation and marketing.

You listen by researching the types of content that your target audience finds useful.

Monitor the typical path your prospects take from initial connect through lead conversion.

As you evaluate, adapt your content strategies to emphasize preferred communication formats, messages and content elements.

Giving buyers what they want is personalized, and better for your business too.

Conclusion

Effective personalization in lead generation includes a genuine interest in your target audience. Without it, you won’t get the results you want.

Get familiar with their needs and problems. Remember, these are people just like you.

Rely on data, not assumptions or hunches, so that you can develop and deliver engaging content with high-quality visuals.

Over time, listen, evaluate your results, and adapt. The success of your business in the online world could depend on it.

Food waste is a global epidemic, but it's especially problematic in the US.

People don't buy bruised fruits and vegetables, so grocers will throw them out before they reach the shelves. For the same reason, farmers will also trash crops that they think grocery stores won't buy.

Added up, Americans throw out 113 billion pounds of food annually — which is worth about $161 billion.

A new site, called Cerplus, aims to alleviate food waste by matching farmers directly with restaurants and grocery stores in northern California. Think of it as a dating site for food.

Since its launch in January, the San Francisco-based startup has saved 20,000 pounds of produce, co-founder Zoe Wong tells Tech Insider. That's $18,000 worth of food, she adds.

With Cerplus, farmers can offer their unwanted produce to grocers and restaurants at a discounted price, rather than throwing out those fruits and vegetables. 

Let's say you work on a farm, and you have surplus peaches. After you sign up for Cerplus, you create a profile for your peaches and attach a photo. You also list your price, total volume, and minimum volume for purchase.

Cerplus is geared toward retailers — the majority of fruits and veggies are sold wholesale — so small food businesses, like cafés, grocers, and restaurants, can sign on and order what they want. The Cerplus team handles the logistics — they go to the farms, bring the produce to a small, refrigerated warehouse, then deliver it to the buyer.

"Produce moves very quickly," Wong says. "It comes in one day and goes out the next."

Cerplus' revenue comes from the small service fee it collects from sellers.

Food retailers also make out on the deal, because the produce usually costs about 30% less than the standard wholesale price. 

Before Wong started Cerplus, she made homemade jams from fruits that farmers markets didn't sell.

Realizing first-hand just how much produce is thrown out, Wong wanted to help solve food waste on a larger scale. In January 2016, she launched Cerplus with developer Kyle Brett, who handles the tech side. 

Most of the food they collect either looks weird in shape, color, size, or is a little under ripe. "But it's still tasty," she says. 

In the future, the team also plans to sell other food groups, including dairy, meat, and grains.

Wong says tech can be a useful tool to fight food waste. 

"Cerplus can give farmers information about who wants what and where," she says. "Otherwise they wouldn't know about it."

The team is also developing algorithms that can learn buyers' habits and make predictions about their needs, like the type of food, time of year, and volume. The site will then notify them when there's a batch of something they might want.

As more buyers and sellers start to use the site, the startup will be able to gather more data, and the algorithm will become more accurate.

So far, Cerplus works with 20 farms, but it plans to expand to other parts of California and eventually nationwide — though Wong doesn't feel a need to do that too soon.

"California grows 50% of the country's produce," she says. "So there's a lot of work to be done."

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Digital marketing is quite complex in nature as it involves different techniques and content marketing is one of those. Content marketing is the most effective medium for companies to uplift their brands in all aspects. Whether, it is about increasing user engagement, lead generation, and conversion, content plays a crucial part.

Content creation is an art and embraced by numerous coveted companies across the world. It takes a lot of hard work and research to create content that triggers actions for businesses. If this particular technique of digital marketing is done in proper manner then undoubtedly, it can produce the outstanding results for business.

Content is crucial for getting assured success. However, the irony is many companies don’t know how to leverage the same for their benefits. Therefore, often they make mistakes while performing online marketing. But, the less you make mistakes; more will be the chances of getting success for your content marketing.

What if you have created content but it doesn’t reach to your readers, followers, and buyers. If it happens, then it will be a waste of a labored resource. Well, the cause of this failure may be overlooking or skipping some critical steps while distributing content online through different channels.

In this write-up, I am going to cover some essential tips that you can follow to avoid content marketing pitfalls in 2016.

Creating Excessive Content

Rather creating too much content for overselling your product, focus more on creating content that can deliver value to the customers. Therefore, creating a flexible content calendar for your content marketing is the best way to start.

A content calendar helps you to produce content in a systematic manner and give you the desired timeline to research well about ongoing market trends. Unnecessary creation and distribution of content can badly decline your engagement rate and reputation. So, focus more on delivering quality than quantity.

Lacking at Producing Variation

Be creative with content creation and distribution. Try some mix way to deliver content to your followers and readers to sustain their zest, otherwise, after some time, users will start to neglect your content. Today, online users love diversity along with quality. Delivering content in the same format may bore your readers, irrespective of the fact that, how much your content is well-written.

Don’t let your efforts go waste, weave content creatively, put information, and add fun elements related to your buyers’ situation. If you do so, your readers will enjoy reading your content and appreciate the value delivered through it.

For instance, producing content in the form of whitepapers can be a great way, but there are only a few readers who like to download and read the entire content of it. Being a smart marketer, you need to target maximum audience to improve the brand engagement. Therefore, provide some variation while producing content for marketing.

Ignoring Social Media

Today, when several companies are taking advantage of social media platforms, many still think that marketing on social media isn’t that effective. And, this thinking became the reason for the failure of a well-researched and written content as it gets buried inside company websites and blogs.

In a true manner, if you want to take your business to the next level, then social media channels are the most reliable places to distribute your content. Every social media has its dedicated group of audience, communities, and expert groups. By joining these groups, you can distribute your content by the means of exchanging ideas. With the introduction of Facebook instant articles, content marketers got great power to post their content on this platform.

But, for effective content marketing, you can’t just stick to one platform. Therefore, never ignore social media and try to market your content on different platforms to make your efforts worthwhile.

Forgetting Buyer’s Journey

Don’t oversell and produce content that can deliver real value to your buyers. Identifying your customers’ journey is one of the most crucial factors that determine your success. Improve your loyalty in the eyes of your prospects by leveraging on buyer-centric content.

A buyer’s journey involves three phases namely awareness, consideration, and decision. It is advised to create content for all phases to bring your audience closer to your brand. Further, always distribute content in the same format so that buyers can easily recognize your content.

Whether you generate leads through landing pages or paid ads, highlight benefits through a killer and mobile-friendly content to inveigle buyers. Show them how the things you are offering can positively change their present situation.

Not Adding Interactive Elements

Various businesses never pay attention towards adding interactive elements to your content. No matter whether the produced content is aligning with the needs of the user, they simply know one thing create and distribute content. Disregarding interactive content leads business to lose readers which in turn decline their engagement rate. Therefore, always make your content interactive.

Providing valuable information in the form of statistics, infographics, videos, and podcasts are the great way to make your content interactive. If you do so, you increase the value of your content that can enhance engagement rate for your business dramatically.

In addition to it, engagement increases the chances of lead generation and conversion. After all, what matters is ROI.

Wrapping Up

By following the points mentioned above, you can avoid content marketing pitfalls and make your efforts more efficient, worthwhile, and fruitful for your business. I hope you enjoyed reading this write-up, don’t forget to drop your valuable feedback in below section.

In my days as vice president of marketing at several technology companies, I distinctly remember how difficult it was for my team of marketing professionals to command the respect of the salespeople in the company. We were finally successful in doing so, but only by becoming the company experts on the buyers. The salespeople didn’t care about the brochures we produced or the websites we built. They rarely commented on the email newsletter or the trade shows we spoke at. But by effectively understanding and defining our buyer personas, we shortened the sales cycle for the reps who followed our strategies. Only then did the salespeople offer respect and kudos.

Marketing generates attention of the many people who make up a buyer persona, whereas sales communicates with one potential customer at a time, putting the buying process into context.

But most sales teams and marketing teams continue to operate out of alignment. The marketers and salespeople question the others’ skills and their commitment to the job. They fight over the quality of the leads. I remember hearing of a sales team that snidely referred to the marketing department as the “T-shirt department” because they said all the marketers had accomplished was the production of T-shirts imprinted with the company logo. Others call the marketing department the “branding police.”

Marketers, in turn, complain about how the materials they produce fail to be used by the salespeople. They bitch and moan because the sales leads they generate are left untouched, claiming that sales staffers are too lazy to pick up the telephone.

Think about your own organization’s last launch event. Were the salespeople hanging on every word as the marketers described the features of the latest product, service, or product marketing plans? If you’re like most people I speak with (if they are honest), the salespeople were bored, probably poking at their smartphones instead of paying attention.

Since content drives both sales and marketing success, it is essential that we take just a little time to look at how the two functions differ. By making certain we understand the difference, we can close the gap between marketing and sales and grow business faster.

It is the job of marketers to understand buyer personas—essentially groups of buyers—and communicate to these groups in a one-to-many approach. Marketers are experts at communicating to many people, and typically the potential customers they reach are not yet ready to have a sales discussion.

The marketing team captures the attention of a group of buyers and drives those people into and through the sales process. The content generated by the marketers -- blogs, YouTube videos, infographics, ebooks, webinars, and the like -- can influence large numbers of people. Done well, with a deep understanding of buyer personas based on research, this content generates sales leads and culminates in the buying process.

The role of salespeople is completely different because they influence one buyer at a time when buyers are much closer to making the buying decision. While marketers need to be experts in persuading an audience of many, salespeople excel in persuading the individual buyers. They add context to the company’s expertise, products, and services. Through them, the marketers’ content fulfills its potential at the precise moment the buyer needs it.

Closing the gap between marketing and sales means the marketing staff needs to be the buyer expert, not just the product expert. They need to focus on buyer personas based on real data from interviews with buyers. It’s not about posters or pretty slides. It’s about having deep and factual clarity about how markets full of buyers think about doing business with the company. That’s when marketing can deliver tremendous value to the sales process.

Buyer persona research yields surprising information, and when you are tuned in to a problem that people will spend money to solve and you build a product that solves it, you are on the road to success.

Buyer personas also make it much easier to market your products. Rather than web content that is simply an egotistical reiteration of gobbledygook-laden corporate drivel, you create content that people actually want to consume and are eager to share.

This approach is utterly different from what most organizations do. Either they fail to segment the market, and instead create nonspecific marketing for everyone, or they create approaches to segments based on their own product-centric view of the world.

Marketing needs to be the buyer expert, not just the product expert.

If you have responsibility for both sales and marketing, you need to make certain that marketing is focused on buyer personas. If the marketers work in a different part of the organization, you need to be an agent of change. Figure out how to get them the opportunity and skills they need to interview buyers and become buyer experts. Talk to the head of sales or the CEO if need be. Marketing can deliver incredible value, but only if marketers have a full understanding of their buyers’ needs and perceptions.

Editor's note: This post is an excerpt from "The New Rules of Sales and Service: How to Use Agile Selling, Real-Time Customer Engagement, Big Data, Content, and Storytelling to Grow Your Business" and is republished here with permission.

A career in sales can be demanding and requires quick thinking. Upselling and using rebuttals are things taught to every salesperson in training. You do have to pay attention to your words and think your thoughts through before speaking, otherwise you come across to consumers as if you are trying too hard. This is how the “used car salesman” stereotype comes into play. Making a few changes to training materials and reading consumer reviews can help a salesforce produce higher sales numbers.

Non-Current Quotes of Wisdom

One of the biggest mistakes that a salesperson can make is quoting someone that is no longer living. To remain relevant in the sales world, you must be “with the times”. If quotes are provided by the company, research current entrepreneurs and top sales executive quotes. Recognizable names may entice a customer to listen a little longer and at least consider making a purchase.

Inquire about Preferred Payment Amounts

If your salesforce is working with expensive items that require financing, approaching discussions about money should be done so with finesse. Once a consumer asks about a price, quickly respond with the correct number. Wait for a response and ask how much the client would want to pay per month. Speaking in terms of monthly payment and attempting to work toward what the customer can afford – rather than just telling them how much they have to pay each month – often works better and results in more sales.

In-Bound Sales Scripts

Sales is about more than meeting sales goals and pushing specific products. Some positions are in-bound sales where you are listening to a customer’s needs and carefully suggesting which products would best benefit them to solve their issue. Scripts are boring and customers know when staff is reading off of them, especially if they are a repeat or frequent customer. Stray from the script and customize it to make what you say seem more natural. Gain supervisor approval before freestyling first.

Too Many Follow-Ups

Contacting customers too many times to follow-up is a big annoyance. You will be more likely to receive a rude or inappropriate response when reaching out too many times, especially after a customer did not reply to an initial attempt to follow-up. No answer likely means that they are not interested. Attempt contact twice, and leave a method to contact you. After two attempts and no answer, leave the customer alone.

Provide Good Leads

Salespeople can only be so productive with leads. It is important to ensure that the leads are genuinely interested. Time wasted on mishandled time, poor leads, and lost productivity costs businesses a reported $1-trillion annually. Consider developing a team to send a follow-up email to those on lead lists to confirm interest and actually set an appointment for a sales call. This sets the salesperson up with people that want to listen and make a purchase.

Learn to Listen

Before you can offer a solution for a customer’s problem to make a sale, you must learn to listen to them first. A customer is going to tell you what their main issue is, what they need and likely, what their budget is. All of these are key pieces of information that you have to pay attention to. Offering a customer what they don’t want and not listening to what they are telling you is the best way to lose a sale.

Don’t Offer Private or Secret Incentives

If you are a person-to-person salesperson, offering incentives or making side agreements to make a sale likely goes against company regulations. It becomes a bigger problem when a customer tells their friends and family about the side deal and they all expect the same thing. You could end up an unemployed salesperson from using tactics like this. Be straight forward with customers and only offer what you are permitted to by your employer.

Stop Nervous Pitch Recovery Talking

Customers know when you are struggling when reading your script or delivering your pitch. This can cause you to ramble or give away sensitive company information. Nervous speaking loses your customer because they have lost the ability to follow the direction of your words.

Closing Thoughts

A salesperson has to work hard for every commission dollar earned. At the same time, they have sales goals to meet and company standards to uphold. Following a pitch written by an employer makes a salesperson nervous, so consider allowing salespeople to create their own script based upon the mood of the conversation. This often works better and results in more sales goals being met.

Content marketing is not really the new kid on the block anymore. It’s something nearly all marketers claim to practice. Even though there are still some that are creating content for content’s sake, the marketers who are successful are the ones who approach it with a strategy.

This is no different than any other kind of marketing. You need to know what you are trying to achieve, how you are going to accomplish that, and how you are going to measure a successful outcome. That’s a pretty succinct way to thing about marketing strategy. You can certainly add more detail, but at the highest level, it works.

So what do all those strategic content marketers want to accomplish? In a recent survey by Ascend2, 58 percent of content marketers indicated that they want to increase lead generation.

Sounds reasonable. Marketers, especially those of the B2B variety, have always focused on generating leads for their sales counterparts. There’s no reason to think that would change with content marketing—and I would argue that it has gotten easier.

How Content Marketing Transformed Lead Generation

Grab your time machine, and let’s take a trip back to Ye Olde Marketing Shoppe. Think of the days before most marketing had gone digital. Anyone remember reader reply cards? This was lead generation in a trade magazine, and it let buyers express their interest in products and services. It was top-of-funnel activity driven by advertising.

We’ve all collected leads at trade shows, and we still do. But this is focused on buyers who have a specific need in mind. They are “in market,” as they say, for what you are selling. This makes it easy to connect with them, but this is small pool of prospects.

Welcome, content marketing. Marketers now have the ability to talk to prospects before they are in market for a solution. Whether you focus on blog posts, ebooks, white papers, or videos as your primary means of content, if you are providing value and helping prospects solve their business problems, you can start building a relationship with them.

Content makes the connection, and content builds the relationship. (highlight to tweet) As Ascend2’s survey results indicate, marketers are thinking about this in the right way by wanting to increase lead generation. They can now get in front of prospects that they could not market to before, with a variety of content distribution methods. It may be a combination of search, social, or paid versions of both that can surface your content in front of the right prospects. Even if they are not ready to buy today, they likely will be someday. This is a very different audience than the digital tire-kickers who arrive at your website.

But lead generation is more than just getting prospects to fill out a form. You may call them leads, but are they really? They might just be someone who is interested in the content but is not a fit for your products or services. A true lead is someone who can be passed to sales as a likely buyer. Lead scoring is one way to qualify these form-fillers, but it starts with creating the right content.

Nurture Your Leads With Content

Different firms use different terms to describe contacts that are added to their marketing database, and it can be based on how much information has been gathered about them. Someone can go from a suspect to a prospect to a lead as they interact more with a company’s content and express more intent about their preferences. This should not be accidental, but deliberate. It’s called lead nurturing.

There are lots of ways to think about how content moves a prospect through the buying process, but consider having a narrative overlay. What story are you trying to tell the prospects as they move closer to becoming a real lead for sales? The more you understand your prospect, the better this narrative fits.

Instead of viewing this as another marketing cliché, put yourself in the buyer’s place. You want to know about a company you will do business with. You want them to know what they are talking about and have a good reputation in the industry. You don’t want them to be pushy. You want to learn from them. You don’t mind keeping in touch, but you want to control the relationship and reach out when you are ready to consider buying.

If you can create content that does that, then you are well on your way to real lead generation, not just form completion.

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The so-called, dreaded “summertime slump” is approaching. We all know the feeling.

You just had a killer month or quarter, you absolutely crushed your quota, but now the slate is clean and you have to start all over again, hoping for a repeat performance.

Or, on the other side of the coin, you had a miserable month or quarter, and you now need to dig yourself out of the hole you found yourself in.

However, summer is officially in full-swing and the fourth of July is right around the corner, translating to a whole bunch of ‘out of office’ messages. You begin making your normal dials and it starts to feel like everyone got the day off except for you. You start wondering, “how am I ever going to hit this month’s metrics?”

Either way, that SiriusDecision stat about 54% of sales reps not reaching their annual quota is starting to look pretty scary from where you’re sitting.

Now, at this juncture, sales development reps have a choice: They can complain about “lousy territories,” “difficult clients,” or “crappy lists,” or they can be smart and use their tools and training to hit quota every time.

Here are a few sales tips that work for those 46% who do hit quota.

1. Take above-average notes.

The first and most basic sales tip is to take above-average notes on every conversation you have with prospects, especially if those conversations did not result in a passed opportunity.

A disorganized and ill-informed sales rep is going to have a hard time hitting quota.

Write down every detail and get it logged into your prospect relationship management (PRM) system so you can reference it later if you have to. The knowledge you gain with each conversation is knowledge you can leverage with different contacts or with that same prospect when re-engaging them months down the road. If you’re focusing on an account-based sales development strategy, this step is even more crucial to success.

2. Maintain full pipeline visibility.

If you take accurate notes, the next sales tip you’ll want to follow is to begin every month with a pipeline review.

I used to review my conversations from the last 90-120 days and ask myself a series of questions, such as: Who did I talk to? Who asked me to “check back in?” How much information do I already have on that account? Could I feasibly pass this company as a fully qualified sales opportunity this month?

Once I filtered through those questions, I would not only set high priority tasks in my prospecting platform but also write my entire pipeline on post-it notes on one page in my notebook and revisit it every morning. Giving yourself the opportunity to pass over some pipeline opportunities early in the month or quarter can ensure that you are not scrambling near the end of your deadlines.

Colleen Francis gives some great tips for pipeline reviews in this blog post.

3. Keep calling.

Once you have reviewed your pipeline and prioritized your accounts, the question becomes: How are you going to generate new interest from companies you’ve yet to have traction with? The sales tip here is just to keep calling. I found for me that my goal was to get in front of as many prospects as I could and gain that valuable sales context that I knew would help me pass leads.

We know more often than not that when calling into a cold list, sales development reps will encounter someone who says, “I’m not the right person,” or, “You need to talk to so and so who handles that.”

The more people you call, the quicker you are able to navigate through the account and reach that contact identified, or CI. CIss are either decision makers or valuable influencers that can help you get to the next step. The more you have going any given month, the easier it will be for you to reach quota. That way, you won’t be stuck relying solely on your existing pipeline in case some opportunities fall through.

4. Think critically about your account.

The final sales tip I have is to just think critically about your account, know your audience and make sure you are reaching out to the right people and doing the appropriate amount of research to be successful. Breaking into a new account is no easy feat. That’s why QuotaFactory packaged their best sales email and voicemail templates here.

Don’t wait for a manager or director to tell you how to reach quota (although they should be helping you). I give a tremendous amount of autonomy to sales development reps who consistently hit goal, and it’s that freedom that helps them do what works for them.

What are some sales tips you use to meet and exceed quota? Interested in determining if account-based sales development is the right strategy for you and your team? Download our playbook below.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) has been a hot topic in B2B marketing strategy lately. Marketers are going crazy for the ability to collect information on their targeted accounts and use it to reach them more effectively. There are many different ABM approaches that marketers can take to do this (email campaigns, digital advertising, trade shows, etc.), but one of the more common tactics is to use reverse IP lookup to identify when an employee from a particular company lands on your homepage. Typically, marketers are looking to ensure that visitors see content specific to their industries on the homepage.

The problem with this is that reverse IP lookup technologies, including our own B2B Detect product, have limited coverage. Only companies with their own dedicated IP address ranges match to an account or industry with these technologies, and even in those companies, the coverage is declining as more people work from home or do research on their phones and tablets while on the go.

As a result, this approach creates very narrow segments, meaning that only a limited number of visitors to your site will see a personalized experience. If you are investing in a solution to provide this experience, you aren’t maximizing your ROI.

By incorporating a visitor’s intent and real-time behaviors into the mix, we can create more accurate segments. For example, if a visitor lands deep-linked on a blog post that pertains to a specific industry or solution, we can leverage his interest in this topic to make the rest of his experience more relevant.

In this post, I’ll show you how to do this to make your account-based marketing more effective.

Intent-Based Marketing

Intent-based marketing leverages a visitor’s behavior to identify what information the person is looking for (in other words, what that person’s intent is). It can complement reverse IP lookup tactics to enhance an ABM strategy by creating more accurate segments of visitors on your site. You’ll get huge returns by leveraging all your visitors’ browsing data to make informed decisions on what to show them.

Here’s how. If a visitor spends time on your blog, the specific articles he reads are a big clue to what he is interested in and who he is. Intent-based marketing will look at the quality attributes associated with the article—like titles, categories or tags—and will enable you to personalize visitors’ site experience based on these factors too. This means that even if a reverse IP lookup is not able to identify a visitor’s company or industry, intent-based marketing can infer it for you and ensure that the visitor is offered the most relevant content, designed to help him advance through the buyer’s journey.

And this information can be used to personalize across the site — not just the homepage. For example, it can suggest other relevant blog posts to him while he is on the blog or promote the most relevant case studies, eBooks or webinars.

An Intent-Driven Case Study

Evergage.com, for example, uses intent-based marketing as part of its ABM strategy to pick up signals and augment targeting from IP lookup. Like most B2B companies, Evergage has different target profiles. The first thing we want to know about a visitor is whether they belong to one of our target industries. That way, we can welcome them with the most relevant solution messaging and client examples. We consider it a waste of real estate to show a B2B case study on demand generation to a B2C retailer.

First, we set rules based on the user’s industry or company using reverse IP lookup, like most solutions that help marketers with ABM. Below, we create a rule for visitors who are affiliated with the retail industry.

Image 1: Creating a Personalization Rule based on the Account’s Industry

With this rule, we change the content of our default home page (Image 2) when we detect that a visitor comes from a retail company by adjusting the image and messaging and modifying the list of logos to show only companies in the retail industry (Image 3).

Image 2: Default, Non-personalized Home Page

Image 3: Retail-specific Home Page Experience

While this is a good start, it still results in very narrow segments. So we also include parameters to ensure that those who aren’t identified with reverse IP lookup are still provided with a personalized experience. Here we target based on visitors’ browsing patterns — how much time they have spent on industry-specific pages and on blog articles by category, and how many articles of each category they have viewed.

Here’s an example of how a more expansive rule would be set up (Image 4).

Image 4: Creating a Personalization Rule based on the Account plus Favorite Article Category

Use a Multi-Layered Approach

The basic truth about marketing is that information rules. The more you know about the people visiting your site (and the more you can take action on what you know), the more likely you are to convert them into qualified sales leads.

Leveraging ABM on your website is a great way to create personalized experiences for your visitors. But when you rely only on reverse IP lookup to identify the industries of your visitors, you are sure to miss many (if not most) of your opportunities due to lack of coverage. A robust personalization strategy will leverage intent data to maximize coverage and deliver relevant experiences.