VICTORIA – University of Victoria scientists say they have some good news about global warming and its impact on British Columbia’s forests, especially about the environment’s recovery from the devastating mountain pine beetle outbreak more than a decade ago.

A group of scientists at the university’s Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions have discovered that global warming is producing larger trees and faster-growing forests.

The findings, published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal American Geophysical Union, conclude global warming is making B.C. forests grow faster and the trees in those forests are able to take in more carbon dioxide, the gas associated with the globe’s steadily climbing temperatures.

“What we have found is the forests in B.C. are growing much faster than in the past due to climate change and increases in carbon dioxide, and this has helped us recover from the mountain pine beetle outbreak,” said lead research Vivek, Arora, a climate modelling expert.

Under normal conditions, forests act as so-called carbon sinks, which scrub the atmosphere by pulling in CO2 while releasing oxygen, he said.

But during the pine beetle epidemic, which lasted from the 1990s up until 2005, 18 million hectares of dead and rotting pine trees pumped more carbon into the environment, turning the forests from carbon sinks into carbon sources.

Arora said as the outbreak waned, scientists found evidence of faster growing and larger trees emerging in B.C. forests. He said those trees are able to take in more CO2, leading the scientists to conclude the growing forests will compensate for the carbon emitted into the atmosphere by the beetle kill epidemic.

He said the trees will continue to grow larger and faster, but the look of the forest will not change drastically.

“We are not going to turn into an Amazon Rainforest,” Arora said.

But the scientists’ measurements have found that the trees and their branches have increased in size by up to three per cent over three years, he said.

“If the system keeps on doing what it has done over the past few years — the last three or four decades — then the implication of that is the carbon gained due to climate change had increased CO2 more than compensates for the loss associated with the pine beetle outbreak,” Arora explained.

Note to readers: This is a corrected story. A previous story said the forests were putting out more oxygen. In fact, they are taking in more C02.

The post B.C.’s beetle-gnawed, carbon spewing forests recovering quickly, says researcher appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

DENVER – Garden-care giant Ortho said Tuesday it will stop using a class of chemicals widely believed to harm bees.

The company plans to phase out neonicotinoids by 2021 in eight products used to control garden pests and diseases.

Ortho will change three products for roses, flowers, trees and shrubs by 2017 and other products later, said Tim Martin, vice-president and general manager of Ortho, a division of Marysville, Ohio-based Scotts Miracle-Gro Co.

The chemicals, called neonics for short, attack the central nervous systems of insects. Some advocates say neonics are one of several reasons behind declining populations of bees, which are major pollinators of food crops.

About one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and honeybees are responsible for 80 per cent of that pollination.

Ortho is acting out of concern for possible threats to honeybees and other pollinators and to reassure customers that “Ortho’s got their back, taking care of whatever they need controlled in the most responsible manner,” Martin said.

The change might require gardeners to apply the reformulated products more frequently, but it will be easier to target pests while reducing the chances of hurting bees, he said. The cost of the products won’t change significantly, Martin said.

It wasn’t immediately clear what effect Ortho’s decision would have on the health of the overall bee population. Neonics are used in a number of chemicals applied to food and textile crops such as corn and cotton as well as individual gardens.

The severity of the effects of neonics on bees appears to vary depending on what type of crops or plants they are used on, according to a study by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California’s environmental agency that was released in January. Another study published last year showed neonics might hit wild bumblebees harder than domestically raised honeybees.

Bayer CropScience and Syngenta, the top manufacturers of neonics, have said the research has exaggerated the risks and understated the benefits.

Concern about bee health is growing. Last week, the Maryland General Assembly passed a bill that would allow only certified applicators, farmers and veterinarians to apply pesticides containing neonics. In March, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said it would consider whether to protect two species of wild bumblebees under the Endangered Species Act amid declines in their numbers.

The environmental group Defenders of Wildlife, which asked the service to consider protecting the bees, said neonics were one a factor in the bees’ decline.

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Follow Dan Elliott at http://twitter.com/DanElliottAP. His work can be found at http://bigstory.ap.org/content/dan-elliott.

The post Ortho to drop chemicals linked to bee declines appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

JERUSALEM — Israeli mathematicians and archaeologists say they have found evidence to suggest that key biblical texts may have been composed earlier than what some scholars think.

Using handwriting analysis technology similar to that employed by intelligence agencies and banks to analyze signatures, a Tel Aviv University team determined that a famous hoard of ancient Hebrew inscriptions, dated to around 600 BC, were written by at least six different authors. Although the inscriptions are not from the Hebrew Bible, their discovery suggests there was widespread literacy in ancient Judah at the time that would support the composition of biblical works.

The findings, released Monday by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, an American scientific journal, contribute to a longstanding debate about when biblical texts first began to be compiled: did it take place before or after the Babylonian siege and destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BC and the exile of its inhabitants to Babylon?

In recent years, many scholars have attributed the composition of a group of biblical texts, from the Book of Joshua to the second Book of Kings, to the period after the siege, according to Israeli archaeologist Israel Finkelstein, who participated in the study. That theory holds that the biblical texts were written as a result of the exile to Babylon, when the composers began to think about their past and put their history to parchment.

Finkelstein, however, said he has long believed those texts were written in the late 7th century BC in Jerusalem, before the siege. He said the study offers support for that theory.

“It’s the first time we have something empirical in our hands,” said Finkelstein.

The team _ made up of doctoral students in applied mathematics, math professors, archaeologists and a physicist _ examined 16 ink inscriptions on ceramic shards discovered at the site of an ancient military fortress in Arad in southern Israel. It used multispectral imaging to reconstruct Hebrew letters that had been partially erased over time, and then used a computer algorithm to analyze the writings to detect differences in handwriting strokes.

Doctoral student Arie Shaus, who helped develop the algorithm, said it was the first time such technology has been used to reconstruct and perform handwriting analysis on ancient Hebrew inscriptions.

The inscriptions themselves are not biblical texts. Instead, they detail troop movements and expenses for provisions, indicating that people throughout the military chain of command down to the fort’s deputy quartermaster were able to write. The tone of the inscriptions, which suggest they were not written by professional scribes, combined with the fortress’ remote location, indicate a wide spread of literacy at the time, according to the study.

A high level of literacy would support the idea that some biblical texts had already been authored by this time. The Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest known collection of certain biblical texts, are believed to date several centuries later.

Shmuel Ahituv, an Israeli bible scholar who did not participate in the study, also believes literacy in ancient Judah was widespread before 586 BC and that the biblical texts in question were written before the siege of Jerusalem. He said he believes this is apparent through a literary analysis of the biblical texts alone.

“I don’t need algorithms,” Ahituv chuckled.

The post Handwriting analysis offers clues on when biblical texts written appeared first on Macleans.ca.

Whether starting a business or trying to grow and expand your existing business, there is undoubtedly going to be ton of research involved. From staying on top of industry trends to better understanding your competitors; from determining best pricing to your legal designation… there is a lot to learn! But with all of this research of getting your business up and running (or expanded), you may be missing the most important piece of the puzzle – your customer.

Understanding your current and potential customers needs, desires, frustrations and challenges is what will set your offering a part from your competitors. The more you know, the more successful you’ll be. So, how can you find out what will best resonate with your customers? Research, of course. These tips will help you.

Surefire Ways to Get to Know Your Customers

To start, you’re going to do a bit of analysis on your own and then figure out how to best interact with your customers in order to gather data with the tips below, then you’ll be ready to start conducting surveys to further the process.

1. Analyze Your Product

Start with products or services you offer. If you’re an existing business and you’ve been offering your services for some time, this will be easy. If you’re just getting started, you’ll need to brainstorm a bit.

Take one product or service and write down a list of its features. Beside each feature, write the benefit that it provides for the customer. The difference here between features and benefits is that a feature is some quality or part of the product itself. The benefit, on the other hand, is the subsequent effect it has on the purchaser’s life.

For example, let’s imagine that your business provides a new kind of content management system (CMS). The CMS allows people to work together remotely and updates in real-time. That’s its feature. The result is that your workforce can be spread across the globe but informed about what’s going on as soon as it happens, thus increasing your business’s efficiency. This is the benefit.

For each benefit that you list, ask yourself: Who does this feature benefit? In the above example, it benefits businesses which are either international in scale, or that hire virtual assistants in other parts of the world.

2. Look at Existing Customer Data

If you’re already running your business, take a look at existing customer data. Your existing customer data offers a valuable shortcut to understanding who your customers are. You may be planning to expand or better target your services, but you can still get some clues by looking at existing customers.

Thus far in your business, what products or services are selling the best among your existing customers? Are there any differences at different times during the year or business cycle? How have buying patterns changed over time? Consider which customers buy the most from you and those from whom you’ve received positive feedback and referrals.

3. Analyze the Market

If you’re a new business that doesn’t currently have a base of existing customers, or if you’re shifting your offerings completely, you can learn some things by analyzing the general market. Start with associations in your industry. See if you can find any demographic data they’ve done. Look for trade reports, census data, published survey results, white papers, and so on.

You can also learn valuable information by researching your competition. Who do they target and serve? Are there segments of the market that they underserve? One way to do this easily is to “stalk” your competition by following them on social media, reading their blog, watching their YouTube videos, and so on. Look at the comments, reviews and other feedback from customers. You can get an idea of who your competitors serve and also how their customers feel about their service.

One more way to get ideas is to use your intuition. Ask yourself:

• Who do you envision to be your ideal customer?
• Who would you like to be your ideal customer?
• What demographic groups are most likely to buy from you, and which ones aren’t likely to buy?
• What challenges, problems, questions, or pain will your product or service help them solve?
• How do they feel about the products they buy?

4. Start Interacting

Next, you have to make a plan for how you’re going to interact with your market. The internet makes it easier than ever to get in touch with your customer base and there are many easy and free ways to do this.

Email

Email is a relatively old method for reaching customers. Long before there were Facebook and Twitter, there was email. And although new means of communication are continually appearing, email is still the old standby. People still pay more attention to email messages from companies they patronize than anywhere else online.

There are several ways to connect with your customers through email. The standard is to ask for their email at the point of sale, promising them deals, news, discounts, and other exclusives they can only get through email. In addition to special offers, it’s good to send a customer newsletter. This is a way of keeping in touch and it then doesn’t seem abrupt if you contact them out of the blue asking them to do a survey. It’s also a way to boost post-purchase sales through the exclusive deals you offer.

As part of the content that you send your customers through email, you can also elicit feedback by asking questions or providing a way for them to reach you.

Social Media

By simply having an account on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or other social media sites, you can keep in steady contact with your customers. However, it’s even better to get further involved with social media, joining forums, groups, and discussions.

While you’re using social media, you can also conduct research on your customers. You can look at their profiles, see what’s trending, see what other businesses they like or follow, see what content is most popular, and so on. Look especially for gaps where needs aren’t being met and what other similar solutions are being offered.

In-Person Events

The internet offers many easy and convenient ways to interact with your customers, but face-to-face interaction is still the most authentic. Take any opportunity possible to actually meet your customers offline at conferences, training events, local community events, trade shows, and so on.

For example, if you hold a booth at a trade show or conference, as part of the stand you can offer a survey on an iPad. The iPad makes it easy and hassle-free for the attendee to take your survey and also easy for you to analyze the results. You may offer some small gift item, freebie, or even a cup of coffee as a way to say “thanks” for taking the time.

Once you have moved forward to better understand your customers with these tips, then it’s time to administer customer surveys. You’ll know your customers in no time! In the meantime, I have created this helpful worksheet to get you going in the right direction. Click below to sign up and download it.

Complete Views & The Art of Storytelling

Video content took the spotlight early at the 4A’s “Transformation 2016” event in Miami Beach, with opening day sessions covering multiple aspects of the video revolution. I had the pleasure of joining Tara Walpert Levy, Managing Director of Agency Solutions at Google and YouTube on her main stage panel “Where Culture and Content Collide” along with fellow guests Shabnam Mogharabi, CEO and Executive Producer, SoulPancake and Rob Candelino, Vice President of Marketing, Unilever. Towards the end of the session, Tara asked each of us to give one piece of advice to the audience. I spoke about the value of engagement and the red herring of “complete views” as a metric; a topic worth expanding upon here.

The core Internet user experience is predicated upon the notion of instant gratification: the user clicks and the user gets what they want. As marketers, it is often our goal to insert a brand message or prompt into this basic transaction. That can be problematic, as unwelcome intrusions delaying immediacy offend the very promise of the medium, itself. Even more troublesome is the layer of expectation marketers put on the experience, especially when we start tracking the illusive “complete view.”

The idea that complete views of video content are the holy grail of video marketing stems more from habit than reality. The online video industry adopted, without question, storytelling techniques of the past. More often than not, this is reflected in the 3-act story arc that has driven movies, sitcoms and even 30-second TV spots throughout the history of motion media (and theater, before that). In the 3-act arc, the payoff to the story happens at the end. In film, that means the Death Star doesn’t get destroyed until late in the movie; in TV commercials, the story wraps up and a logo appears around the 27 second-mark; and in digital video, the end of a clip traditionally leads to a URL and a call to action. By the design of our stories, we are forced to value complete views because our story is only effective if the user gets to the CTA/URL closing frames.

That’s great, except for one thing: web users have little motivation to stick around to the end of a video.

We see this in the numbers. You will see it in yours, if you look carefully. Unless you have a pre-roll situation where the user is forced to let the video play in its entirety (whether they are actually watching it or not is another question), reaching completion rates of 70, 80 or 90% is a very difficult feat. We live in a click-happy culture where time is truly the most valued commodity. The online video viewer is more likely to skip around your video and stop viewing when they are satisfied, completely without regard for how the agency or brand intended the clip to be consumed. Generally speaking, a video earning a 40-60% voluntary completion rate is actually doing pretty well. If the payoff to that video is held until the end, that’s not a good sign for message delivery.

The solution is to focus on engagement and what the user does after viewing the video, rather than stressing out over how much of the video gets viewed. At the end of the day, the goal of branded content is to sell product, not score high completion rates. We are marketers, not filmmakers.

Accepting this reality also means changing the way we tell stories. The 3-act play, dependent upon completion to make its point, is not the most effective story arc for online video. There are other models that seem to work better, including the journalistic-style which puts the emphasis on explaining key information at the beginning of the story, with the remainder used to flesh out details for those who care. There is a simple brilliance to this: all comers get the heart of the story, while the rest of the video is there for those who want a deeper experience. Isn’t that what good marketing should do? Deliver the message to everyone and provide the details for those most interested in the product?

If we begin to consider this kind of experience as the online standard, we can lose the shackles that bind us to “complete views” and start focusing on storytelling that motivates the consumer towards the kinds of engagement we want; the kind that drive sales.

Rob Davis is Executive Director, Content and Social at OgilvyOne in New York.

Sales enablement technology is continuing to take hold as an important investment for organizations of all sizes. In fact, sixty-eight percent of sales executives plan to invest in sales enablement technology to improve sales process and productivity.

While that’s an impressive stat and shows the importance of a measurable, structured approach to sales enablement, without a plan to drive adoption amongst sales reps, technology can only do so much. According to a study from CSO Insights, just over half of all organizations lack a formal sales enablement vision.

The fact is, in order to maximize the value of a sales enablement platform, you need both the right technology and the right plan to drive and maintain adoption. Here are five critical components you should consider when searching for a sales enablement platform to improve adoption.

1. Let Sales Reps Sell
   One of the easiest ways to help sales drive revenue is to reduce or remove non-selling tasks from their days, and a sales enablement platform can help immensely. According to research from McKinsey, an average sales rep spends sixty-five percent of their time on non-selling activities. Removing some of their administrative tasks and wild-goose chases looking for content only helps performance.A good sales enablement solution eliminates a lot of the administrative tasks like tracking activities, email pitches, and live online meetings in your CRM system against the lead, account, or opportunity record. The platform should automate this work to let sales reps sell instead of processing data all day.
2. Keep it Simple and Reliable
   To avoid having your sales enablement platform become “just another” piece of technology that sales is “required” to use, it should make life easier for them. Solutions that force sales reps to work outside of their preferred methodology are less likely to be adopted.For example, when it comes to ensuring your reps can find the content they need for a particular selling scenario, don’t assume they’ll search how marketing has categorized something. They may think about content completely differently than marketing. Your sales enablement platform should make it simple for reps to find what they need—when they need it—with intuitive search that works, automatic language filtering, and intelligent content recommendations.
3. Work Where Your Sales Reps Work—and Make it Seamless
   Just like anyone, sales reps generally have a preferred workflow and typically like to use one or two systems (at most) to get their critical tasks accomplished so they don’t have to flip between siloed systems. Focus time to work is rare and fleeting, so seamless integration across CRM systems, Outlook and other email platforms, 1-click live online meetings, and 1-click Microsoft Office editing capabilities is critical. If they have to learn a new workflow, odds are high that adoption will suffer.
4. Help Sales Reps Prioritize Prospects Based on Buying Indicators
   As the saying goes, “knowledge is power.” When sales reps know how, when, and for how long a prospect has engaged, they can better prioritize where to focus their time and energy to close deals. A good sales enablement platform offers the ability to see how much time a prospect spent on certain content and if they forwarded it to their colleagues, as well as the ability to organize and filter that engagement all on one holistic pitch dashboard.
5. Align Content to Sales Goals and Targets
   It’s no secret that sales reps live and die by their quotas. Solutions that don’t help them sell better simply get in the way and will never be adopted. Your sales enablement platform should be able to measure content usage throughout the sales cycle as well as analyze content’s effectiveness in moving customers through the buying process including its impact on revenue.The platform should offer closed loop analytics that let you understand which pieces customers respond to with absolute certainty, enabling mapping of content back to revenue results and letting you optimize content over time to help sales hit their goals and targets. When sales and marketing know what works, they know where to focus their energy to better drive revenue. It’s a win/win, and it makes both teams happy and successful.

When it comes to selecting and deploying a sales enablement platform, these five items are critical to successful sales team adoption. Robust solutions fit all of these requirements—and more—with easy and intuitive interfaces, but not all solutions are created equal. From a sales enablement professional’s standpoint, it’s also important to have a platform—and platform provider—that understands the importance of user adoption.

There are three ways to measure user adoption: By number of people who have adopted, breadth usage (how many people used the solution over a period of time), and depth usage (how many people have used the product to accomplish something of value).

At Highspot, we think measuring adoption is so critical that we do regular QBRs with all of our customers. In these sessions, we review a custom scorecard that shows usage and specific recommendations on how to improve adoption across sales reps and even across departments within the organization. In fact, our client at PayScale talked about this aspect of the Highspot solution in a recent Q&A.

Okay, now what?

Now that you know how to set sales up for success with a sales enablement platform, check out this recent report from SiriusDecisions that provides an evaluation of the capabilities of 12 sales asset management vendors, including a comparison of the available features, strengths, and challenges of each provider. This report is very informative and thorough, and if you’re searching for a new sales enablement platform, it will undoubtedly help.

While more and more companies may be focused on automating customer interactions (just look at Taco Bell’s new TacoBot or Kik or Facebook’s bot stores), but new research from Accenture Strategy found that customers still value a human touch.

According to Accenture’s 11^th annual Global Consumer Pulse Research survey, over 75% of customers prefer human customer service. The report also found that “consumers are more than twice as likely to be upsold (45 percent vs. 18 percent) through a human interaction than through a digital channel.” The survey gathered insights from more than 24,000 participants in more than 30 countries and 11 industries.

Accenture’s survey also found that good service can have a significant financial impact on a company. Over 45% of customers are willing to pay a company more for a better service experience. In addition, the survey found that 68% of customers who switch companies due to poor service will not go back, and 80% feel that the company could have done something to keep them around. These dissatisfied customers can ultimately end up hurting a business–poor customer service ends up costing companies $1.6 trillion.

Finally, the survey also mentioned the important of providing seamless, integrated cross-channel experiences. Nearly 75% of customers expect customer service to be easier and more convenient, while 61% of customers expect service to be faster. Part of this comes from making sure a company provides an omnichannel service experience. The report also suggested that companies focus on delivering great customer experiences rather than trying to offer every single channel across the board.

As this report points out, it’s important to remember that some customers are looking for human customer service and want to be able to contact that agent quickly and easily. Key takeaways from this survey should be a focus on the human to human customer service (automation can still play a role) and making sure that support channels are integrated.

View the full survey findings here.

Every marketplace and industry is currently going through a digital transformation. The days of having a “wait and see” approach in business are over. Your brand along with your products and services will need to continually evolve to remain relevant in a world dominated by increasing digital disruption.

The word disruption often conjures negative connotations. However, when we take a step back from the rapid pace of change, it becomes apparent that everything can be improved upon. Today, we have powerful new tools to not only improve what we currently have, but jump far ahead if we think big enough.

The reality is that Netflix was not focused on destroying Blockbuster or cable TV as much as they were focused on using new tools to reinvent how we all rent movies. If you focus on the competition, you will think like the competition and end up competing. It’s far better to look at the current methods for doing things, in this case renting movies, and then ask yourself a powerful question: Is there a far better way? That simple question, coupled with an understanding of what can now be done with the latest technology, will give you amazing and powerful answers. Similarly, the founders of Uber realized that the Taxi industry just wasn’t giving the service that consumers yearned for, they were often left feeling short-changed or frustrated. Could new technology redefine the customer experience? As we all know, the answer was yes!

This is one of the many reasons why so many businesses failed to respond to consumers evolving needs and expectations. They didn’t see the value in emerging technological innovations and as a result are now struggling to survive. As game changing solutions continue to be introduced allowing anyone to become a new competitor, now is the time to see disruption as your new friend, not your enemy.

The technological revolution is often accused of removing thousands of jobs as automation and outsourcing become all-too-familiar. However, we seldom read stories that reveal how technology is actually creating than it is taking away. We might not be able to sit at the same desk performing the same role for 20+ years anymore, but is that really such a bad thing? Isn’t it far less boring and far more exciting to be learning new skills and improving whatever you do?

Technology might be removing the mundane and monotonous jobs from our past, but it is also freeing us from daily routines allowing us to focus on tasks that machines cannot do as well. It allows us to deliver a new level of value to our customers and our business. Machines are getting much smarter, but they will find it quite difficult to replicate the complexity behind the creative and social intelligence that represents the essence of the human condition, we just need to embrace our strengths rather than resist them.

The phenomenal rate that technology continues to grow at is already highlighting a skills shortage where students often know more about the emerging technology than their teachers who were not raised on five screens. They might not have the time to invest in online research and self-teaching. As new roles begin to appear, there will be an inevitable skills shortage that is required to fill these new job opportunities, but sadly this is a subject that is not currently being dealt with quickly enough.

As our world continues to evolve at lightening speed, it’s easy to blame disruptive technology for changing what we once loved. However, we should be concentrating on learning new skills, identifying new opportunities, and looking at how our current roles can be redefined in a way that empowers us.

Each and every one of us has an inner desire to make our lives easier and more productive. I cannot help but think that for these reasons alone the phrase disruptive technology should not be considered offensive when we can learn to use digital disruption to dramatically improve the old, less efficient way of doing things. Replacing a past mindset with a future focused mindset that looks at new ways to improve existing services to make them more efficient should be celebrated rather than feared.

The secret to success will be taking continuous improvement to a new digital level. No one is safe, not even the new guys in town. It will be interesting to see if Airbnb or Uber will eventually see another new start-up disrupt their creation in this time of rapid disruption that is unforgiving to anything that attempts to stop progress in its tracks. Maybe, its time to remember that it really isn’t about disruptive tech, but about dramatically improving industries with both old and new technology.

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How is technology disrupting your industry and what are you doing to ensure that your business does not get left behind? I am genuinely interested in the daily challenges you face and how you overcome them, so please post your thoughts below.

 

This is my first public exploration of the business and art of podcasting. I still have much to improve, but I’m ready to share a few lessons learned. It’s my hope that they’ll save you a ton of time.

I’m still flabbergasted by how this experiment took on a life of its own.  It started with too much booze with Kevin Rose, and I expected it to die a quiet death after six episodes.

That said, here are a few quick stats on The Tim Ferriss Show after 150 episodes of mucking about, screwing up, and refining (as of this writing):

• Nearly 70,000,000 downloads as of April 2016
• More than 2,500 reviews on iTunes, 2,100+ 5-star reviews
• Selected for “Best of iTunes” in 2014 and 2015
• Out of 300,000+ podcasts on iTunes, it’s generally the #1 business podcast and an overall top-25 podcast
• Won “Podcast of the Year” in 2015 for the Jamie Foxx episode (via Product Hunt)

I’ve certainly stumbled a lot, but that’s how you figure things out.

I’ll share the first batch of big lessons in this post. If you like it, there’s a whole lot more to divulge (e.g. exactly how I get guests, etc.). If the response is a collective “meh,” I’ll play with my dog instead.

I’ve formatted this little ditty as a Q&A, based on the most common questions from readers, podcasters, and journalists.

Hope you find it useful!

The overarching principles explored apply to a whole lot more than podcasting…

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QUESTION: Why did you start the podcast? How has it evolved over 150 episodes?

The podcast was never intended to be a business.

I was burned out after The 4-Hour Chef, which was nearly 700 pages, and I wanted a casual but creative break from big projects. Since I enjoyed being interviewed by Joe Rogan, Marc Maron, Nerdist, and other podcasting heavies who really move the needle, I decided to try long-form audio for six episodes. If I didn’t enjoy it, I would throw in the towel and walk.

My rationale: Worst-case scenario, the experience would help me improve my interviewing, which would help later book projects. This is a great example of what Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, would call “systems” (win even if you lose) thinking. He discusses this at length with me here.

Flash forward to the current day, the podcast has found a nest in my “business,” but there is a clear hierarchy. Here are the pieces, in descending order of importance:

1) E-mail newsletter and “5-Bullet Friday” — Unlike, say, Facebook or Twitter, I own this communication directly and it’s less subject to the whims of algorithm changes (e.g. “Oops! Now you only reach 10% of your audience.”). Some people insist that e-mail is dead for younger generations, and they’re right… until those young people get jobs. E-mail will stick around for a while, despite attempts to kill it.

It’s still the most reliable delivery mechanism, although mobile push notifications are increasingly interesting to me. Though I use Slack for internal team communication, email is still #1 for external.

2) Blog and website — Based on WordPress VIP, ditto for the above. Even if Automattic goes out of business (disclosure: I’m an advisor, so I think this unlikely), WordPress is open source and I’ll survive. Video and audio are fantastic, but few things travel as well as text. Unlike video and audio, I feel there is a greater appreciation of page value with solid long-form, evergreen text content. The vast majority of my most popular posts are years old (e.g. Hacking Kickstarter: How to Raise $100,000 in 10 Days, Scientific Speed Reading). The best SEO is good, non-newsy content that remains relevant for years.

3) Podcast — This is the fastest growing piece of the puzzle, and I’m heavily investing here. Unlike the above two, audio can be a secondary activity. In other words, people can listen to my podcast when they commute, cook, walk the dog, work, etc. There’s also no degradation of experience when moving from laptop to mobile. Last but not least, I’m currently having the most fun with audio.

All that said, I put “business” in quotation marks in this answer because I don’t rely on my writing, etc. for money.

The majority of my finances come from early-stage startup investing, which I started in 2007 (portfolio) and stopped about six months ago. For this reason, I don’t feel pressured to monetize, per se. I put out what I want to put out, when I want to put it out, and that’s it.

Paradoxically, this seemingly lax approach appears to generate more revenue than if I focused on pushing product. My fan dedication (and occasional conversion) is high precisely because I don’t constantly bombard them with sales pitches and calls to action. Sure, I could make $5-10M additional per year for 1-3 years until I burned my audience out, but these people (you!) are worth far more to me than that. They’re a high-calibre bunch, people I want to be friends with rather than irritate.

Your network is your net-worth, and there are many ways to build it. Content is definitely one tool.

QUESTION: Does the podcast make any money directly, though?

Yes. If I wanted to fully monetize the show at my current rates, I could make between $2-4M per year, depending on how many episodes (“eps”) and spots I offer.

So why “if I wanted to fully monetize?” Because “fully monetizing”–bleeding the stone for all it’s worth–is nearly always a mistake, in my opinion.

I want to convert casual listeners into die-hard, fervent listeners, and I want to convert casual sponsors into die-hard, fervent sponsors. This requires two things: 1) Playing the long game, and 2) Strategically leaving some chips on the table. As a mentor once told me, “You can shear a sheep many times, but you can skin him only once.”

So, don’t skin your fuckin’ sheep, kids. In practical terms…

The podcast over-delivers for sponsors (here’s one example), partially because I deliberately undersell downloads. If I hypothetically get 1M downloads per episode, I might only guarantee (and charge for) 750K downloads.  This has attracted and kept sponsors ranging from Audible and Wealthfront to MeUndies and 99Designs.

I don’t have any sophisticated “funnel” or loss-leader campaign. I charge each sponsor per thousand downloads/listens that I guarantee. This cost per thousand (e.g. downloads, impressions, delivered email, etc.) is abbreviated as “CPM,” and the amount you charge per M (“thousand” in Roman numerals) is your “CPM rate.”

I’m not going to give my exact rates in this post, but I’ll give you something better: the bigger picture.

Premium podcasts tend to charge between $25-100 CPM. By “premium,” I mean high-converting, (often) single-host (due to Oprah-like sales impact), iTunes top-50 podcasts.

Let’s look at some numbers. If you can hypothetically guarantee 100,000 downloads per episode, as measured at six weeks post-publication (which seems standard for some odd reason), here is how the math shakes out at different CPM rates:

$50 CPM x 100,000 = 50 x 100 = $5,000 per sponsor per episode
$75 CPM x 100,000 = $7,500 per sponsor per episode
$100 CPM x 100,000 = $10,000 per sponsor per episode

Now, if a podcaster can guarantee 500,000 or 1M downloads/listens, you can see how the numbers add up.

To put these rates in context with other advertising, consider banner ads and email newsletters targeting high HHI (household income) demographics.

On the cheaper end, display/banner ads often cost less than $10 CPM, but a high-converting email newsletter can sell ads/sponsorship at $200-250+ CPM (with no guarantee of opening, only delivery). Premium podcasts currently fall in the middle.

Some podcasts charge $100 CPM or more and are worth it, but… I like setting numbers I can easily beat.

Any marginal short-term loss is made up for by repeat sponsors and larger, long-term purchase orders.  I also rig the game to tilt ROI for sponsors by including blog posts (~2.5M uniques/month), e-mail newsletter (500K-1,000,000+ with sharing), and social (2M+) in the podcast sponsorship versus charging separately a la carte. That might change, but it currently guarantees that 90%+ of my sponsorships clobber competitors, as the cumulative CPM is probably 50% below market.

(Related: If you spend at least $100K per year in marketing and are interested in test sponsoring the podcast, click here for more. Minimum test spend is, at least, $50K-$100K. Seriously inquiries only, please, and pricing is non-negotiable.)

Note to everyone asking “How do I get sponsors?”:  It’s critical to realize that I didn’t accept advertisers for the podcast until I had 100,000+ downloads per episode, as measured six weeks after publication.

Novice podcasters (which I was) and bloggers get too distracted in nascent stages with monetization. In the first 3-9 months, you should be honing your craft and putting out increasingly better work. Option A: you can waste 30-50% of your time to persuade a few small sponsors to commit early and stall at 30,000 downloads per episode because you’re neglecting creative. Option B: you can play the long game, wait 6-12 months until you have a critical mass, then you get to 300,000 downloads per ep and make 10x+ per ep with much larger brands. If you can afford it, don’t be in a rush. Haste makes waste; in this case, it can make the difference between $50,000 per year and $1,000,000+ per year. To reiterate a phrase more often used for blogging: “Good content is the best SEO.” Read The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing to be different, not just incrementally better.

But…all this advertising talk is important to consider in the context of higher-level strategies. In podcasting, it’s easy to get stuck in the CPM and what-preamp-do-I-need? weeds. Decide on your larger framework and philosophy first.

Example — In general and across the board, I split my content in a very binary fashion: free or ultra-premium.

“Free” means that 99% of what I do is free to the world (e.g. podcast, blog) or nearly free (books). I write on topics A) that I enjoy and want to learn more about, and B) that I think will attract intelligent, driven, and/or accomplished people. This is what allows “ultra-premium.”

“Ultra-premium” means:

• Once in a blue moon, I offer a high-priced and very limited product or opportunity, such as an event with 200 seats at $7,500-$10,000 per seat. I can sell out a scarce, ultra-premium opp within 48 hours with a single blog post.

• I use the network and contacts I’ve built through “free” to find excellent non-content opportunities. I already mentioned one example: my early-stage tech investing. This came from the first book, blog, and social. I found Shopify, for instance, via my fans on Twitter while updating The 4-Hour Workweek. I started advising Shopify when they had ~10 employees. Now they have 1,000+ and are a publicly traded company (SHOP).

An openness to indirect paths means I don’t obsess over selling my content, and I never have. If the podcast sponsorship stuff turns into a headache, I’ll just drop it. Not to beat a dead horse, but let’s restate the most important takeaway — my network, built through writing, is my net worth. That travels with me. If you’d like more practice thinking laterally, try the work of Edward de Bono as an introduction.

Back to the money…

Whenever possible, I avoid what I consider the “blood-bath zone” — products or services priced from $20-100. This is where your customers will be at least 1/3 high-maintenance and cost-sensitive. For my minimalist preferences and operation, that’s too much customer service headache for the ROI, unless it’s automated like my book club with Audible.

[Afterword: I asked my Managing Editor to proofread this post, and he gave me the below comment. I’ve decided to simply copy and paste it.]

*** Tim: I think you should dig in more on just how much money you actually pass up. Including:

1) You don’t do more than 2 sponsors per ep (you could).

2) You vet [and use] all products and turn down >80% of advertisers.

3) You turn down sponsors that want you to do ridiculous reads. I’ve seen it multiple times where advertisers are like, “We need this to be longer” and you tell them to fuck off. This is important. You value your listener waaaaaaay more than they ever realize, and do it to the tune of legitimately millions “lost.” It’s not lost, but is worth mentioning and understanding.

4) You want the ads–like the content–to add value. You’re hoping when you hear it for the first time that you think it’s cool, new, different, or interesting. Otherwise, you wouldn’t share. When you hear it the 4th time, are you tired of it? Maybe. But your fourth time might be someone else’s first. It’s like complaining about shared content on social media. Just because you’ve experienced something before, that doesn’t mean everyone has, and your job is to best serve the audience. You do pre/post roll [instead of mid-roll] to make avoiding this easy: if you don’t like it, they can simply fast forward.

QUESTION: What’s your long-term revenue strategy with the podcast?

There is no long-term revenue strategy. I focus solely on making it as fun as possible for me to do. But — perhaps this itself is a solid strategy, not a lack of one. Simple can be effective. At least 50% of the venture capitalists I’ve met over the years laughed at my simplistic “scratch my own itch” investing approach. Net-net, I’ve now beaten most of their IRR. (Don’t get me wrong; many investors perennially kick my ass.)

For me, the moral of the story is this: Revenue opportunities often present themselves if you focus on creating something you’d pay for yourself.  If you can easily sell it to 10 friends and do some basic market research on top of that, the odds improve.

Of course, “scratching your own itch” doesn’t always work, but I think of it as necessary but not sufficient. If you have enough at-bats, and if you know how to limit losses (knowing when to fold ’em and walk away, like my six-episode commitment), you’ll eventually hit the ball.

The recipe is straightforward — Study the craft like it’s your job (e.g. Find people like master interviewer Cal Fussman), make yourself smile, don’t rush, don’t whore yourself, test a lot of wacky ideas, and think laterally. If you want to increase your income 10x instead of 10%, the best opportunities are often seemingly out of left field (e.g. books → startups).

Just remember that, even in a golden age, podcasting is a squirrely opportunity and not a panacea on a silver platter. Even if you work smart, you still have to do the work and take your lumps.

Amelia Boone, the world’s top female obstacle racer, said on my podcast that she’d put the following on a billboard: “No one owes you anything.” I think that’s a good mantra for life.

Try your best, take notes, and do better the next time.

QUESTION: What gear do you use for the podcast?

The recording gear is better and cheaper every year. It’s extremely easy for me to travel with a small recording studio in my backpack. If you’re on a budget, even an iPhone will do, but–bang for the buck–the ATR-2100 is hard to beat.

My mantra for gear is borrowed from my podcast with Morgan Spurlock: “Once you get fancy, fancy gets broken.”  Keep it simple.

For post-production and editing, I used Garageband for the first 30-40 episodes, but I now outsource to people who use primarily Ableton and Hindenburg. The simplicity of the latter is very appealing to me, but as a pure editor, it doesn’t include sound effects, transitions, etc. as a Garageband does.

Pat Flynn, a seasoned podcaster who’s helped me a ton, made a great and free podcast-editing tutorial for you all. This covers nearly everything you need to know for basic post-production.

For free options, Audacity is also popular. My suggestion: use the simplest editing software you can, or pay someone to do it for you. If Garageband appears too amateur for your first 1-3 episodes, I’d bet money you quit before episode 5. Keep it simple.

I host episodes on Libsyn for reasons I can elaborate on in future posts.

Regarding consumption and promotion — I love Marco Arment’s Overcast, both as a listener (smart speed) and podcaster (can link to specific time stamps). My wish and ask for them: to embed a small player on my blog instead of having to link out.

QUESTION: Is it too late to start a podcast? Don’t you feel pressured by all the competition? it seems like thousands launch every week.

Competition makes you better.

Everyone should try podcasting for at least 3-6 episodes, even if just to get better at asking questions and eliminating verbal tics. Those gains transfer everywhere.

If someone ends up better than me (or ranking better than me), they deserve to beat me. I’ll be the first person to buy them a beer. Remember that podcasting isn’t a zero-sum game, and a rising tide raises all ships (Check out the “Serial effect”). There’s plenty of room for more good shows, and the pie is expanding. Bring your A game and the cream will rise to the top.

Of course, you don’t need to be perfect (and you won’t be), but you need to try your best.  As Michael Gerber, author of The E-Myth Revisited, told me over coffee before I wrote The 4-Hour Workweek: “If you’re going to write a book, write a fucking book.”

If you start out bad but are incrementally improving towards awesome, that’s totally fine. If you’re half-assing it and coasting, find something else you can whole-ass.

QUESTION: How much time do you put into the podcast? Aren’t you The 4-Hour Workweek guy?

The 4-Hour Workweek is, first and foremost, about 10x’ing your per-hour output. I have no problem with hard work, as long as it’s applied to the right things, and I never have.

This is partially why The 4-Hour Workweek and the podcast have attracted some of the world’s most successful hedge fund managers and start-up founders. They might work 80+ hours per week, but they value efficient and elegant solutions.

The objective is to control your time — a non-renewable resource — and apply it where you have the highest leverage or enjoyment. For me right now, the Archimedes lever is clearly the podcast. I get to interview the most fascinating people I can find, including Rick Rubin, Jamie Foxx, Maria Popova, General McChrystal, Tony Robbins, and dozens of others. I would pay a small fortune to do this. Instead, I somehow get paid. For the time invested, especially when batching (e.g. I try and record eps on Mondays and Fridays, two weeks a month), it has the most disproportionate hours-to-ROI imaginable.

I don’t want my readers to be idle. Mini-retirements are wonderful (here’s a month-long example), but I’m not going to spend my entire life on the sidelines. This is all covered in the “Filling the Void” chapter of 4HWW, but it bears repeating.

For those curious, here’s what one of my days looks like. No two are quite alike.

QUESTION: But–for God’s sake–I don’t have bestselling books or a big blog! You had an unfair advantage. What can I do?

Get started.

Remember Amelia Boone, the most successful female obstacle racer in history? No one owes you anything. So… gird your loins and fucking get amongst it. Prepare to bloody your knees and learn a lot.

Yes, I came into podcasting with a text-loving audience, but guess what?

#1) Like everyone else, at one point, I had zero readers and zero listeners. We all start out naked and afraid. Then your mom starts checking out your stuff, or perhaps a few friends give a mercy-listen, and the fragile snowball grows from there. Here are a few ugly first versions of popular blogs. Mine was incredibly unpopular and hideous.

#2) Coming to the party with a pre-existing audience isn’t enough. Celebrities, YouTube icons, and bestselling authors start podcasts every week that get abandoned three weeks later.

Fortunately, the most common pitfalls are easy to avoid.

Here are a few things I found helpful that might help you:

1) Upload at least 2-3 pre-recorded episodes when you launch your podcast (real-world example). This appears to help with iTunes ranking, which — like bestseller lists — can be self-propagating. The higher you rank, the more people see you, the higher you continue to rank, etc.

2) Keep the format simple. Most would-be blockbuster podcasters quit because they get overwhelmed with gear and editing. Much like Joe Rogan, I decided to record and publish entire conversations (minimizing post-production), not solely highlights. I also use a tremendously simple gear setup and favored Skype interviews for the first 20 or so interviews, as the process is easier to handle when you can look at questions and prep notes in Evernote or a notebook.

As Tony Robbins would say: complexity is the enemy of execution. You do NOT need concert hall-quality audio; most people will be listening in the subway or car anyway, and they’ll forgive you if recordings are rough around the edges. Audio engineers will never be fully satisfied with your audio, but 99.9% of listeners will be happy if you’re intelligible and loud enough.

3) Don’t pursue or even think about sponsors until you have a critical mass. I discussed this earlier. It’s a distraction. Play the long game.

4) Get transcripts and send highlights with pitch ideas to print/text journalists. I have done this with several outlets, and it’s resulted in some outstanding original pieces like this one from Business Insider, who came up with the story angle on their own. I suspect this type of coverage also helped the Jamie Foxx episode win “Podcast Episode of the Year” on Product Hunt.

5) If you use blog posts, utilize graphics to increase podcast downloads/listens for your target platform. This is a tip I got from podcasting veteran John Lee Dumas. Here is one example of mine, where the iTunes button is exceptionally clear.

6) Experiment constantly. I have tested conversations in a sauna (Rick Rubin), solo Q&As based on reddit submissions (e.g. Maria Popova, Round Two), drunk dialing fans via Skype, audiobook excerpts (e.g. Tim Kreider), and more. It’s easy to assume that labor-intensive, polished episodes get the most downloads. Luckily, sometimes the opposite is true—the easy, low-labor stuff kills. This experimentation also keeps things fun for me. Podcasting isn’t radio, and there aren’t any hard-and-fast rules. Go nuts and let the world tell you what works.

A Few Closing Thoughts

There is no reason to bore your listeners (or yourself) because you’re slavishly following someone else’s playbook.

This post explains a few things I’ve found useful, but they’re guidelines at best, not rules.

Borrow, be ridiculous on occasion, and be yourself. This is one medium where it can pay 100-fold to simply be you: warts, weirdness, and all.

How about throwing chimpanzee screeches in the middle of an episode? Fuck it, sure. Making weird Mogwai noises during the intros with no explanation whatsoever? If I’ve had enough wine, definitely.  Recording last-minute guest bios in an airplane bathroom? Done it.

If you make yourself laugh every once in a while, at least you will have fun.

And that is perhaps the best strategy of all.

###

Last but certainly not least, I want to thank a few smart people who generously spent many hours educating me on the details, tech, and craft of podcasting. In alphabetical order by first name (and if I forgot anyone, please let me know!):

Jason DeFillippo of Grumpy Old Geeks
John Lee Dumas of Entrepreneur on Fire
Jordan Harbinger of The Art of Charm
Lewis Howes of The School of Greatness
Matt Lieber and Alex Blumberg of Gimlet Media
Pat Flynn of Smart Passive Income
Rob Walch of Libsyn

If you’re curious to know my top-10 most popular podcast guests (as of April 2016), here they are.

If you enjoyed this and would like more on podcasting, please let me know in the comments, and I’ll write more. Specifically, what would you most like to know?

7 Ways To Improve Your Professionalism

By Bill Treasurer

At Giant Leap Consulting, we understand the need for professionalism - and in fact, we offer an entire workshop focused on that particular topic, which highlights the following 7 characteristics. These focal points are designed to help you and your company improve professionalism across the board.

#1 Character

It all starts with who we are, and how we conduct ourselves. Character is the defining attribute of professionalism.

A key aspect of professional character for anyone - leader, employee, or even client - is integrity. Like bridges, people with high integrity are those who aren't missing elements of good character. They are honest and ethical in all their dealings, not just at times when it is convenient or when they are being watched. When you have integrity, there's a high degree of congruence between the values you espouse and your actual behavior.

Remember: the best test of your integrity is how you behave when nobody is watching.

#2 Caring

Are you invested in your work? Go-getters, the best (and often most professional) employees, take an interest in strategy and direction. They seek out tough job assignments. They take responsibility for their own careers. They strive to learn new skills and capabilities to deliver higher levels of value. They want success for their teammates and themselves. In short, go-getters care - they give a rip!

#3 Clothing

Be conscious of your professional image. The way in which you physically show up (clothes, hair, tidiness, etc.) will certainly make an impression on the people you meet and those with which you work. A professional appearance is also a way to express consideration for others and a desire to keep them from feeling uncomfortable.

#4 Customer Service

A keymark of a professional is how they treat their customers. Exceeding the expectations of customers should be a part of every company's mission statement. Great customer service is based on building relationships. Some tips for relationship building include:

*Make friends with clients. There's an old saying, "Get a customer, make some money. Make a friend, make a fortune."
*When entertaining, know what you can and can't do from an ethics standpoint.
*Learn and acknowledge birthdays. Send people birthday cards.
*Send handwritten thank you notes. Mailed, not emailed.

#5 Communication

What you say and how you say it will go a long way to communicate whether or not you are a true professional.

Before meeting with a client for the first time, set yourself up for good and friendly communication. Do upfront research on that person - Google them, use LinkedIn, get to know as much as possible about them. Make a good first impression by looking people directly in the eye, shaking their hand (firmly), and saying their name enough to memorize it. Don't jump into the business conversation. Find out what they like to do, their passions or interests, and start with that.

#6 Composure

Composure means handling stress maturely. It involves being level-headed when dealing with pressure. When in conflict, remember that there are always three sides: my side, the other person's side, and some place in the middle that has pieces of each side. Usually the middle is the truth.

The ability to courageously maintain composure amidst conflict is a key marker of professionalism.

#7 Commitment

Professionalism requires commitment. It requires maintaining professionalism when it's temping or easier not to. With clients, show your commitment by following up soon after meetings to recap the outcomes and commit to your action items. It shows you're conscientious and engaged.

As an employee or leader, YOU must commit to stepping it up!

Commit yourself to the 7 C's and you will see a difference in how you are perceived and, more importantly, how you feel about your own professionalism.

©2016. Bill Treasurer. All rights reserved.

Bill Treasurer is a professional speaker and the Chief Encouragement Officer of Giant Leap Consulting. His most recent book, Leaders Open Doors, became the top-selling leadership book on Amazon. Bill is also the author of Courage Goes to Work and Courageous Leadership.  Bill has worked with thousands of executives from top organizations, including NASA, Accenture, CNN, Spanx, Hugo Boss, the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs.   Interested in learning more about Giant Leap's professionalism workshop - or other courses? Contact them at http://www.giantleapconsulting.com. 

 

With instant access to information across digital channels, consumers have more choices than ever. They are constantly interacting with brands, and if marketers can’t keep up, they are missing opportunities. Marketers are increasingly investing in real-time solutions to engage with multi-channel consumers in the moment. According to research by Wayin, 98% of marketers plan to increase their real-time marketing budgets in the next year and 59% report a positive return on their real-time marketing investments.

Perceived Benefits of Real-Time Marketing

According to research by Econsultancy, marketers and agencies perceive the top three benefits of real-time marketing to be better customer experiences, improved conversion rates, and improved customer retention.

(Source – Econsultancy)

Challenges of Real-Time Marketing According to North American Marketing Executives

Marketers understand the need to invest in real-time marketing solutions, but also acknowledge the challenges it involves. The top three reported are:

1. Personalizing messages based on consumer behavior
2. Marketing effectiveness of response rates
3. Improving customer retention

(Source – Adobe July, 2014 The Financial Brand)

The Shift from Real Time to RIGHT Time Marketing

Recently, real-time marketing has gotten quite a bit of attention, but the concept of “marketing in the moment” is evolving into the idea of marketing at the RIGHT moment. Not every situation calls for an instant marketing message or offer. Remember, we are in the age where consumers are in control. They demand communications at a time when it is most suitable to their needs, through the channels they prefer.

To meet this demand for “right time, right channel messaging,” marketers must continually collect data such as: where consumers have been, what they are doing, who they are, and which channels they use. By collecting and analyzing 1^st party data, behavioral data, 3^rd party demographics, firmographics, and specialty data, marketers can create highly informed offers, delivered through the most relevant channels and at the time when consumers are most likely to convert. Often a real-time response is indeed the best response, but by utilizing data insights and analytics to better inform these decisions, the best marketing outcome can be achieved. In essence, this is ‘Right Time Marketing.’

DataMentors defines Right Time Marketing through the idea of the 4 R’s: The Right Person, The Right Channel, The Right Moment, and the Right Answer.

Target the Right Person

To maximize ROI, marketers must pinpoint and target consumers who are most apt to convert. The right message sent through the right channel to an undefined audience will only waste acquisition dollars. Many brands continue to rely solely on first-party data and superficially modeled prospect lists when deploying acquisition campaigns. Right Time Marketing takes this a step further to combine first-party data with rich third-party enhancement, behavioral data, and in-market purchase signals for finely tuned audience identification.

Marketers are realizing that data is the fuel of competitive advantage. In addition to internal data sets, marketers are placing more value on third party data sources to better understand their customers and prospects. According to a research study by Econsultancy, the top data sources according to the research include:

1. Transaction history – 87%
2. Customer information from a CRM – 80%
3. Behavioral data from websites and campaigns – 74%
4. Data about customers from trusted partners – 60%
5. Behavioral data from third party sources – 52%
6. Customer data from third party sources – 51%
7. Demographic customer data from third party sources – 49%

Target at the Right Moment and through the Right Channel

The number one goal for marketers is to reach the right consumers through the right channels and at the moments they are most likely to be influenced. Consumers today shop across an array of digital channels, often moving from device to device. Even when they arrive at the store to make a purchase, many shoppers use their smartphone to price check and comparison check across other sites. This represents a huge window of opportunity for marketers to sway the decision up until the very moment of purchase.

(Source: Google/Ipsos, “Consumers in the Micro-Moment“ Study 2015)

(Source: Google/Ipsos, “Omni-Channel Retailing” Study 2014)

With advancements in technology and analytics and the influx of new sources of digital and mobile data, marketing data solution providers have developed innovative processes to match a consumer’s offline and online identities. This linkage enables marketers to track both offline and online consumer behaviors indicating purchase intent as well as deploy targeted messages for multi-channel engagement.

Example: Identify and Target In-Market Auto Shoppers across Channels

In this example, a car dealer can track both mobile and social car shopping activity. These insights can be linked back to a Household’s mobile device or social accounts. These data insights alone would bring a huge competitive advantage to dealers, but when enriched with third party specialty auto data, such as VINS, demographics, and contact data, the best offer can be presented, through the right channel, and at the time when consumers are actively in market.

The Right Answer

Data and the way it is utilized is clearly the backbone to driving right time engagement and acquisition. VB Insight surveyed over 3,000 marketers and looked at tools used on over 3 million websites and found that when (the right) data informs marketing strategies, the average return on investment (ROI) is an impressive 224%. Even small improvements have the potential to drive higher ROI. According to the research, if your business has a 4-phase customer acquisition funnel, and you improve each phase of the customer acquisition funnel by as little as 5%, the overall improvement is 22% at the bottom of the funnel.

These findings are further backed by a report released by Forbes Insights and Turn, “Data Driven and Digitally Savvy: The Rise of the New Marketing Organization.” According to the report, organizations that are “leaders” in data-driven marketing are three times more likely than “laggards” to say they have achieved competitive advantage in customer engagement/loyalty (74% vs. 24%) and almost three times more likely to have increased revenues (55% vs. 20%).

By integrating the right data across multiple channels to understand a consumer’s behaviors in the moment, companies can find smarter ways to meet increasing customer expectations.

To learn how to target the right person, through the right channel, at the right time, download this free Right Time Marketing Data Solutions Guide.

We all know the caricature of the greasy, wheeling-and-dealing used cars salesman. We all know how uncomfortable it can be to find ourselves stuck in a high-pressure sales scenario. And as a general rule, I think most of us would prefer to get through our days talking to as few sales representatives as possible.

Our aversion to sales reps is pretty simple: Frankly, we’re afraid of getting sold on something. But while everyday consumers can get through their day simply refusing to talk to sales professionals, entrepreneurs really can’t. You’re going to have media representatives, vendors, and suppliers who want to sell you on their services. And while you certainly need to vet them, not wasting time with people whose products clearly have no relevance to your business, you can’t ignore all of them. Sooner or later, you’re going to need to sit down and actually listen to a sales pitch—not just humoring the sales rep, but really engaging them.

So what can be done to make the process a little bit less off-putting—a little bit less daunting? One tip I’d offer is to benchmark the product you’re being offered versus similar products—a good way to gauge what kind of value you’re really being offered. In doing so, make sure to draw apples to apples comparisons. If you’re buying ad space in a magazine, for instance, note that readership numbers are nebulous and easy to fudge; distribution numbers are a better barometer of true reach.

Another recommendation: Be honest with the sales representative. Be honest about where you are with your business; maybe you’ve already spent a big chunk of your budget for the coming season, for instance. You might as well be up front about it. There’s no use in wasting your time—or the sales rep’s—on something that’s just not going to be tenable.

Also, be honest about what you think of the sales pitch. Remember that the representative’s job is to listen to your objections and try to find solutions for them. You’re not being mean or rude by noting the objections you have to the sales pitch; actually, you’re being respectful of the agent’s time.

A final tip for dealing with sales reps: Set expectations. Following a pitch, lay out the follow-up information or documents you expect to see before you make a final decision. Give the rep an opportunity to do his or her job and to try to meet you halfway.

More than anything, I recommend that entrepreneurs lose their mindset of avoiding sales representatives; instead, try adopting a mindset of being open and honest—and in the process, getting something of potentially good value.

As more and more people understand the value of contents for the growth of their online businesses, the web as seen an all-time high volume of contents published daily. Considering the massive pool of contents been published daily on the internet, if you truly want to stand out among the sea of content marketers existing […]

The post Increase Your Blog Traffic With These 17 Online Marketing Tools appeared first on Blogging Tips.

Hiring sales representatives isn’t easy.

In fact, according to ManPower’s 10th Annual Talent Shortage Survey, the fourth-hardest job to hire for in 2015 was sales representative.

Many organizations searching for sales talent rely on personality-focused pre-hire assessments like DiSC, Meyers-Briggs, the Predictive Index and other similar assessments without questioning their true value. While the results of such tests are certainly telling of a candidate’s potential culture fit within an organization, personality tests alone cannot predict some of the most important things about a new hire – like how much revenue a potential sales candidate will bring in, or what his or her actual performance, conversion rates, and customer satisfaction will look like.

Sales candidates who achieve the greatest amount of success in the shortest amount of time are those who not only fit the personality profile for the role, but also possess the right combination of KSA’s (knowledge, skills, and abilities) for the job in the form of ten critical sales skills, discussed below.

To find the best fit, it’s important for organizations to use hiring assessment tools that are customized, focused on KSA’s, and require applicants to demonstrate proficiency in specific, sales-related competencies and duties.

Tailor Your Pre-Hire Assessments to Fit Your Sales Skills List

By tailoring the assessments you use to hire sales representatives, you can increase their predictive validity, and, consequently, increase your odds of making the right hire.

When it comes to talent acquisition software like hiring assessments, predictive validity indicates how well an assessment forecasts a candidate’s future success on the job. For an assessment to provide truly accurate evidence of predictive validity, it needs to be tailored to the specific role of the specific organization.

You can help your organization be more successful in increasing the predictive validity of an assessment by updating the job profile to reflect the sales abilities, skills, and behaviors necessary for success.

FurstPerson’s proven sales skills list identifies ten competencies that are the most predictive of a candidate’s acumen and potential for success. Those are:

1. Composure
2. Oral communication
3. Sales aptitude
4. Compliance
5. Integrity
6. Dependability
7. Decision-making
8. Listening
9. Tact
10. Self-confidence

Although most great salespeople naturally possess similar traits, out-of-the-box assessments that have not been tailored to your organization’s specific culture or the specific role in question will have far less predictive validity than those that are customized. After all, a salesperson for Xerox must demonstrate proficiency in different areas of knowledge and schools of thought than a salesperson for Google. Using generic assessments marginalizes the nuances that may be required for one type of sales role but not another.

Focus on Testing Sales Skills, Knowledge, and Abilities

Most good sales candidates have a knack for reading their interviewers well, and telling them what they know they want to hear. However, data-driven predictive software tools ensure that underqualified representatives won’t be able to bluff their way through interviews or complex sales scenarios and role-playing.

FurstPerson research demonstrates that conducting a sales job simulation in the form of a customer call can help identify hires who, once on the job, increase sales conversion rates by as much as 25%, overall sales performance by 27%, and revenue per call by 30%.

Behavioral assessments – those that include structured-behavior interview guys and role-plays or simulations – are the most efficient way for hiring managers to get an accurate picture of a sales candidate’s skills and abilities. Unlike a simple personality test, a job simulation tailored to a specific position has the ability to measure a wider spectrum of candidate KSA’s, including:

• Multi-tasking ability
• Data entry accuracy
• Computer ability
• Sales orientation
• Service orientation

With the help of hiring assessment tools and role-playing, hiring managers can get true grasp of a sales candidate’s skills and abilities by having the candidate demonstrate them, as opposed to just talking about them.

Learn how assessments can help you improve your quality of hire by downloading our white paper below, or speak with one of our talent selection specialists for more information.

As much as you might want your business’s blog or social media account to post amazing, completely original content multiple times per week, sometimes that can be unrealistic. One option is to curate carefully selected content from third parties that will interest your audience. The main concern is to make sure that the content you choose to post holds value for your readers – and don’t forget to credit the original source. A great way to generate traffic and engage your audience is to create “roundup” posts. Roundup posts collect a number of different links to content and pull them all together into one blog post. Often, the links will fall under the same theme, like “Paleo recipes” or “design trends”. Siege Media has created an infographic that outlines the finer points of curating roundup posts. Let’s take a look.

1. Use a plural keyword. Make it easier for your audience to find you. Search driven posts tend to generate six times more traffic.
2. Create a short URL that uses the keyword. Don’t use a url that is made up of random letters and number. Short URLs are 2.5 times more likely to be clicked, and including your keyword is a top 5 on-page ranking factor.
3. Use odd-numbered headlines. Using numbers in your headlines can grab you over 35% more clicks, and odd numbers generate 20% more than even.
4. Aim for higher numbers. Posts that promise 35 items will do better than posts promising 16. Try to include as many items as you can, without diluting your content.
5. Use a pinnable top-image. Pinterest’s pin technology is a great way to have your content shared widely. Pins with text overlay can receive 300% more engagement.
6. Use floating share buttons. These buttons make your content quick and easy to share, and can increase social traffic by nearly 30%.
7. Source professional photos. Looks really are important. An attractive, professional photo will grab attention, and can lead to 121% more shares.
8. Be consistent. Disappointing content can cost you – consumers are 23% less likely to engage with a brand that has offered sub-par content.
9. Keep descriptive text concise. Readability is the goal here – keep it short and sweet when it comes to your descriptive text.
10. Make it skimmable. You want your content to be concise and objective – this can improve readability by 124%.
11. Source content with high link and share numbers. Using content from high-traffic sites can give you a built-in distribution network.
12. Reach out to people mentioned in the content. If people or companies are mentioned in your content, send them a brief heads-up and ask if they would consider sharing it on their own networks. This can triple the traffic that your post receives.
13. Reach out to previous sharers. If another website or blogger previously shared one of the links in your post, let them know that you’ve gathered similar resources and see if they would be interested in sharing. Gaining more links will only help your content when it comes to Google rankings.

Do you have any other helpful tips for putting together an effective round-up post? What is your approach to curated content? Let me know in the comments!

Accepting that your site has a high bounce rate is a little like accepting that maybe, just maybe, your child isn’t the best-looking kid in the schoolyard. Sure, you think your precious little angel is just adorable (and just so we’re clear, we’re talking about your website now), yet when you head into Google Analytics to check the numbers, your bounce rate tells a different story.

It’s hard to come to terms with. After all, you love your website, so why doesn’t everybody else?

What Is a Good Bounce Rate?

Of course, just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so too is what constitutes a “good” bounce rate. Some sites might view a bounce rate of 80% as awesome, whereas other sites might see this as nothing short of catastrophic. It really depends on your site and business goals.

Regardless, many site managers and webmasters pay close attention to bounce rate as an overall indication of a site’s “stickiness” or appeal, and would like to reduce this troublesome number as much as they can. Some people even think that bounce rate can influence your search rankings, via Google’s new machine-learning algorithm RankBrain. So it’s obviously in your interest to optimize this metric.

In today’s post, we’ll look at 11 ways you can do just that.

However, before we dive in, we need to talk about the flaws inherent in bounce rate as a performance metric and what this means for you as a marketer.

A Brief Note About the Problems with Bounce Rate

Alongside Bounce Rate, you’ve probably noticed the Time on Page metric in Google Analytics. This, as its name implies, is an estimate of how long on average users spend on a given page. The reason Time on Page is an approximated metric, rather than a clearly defined measurement, is because Google Analytics (and other analytics platforms) require two clicks to accurately calculate Time on Page; an “entrance” click – typically the link click that brings a user to a page in the first place – and an “exit” click, usually a click on a navigational element that takes them away from a page.

Unfortunately, this crucial exit click is often missing from the equation. Ever spent a few minutes reading a page before closing the tab (or the browser)? If so, Google Analytics couldn’t accurately measure the Time on Page because it missed that vital exit click during that particular session. In this example, it doesn’t matter if a user clicked onto a page, read every single last word of an 8,000-word blog post, and left entirely satisfied – if they closed the tab without exit clicking, that session is logged as a bounce. The same goes for sessions in which a user opens a link in another tab and leaves the original tab open before eventually closing their browser.

This is why bounce rate, as a metric, kind of sucks.

Rigby knows what’s up.

As a result of this inherent flaw, many marketers are moving away from their reliance on bounce rate as a metric and are instead focusing on so-called “attention metrics” such as dwell time and scroll depth. It’s simply too difficult to accurately measure bounce rate (and Time on Page), but it’s still worth trying to keep your bounce rates low.

Still, if your bounce rate is insanely high, or suddenly spikes due to changes you’ve made on your site, you’ve got a major problem to deal with.

With that caveat out of the way, let’s look at how you can make your pages stickier and reduce that pesky bounce rate.

1. Optimize Page Load Time

Many marketers assume that if their bounce rate is high, the issue must lie with a page’s content – when, in fact, serious problems can arise before a user even has the chance to read a page at all.

Of all the problems a web page can have, taking forever to load is arguably the worst. After all, it doesn’t matter how good or bad a page’s content is if a user can’t read it (or even see it), and 47% of users expect a web page to load in two seconds or less, making on-page optimization crucial to reducing your bounce rate.

This is especially true for mobile sites. According to data from Radware, a connection speed delay of just 500 milliseconds can result in an increase in “peak frustration” of more than 26% and a decrease in engagement of 8%.

Further, slow-loading pages are among the leading causes of shopping cart abandonment for ecommerce retailers. Amazingly, only 2% of the world’s leading 100 ecommerce websites have mobile sites that load fully in less than five seconds on mobile devices – and one-fifth take almost eight seconds to load completely, an almost criminally long time for sites that live and die by conversion rate optimization.

Image via Search Engine Journal

Before you even think of looking at the content of your pages, make sure your visitors can actually view them in a reasonable amount of time.

2. Make Your Content More Accessible with Smart Formatting

Ever clicked through to a blog post or webpage, only to discover an immense, intimidating wall of text? If so, you already know how discouraging this can be to readers. Even if your content is incredibly valuable and completely unique, it won’t matter if your readers are scared off by the prospect of wading into a blog post of equal density as War and Peace or ‎Les Misérables.

A little light reading.

Formatting your pages to be as welcoming and accessible as possible is one of the best ways to reduce your bounce rate. The less “work” a visitor has to do to get what they want, the more likely they are to stick around. Don’t overwhelm your visitors with weighty paragraphs that span entire pages, and make use of white space to make your content more approachable.

Here are some ways to make content less visually intimidating:

• Appropriate use of headers
• Frequent subheadings
• Suitable images
• Bulleted lists (see what I did there?)

Use of these formatting options makes your content more accessible and allows the reader to scan or skim your content quickly to identify points that are most relevant to their needs.

That said, don’t insult your readers’ intelligence, either. Trust your audience to know what they need, then give it to them. I’ve seen blogs that, while offering useful information, insist on using a line break or including an image between every single sentence, which can be just as annoying as huge walls of text.

3. Use Sidebar Widgets and Promotions Sparingly

Some web pages are an ideal vehicle for offering relevant content, offers, and other material to your audience. Blog pages are a prime example, and you’d probably struggle to find a decent blog without something in the sidebar. However, cramming the digital margins of your content with ads, offers, award emblems, and other crap is a surefire way to overwhelm your visitor and tempt them to bounce.

If you want to highlight relevant content from your sidebar, do so in a way that offers the reader additional value. For example, related article recommendations that expand upon the topic covered in a blog post is a great way to make your site “stickier” as well as provide genuinely valuable and useful content to your readers. Similarly, if you choose to include awards and trust signals in your sidebar, make sure they’re from only the most reputable and renowned sources so that they serve an actual purpose.

Also, be wary of the type of pop-ups offered by services such as Bounce Exchange. These promotions can be highly effective, but they can also be terribly distracting, especially if you set them to appear the moment a user visits a page. Give your visitors enough time to immerse themselves in your content before pouncing on them with newsletter sign-up offers or other promotions. Don’t push too hard, too fast.

4. Cross-Reference Bounce Rate with Time on Site

As the old saying goes, “No metric is an island” (or something), and taking bounce rate data out of context can be as dangerous as relying on it exclusively as an indicator of your site’s performance.

It’s important to look at your bounce rate within the wider context of your site in general. Doing so allows you to ascertain more accurately whether the problem is with a specific page, a type of page (such as your site’s blog or product pages), or your site as a whole. If your Time on Site metrics are decent, but your blog pages have a high bounce rate, the problem may be with your content. On the other hand, if your bounce rate is high and Time on Site is low, you may not be giving visitors what they want in a more general sense.

Read more on Analytics’ Time on Site metric in this excellent
post by Google’s Justin Cutroni

As with any metric, be sure to investigate usage trends with wider site data to make sure you’re not dealing with an anomalous outlier of a page when making decisions that will affect your whole site, or that you’re not missing a larger problem by focusing too narrowly on the details.

5. Ruthlessly Optimize for Relevance

Aside from technical considerations like page load times or failing to adhere to formatting best practices, one of the biggest contributing factors to high bounce rates is relevance – or irrelevance.

Some sites target certain keywords very effectively, only to serve content that is tangentially relevant to that query at best, or downright irrelevant to it at worst. If the page you’re serving isn’t directly relevant to a user’s query, you can almost guarantee that they’re going to bounce. For this reason, it’s vital that you optimize for relevance above all other considerations.

If you decide to go after a keyword and end up ranking for it, make sure the content of the page you serve is highly relevant to that query. Consider user intent when targeting keywords. Is the prospect looking to learn something, or buy something? What stage of the funnel are they in? What problem are they trying to solve? These are all questions that can help you provide the most useful, relevant content to your audience, and the more relevant your content is to users’ queries, the more likely they are to stick around once they’ve arrived on your site.

6. Include a Single, Clear Call to Action

Just as you should consider what the user wants when serving content (as you should be when optimizing for relevance in tip #5), you should also think about what specific action you want users to take when they’ve consumed whatever content you’re offering. Once you know what you want them to do, you can prompt your visitors to take action by including ONE crystal-clear call to action.

Uh, yeah. No thanks.

The more CTAs you include on a single page, the more likely you are to confuse and overwhelm your visitors. Sure, it’d be great if we could include several CTAs on a single page and trust visitors to diligently investigate and evaluate each before taking an action, but let’s face it – this doesn’t happen very often. Your site should make it effortless for visitors to find – and do – what they want to, quickly and easily.

Don’t overwhelm your visitors with dozens of CTAs. Think about user intent and how your pages can help visitors accomplish their goal, then include a clear, relevant call to action that helps them get the job done.

7. Use a Logical – and USEFUL – Internal Linking Structure

Many people advocate for including dozens of internal links in your content as a way to reduce your bounce rate. Although this strategy can work well, as it provides Analytics with that essential second click to accurately measure Time on Page, it can also backfire by making your content seem, well, a little sleazy or cheap. We’ve all seen sites that link internally in every other sentence, and not only does this look awful, it doesn’t do much to enrich the user experience or offer audiences something of genuine value.

Don’t do this.

This principle comes back to relevance. If you have a useful, highly actionable blog post that outlines a specific topic in great depth and would be of interest (and value) to your audience, by all means link to it from other pages. However, don’t go overboard with the internal links. This can confuse and overwhelm your visitors (see above), and can also dissuade visitors from clicking any of the internal links in the first place.

When choosing internal links and anchor text, focus on relevance and a logical linking strategy. If you take a look at our guides on Quality Score, for example, you’ll see that we link to other pages focusing on topics such as bidding in AdWords and click-through rate, because these topics are highly relevant to the topic of Quality Score. It would make much less sense for us to link to articles focused on, say, clickbait or SEO simply because they aren’t relevant to Quality Score.

Resist the temptation to internally link to every article in your archive, and focus on linking to useful articles or pages that are highly relevant and potentially useful to your visitors.

8. Rework Your Product Pages

Getting product pages can be tricky. Offer too much information and you risk overwhelming your visitors. Offer too little and your prospects may not feel as though they have enough information to make an informed decision. However, if you spend even a little time looking at product pages, you’ll probably notice several opportunities for optimization that could not only decrease bounce rates but improve conversion rates.

Too much? Too little?

One of the major reasons people fail to convert from product pages is because they aren’t ready to complete a purchase or transaction. Sometimes this is as simple as buyer hesitation or an aversion to price, but sometimes, it’s because the information they want about a product isn’t provided. This could include details on where something was manufactured, the specifics of your return policy, or user reviews.

It’s worth remembering that bounce rates from product pages can be a little higher than some other types of pages and that this can vary further depending on the nature of the product or service in question. However, if you’re noticing unusually high bounce rates on your product pages, consider testing whether adding more information helps. Is your return policy clearly stated on your product pages to offset prospects’ risk aversion? Is it clear how and where the product was made? What do your satisfied customers think of your products, and are these rave reviews featured prominently? As always, be sure to A/B test these variables before committing to any firm decisions.

9. Make Your Site Easy to Search

Even in 2016, site search functionality is one aspect of the Web that seems to have remained largely unchanged since the migraine-inducing days of Geocities sites. For whatever reason, site search is considered an afterthought by many websites, representing a huge missed opportunity to provide your visitors with the tools they need to find what they want and reduce your bounce rates.

Heady days indeed.

Even the most accurate, relevant content recommendations still put the ball firmly in your court in terms of control. Site search, on the other hand, allows visitors to find what they want, not what you think they want. If you’ve ever tried to search a site only to be presented with a “Page Not Found” or “No Results” page for a search query that should have offered dozens of results, you know how needlessly frustrating this can be.

Sure, your site’s search functionality will probably never be as good as Google, but that doesn’t mean you should overlook or ignore it, either. The more easily users can search for and find what they’re looking for, the more likely they are to stick around.

10. Optimize for Mobile

It’s a little sad that we have to reiterate how important this is, but the number of websites that still aren’t optimized for mobile is breathtaking. With the number of users accessing the Web primarily from mobile devices increasing every year, failing to optimize your site for mobile is practically begging for users to bounce and take their business elsewhere.

Responsive design – all the cool kids are doing it.

Unfortunately, launching a mobile-friendly site is a huge pain in the ass, especially for larger websites. It’s just that simple. It can be a painstaking process, and may be beyond your own technical capabilities, which means it can also be another (considerable) expense for your site or business. However, it’s hard to understate just how crucial mobile optimization is for every type of site, and you should strongly consider making your site mobile friendly, regardless of the time, effort, and expense involved, or the ulcers or sleepless nights you incur in the process.

It’s also vitally important to remember tip #1 when optimizing your site for mobile. It doesn’t matter how pretty your site looks on an iPhone if it takes more than a minute to load.

11. Make Your Site’s Navigation Effortless

In the simplest (though perhaps harshest) terms, you can think of your site visitors as lazy, entitled, spoiled little snowflakes that want everything spoon-fed to them with minimal effort. This might not be the most pleasant way to imagine your audience, but let’s be honest – if you force your users to do even the slightest bit of work to get what they want, they’ll simply go to another site. For this reason, it’s crucial that your site navigation be as effortless as it possibly can be.

Picture a typical browsing session on your site from the perspective of a user. They arrive at your site, and after evaluating your content for a second or two – and oftentimes that’s literally all the time you have – they decide that although this page isn’t precisely what they’re looking for, your site could potentially give them what they want. They then attempt to locate the page they are looking for, only to find that your navigation is hidden behind illogical animated drop-down menus or image links that don’t look like image links or some similarly atrocious navigational horrors.

What do you think they’ll do next? That’s right – they’ll bounce faster than one of those neon-pink rubber power balls you used to get out of gumball machines.

Your site navigation should be clear, immediately understood, and offer the user a seamless experience in getting from one part of your site to another. Visitors shouldn’t have to guess where they are on your site to know how to get around, and they shouldn’t be forced into artificial pathways that you’ve put in place to shepherd them through your sales funnel. Remember – they’re in control, not you.

Examine your current site navigation and identify opportunities to simplify it. Then simplify it some more. In fact, I challenge you to simplify your site navigation to the point at which it seems almost counterintuitive because that’s what your visitors want. They don’t care about you, they don’t care about your company – they only care about themselves and what they want, like the lazy, entitled little snowflakes they are.

You’re a master content creator. Blood, sweat and tears have gone into your latest creation, and you’re positive the leads will be rolling in. You sit back in your chair, prop your feet up on your desk and wait. And wait. And wait.

Where are those leads?

Sometimes, no matter how much work you put into a piece, the leads don’t come in as quickly as you’d like. That’s not to say your work wasn’t great (it probably was, you’re a master at your craft, after all), it might just need a little boost in the form of paid media.

But be careful. Just because you’re paying to promote a piece doesn’t mean you can throw caution to the wind and abandon all the inbound techniques you know and love. Consider these tips for creating engaging paid campaigns.

Choose your social channels wisely

Algorithm changes to Facebook’s timeline (and soon, Twitter) have some marketers breaking out in a cold sweat. Instead of reaching people for free with witty, creative posts, now we have to scrape together the budget to promote our content on these social networks.

Before you dive in and start looking between the couch cushions for money for your paid social budget, take a cue from the audience you want to reach. Instead of throwing money at every social channel, consider this: On what social networks does your audience spend their time? You could discover this information through the Buyer Insight Process, or you could look at your data and see where your content gets the most traffic organically.

Take this example from one of Kuno’s clients:

When creating campaigns for a not-for-profit organization that provides services for older adults, we found, through our use of data from HubSpot, that the majority of our content was viewed and shared on Facebook, which helped us refine our social targeting. Without this data in hand, we would have missed this valuable opportunity by assuming our audience wasn’t active on this channel.

“Assuming you know which social networks your prospects prefer is a reliable way to misallocate your advertising budget. As part of a social media marketing plan, you need to spend time researching which networks your potential buyers frequent for community interaction and information. This step will save you money and improve performance later,” said marketing expert Joe Chernov.

Consider the kind of content you want to promote

Remember that data you gleaned from the Buyer Insight Process or from your marketing software to see what social channels your audience prefers? Get more mileage out of that data by using it to help determine what types of content resonate most with your audience.

Whether you’re targeting your audience with whitepapers, checklists, infographics or videos, it’s important to keep in mind the value of what you’re producing.

Is this content valuable enough that someone would give their email address to access it? If not, head back to the drawing board and consider ways to improve the value of what you’re offering. Could you add a few more statistics or a sidebar with additional information or instructions? Could you produce a short companion video to go along with the piece? Is there an additional area not covered you could shed some light on?

For our not-for-profit client, we knew from our Buyer Insight research and data that our audience was active on Facebook and that a perpetual issue for older adults is avoiding entering a nursing home as they age. Our research also revealed there was little information available on how to avoid a nursing home.

We created an e-book filled with actionable ways an older adult and his or her family or friends can avoid a nursing home. We promoted it on Facebook to the specific geographic area our client served.

The piece generated impressive stats over a six-month period—especially considering the niche market and the limited audience we were targeting.

Resist the urge to be overly promotional

Creating an engaging campaign on social sites follows the same rules you’d use to create the piece you’re going to promote: It needs to be relevant, educational and, most importantly, not overly promotional.

We can hear you now: “But these are ads, aren’t they supposed to be promotional?”

Not necessarily. If your audience is on sites like Facebook or Twitter, they’re likely engaging in conversations and might be put off when they see something overly promotional pop up in their newsfeeds. Remember, if you’re doing sponsored content, it is designed to look like it belongs in a newsfeed. And as you would when promoting content organically, make sure your ad copy explains why or how your content can help someone.

Here’s an example from Microsoft. The software giant aired three commercials during primetime TV and promoted them with two pieces of creative on social media—one piece of creative was designed to tug at emotions, while the other was purely promotional. With the help of ratings and analytics company Nielsen, Microsoft analyzed which ads performed better.

“Overall, the emotional ads drove significantly more Microsoft discussion from exposed TV authors compared to the rational ads,” explained Nielsen.

Bonus tip: Beware the lure of holidays

Whether it’s Christmas or a national day of remembrance, you’re likely to see a brand or two (or more) participating in hashtags or sponsored updates around it. Avoid the urge to jump on the hashtag bandwagon. Unless your product or service has to do with said holiday or event, it’s better to stay quiet, as shown by this Tweet:

Savage is far from alone in his dislike of brands chiming in on holidays, as Adweek points out. This seemingly regular occurrence has spawned “brand critics”—social media users who wait for, and pounce on, a brand for taking advantage of a holiday or event on social media.

The Bottom Line

Promoting content on social channels can be tricky: You’ve got to find the right channel, the right audience and make sure what you’re promoting (and the promotional post itself) is the right mix of shareable, enjoyable and educational. Without these elements, your brand will likely find itself at best ignored by consumers and at worst on the receiving end of harsh words from brand critics.

But making use of your buyer insights and data can help your brand get the most bang for its paid social media buck while delighting prospective customers.

People make hundreds of decisions every day and many of them are about buying. Be it a new car or just ingredients for dinner, customers prefer one thing and put everything else away. Psychologists claim that consumer making a subconscious choice takes about 10 seconds. That’s why sellers put such an effort into product packing, bright signs, and other eye-catching marketing. E-commerce merchants should do the same, so it’s time to figure out how to make a killing product page.

The first thing you need is a jarring product description. Of course, it has to be unique; it’s well-known that Google and other search engines chastise sites and pages with duplicating content. The product description should also be useful; describe benefits and features to show the real value. Plane marketing calls about best of the best items that you should fall in love with as soon as you have it – this stuff doesn’t work.

Remember to weave SEO keywords into the text. Keys will boost your ranks as well as help to create an efficient internal site search tool. Customers look for a product using certain words and they need to get relevant items in search results. Try not to go over the edge with SEO though; the text should sound natural without any awkwardness. Remember, that you sell to people, not to search robots. When you are done with the description, read it three times. If you still like it – go ahead and post.

One last thing about description: highlight the most important features. Some shoppers just scan the text diagonally without the actual reading, so you need a way to draw their attention.

Just a look through this product description on firebox makes me want a cup of this tea!

Pictures make the difference! When shopping through the Internet, people save time and avoid crowd but they also loose the chance to actually picking something up and examining it by touch. Store owners should make up for it by providing large product images. Show the item at different angles, enable zoom or go an extra mile and make videos. Give customers a sense of the product through visual info. Also, make sure that each photo can be viewed without leaving the product page; shopping shouldn’t be interrupted by unneeded page loads.

With such a variety of pictures and zoom options, it’s impossible to miss a spot of these Zappos shoes.

Clear call-to-action button is the next step on the path of creating a successful product page. Remember that at this stage of a potential purchase, confusion is your enemy. You’ve caught attention by an appealing description and decent product images and the customer is ready to pay money to get such a cool product but doesn’t understand how to pay. This is not what you want to happen! Make sure that your call-to-action button is large enough and instantly visible on the page. It may say ‘Add to cart’ ‘Buy now’ or something else as long as the message clearly means purchase. Don’t be afraid to experiment with the text; the right message can dramatically increase sales!

Asos ‘Add to bag’ CTA almost makes it feel like you are in an offline store with a crunchy paper bag full of new clothing.

Many web store owners have proved in practice that people tend to make purchases at the very last moment when the item they want is just about to disappear. It happens due to a simple psychological mechanism: customers feel scarcity because they may not get this desired thing and would have to go through an unnecessary fuss of searching for another store or product. A sense of urgency pushes them to buy immediately without taking more time to dwell over the purchase. Tools like custom stock status are secret weapons of e-commerce merchants to make buyers rush for shopping.

Delivery options are also very important for online shoppers. All terms, fees or an offer of free shipping need to be noticeable and clear. Often quick and convenient delivery is a key to the actual purchase. Don’t try to cover shipping expenses. 43% of buyers abandon their carts due to unexpectedly high costs of delivery.

Ao.com is very convenient for that matter. All the main product info like price, ‘Add to cart button’, delivery options and product features are gathered in one comprehensible block.

Opinions matter! 70% of online shoppers browse through reviews every time they make purchases. But you don’t really want to waste space on your product page for loads of text with buyers’ reviews. What to do? That’s simple! Put a symbol of an average score (stars for example) on the category page and somewhere at the top of a product page. For details and letters of appreciation, there should be a separate place.

Reviews, though, work only for those who already are on your web store pages. So basically they step in when a person is already here to become a customer. Make the word of mouth spread even wider by adding social buttons to your product pages. Happy customers or potential buyers will gladly share their wishlists and bits of information about you and your goods on their pages on Facebook, Pinterest etc. This kind of marketing works all the time without investments of time and money. Amazing, isn’t it?

Claire’s are making sure that everyone finds out about their products!

To sum it up, let me share with you the best-ever practice of creating astonishing product pages:

1. Think of something you wanted to buy for a long time, be it a new cell phone or a toy for your child.
2. Search for the item online and visit as many web shops as you can.
3. Examine not only the product you are searching for but also its page. Write down your likes and dislikes.
4. Based on this analysis you can come up with your own criteria of the perfect product page.
5. Double profit: you’ve figured what product page of your web store should look like and as a bonus bought the desired product.

With the combination of The Internet and digital marketing, it has become a great way to reach any audience around the world. Product sellers are no more worried about investing huge capital on infrastructure and other offline materials. Due to the introduction of cash on delivery, easy returns and strict consumer protection rights, people have started trusting offline market’s as much as online.

I’d love to find out about your experiments on product pages in comments!

It’s the end of the month, and you’re just one deal away from hitting your number. You have the contract out … but the prospect hasn’t signed it yet.

With just that one signature, your month is made. Without it, you’re in the red.

In this scenario, the urge to become a high-pressure sales jerk is overwhelming. Believe me, I’ve been there. But if you’re truly committed to serving your buyers, it’s never acceptable to be a jerk. Don’t turn into a jerk just because you are almost at the finish line -- after all, this is when your buyer might need your help the most.

Obviously, yelling and making threatening demands is jerk-y behavior. But I find that many reps kill their deal with rudeness at the finish line without even realizing it. All it takes is 10 short words:

“Why haven’t you been able to get this finished yet?”

Translation: “What is wrong with you that you haven’t signed the contract?” That’s what your prospect hears when you ask this passive-aggressive question. Time of death of your deal: The moment this awful phrase is uttered.

This question makes your prospect feel like they aren't doing a good job getting this done. If you have capably helped your prospect and shown value up until this point and they are ready to buy, don't screw up your hard work at the last minute because you’ve gotten nervous.

Tell your nerves to calm down. Things will work out the way they will work out, but you being annoying and rudely questioning your prospect's process is not going to help them or you.

Modern sales reps never, ever pressure their buyer. Sales is about helping the buyer buy on their timeline, not forcing them to fork over the money when it’s convenient for you.

The next time you inevitably find yourself in this situation, take it as an opportunity to demonstrate your commitment to helping your prospect. Instead of demanding why the buyer hasn’t gotten the contract back to you, ask open-ended questions to uncover the obstacles they’re facing, and learn how you can best help.

Here are some examples:

• How can I help you to get started using our product or service?
• What things need to happen from here to get this approved?
• What are the next steps you have to take to get approval on this?
• Who do you work with internally on this and what kinds of things do you think they would have questions on?
• What kinds of content will help you internally in getting this done?

There’s a line between being assertive and aggressive in sales. Don’t ever -- for any reason -- cross over that boundary. You might think that pushing is the best way to close a deal, but I can guarantee you that the only thing aggression will do is kill a sale -- in record time.

Author: Elaine Ip

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that nothing comes free.

That free trial of Netflix you signed up for? They didn’t offer you it to support your binge watching habit. Ultimately, they wanted you to get a taste of what they’re offering so that you stay a customer. Or what about the newsletter you signed up for from your favorite retailer to receive a 15% discount in your inbox? Soon, those promotional emails on new items and sales will start flooding in. Even the stray kitten I decided to adopt last year wasn’t free. His cute little face didn’t just bring endless cuddles; it came with vet bills and sleepless nights filled with meows and yowls.

Why does this matter to you as marketer? We’re all familiar with the idea of give-to-get. To gain something you want, such as new clothes, knowledge, or relationships, you need to be willing to give something up—money, time, effort, etc. As a consumer, it’s likely that you know this already and have given up pieces of your personal information for something in return. On the flip side, as a marketer, your goal is to give your buyers something valuable enough to earn their interest, business, loyalty, and advocacy.

So what might these incentives look like? According to eMarketer, when U.S. internet users were asked what would motivate them to share personal information with brands:

• 100% of respondents would share personal information for cash rewards
• 77% of respondents would share personal information for significant discounts
• 68% of respondents would share personal information for fewer steps to get things done
• 63% of respondents would share personal information for something that inspires something new based on people like them
• 63% of respondents would share personal information for reminders at the right time on the right device

The incentives above aren’t all encompassing, and the best marketers know how to create engaging campaigns that offer their audience something they want for a price that’s well worth the exchange. Let’s take a look at a few recent marketing campaigns that have gotten this down, offering valuable (or just purely entertaining) content for a small price the audience is happy to pay:

1. Powerpuff Yourself

There’s a lot I don’t remember from my childhood, but one thing I do recall is the television programs on Cartoon Network. Dexter’s Laboratory, Cow and Chicken, Johnny Bravo, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Ed, Edd n Eddy, and Powerpuff Girls pretty much took over my afterschool life.

To promote their Powerpuff Girls reboot, Cartoon Network recently launched “Powerpuff Yourself,” an avatar generator that allows you to become a Powerpuff Girl or Boy. Jill King, SVP of Consumer and Sponsorship Marketing for Turner Broadcasting, parent company of Cartoon Network, told Digiday that “Powerpuff Yourself” was created for fans to “engage and identify with the brand.” Their goal is clear: to revive the legion of Powerpuff Girls fans and boost their program ratings.

As I began “Powerpuffing” myself (which I enjoyed way too much), a familiar marketing tool appeared before I could save my avatar: a gated page with a form fill-out. This particular one asked for my birthdate:

What can we assume from this clever tactic? Perhaps Cartoon Network is interested in learning about their audience demographics so that they can make sure their programs appeal to the right audience and keep their ratings high. I’m all for supporting the Powerpuff Girl franchise, so I didn’t even hesitate to fill it in. In fact, it helped me fulfill a bucket list goal that I never realized I had.

Powerpuff Girls avatar or not, you need to give your audience something worth what they’re giving up. I didn’t even hesitate to fill in my birthday for this fun avatar generator. Now, if they were asking for my full name and address, it might be a different story. If you’re offering educational content, don’t ask your visitors for too much information or don’t even gate it. And with marketing automation technology, you still stand to gain something by tracking the behavior of anonymous website visitors and converting them down the road with web personalization tools.

2. Snapchat Filters

Snapchat filters have been all the craze lately. You may have seen screenshots or videos floating around on social media of your friends or family with fun overlays of dog faces, animations, and even face swaps (some that are downright horrifying).

The filters are a great way for Snapchat to increase app usage and engagement, with this fun feature exclusive to their app. It might even result in more app downloads from new users, as Snapchat users share pictures with these filters on their other social networks. But this isn’t all that they gain. In fact, these filters are bringing in some major revenue for them.

Snapchat’s filters are open to brands through sponsored geofilters, which is really quite genius for “free” product placement that personally incorporates your audience (similar to when consumers wear clothing with a retailer’s logo splashed on top but an instant, digital version). Snapchat geofilters place users directly into a brand’s filter, not only showing their support for the brand, but also influencing their networks to feel positively about it and participate too.

Both Snapchat and brands are cashing out on this. In fact, more than 60% of U.S. 13 to 34 year-old smartphone users (Snapchat’s target audience) are Snapchatters, according to Snapchat. And their user base is at 100 million daily active Snapchatters and growing.

Being that Snapchat is a mobile app, these sponsored geofilters not only follow users wherever they go, but they are relevant to that particular user’s location. While Snapchat might not be the right channel for every brand, the key message here is to be where your audience is and find ways to interact with them personally and build advocates. There’s nothing more personal than placing a brand’s geofilter on your face.

3. #TacoEmojiEngine

Emojis are a popular form of self-expression. 92% of the online population uses emojis. People use them to help communicate their thoughts and build personal relationships, according to the 2015 Emoji Report by Emogi. It’s also a universal language that translates well across languages and regions.

Brands have caught on to the emoji phenomenon using them more and more in their advertising, emails, even billboards, and fast food chain Taco Bell is no exception. In fact, they led a movement to add a taco emoji through a Change.org petition, one that garnered 32,797 supporters. When the Unicode Consortium finally approved the taco emoji for iOS 9.1, Taco Bell celebrated with the launch of the #TacoEmojiEngine on Twitter. Just tweet at Taco Bell with a taco emoji along with another emoji, and you’ll receive an instant, personalized response—one of 600 pieces of unique taco-inspired content. Here’s the #TacoEmojiEngine in action:

@_elaineip #TacoEmojiEngine pic.twitter.com/s9ZSobc5UQ

— Taco Bell (@tacobell) April 8, 2016

So what’s behind these 600 bits of pure pleasure? Rob Poetsch, Director of Public Affairs and Engagement at Taco Bell, told TechCrunch that they launched the #TacoEmojiEngine to celebrate the long-awaited arrival of the taco emoji and to thank taco lovers everywhere for their support of the emoji, which they had been campaigning for more than a year. But there must be more to this to justify all the time, money, and effort they put into creating this viral campaign, not to mention maintain it. What other objectives might be driving this effort? Let’s taco ’bout it (sorry, I couldn’t resist).

Hashtags are a great way to build brand awareness and generate awareness. The #TacoEmojiEngine campaign lives on Twitter, where trends are a way for users to gauge which topics are going viral that they are most likely to care about based on their interests, network, and location. With all the traction #TacoEmojiEngine generated, it successfully became a trending topic, meaning it became something “worthy” of your interest. You might be among the few that first discovered it and if not, then you were likely among the many that jumped on as @tacobell and #TacoEmojiEngine started popping up all over your feed and on the “Trends” sidebar. The impact continues to spread to this day as users still interact with the campaign.

There are quite a few things we can learn from Taco Bell, and it’s not just that tacos go with almost anything. As you’re planning your marketing campaign, find something that aligns with your mission and resonates with your audience, and then actively join the movement. REI demonstrated this on Black Friday with their “Opt Outside” campaign that closed their stores and paid its employees to go outside. Also—no surprise here—personalization played a critical factor in the success of this campaign. Taco Bell responds to each tweet with literally the same exact combination the user asked for. Emojis might not be the right way to personalize your content to your audience, but the idea is the same: find what your buyers are interested in and respond with curated content that resonates with them, promptly. Seconds (or maybe even milliseconds) after sending out my tweet, I received a response from Taco Bell.

Cartoon Network, Snapchat, and Taco Bell are brands with significantly different business models and audiences, but they’ve got their marketing down to a T (or in Taco Bell’s case, an emoji). These brands have all successfully influenced their audience to want to become part of their marketing campaign, with buyers disclosing their information, engaging with the brand, and sharing on their networks—all on their own terms. So find what resonates with your audience the most and think of creative ways to successfully do the same.

What other creative marketing campaigns have you seen that were worth the catch? I’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

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3 Viral Marketing Campaigns That Are Worth the Catch was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post 3 Viral Marketing Campaigns That Are Worth the Catch appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Many people inside and outside the B2B world believe that brand strategy is not as important for B2B companies, and that branding is something that only B2C companies need to worry about.

Nothing could be farther from the truth. McKinsey & Company recently wrote in Forbes magazine that some of the most successful B2B companies have as much or more of their company assets tied up in goodwill and other intangible assets––better known as their “brand”––as B2C branding giants like Procter and Gamble.

What is a Brand, Anyway?

The word “brand” isn’t always well understood. Some people use the term interchangeably with “company” as a kind of shorthand term. A “brand” is actually something very specific. It is, in essence, a promise to the buyer about the kind of product or experience they are purchasing, and how they will feel when they use it.

Coca-Cola is a well-known brand name. Coke’s brand tells you what to expect from the experience of drinking a Coke and differentiates it from similar products. The phrase “have a Coke and a smile” defines the Coke brand in the minds of many consumers as an experience that will make them happy.

Why is Brand Strategy Important?

Strong brands don’t just happen. They are usually the results of a long-term strategy that guides how a company does business and is tightly bound to its understanding of customer needs.

Why is having a solid brand strategy important in B2B? According to McKinsey, it is because the brand serves as a kind of shorthand for decision-makers, just as it does for consumers, but the stakes for B2B are often much higher. If a consumer chooses the wrong brand of toothpaste, they can always buy a new tube if the product doesn’t work out.

But in B2B, choosing the wrong products can have disastrous consequences. For example, if a manufacturer purchases poor quality components for the products it manufactures, it could cost the trust of not only B2B buyers, but also end consumers. In short, a strong brand gives the B2B customer confidence to move forward with a purchase decision.

According to Harvard Business Review, building a solid brand benefits B2B companies three ways:

• It is an economical means of addressing customer concerns at scale.
• It prevents ad hoc marketing efforts that result in unclear messaging.
• It allows B2B marketers to increase margins and build loyalty with their own customer base and protects them from competition.

Building Your Brand: 6 Key Elements

So clearly, it is important to have a solid strategy in place to guide your brand. As you look at building your brand, there are six key elements to consider.

1. Target Audience.

In B2C, the target audience or market for your brand is the person who is most likely to buy your product. In B2B, your target audience is still the most likely buyer for your product or service, but because the nature of the purchasing process is more complex in B2B, you’ll need to be looking not just at which companies are likely to buy from you, but at who within those companies is going to make those decisions. Is it a purchasing manager, a department manager, or a team of executives? Depending on the value of your products, the decision might have multiple influencers and decision-makers. You’ll need messaging that speaks to all of them.

2. Brand Promise.

The brand promise is the message that speaks to your target audience. It tells them what to expect from purchasing your product.

3. Brand Perception

You’ll want to take a look at what the perception of your brand has been in the past, what it is now, and what you want it to be in the future. One way to do this is to survey your current customers to find out what they think of your brand. Do your target customers know your brand? What do they think of you? What do you want them to think of you? Understanding how your brand is perceived is especially important if you are looking to change your business strategy: maybe you’re looking to enter new markets, or you’ve been known as the low price provider in the past, and you are looking to move up market.

4. Brand Values

Clearly define what guides your company’s decision-making. These are the core values that your brand seeks to embody.

5. Brand Voice

How does your brand “speak?” What is its personality? Is it buttoned down and serious, or more playful and fun? The answer to these questions will depend the audience you are trying to engage, and there should be a fit between your audience and the voice you use to speak to them.

6. Brand Positioning

Brand positioning is defined as the position that a brand holds (or wants to hold) in the mind of the customer. It can usually be boiled down into a one or two sentence “positioning statement” that defines the target audience, who the brand competes against, the benefits of using it, and a statement of proof for the brand promise. It tells you what the brand’s position in the market is relative to its competitors, and what sets it apart from the rest.

There are many components that make up a brand, including logos and packaging, brand equity (which is the value of perceptions and expectations about your brand), and the brand persona or voice. Your brand strategy is an essential tool to developing these elements so that they work together in the minds of purchasers to give them confidence when considering making a purchase.

What is your company doing to develop its brand strategy? We’d love to hear about it in the comments.

Ah, the dreaded cold call. It is a tricky science, yes it is. However, it can be incredibly rewarding if you are willing to go outside your comfort zone. For some people, this can be WAY outside their comfort zone.

Please keep in mind; it is helpful to have already had experience making calls to family and friends first, before venturing into the world of cold calling.

#1 Script it

Create a basic written outline for what you are going to say over the phone.

You will want this to be somewhat brief. Make sure not to start out with phrases like “Hi sir/ma’am this is John Smith calling from Business Investments, Inc. to tell you about a fantastic opportunity for money-making. Would you be interested?”

From my experience, this will just make you sound like a telemarketer.

You’ll want to ask some genuinely intriguing question to hook them on the phone.

After you’ve created a brief written script, practice it loosely.

Confidence is key, and knowing how to work around your script outline while mid-conversation is important.

If you have a business mentor or friend, you may find it helpful to practice a mock cold-call over the phone with them and work on handling different objections (I recommend doing a Google Search of common sales objections to role-play with your partner).

#2 Generate Leads And Contacts

When searching for businesses to contact, you will want to start with a useful site like Yelp for easily gathering phone numbers.

Make sure you have a brief understanding of each business before you call them. Do your research, and learn about the company.

Finding numbers online myself has worked out fine for me when I was making all the calls myself. You can expedite the process buying leads from a lead generation company if you have the means to do so.

I like to keep record of the names and numbers of all the businesses in a spreadsheet (Google Sheets or Excel work swell).

I will also include the date of initial first contact, whether it was a voicemail or a live answer, and any other useful info on who you spoke with and what the next steps are.

#3 Make the First Call

If you don’t have experience cold-calling, you’re heart will likely be beating a little faster than usual at this stage…totally normal.

The longer you wait to press the call button, the harder it will be. The phone feels like it weighs about 10,000 pounds on the first call.

However, after about 4 or 5 more calls, that weight will have dropped massively.

Understand that your first few calls will likely be shaky, whether you have practiced your script or not. The key is to keep going and understand your outcome in the end.

Keep your outcome clear (write it down) so that you know why you are making all these calls in the first place

#4 Turn the Cold into Warm

When you have jumped over the hump and are finally on the phone, do your best to connect with the person on the other side of the line.

If they are bright and bubbly over the phone, then you will want to mirror and naturally throw in some of your wit here and there.

There are 4 different personality types you will encounter:

• The Whale
• The Dolphin
• The Urchin
• The Shark

Whales love helping people and are usually softer and more timid on the phone.

Dolphins love to chit-chat and love to have fun or joke around.

Urchins are more analytical and love to talk numbers and percentages.

Sharks are interested in the end result and what is the quickest way for them to achieve it.

If they are a whale… speak whale. If they are a shark… speak shark. You get it.

Mirroring and speaking in someone’s language builds immediate bonding and rapport.

After you have connected with them, focus on the next steps.

If they aren’t the decision maker, the next step would be to reach whoever is in charge (CEO, Marketing Director, Manager, etc.).

See if they are willing to patch you in to whoever is the best person to speak with. Before they patch you in, be sure to get their name so that you can reference them in your conversation with the decision maker.

#5 Keep a Note Sheet

I can’t even emphasize how important this one is.

Keeping a note sheet will allow you to have a clean record of the calls you’ve made and any details within.

You will want to record the company name, date of initial call, whether you left a voicemail or not, notes (ex. laughed and talked for a while, CEO loves playing guitar), contact names, follow up dates and times, etc.

Half of the business I get is from following up with people I haven’t heard from. The old phrase is “fortune is in the follow up.”

#6 Always be Leaning Towards the Next Contact

It is important to make sure that after EVERY call, you know exactly when you will be following up or when the next meeting will be.

It’s okay to ask the person on the other line when the best time to call back would be. If they say something like “well, maybe in a couple weeks or so,” what I normally do is respond with something like “How about this, I’ve got a 2:15pm open on Wednesday the 15^th, would that work?”

This shows them that you are busy as well, and naturally people are attracted to busy people and will likely respect your time a little more.

Pro Tip: If you add a “:15, :25, or :45” to the end of the time (instead of just saying “5pm”), they are more likely to stay on schedule as it comes across to be a more exact time.

#7 Leave a Voicemail

Oh no! No one even picked up the phone!

No problem, just leave a voicemail (also should be scripted!).

Continue your follow ups every 2-4 days of course, but make sure when you finally talk to a live person that you reference the voicemail you left on “blank day” at “blank time”. This shows that you are extra organized and not just blowing through a bunch of calls to different companies mindlessly.

Whew!

Hopefully I didn’t wear you out too much, but if you stuck around, kudos to you!

Cold-calling is not for everyone.

However, if you truly enjoy meeting new people every day and don’t mind devoting a few hours a day to it, it can be very rewarding once you strike gold.

The thing with cold-calling, is that your numbers can be different with every industry. But no matter what, after 20-30 calls, you will start to see patterns and ratios that you can use to improve the quality of your calls and up your numbers.

I wish you success in your business and hope that this info will serve you over and over again in your future endeavors.

Have any steps to add? Let us know in the comments!

Is Twitter still a useful social media tool?

Is the party is over?

Has Twitter become a one-way conversation with everyone talking and no one listening?

These are questions that I have been wrestling with lately along with many others who make a living in social media and digital marketing.

Experts from around the web are very conflicted on the question. Some say yes, Twitter is still relevant and one of the best ways to drive traffic to your website, while others are writing obituaries.

There is currently a hashtag called #RIPTwitter that is trending due to a report on BuzzFeed that surfaced in early February 2016 about the new algorithmic timeline that would alter the essence of how the network works.

With all of the utility apps like Buffer, Hootsuite, Crowdfire, etc. it is entirely possible to automate your entire Twitter experience and never engage directly with a human being or brand. Judging from my own personal experience and the sheer volume of junk in my Direct Message Inbox, it seems like many are taking the full automation route and the network is becoming a cesspool of pre-scheduled Tweets and automated DM’s and automated Twitter Lists.

What made the network so great, and what’s been lost to a certain extent is engagement.

Before you label me as Mr. High and Mighty, I must confess that I like many others have largely ignored my own Twitter account and have put it on auto-pilot. I AM GUILTY AS CHARGED!!

On my account, articles are posted from our company blog three times per day, new Twitter followers are re-followed or ignored and that is the extent of my involvement with the network.

I am guilty of set it and forget it.

The Problem with Automation

The problem with all of this automation as I see it, is that AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT is lost, and it defeats the purpose and potential of this social media channel. It relegates Twitter to nothing more than WHITE NOISE, a broadcast channel where everyone is talking and no one is listening.

I recently decided to take a look what all of this broadcasting has done for the traffic stats for my own personal account and as I suspected my Twitter traffic numbers are SCARY BAD.

Here’s how the data shakes out over a three-month period.

I have an account with approximately 1,100 Twitter followers. I spent a lot of time about 2 years ago trying to cultivate a following, but for more than a year, I have largely ignored my account.

I am pretty careful not to blindly follow back fake accounts, so my audience was grown organically. I ran a quick check on Twitter Audit and my account brings back a 98% authentic rating. Not too bad.

The Metrics

Here is where it gets ugly. My account Tweets two to three times per day, six days per week. On average, this breaks down to about 60 Tweets per month. Here are the Impression metrics from November 2015 through January 2016 as reported on my Twitter Analytics Page.

My 180 Tweets earned 23.2K impressions, or on average 128 Impressions per Tweet.

The engagement stats are where it gets truly depressing. My broadcasted message system led to a 0.8% engagement rate, 7 clicks on my content (Wow!!), 10 Retweets, and I was mentioned ten times in three months.

What Did I Expect?

As I wrote at the beginning of this piece, is Twitter still relevant? Is it only suited for the Justin Bieber’s and Kim Kardashian’s of the world, celebrities with huge built in followings? With dreary financial results, are the social media pundits correct? Is Twitter dead?

Intuitively, I know better. Broadcasting without context or relationship serves very little purpose. As you can see by my numbers, all of this activity is leading nowhere.

What I have surmised is missing in all of this is AUTHENTIC ENGAGEMENT. I hadn’t taken the time in more than a year to engage with my followers, so why should I expect them to care about anything that I have to say, or more importantly what I write.

Maybe this is the problem that Twitter faces. Gary Vaynerchuk wrote a really insightful article on this question a while back and the issues that he has noticed with his own levels of engagement. I suggest that you give it a read.

My 30-day Twitter Experiment

For me it was clear that I made some mistakes, but the bigger question remains.

Is it still worth my time?

As a true marketer the only thing left to do to answer my questions is EXPERIMENT.

At the end of February, I created a small experiment to test the benefit of engagement.

The objective was simple. I created an experiment where I authentically engaged on Twitter for 30 minutes per day for 30 days.

I defined authentic engagement with the following best practices by different social media experts, and the actions included:

1. Reading Interesting Tweets from people I followed and clicking on their content
2. Curating content and only retweeting linked content that I read – If I re-tweeted it, I read it and liked it.
3. Replying to any re-tweets or Mentions that I received.
4. Replying to any DM’s that did not appear to be automated to see if someone is on the other end of the line – This was the hardest task. Most were automated.
5. Attempt to engage in legitimate Twitter conversations with real people.

In addition, I continued my 60 pre-scheduled Tweets to see if my blog readership would be impacted by authentic engagement.

Goals and Results

To determine success, I established some modest SMART social media goals for the project.

1. Double the amount of my average monthly Tweet Impressions – 15,500 Impressions in 30 Days
2. Increase link clicks to my blog – I was averaging 2.3 per month – Modest goal of 10 in 30 Days
3. Add 50 New Twitter Followers in 30 Days

I started the process on February 18, 2016 and for the purposes of this post we will take a look at the activity for 30 days ending on March 18, 2016. During the course of that time frame, I had 60 pre-scheduled Tweets with links to my blog, and I had another 120 Tweets that were either replies or content sharing.

Here are the statistics from that 30-day time period.

With 84,400 impressions, I was able to realize a 263% gain in the impressions over the previous 3-month time frame and smashed my objective by 444%.

Here are the engagement stats.

The engagement statistics were up substantially, as I had hoped. Link clicks were up with a 600% increase over the previous 90-day period and 500% of my goal. While not all of the clicks were on my articles since I also curated some posts from some of the people I followed, there was a noticeable jump in traffic to my blog with 40 unique visitors during the experiment.

Likes, retweets and replies were all up for the month.

The third specific goal was the most noticeable, as I increased my engagement, the number of followers increased substantially. When I started my 30-day engagement project, I had roughly 1,100 followers. As of this writing, my new followers sit at 1,475, and increase of 375 real followers. Way better than I expected. In addition, to increasing my followers the biggest benefit as I see it are the quality of my engagements.

I met some really cool folks in my niche and have learned a lot from the assorted articles that I took the time to read.

What I found by working on this project, is that there are still people using Twitter effectively to engage with their audience. There are also far too many people mailing it in, like I was doing last year. If you carve out some time each day to spend with your following, you can realize some significant engagement results.

So now the question that I am left with is this.

If authentic engagement can increase an audience and drive traffic, is there a tangible business benefit to the activity that justifies the time and money spent on Twitter. Is there a bottom line in terms of lead generation, and or sales that can be realized from the expenditure of time, money and engagement on Twitter?

Over the next 3 months I am going to test out different strategies to determine if Twitter is a viable tool to develop business leads.

Do you want to build buzz around your product or service to a segmented audience? Do you want to discover influencers in your customer base? Do you always look for fresh ways to spark a conversation with your customers? Of course you do! It’s 2016 and brands have to find unforgettable ways to stand out from the crowd and engage with an audience that makes sense for them (all while meeting the bottom line).

Today’s marketing solutions landscape is saturated with apps, programs, plugins, and add-ons that promise to remedy every company’s pain points and monetize their sweet spots. Only a few strategies can offer high-quality leads and highly engaged customers the kind of significant and continuous benefits that referral marketing programs provide.

So, does referral marketing work? Of course it does! According to a recent survey conducted online by Harris Poll on behalf of Ambassador, 82% of Americans say they seek recommendations from friends and family when considering a purchase. Before your company can start to experience the benefits of referral marketing, you have to determine if it’s the right strategy for your unique goals. You can start by considering five important questions.

1. Does my business have a lot of customers?

As more companies discover that existing customers have major marketing potential and access to new customers, it becomes increasingly important to strengthen your relationships with your customer base. Your chances for experiencing referral marketing success through increased engagement, sharing, and purchases is largely reliant upon your audience of customers. Referral marketing automation works best with an established group of engaged customers, users, influencers, affiliates, and fans who open countless pathways to new leads. Yes, referral marketing programs are created to link your business with new leads, but it’s important to begin with a sizable audience of customers.

2. Do my customers have a high lifetime value?

You’ve built a business from the ground up and crafted an unbeatable product or service, but how often are your customers interacting with your brand? In order to determine the lifetime value of your customers, consider the average order value of your product or service, the number of repeat transactions, and the average customer lifespan within your company. Highly informed, engaged, and loyal customers are an ideal component of referral marketing success. Your biggest fans can become your best advocates for reaching new customers and driving positive referral marketing ROI, but only if they have developed a clear preference for your brand.

3. Do people naturally want to share my product or service?

Every successful business fulfills a specific set of customer needs, but does your product or service make your customers want to share with others? Whether your brand offers an innovative alternative to an age-old product or provides a unique service, you must know how to excite your consumers. The customers who are most excited about your company are more likely to become brand ambassadors in the future. Being able to encourage customers and their sharing behavior with an incentive should be a key ingredient in your recipe for referral marketing success.

4. Are we a community-oriented brand?

At its core, referral marketing success relies on the power of word-of-mouth to attract loyal customers, fans, and advocates. Well-defined audiences of customers who actively seek information and know how to find one another are a beneficial component for developing a successful referral network. Let’s face it, it’s much easier to spread your brand message in a circle of friends than in a room full of strangers. Referral marketing solutions will enroll, track, and reward members of your tight-knit customer base.

5. How advanced and compatible is our company website?

This may sound like a no-brainer, but your brand must have an established and cohesive online presence to attract rich leads and properly align with a high-quality product. This tech becomes even more important as your brand prepares to adopt a highly customizable platform for your marketing efforts. Referral marketing software is designed to blend in with the rest of your digital marketing processes, but only if everything else is up to par. In addition to aesthetics and ease-of-use, referral marketing success is most commonly achieved by brands with websites that drive the majority of sales. The true benefits of referral marketing automation are only accessible if you can properly accommodate the technology.

Putting Referral Marketing To Work

Even if your company can’t check off each of these boxes, referral marketing may offer a unique opportunity to link new customers and loyal leads to your brand. Referral programs are designed to fit into the organic sharing process that customers and companies have practiced for centuries. If you’re ready to elevate your business with seamless software that nurtures the customer journey and helps your company reach aspirational goals, then referral marketing just might be the strategy for you.

Great sales prospecting email templates are hard to craft. At HubSpot, we use our sales software to track which ones have the highest open and click rates. We then organize them into folders so reps can quickly access, customize and send them right from Gmail and Outlook.

We also encourage our team members to experiment with writing their own -- following our email prospecting template guidelines, of course. Some of the best innovations are crafted by individuals and later rolled out to the team. This template from HubSpot business development rep Caroline Ostrander is so good, I thought I'd share it with all of you.

Why do I think this note is crafted so effectively? Here are nine things Caroline did well:

1. She referenced previous her efforts trying to help the company. Further, it’s believable because she referenced his co-worker’s names.
2. She referenced her efforts trying to reach him by phone, showing that she follows through effectively.
3. She even suggested that it was fairly frustrating trying to help his company given the turnover. This was a smart, calculated risk. It could be offensive to the company, but since this guy was a beneficiary of the other's departures, probably not too risky.
4. She leveraged a trigger event: Her prospect getting a new job.
5. She related to the prospect’s emotions by suggesting that taking on a new role is stressful.
6. She injected some humor into the situation by including cute baby animal pictures.
7. She suggested that it might not be a good time to have this conversation. This implies she’s not overly eager to pitch or sell him something if it’s not a fit. This is a refreshing change for most prospects since many salespeople pitch and sell in their first email.
8. She very lightly introduced her expertise (helping companies grow traffic, leads, and sales) and focus (local companies).
9. She did NOT ask for a time on his calendar. Instead, she asked an open-ended question designed to merely elicit a response.

But don’t take my word for it. How did this email work? The first time she used this template, her prospect responded in this way:

If you want to craft relevant and timely prospecting emails like these, here’s some further reading on trigger events.

• How To Close More Inbound Sales Deals With Timely Trigger Events
• 30 Types of Sales Trigger Events and How to Track Them
• How to Leverage Trigger Events for Faster Sales

What do you think of this template? How could it be even better? If you use it, share your successes in the comments.

Tweet me at @pc4media if you have a template that is working for you that you want us to highlight on the HubSpot sales blog.

Need help thinking through your entire prospecting strategy? Take the Identify and Connect courses in HubSpt’s free on-demand sales training course.

When properly executed, sales coaching delivers a positive ripple effect that leads to performance turnarounds for both salespeople and their teams. So how can you best help them increase both their effectiveness and efficiency?

As the needs of industry change, so too does the commonality of U.S. jobs. In certain sectors of the labor force, millions of Americans work the same positions. However, just because a job is common doesn’t mean there isn’t continued demand. Many of these positions are essential parts in the machinery of the U.S. economy.

Some of the most common positions also make lists of jobs crucial to America or the most meaningful occupations. The food industry, one of the top providers of common jobs, has been called “the most important industry in today’s America.” Although these occupations are common, they are by no means trivial. From sales to education, these industries and the workers within them are the foundation of a strong economic future.

In order to determine the most common jobs in America, the data scientists at CareerTrends used occupational employment statistics released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) on March 30, 2016. The list is ranked based on employment numbers. We provide context for these positions with average salary data and descriptions used by the BLS.

#30. Maids

Current Employment: 926,240
Mean Salary: $22,990
Category: Cleaning and Maintenance

Description: Perform any combination of light cleaning duties to maintain private households or commercial establishments, such as hotels and hospitals, in a clean and orderly manner. Duties may include making beds, replenishing linens, cleaning rooms and halls and vacuuming.

#29. Online Merchants

Current Employment: 926,610
Mean Salary: $73,480
Category: Business and Finance

Description: Conduct retail activities of businesses operating exclusively online. May perform duties such as preparing business strategies, buying merchandise, managing inventory, implementing marketing activities, fulfilling and shipping online orders and balancing financial records.

#28. High School Teachers

Current Employment: 962,820
Mean Salary: $60,440
Category: Education

Description: Teach students in one or more subjects, such as English, mathematics or social studies at the secondary level in public or private schools. May be designated according to subject matter specialty.

#27. Receptionists

Current Employment: 975,890
Mean Salary: $28,430
Category: Office and Administrative Support

Description: Answer inquiries and provide information to the general public, customers, visitors and other interested parties regarding activities conducted at establishments and locations of departments, offices and employees within the organization.

#26. Security Guards

Current Employment: 1,097,660
Mean Salary: $28,460
Category: Protective Services

Description: Guard, patrol or monitor premises to prevent theft, violence or infractions of rules. May operate X-ray and metal detector equipment.

#25. Team Assemblers

Current Employment: 1,115,510
Mean Salary: $31,560
Category: Production

Description: Work as part of a team having responsibility for assembling an entire product or component of a product. Team assemblers can perform all tasks conducted by the team in the assembly process and rotate through all or most of them rather than being assigned to a specific task on a permanent basis. May participate in making management decisions affecting the work. Includes team leaders who work as part of the team.

#24. Restaurant Cooks

Current Employment: 1,150,760
Mean Salary: $24,430
Category: Food

Description: Prepare, season and cook dishes such as soups, meats, vegetables or desserts in restaurants. May order supplies, keep records and accounts, price items on menu or plan menu.

#23. Retail Worker Supervisors

Current Employment: 1,193,850
Mean Salary: $42,900
Category: Sales

Description: Directly supervise and coordinate activities of retail sales workers in an establishment or department. Duties may include management functions, such as purchasing, budgeting, accounting and personnel work, in addition to supervisory duties.

#22. Accountants and Auditors

Current Employment: 1,226,910
Mean Salary: $75,280
Category: Business and Finance

Description: Examine, analyze and interpret accounting records to prepare financial statements, give advice or audit and evaluate statements prepared by others. Install or advise on systems of recording costs or other financial and budgetary data.

#21. Teacher Assistants

Current Employment: 1,228,440
Mean Salary: $26,550
Category: Education

Description: Perform duties that are instructional in nature or deliver direct services to students or parents. Serve in a position for which a teacher has ultimate responsibility for the design and implementation of educational programs and services.

#20. General Maintenance Workers

Current Employment: 1,314,560
Mean Salary: $38,950
Category: Installation, Maintenance and Repair

Description: Perform work involving the skills of two or more maintenance or craft occupations to keep machines, mechanical equipment or the structure of an establishment in repair. Duties may involve pipe fitting, boiler making, insulating, welding, machining, carpentry, repairing electrical or mechanical equipment, installing, aligning and balancing new equipment and repairing buildings, floors or stairs.

#19. Personal Care Aides

Current Employment: 1,369,230
Mean Salary: $21,790
Category: Personal Care and Service

Description: Assist the elderly, convalescents or persons with disabilities with daily living activities at the person’s home or in a care facility. Duties performed at a place of residence may include keeping house (making beds, doing laundry, washing dishes) and preparing meals. May provide assistance at non-residential care facilities. May advise families, the elderly, convalescents and persons with disabilities regarding such things as nutrition, cleanliness and household activities.

#18. Elementary School Teachers

Current Employment: 1,381,430
Mean Salary: $57,730
Category: Education

Description: Teach students basic academic, social and other formative skills in public or private schools at the elementary level

#17. Manufacturing Sales Representatives

Current Employment: 1,409,550
Mean Salary: $66,790
Category: Sales

Description: Sell goods for wholesalers or manufacturers to businesses or groups of individuals. Work requires substantial knowledge of items sold.

#16. Nursing Assistants

Current Employment: 1,420,570
Mean Salary: $26,820
Category: Healthcare Support

Description: Provide basic patient care under direction of nursing staff. Perform duties such as feed, bathe, dress, groom or move patients or change linens. May transfer or transport patients. Includes nursing care attendants, nursing aides and nursing attendants.

#15. Office Supervisors

Current Employment: 1,424,450
Mean Salary: $56,170
Category: Office and Administrative Support

Description: Directly supervise and coordinate the activities of clerical and administrative support workers.

#14. Accounting Clerks

Current Employment: 1,580,220
Mean Salary: $38,990
Category: Office and Administrative Support

Description: Compute, classify and record numerical data to keep financial records complete. Perform any combination of routine calculating, posting and verifying duties to obtain primary financial data for use in maintaining accounting records. May also check the accuracy of figures, calculations and postings pertaining to business transactions recorded by other workers.

#13. Truck Drivers

Current Employment: 1,678,280
Mean Salary: $42,500
Category: Transportation

Description: Drive a tractor-trailer combination or a truck with a capacity of at least 26,000 pounds Gross Vehicle Weight (GVW). May be required to unload truck. Requires commercial driver’s license.

#12. Stock Clerks

Current Employment: 1,934,060
Mean Salary: $25,940
Category: Office and Administrative Support

Description: Receive, store and issue sales floor merchandise, materials, equipment and other items from stockroom, warehouse or storage yard to fill shelves, racks, tables or customers’ orders. May mark prices on merchandise and set up sales displays.

#11. Operations Managers

Current Employment: 2,145,140
Mean Salary: $119,460
Category: Management

Description: Plan, direct or coordinate the operations of public or private sector organizations. Duties and responsibilities include formulating policies, managing daily operations and planning the use of materials and human resources, but are too diverse and general in nature to be classified in any one functional area of management or administration, such as personnel, purchasing or administrative services.

#10. Janitors

Current Employment: 2,146,880
Mean Salary: $26,180
Category: Cleaning and Maintenance

Description: Keep buildings in clean and orderly condition. Perform heavy cleaning duties, such as cleaning floors, shampooing rugs, washing walls and glass and removing rubbish. Duties may include tending furnace and boiler, performing routine maintenance activities, notifying management of need for repairs and cleaning snow or debris from sidewalk.

#9. Administrative Assistants

Current Employment: 2,281,120
Mean Salary: $35,200
Category: Office and Administrative Support

Description: Perform routine clerical and administrative functions such as drafting correspondence, scheduling appointments, organizing and maintaining paper and electronic files or providing information to callers.

#8. Material Handlers

Current Employment: 2,487,680
Mean Salary: $27,840
Category: Transportation

Description: Manually move freight, stock or other materials or perform other general labor. Includes all manual laborers not elsewhere classified.

#7. Waiters and Waitresses

Current Employment: 2,505,630
Mean Salary: $23,020
Category: Food

Description: Take orders and serve food and beverages to patrons at tables in dining establishments.

#6. Customer Service Representatives

Current Employment: 2,595,990
Mean Salary: $34,560
Category: Office and Administrative Support

Description: Interact with customers to provide information in response to inquiries about products and services and to handle and resolve complaints.

#5. Registered Nurses

Current Employment: 2,745,910
Mean Salary: $71,000
Category: Medicine and Healthcare Technology

Description: Assess patient health problems and needs, develop and implement nursing care plans and maintain medical records. Administer nursing care to ill, injured, convalescent or disabled patients. May advise patients on health maintenance and disease prevention or provide case management. Licensing or registration required.

#4. General Office Clerks

Current Employment: 2,944,420
Mean Salary: $31,890
Category: Office and Administrative Support

Description: Perform duties too varied and diverse to be classified in any specific office clerical occupation, requiring knowledge of office systems and procedures. Clerical duties may be assigned in accordance with the office procedures of individual establishments and may include a combination of answering telephones, bookkeeping, typing or word processing, stenography, office machine operation and filing.

#3. Food Preparation & Serving Workers

Current Employment: 3,216,460
Mean Salary: $19,710
Category: Food

Description: Perform duties which combine preparing and serving food and nonalcoholic beverages.

#2. Cashiers

Current Employment: 3,478,420
Mean Salary: $20,990
Category: Sales

Description: Receive and disburse money in establishments other than financial institutions. May use electronic scanners, cash registers or related equipment. May process credit or debit card transactions and validate checks.

#1. Retail Salespersons

Current Employment: 4,612,510
Mean Salary: $26,340
Category: Sales

Description: Sell merchandise, such as furniture, motor vehicles, appliances or apparel to consumers.

Compare Careers on CareerTrends

Project management is not something that only those with plenty of experience can be good at. Anyone can master the art of managing projects; all they really need is a bit of knowledge and creativity. Entrepreneurs, whether they are managing a startup or handling a well-established organization, need to be exceptionally good at the art of project management.

Here’s a choice selection of project management tips that explains how creative entrepreneurs get things done:

1. Avoid multitasking – at all costs

According to a study by Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, ‘Multitasking causes a greater decrease in IQ than smoking pot or losing a night’s sleep’. So, without a doubt this is one thing that every project manager must avoid at all times. Doing several things simultaneously does not mean that you are getting more done in less time. It only means you are building up on loads of errors and rework in future. Instead of cutting down the time, you are only wasting more of it while also reducing the levels of productivity.

2. Have a good project management tool

According to a survey conducted by Pricewaterhouse Cooper: “Use of commercially available PM software increases performance and satisfaction.”

The market is flooded with project management tools like ProofHub, Asana, Trello, Wrike, etc. Getting the one that everyone else is using is not going to cut it. You need to find the one that fits in seamlessly with your work style and requirements; something that will help you plan and manage more intelligently. Distributing tasks, collaborating, monitoring project progress – all this will become super simple with a good project management tool.

3. Give extensive training

To make a project function smoothly, give extensive training to everyone involved before getting started. Let everyone know thoroughly the ins and outs of their tasks, and to-do’s. Sure, it’s going to be a lot of work, but only initially. Once the training is over, teams are ready to work independently without too much of guidance. Team members can do their jobs and the managers can do theirs. No confusion and no waste of time.

In fact, according to one of the studies carried out at IBM, “75-80% of managers believe effective training is critical to project success, skill levels linked to business value yield a 10% increase in productivity.”

4. Avoid getting lost in the minor details

It is good to be detail-oriented, but don’t get lost so much into little things that bigger and really important ones get neglected. Look at the bigger picture, especially if the project is a major one. Being too detail-oriented can make you spend more time accomplishing relatively smaller and unimportant things. Always keep the focus on the most important aspects, and slowly build things around it.

Let’s say you are to create a new website for a product. Simply building a site is not enough. Everything from its designing and development to marketing is important. But, if you spend too much time micromanaging smaller things like, color of the website, placement of call to action buttons, and other stuff like this, you may be left with no time for other major tasks that are even more crucial. You need to know when to move on to the next thing so that each aspect gets your attention.

5. Design a critical path

Start the day with prioritization. Divide all the tasks into various categories and label them based on the degree of priority – low/high. Keep a few important tasks for each day. Try to complete the ones that fall into the critical path within the decided timeframe. Some tasks are first in the series; the building blocks of the project. Failing to complete those would delay the entire process. Recognize those tasks and accordingly set dependencies between them and work on the same basis.

For example, if the new project is about the launch of a new website, then the process would include creation of new site followed by content development and then eventually marketing and promotion work. In this case, the priority would naturally be first given to designing and development instead of marketing, because the whole thing is sequential and you cannot break that chain. Similarly, depending on what project you are part of, you would have to design the critical path and stick to the process.

But, how to go about it? Well, there are tools out there which you can use to get it done. I personally am an advocate of using project management software as it comes with features like Gantt Charts that help discern the critical path. As you assign tasks and distribute work among team members in these tools, along the way you also go on creating a critical path which is visible in the Gantt chart.

6. Confirm that everyone has understood their role

The biggest reason for mismatch between expected vs. actual output is when people fail to understand the project details. Be sure that the people have understood the details of the project in the exact same way that you wanted them to. Keeping everyone on the same page is really important if you want to avoid errors. Be sure that there are no gaps in knowledge and everyone has understood the requirements in the right context.

A good way to be sure that people have understood the project is to make them phrase things in their own words. You could also have them write down their roles and responsibilities on paper to see if they have fully understood everything or not.

7. Leave room for changes

It’s unwise to expect things to go as you planned. So, you must always be ready for unexpected/unseen problems to creep in. Create multiple contingency plans as backups. Have a safety net to fall back on should things go south. Think of all the things that could go wrong, and then make room for adjustments in the process.

Let’s take resources for example. The wise thing is to maintain flexibility in terms of how many people will handle the project. Who knows, you might need to cut the number down later on. Or, you could also need to increase that number. It could be anything. Being rigid in terms of how many people will handle the project is not a smart idea. You must be ready for the possibilities of making alterations any time depending on what the situation demands.

8. Have detailed documentation of the entire process

Team members are going to need something to refer to every now and then. Be sure to document every conversation, every presentation, computer screenshots and everything else explaining the intricacies. Document important information like minutes of meetings in textual as well as every other form of writing for team members to use as a reference point for future. This will eliminate the need to spend time in contacting one another to clarify certain points; which can lead to quite a lot of time wastage.

Primarily, there are three concepts that are taken care of by documentation – traceability, history, and control. You can trace each and every step back along with all the additional weekly and daily updates. Other than that, you get to maintain the history of project which could prove useful somewhere in the future. The practice makes it easier to exercise control by offering a common source of information for everyone.

According to what I feel, the best way of documentation is resorting to a good project management software. Coupled with all the other powerful functionalities that the software offers, the documentation will make sure you have permanent record of everything right along with all your other critical project information.

Just a few simple yet effective techniques to make project management creative. These tips are sure to work wonders if you follow them religiously. Project management is not rocket science. It’s about taking care of just a few things here and there, and everything else will be corrected automatically.

Author: Shikha Menwal

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Particularly beneficial for larger companies, business intelligence solutions with a centralized portal for multi-channel and system-specific data allow for faster in-depth analysis and more effective decisions. When searching for a business intelligence system, check for mobile accessibility, flexible export formats, financial analysis tools, and real-time and pre-scheduled reporting capabilities. Other features to consider before purchasing business intelligence software leads include third party integration capabilities, dashboard customization, predictive analytics functionality and visualization tools such as charting or graphing abilities.

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