Rnordman

What would you think if I told you that that box of cereal you want to buy will cost you $10? Likely, you would think to yourself, WTF? Erika is crazy! Is that cereal made of gold? Suppose I followed up by saying, “No, actually it is $8.” Then you would think that was better and you might even come close to being satisfied with the $8 price tag. You would be far more convinced by that pricing than if I had started the conversation by saying the cereal costs $8. That’s because of a little psychological phenomenon called the anchoring effect.

As part of our monthly series about how to use psychology to improve your website presence, we’ll delve further into the anchoring effect and figure out how you can make it work for you.

Before we get started, let me show you perhaps the best example I have ever seen of the anchoring effect in action. Take a look at this video of master marketer Steve Jobs disclosing how much the new iPad will cost. Notice that he starts talking about pricing the device at $999 and leaves that price up on the screen for what seems like ages before disclosing the real initial price of $499 to waves of cheers. Had he started out by saying, we’re pricing this at $499 would people have cheered? Maybe, but likely not as loudly. He created excitement about the lower price by “anchoring” the price at $999.

So how can you use anchoring on your website? Here are three ways:

Offer multiple options with the most expensive first: We all know this basic principle of negotiation: when you are the seller, start with a number higher than what you are willing to accept in the end. The same principle can work with pricing services or products. Keep in mind that many users come to your website with only a vague idea of what they are willing to spend on the services you offer. How can you influence them to move from prospective buyer to actual buyer? Put prices into perspective for them. Seeing the most expensive option adjusts expectations up, so it’s a relief to see the more affordable option. In this example, the middle price is just 25% of the expensive option.

High prices slashed: Everyone loves a sale. That jacket you tried on last week and loved was $350, but this week it’s only $215. What a deal! Notice that it’s the feeling of getting the same benefit for a fraction of the cost that sticks with us, more than details like what we paid in the end. This is because purchasing decisions are largely driven by emotions. You see something sparkly and your inner lizard brain instantly wants it. You see that the price has dropped and your more evolved rational brain can more easily justify making the purchase.

Reducing price of upsells (buy both items and save): What do you first think of when you hear the word ‘upsell?’ Some sleazy, used car salesman trying to sell you something you don’t really want (obviously, you need a paint protection package on a faded Honda Civic), right? But when used well, upselling can actually make your customers happier. And happy customers means happy business owners. eCommerce businesses use this tactic a lot. One great example is 1-800-Flowers. When you put a bouquet in your shopping cart, you’ll see relevant upgrades (balloons, candy, a teddy bear, etc.) that help you send a better gift and you get a discount for buying two or more items together. Offering to upsell at a relevant time and place is key. Simply put what you’re doing in the context of helping your customers win. What could be less sleazy than that?

As a small business owner, your survival depends on influencing customers to use the services you offer. There’s no doubt that learning a little about psychological principles like anchoring can help.

Have you seen any standout examples of the anchoring effect at work? Let me know in the comments below.

Saudi Arabia, the Gulf State which is taking a beating from the crash in oil prices, got another chunk of bad news on the state of its economy.

In a note released by analysts Simon Williams and Razan Nasser, HSBC shows that in February, the country's foreign-exchange holdings took another big dive, adding to the massive losses in foreign currencies held by the oil rich nation seen in the past couple of years.

HSBC shows that FX reserves dropped by more than $9 billion (£6.2 billion) in February, falling to their lowest level in nearly four years, and continuing their inexorable slide lower. Reserves had fallen by £14 billion (£9.7 billion) in January.

The amount of reserve assets held by the Saudi government now stands at $593 billion (£411 billion), more than $150 billion (£104 billion) down from its recent peak in late 2014, just before oil prices started plummeting. Here's what HSBC had to say (emphasis ours):

Saudi Arabia’s FX reserves stood at USD593bn in February – a m-o-m drop of USD9.4bn. The pace of decline was the most modest in four months but remained large, and leaves central bank foreign assets down more than USD150bn since oil prices began to decline in late 2014, to reach their lowest levels since mid-2012. The decline comprised a USD4.6bn drop in the Central Bank’s deposits held abroad and a USD2.8bn drop in investment securities. Even the typically stable SDR holdings and reserve position with the IMF declined USD2bn.

And here's the chart:

The amount of money held in foreign reserves by the Gulf State has fallen in almost direct proportion to the price of oil over the past 18 months. The world's most crucial commodity has lost about 60% of its value since mid-2014, falling from more than $100 (£72.17) a barrel to as low as $28 per barrel in late January, thanks largely to sluggish demand, and a huge oversupply. It has since recovered to around $39 right now, but that huge decline is clearly having a massive impact on Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, along with its fellow OPEC members, has strongly resisted calls to cut the amount of oil it produces, though it did recently agree to a freeze in production, and is set to meet other oil producers in Qatar in April to discuss the conditions for that proposed freeze.

The country is now running a massive budget deficit, just shy of $100 billion (£72.2 billion), as it refuses to cut spending even though oil receipts are down. This led to Business Insider's Lianna Brinded to argue that the country's refusal to cut production of oil is effectively "killing" its economy.

While the big decline in foreign exchange reserves is pretty worrying news for the Saudi economy, the news is not all completely terrible, and in February, reserves declined at their lowest levels in four months, suggesting that a slowdown in how much the country has to use of its reserves could be on its way.

Saudi Arabia is not the only major economy that has seen foreign-exchange reserves drop massively in the past couple of years. Earlier in March, Business Insider reported that the global slowdown had led China to expend more than $800 billion (£577 billion) of FX reserves since the middle of 2014.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: James Altucher makes an argument for not paying back your credit card debt

Here is a tragedy that happens to almost all companies with B2B clients.

Most companies start ignoring their B2B clients as soon as they become clients, except to possibly send them an invoice once a month.

They don’t do it on purpose, but their sales people have new client quotas to reach, and they won’t get their commissions if they spend too much time with the clients they have already sold.

Do you know if your B2B clients are already talking to the competition?

If you’re ignoring your clients, they will soon become past clients.

I have developed 12 questions, that you can answer in less than 5 minutes, to let you know if you are ignoring your B2B clients or not.

Answer these questions honestly, so you can see if any of your accounts are not only strategic, but to ensure they they won’t become past clients in the near future.

12 QUESTIONS FOR B2B CLIENT RETENTION

When was the last time you;

1. Asked your B2B clients if you are delivering the value you promised?

2. Showed them the value you are bringing them with your products and/or services?

3. Ran a planning session for your best clients?

4. Took the CXO out for dinner with his/her partner?

5. Introduced the CXO to someone that could help his/her business?

6. Had a lunch and learn for your clients?

7. Asked for a referral?

8. Offered them other products/services you and/or your partners have?

9. Sent your clients an article that you believe they would be interested in, and you do this at least 2-4 times a month?

10. Took the CXO to an event that he/she would find useful for his/her business development?

11. Built relationships between your strategic account team and the different influencers in your strategic clients?

12. Ensured your CEO had lunch with the CEO of all of your Strategic Accounts, at least twice per year?

Your Answers Are Important – Here’s Why

If you answered in a negative way (meaning you’ve ignored them for more than six months) to five or more of these questions, then that account is not strategic to you, and they could be working with a competitor right now, and you won’t know it, until it’s too late, and you get that dreaded phone call to say they are leaving for the competition.

These questions are just a few of the ways you need to work with your major accounts, to ensure they remain your clients, and allow you to grow these accounts, so that you can become strategic with them, if that is what you want.

By becoming strategic with your B2B clients, you will automatically eliminate the competition, as these accounts realize they cannot grow without your support and your products and services.

The post Making the Business Case for Leadership Development appeared first on People First.

The lives of most sales people seem to be split between two types of frenzied activities—prospecting, trying to find someone willing to talk to you and chasing down deals. Often, our engagement models are reflections of this frenzy.

We send 1000’s of emails, hoping enough people respond. For those that do, we’re in a rush to qualify–qualifying even the most marginal because our pipelines are empty.

The deals that we do find are tough. Customers are much more educated and informed. They’ve done their homework, they know (or at least think they know) what they are looking for. We face tough competition, work at closing a deal–often winning because we offered the greatest discount.

We eke out some purchase orders, celebrate for a moment, then go back and do the same thing all over again. Prospect, pitch, discount, win/lose, prospect pitch, discount…….

Customers’ lives are busy and frenzied, as well. We struggle to get time with them—they’re busy doing other things, plus they let their fingers to the research on the web.

In the end, if we’re lucky, we get to share 2% of our customers’ time with our competitors.

That’s it, it’s pretty startling. The amount of work time customers spend buying–in deals that you can compete for–is roughly 2% of their total work time. That’s roughly 40 hours a year!

It’s impossible to develop relationships, to really understand the customer and what they are trying to achieve, to guide and influence them to help make a great decision if we are limited to the 2% of their time when they are actively buying.

It’s impossible to do our best selling then!

I was struck by a quote from a high performing sales person. He said, “I do my best selling when my customer isn’t buying.”

The trick this sales person had discovered was how to gain access, build credibility, trust, and value. It wasn’t during that 2%–customers behave differently during that 2%. This sales person sought to engage the customer during that 98%. Getting in early, understanding the customer, understanding their business, talking to the customer about new opportunities, getting them to understand new methods, and ways to improve the business. Building the customers’ interests in changing, in looking at new solutions, engaging them long before they are buying.

Top performers, also, act differently after the deal is done. Where most sales people run off in search of the next PO, top performers realize the deal isn’t really done. The customer has to realize the value committed for the solution–they have to make it work. This is, possibly, the highest risk period for the customer. If they don’t get the value committed to their management–they’ve failed! They’ve wasted time, resources, money. They may have lost opportunities. Ultimately, they might lose their jobs.

Top sales performers recognize this. They make sure the customer realizes the value committed. These sales people understand the risks customers take. But they also understand, if they are going to build a strong platform for referrals, or if they want to grow the relationship and results with their customers, they have to realize the value. Top sales performers stay engaged, driving growth in the account and through referrals.

All of this is happening during that 98% of the customer time. All this helps build disproportionate advantage during that 2% of the time the customer is buying. All to better position top performers to win.

There’s not a whole lot of magic in this engage, win, grow process. It’s all based on fundamentals of understanding your customer, building relationships and value in every interchange. Growing those relationships and that value through the life cycles of the relationships they have with all their customers.

Steve Andersen and Dave Stein explore this process brilliantly in Beyond The Sales Process, 12 Proven Strategies For A Customer Driven World.

When I read the book, I was reminded of my early lessons in selling. There were no tricks, no techniques, no manipulation. It was just the basics of understanding what customers value, demonstrating that value in the sales process, and assuring the customer realized the value. Done consistently, I was able to create customers for life and those customers helped me constantly grow my customer base.

Steve and Dave have a time-tested approach that’s rock solid. Make sure you take the time to read, study, execute!

Customer experience: powered by Voice-of-the-Customer

Most executives recognize that customer experience is important to their business. In fact, Gartner Group says that 89 percent of companies expect to be competing primarily on customer experience… as of now (better hurry).

To compete on customer experience, companies need to consistently deliver a better experience. To do that, they need to understand the experiences they’re delivering today. This is why Voice-of-the-Customer Programs are such a priority for so many businesses; the ability to listen to your customers is crucial to your ability to compete on customer experience.

In fact, fully 95 percent of companies say they regularly listen to their customers. Of these, 84 percent regularly ask customers for feedback, while 11 percent do so occasionally. Yet despite this widespread collection of customer feedback, only 29 percent of firms with VoC in place systematically incorporate insights about customer needs into their decision-making processes. And nearly three-fourths don’t think that their VoC programs are effective at driving actions.

Sadly, they’re right. An HBR article noted that marketing decision makers in the Fortune 100 use data just 11 percent of the time to make decisions that affect customers.

Doing the math: VoC leaders consistently blow away the rest of the pack.

A recent Aberdeen Group report titled The Business Value of Building a Best-in-Class VoC Program (download with free registration) nails this to the wall. According to their research, Best-in-class VoC users—the top 20 percent of respondents, based on performance—enjoy an almost 10-times greater year-over-year increase in annual company revenue compared to all others.

I don’t know about you, but that number is eye-popping to me. At the end of the day, radically increased revenue growth is what it’s all about. Some of the other findings that help contribute to that top (and their bottom) lines include that fact that, compared to all others, best-in-class VoC users also:

• Enjoy 55% greater customer retention rates
• Have an average 23% decrease in year-over-year customer service costs
• Sport 292% greater employee engagement rates

VoC Programs are the only way to systematically listen to your customers, use this information to take action, and monitor your performance over time. The truth is, customer experience “lives” entirely in the minds of your customers. Great experiences mean expectations are exceeded; good experiences mean they’re met; bad experiences mean these expectations are not met.

If you don’t understand customer and market perceptions or how interactions with your firm are being experienced by your customers, it’s nearly impossible to regularly meet, much less exceed, customer expectations, or to improve your organizations performance.

Customer experience leaders are VoC leaders

At a high level, VoC leaders are better than just about everyone else at doing a few things consistently. I go into more depth in my article here on designing a VoC program, but the upshot is their unparalleled ability to systematically collect and analyze customer data, followed by the ability to consistently put these insights into action. Examples of this include customer experience leaders like:

• Zappos: When it comes to creating great experiences, Zappos says that the number one tool any company can use is listening. Backing this up with action, they “respond to every single customer inquiry, whether it’s via phone, email, live chat, Twitter, Facebook, Zappos blog, etc.” In fact, many of their experience improvements are inspired by customer feedback.
• Apple: Listening to customers is more than lip service at Apple. CEO Tim Cook reads—and sometimes responds to—up to a hundred customer emails every day. And despite the myth, Steve Jobs really DID listen to customers. Maybe people don’t know what they want until you show them. But if you show them and pay attention to what they say and do? Bingo.

• QVC: A top CX leader (number two in one national study, behind USAA), QVC encourages customers to share via product feedback, ratings, community forums, and on-air testimonials. They regularly listening to and thanking customers by promoting Customer Picks, and responding to all kinds of on-air questions. It’s real-time, transparent VoC.

• Amazon: All departments at Amazon, are completely data-driven—based on the success and failures of the customer experience. And like Apple’s Tim Cook, CEO Jeff Bezos is a hands-on advocate for VoC, driving it from the top. To which, he’s known for forwarding emails from unsatisfied customers to members of his team and demanding a fix within hours.

Customer experience: powered by Voice-of-the-Customer

Your customers will tell you what their experiences are. In fact, listening to your customers is the only way to systematically deliver a better customer experience. This “outside-in” view of your company, combined with a deep understanding of your customers is how CX leaders lead.

This is where Voice-of-the-Customer (VoC) Programs come into play.

The bottom line is this: Listening to the needs of your customers isn’t an optional exercise; it’s mandatory. Even if you don’t intend to differentiate on customer experience (and you’re in a small minority if so) the value of listening to customers is real, measurable and immediate.

So get cracking. If you’re anything less than 100 percent enthusiastic about your ability to address customer needs, begin the process of designing and deploying a VoC program for your business. You won’t regret it.

All life on Earth evolved from water. Water is the key prerequisite for life. We humans consist of eighty percent water. What water means for all of us, that’s what content could mean for the 21^st century’s buyers. An adventurous hypothesis? Maybe. Let’s see what story our latest CSO Insights research will tell us.

How effective is client-facing content? The results are multifaceted.

In our CSO Insights 2015 Sales Enablement Optimization Study, we asked the participants to rank the effectiveness of various enablement services, such as client-facing content, in four categories: “exceeds expectations,” “meets expectations,” “needs improvement,” and, the lowest ranking, “needs major redesign.”

The content types that showed the biggest need for major redesign (26.5%) and improvement (45.7%) were business value/ROI justification tools. The next content asset, third-party endorsements, follows with less need for major redesign (18.9%) but the same need for improvement (45.7%). Email templates, customer case studies, and presentations showed a similar result, with more than 50% of both, need for improvement and major redesign.

Interestingly, the most effective client-facing content type was the technical product presentation (“meets expectations” and “exceeds expectations” aggregated at 60.1%), followed by product collateral (51.9%) and proposal templates (50.9%). References and customer presentations show a multifaceted result. While they seem to be the content types with the highest “exceeds expectations” result (10.2% and 9.9%), they also show considerable needs for major redesign (16% and 15%).

The transformation from product-selling approaches to more value and result-oriented sales approaches is still the main challenge in many organizations across all industries. And that’s what we see in the data. These data points have also incorporated what salespeople are used to using rather than what they should be using. This challenge, here focused on client-facing content habits, is not only a sales challenge, but it’s also an enablement, content strategy, and content management issue.

Let’s keep this multifaceted information in our minds, and look at the business impact of effective-rated, or rather ineffective-rated, client-facing content.

The effectiveness of client-facing content impacts the relationship organizations can develop with their customers.

Now, what impacts effective content? How do we get there? What hinders organizations from creating effective content?Overall, there is a significant correlation between the effectiveness of client-facing content and the level of relationships that can be achieved with clients. The more effective client-facing content is, the more likely providers can develop a high-level relationship with their customers as you can see here. Content ranked as “meets expectations” or “exceeds expectations” is more likely to lead to a strategic partnership (63%) or a strategic contributor role (59%). In this “effective content” category, only 29% ended up as a preferred supplier or as a supplier (13%). Instead, content that is ranked as “needs improvements” or “needs major redesign” makes it very hard to develop a high-value relationship with clients such as strategic contributor (22%) or strategic partner (9%). With ineffective content, it’s more likely to end up as preferred supplier (45%) or supplier (60%). Simply look at the two different stair-step patterns in the chart here. The difference is quite significant.

The alignment of internal processes and frameworks to the customer’s journey is a prerequisite to creating effective content.

According to our data, organizations made lots of progress in aligning their internal processes to the customer’s journey: 54% reported to be mostly aligned, 19% to be fully aligned, 22% to be minimally aligned, and 5% not aligned at all. Overall, the high degree of alignment is surprising. Looking deeper in the data and in some of the interviews we made, it turns out that even if organizations have made some of the customer’s journey mapping exercises, it does not necessarily mean that they use these results on a regular basis in their sales process implementations and their enablement frameworks.

This fact might be one of the reasons why even a relatively high degree of alignment does not necessarily translate into effective enablement services, designed with the customer’s journey at the core. The time distance from mapping to translating to seeing measurable results might also be a reason many organizations seem to be in the middle of this transition.

Content matters. Content in the customer’s context matters even more. A well executed “outside-in” strategy makes the difference.

As the data says, the quality of client-facing content is a key element that significantly impacts the level of relationship you can achieve with your customers. The quality of your client-facing content is determined by your ability to tell your story from THEIR perspective (their customer’s journey, their context, their challenges, etc.), and not from the perspective of your products and services. Because customers don’t buy products. What they buy is the value they can achieve with your products and services. Now, what is the implication of this analysis?

Client-facing content must become a top priority on every sales leader’s strategic agenda

Having client-facing content on top of the sales leader’s agenda opens a window of opportunity for enablement leaders to establish a) an overall customer-core strategy and b) a sales force enablement framework with the customer’s journey at the core.

Highly effective customer-facing content that covers the entire customer’s journey is a must-have ingredient to remain successful in an ever-changing, buyer-driven world.

 

This article was first published over @ Top Sales Magazine April edition.

 

The post Content in the Customer’s Context Drives Customer Relationships appeared first on Sales Enablement Perspectives.

People lined up at Tesla dealerships for the chance to pre-order the company’s Model 3 vehicle. More than 200 people lined up in the rain in Montreal, for example, to put down their deposits.

It’s an amazing development, for several reasons. For one, when we do we ever see lineups to buy cars? And not just any lineup—a lineup that only grants you the right to pay $1,000 to reserve a car that won’t be delivered before late 2017 at the earliest. Plus these people didn’t actually know the features of the cars they were lining up for at the time. Sound familiar?

Such scenes are usually reserved for new iPhones, and in that case the potential buyers tend to already know what they’re queuing for.

That makes the lineups a significant development. Interest in electric vehicles is clearly growing, to the point where a growing number of people are willing to throw their names in on faith alone.

It’s increasingly looking like their faith will be rewarded. The Dutch government, for one, is looking at banning the sale of gas-powered vehicles by as soon as 2025, while India is doing the same with a target of 2030.

Tesla expects to sell about 50,000 cars this year, but that number is expected to shoot upward as the Model 3 will be its first car priced for the mainstream. The company’s cheapest existing car, the Model S, currently sells for $70,000 (U.S.).

Other car makers are also jumping into the fray, with the Chevy Bolt becoming available later this year with a price tag around $30,000 (U.S.).

Tesla, however, is also trying to change how cars are sold by pushing for the ability to sell them directly, online. A number of U.S. states don’t allow the practice, but with car buyers grossly dissatisfied with the existing process—which typically involves haggling with sales people—it’s a situation ripe for disruption.

Self-driving cars may change everything in the future, but it’s clear the vehicular revolution is already shifting into a higher gear in the present.

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MORE ABOUT TESLA, CARS & INNOVATION:

• How the coming boom in self-driving cars will affect every business
• How big data is helping startups and cities fight gridlock together
• A short history of giving away your patents
• Billionaire Elon Musk can set his patents free—but for most businesses it’s a terrible idea
• How Apple, Google and BlackBerry are fighting to control the future of Smart Cars
• The Hyperloop may be far-fetched, but the impossible is Elon Musk’s specialty

The post How Tesla is leading the Apple-ization of the automotive industry appeared first on Canadian Business - Your Source For Business News.

There’s a misconception about inside sales that I believe is rooted in its name. And it’s hurting many businesses. It’s the “inside” that leads people astray. Too many people think that it must mean that the salespeople are within their company’s walls. This belief is understandable, but it’s not always true. Inside salespeople are simply the opposite of field salespeople. They are not road warriors. They sell remotely and work inside an office, however, that office doesn’t have to be within your company.

Why is the idea that inside sales must take place within the organization hurting some companies? Because inside sales is more important than ever and many companies don’t have the skills or resources to institute or support a robust inside sales department. So they either go without this valuable function, or they stitch one together and limp along.

The B2B Sales Landscape Is Shifting

In recent years, a tidal wave has overrun the B2B sales landscape, changing it forever.

Sales organizations have shifted resources from field sales to inside sales. That’s according to the Harvard Business Review (HBR). They conducted research with over 100 vice presidents of sales in high-tech and business services companies. While some are moving resources to field sales (21%), more than twice as many (46%) are moving in the other direction.

Other figures are even more startling. An InsideSales.com study of sales and marketing managers in 30 non-retail industries shows inside sales growing 300% faster than field sales.

Why Inside Sales Is More Important than Ever

What’s driving the change? It’s all about technology, competition, scalability and results.

• Buyers Are Educated
  Because of the internet, buyers have access to more information than ever before.
• Technology Is an Enabler
  They can be more productive than ever due to technology such as CRM systems, dialers, predictive analysis, marketing automation, online conferencing, social media platforms, appointment setting software and more. All these tools help inside salespeople develop intimate customer relationships even though they do not have face-to-face meetings.
• Inside Sales Is Cost Effective
  The pressure to be competitive is ever-present, and inside sales people cost less than their on-the-road counterparts. When companies analyze return on investment, inside sales often proves to be the winner.
• It’s Easier to Scale
  HBR also discovered that sales leaders felt it was easier to bring new inside salespeople onboard than field sales people, train them and scale their organizations.
• It Gets Results Because companies can increase the number of calls they make, inside sales results increase sales volumes.

Inside Sales: Keep It in or Send It Out?

Given the advantages, going without an inside sales team or using one that’s not up to par, can put your organization at a significant handicap.

So, should you build up your inside sales organization or outsource the function?

First, you’ll want to consider the costs. The investment in an inside sales organization goes beyond salaries, benefits and commissions for agents. You also have management, recruitment and training expenses. Then there’s the infrastructure: phone systems, CRM solutions, office space and computers.

It adds up.

But that’s just one side of the equation. You also have to think about the productivity of doing the job internally. After all, is inside sales a core competency of your organization? For companies that offer outsourced inside sales, it’s often their entire focus. They have the know-how and the systems in place to optimize results. This foundation enables them to make more calls and set more sales appointments. Also, since they qualify the leads better, the appointments are likely to result in higher sales close rates.

How about inside sales turnover! When an inside sales person leaves, you are left with a huge hole. That hole can be even greater if you have a team with multiple languages. If you lose an inside sales person who was responsible for a specific language, you are in trouble. This is mitigated when you outsource to a professional, international outsourced provider. They will have qualified replacements ready to jump in when needed. Scaling is not a problem, and you never lose the business intelligence.

When you crunch the numbers, you’ll discover that in many cases, outsourced telemarketing is less expensive and produces more closed sales, thus delivering a higher return on investment.

To learn more, get our free white paper, “Telemarketing Execution: In-House or Outsource?” Find out how to evaluate the cost and ROI of outsourcing inside sales.

As marketers, we spend a lot of our time and resources on lead generation. But unfortunately, the leads we generate don’t always translate into revenue. In fact, 50% of marketing generated leads are never followed up on by Sales (Miller Pierce).

In the last decade, Sales and Marketing have taken great strides to integrate their processes, but there’s still a disconnect between the two teams. Traditionally, Sales has been measured by revenue and Marketing on lead volume. But what if Sales and Marketing were both responsible for revenue?

To get Sales and Marketing on the same page, we’ve teamed up with Integrate to provide B2B marketers with a next-level Account-Based Advertising offering. It’s an automated process to generate high-value leads from decision-makers at specific target accounts showing elevated interest. We have found that by increasing the quality of the leads you deliver to Sales, velocity increases, deal size improves and conversion rates swell.

So how does it work?

1. Build a list of target accounts

Your target account list consists of companies with the most potential to your business. It can include customers, prospects, partners or a mix of all three.

There are several ways to approach this process:

• Use the list of accounts your sales team has put together

• Gather key stakeholders from both Marketing and Sales to align over a set of key accounts

• Use data to generate a list of target accounts that fit a predetermined set of parameters like industry, growth stage, revenue tier and technology adoption

• Leverage predictive analytics to discern the attributes of your best customers and build a list of pre-qualified, ranked accounts

2. Proactively target companies and decision makers

Once you’ve identified which accounts you’ll want to target, Demandbase can help to run personalized display ads to specific companies. With these targeted ads and analytics to identify which are showing buying signals, you’ll be able to understand which companies are interested in learning more about your offerings.

3. Generate new target account-based leads

From there, Integrate will focus on the accounts showing active buying signals and engage key stakeholders from those accounts. You’ll end up with a list of high-quality leads that have already engaged with your company and content, which makes them more likely to convert into customers.

Lead generation doesn’t have to be such a struggle. By automating the process and focusing on priority accounts, you can align with your sales team and work together to grow the business and drive revenue.

If you’re curious to see how this works in action, watch this on-demand webinar to see how Demandbase and Integrate work together.

When it comes to marketing, there’s strength in numbers.

• The more people you have marketing your products, the better they’re going to sell.
• Also, the more people you have supporting your community, the more enticing it’ll be for others to join in.

Evangelism marketing is the practice of convincing your customers to develop so much brand loyalty that they’re not just willing, but are actively excited about sharing the good word about your products.

From the perspective of the evangelist, this makes perfect sense:

• They’ve found a product that they really enjoy, and they know their friends will love it too
• They want to be able to geek out about their favorite things with someone else who shares that passion
• If somebody is struggling to use a product, they’re happy to share their expertise to help them solve the problem.

A stronger community of fans for a product means that everyone has more fun.

It also means that your products will sell better – friend recommendations are hugely important to the decision to make a purchase for many customers:

• 77% of buyers are more likely to buy a product if their first interaction with it comes from a friend or family member.
• Marketers are aware of this importance: 88% of marketers count customer loyalty as one of their top priorities, and 69% are actively working to encourage brand evangelism.

That said, it can sometimes be difficult to convince a customer base to buy into your brand so much that they’re willing to take to the streets.

Some products have an easier time of getting people excited than others:

• New computer or phone technology already has an in-built community of enthusiasts
• Other products, such as toasters, don’t have the same pre-existing community of excited users.

If you’re looking to build up your brand’s community and turn your customers into brand ambassadors, you’ve come to the right place – I’ve compiled a guide to turning your casual users into enthusiastic, die-hard evangelists.

The Most Important Thing

There’s one thing that every brand absolutely needs before it can build a strong following of customer evangelists:

Quality products or services.

• Put simply, if you want people to rave about your company, you need to give them a reason to. It’s that simple.

So, bearing in mind that you’ve already put a lot of work into creating a powerful, successful product that everyone will love, how can you convince customers to share it with their friends?

Inspiring Loyalty

The truth is, inspiring an evangelist attitude comes from more than just a great product.

• As I said earlier, plenty of great products don’t have a solid community of users who rally around them.
• The trick is to get customers to think of your product as a lifestyle choice, rather than as a necessity.

As much as you want customers to feel like they can’t live without your product, you also need them to feel like they made an active choice in buying from you.

• This choice is important from a psychological perspective – it gives customers a sense of belonging to an exclusive club of like-minded people.
• Once they’re in the club, they’ll be eager to start recruiting their friends and family to join as well.

One common way to create this kind of loyalty is through the introduction of an incentivized loyalty scheme.

• Schemes which reward customers for multiple purchases mean that customers keep coming back for more.
• It’s rare, though, for customers to get so excited about their fringe benefits that they start sharing your products far and wide.

So, to make a club that people want to participate in, you need to build a community.

Building A Community Around Your Product

It’s not always easy to convince people to rally behind your product.

To build a group of dedicated fans, you’ll need to provide your customers with several things:

• A space to openly discuss your products
• Plenty of help and assistance when users need support
• A reason to keep coming back to your website
• Freedom to express any kind of opinion (even negative or off-topic ones)

It’s crucial that your customers don’t feel like their comments will be censored or filtered in any way – they need to know that their opinions are listened to, and that the comments they see from other users are genuine.

For this reason, the best way to attract users to your community is by appealing to their needs.

This can include:

• Publishing relevant content that’s aimed at existing customers, not just attracting first time buyers
• Providing a dedicated, fast support service for those who run into trouble
• Offering (often unexpected) rewards and bonuses for those who get involved

Basically, the trick to creating a healthy community around your product is working to market your company to people who are already customers, and strengthening your bond with existing regulars.

To do this, you’re going to need to know exactly what your customers need, and how you can improve the service that you offer them.

Research Customer Needs

Researching what your customers want is a fantastic way to help convert existing users into evangelists.

This is the case for several reasons:

• Getting clear feedback from your customers helps you to better tailor your post-purchase service to help develop a stronger bond with your customers.
• Showing that you’re interested enough in their opinion to seek their advice helps customers to trust your company.

If customers feel that they’re genuinely being listened to, they’re more likely to share with you – which inevitably leads to sharing with other customers, and the development of a community.

What’s more, you can take the feedback you get and turn it into constructive improvements that can be made to your service, making sure that future customers are happier with the aftercare you provide.

The Correct Space for Feedback

When it comes to collecting opinions and feedback, there are plenty of options for collecting large amounts of data through automated services and systems, such as questionnaires and feedback forms.

These are not ideal for encouraging brand loyalty.

You can definitely get a lot of great data from these resources, but one key element of developing a strong relationship with your customers means letting them speak openly, and in a public setting.

This can include:

• Internet forums
• Social media groups
• Website comments sections

It’s important that your customers are able to express themselves fully, without being constrained by the questions that you ask.

• A customer might want to give you feedback that deviates from the questions you’ve asked, and not giving them a dedicated space for their concerns will lead to frustration as the customers feel like you’re not taking their feedback seriously.

For this reason, it’s important that customers can see the concerns and issues that other users are raising.

• This leads to camaraderie between customers, and some users might even get involved in helping to solve issues when they arise and provide troubleshooting advice.
• This is the case with plenty of tech support forums on the internet, including many such as Microsoft’s which are run by the company itself.

Dealing With Negative Comments

Obviously a public space will lend itself to some abuse, as customers who are less than pleased use it as an opportunity to vent frustration.

• The natural response to these comments will be to either censor or remove them, or at best to simply ignore them.
• In reality, though, these comments will go a long way to helping your community develop.

If you react with courtesy and friendliness when users bring up concerns, it’ll go a long way to helping other customers learn to trust and respect your platform – even if you can’t solve their problems.

• They know they can be open and honest, and no matter what, your company will work to address their concerns and help them to overcome their challenges.
• They also know that your brand can be approached in any context and will respond with warmth and respect – helping to further establish your company as a friend whose products are worth sharing with others.

In some circumstances, you may even find that argumentative commenters are dealt with by other members of your community:

• Seeing a brand that they enjoy suffering from abuse will lead others to develop greater solidarity and support for your company
• Your customers will become more dedicated and eager to share details about your products with others, to counteract the negativity they’ve seen from some other users.
• A good community tends to filter out bad eggs naturally, while the threat they pose means that other community members close ranks and develop closer ties.

Of course, this is the best case scenario – sometimes you might have to step in and mediate over arguments, but your goal should be helping users to befriend each other, and sometimes that means giving them the freedom to express themselves fully.

Make It Personal

So you’ve built a solid online space that your customers can interact, either on a website you control or on social media.

• The next step is encouraging them to invite others to join in the discussion.

There are plenty of examples of this done well, but let’s have a look at one that you should be familiar with: Coca-Cola’s Share a Coke campaign.

In order to draw more customers to their products, Coke started to print special labels for the bottles.

In a massive campaign that has seen hundreds of thousands of unique labels printed, Coke personalized their bottles and cans.

• Each bottle and can invited the drinker to ‘share a coke with’ a person, with large random names printed in the Coca Cola font.

Coke drinkers around the world have jumped at the opportunity to share their favorite drink with friends, whenever they’ve discovered a can or bottle that appears to be personally labelled for somebody they know.

• What’s more, plenty of new customers or occasional drinkers have been brought into the Coke fold as they’ve seen a drink that literally has their name on it.

The lesson to take away from this: customers respond positively and eagerly for a chance to share your products if you point them in the direction of who they should be sharing with.

So how can you put this to use in your own marketing campaigns?

• First, it’s important to remember that many of your customers want to share products they enjoy, they’re just looking for an opportunity.

Evangelism doesn’t come naturally: you need to teach customers how to share.

Teaching Behavior

I’ve talked already about how customer evangelism needs to come with a reward.

There are plenty of possible ways of encouraging sharing, but the best rewards are often social. This can include:

• Making the product more enjoyable if it’s shared.
• Financial incentives to sharing with others.
• A sense that through sharing, customers are doing their friends a favor.

Financial rewards are very common in sharing schemes – typically, both the new customers and the old one get a perk, such as freebies or money off their products.

This doesn’t create lasting loyalty, but it can get the ball rolling.

Some products are more enjoyable when they’re shared – these might be added benefits, or they could simply be social enjoyment.

• For example, sharing a well-loved book or movie with a friend leads to a chance to better discuss the book itself.
• Alternatively, there are examples like the video game Destiny, in which if a player recruits a new user, both of them receive special bonus items and dance moves which can enhance their experience playing together.

It’s common for people who become emotionally invested in an online community to want to recruit their friends, and similarly, you want to teach people to invite people they know to join in the discussion on your product.

While financial or exclusive incentive schemes have a limited range of effectiveness, they can help users to begin their first steps of evangelism.

As customers form a pattern of behavior that involves sharing your products with their friends, it will become more and more easy for them to share with others.

Turn Your Brand into a Lifestyle

The next step beyond encouraging and teaching your customers to spread the word about your products is getting to the point where they’re doing it without even thinking.

You’ve met people before who are like this:

• Typically, they can’t help but tell you all about their favorite company.
• Their first and last point of conversation is about something they’re read or heard about what this company is doing.
• If it’s somebody’s birthday, the first gift idea they’ll think of is something from the company.

Electronics companies in particular seem to do a great job of inspiring this kind of devotion, and there’s a good reason for that: technology is a big part of our lives, so choosing a brand means buying into a lifestyle.

It’s possible for any brand to develop a lifestyle around it – common brand types that manage this include:

• Clothing
• Music
• Food
• Literature or movies

There are a few key steps to developing this kind of loyalty. You need your customers to feel like:

• They’re part of an exclusive club – not everybody is allowed to join in the fun.
• They have their own name, culture, language and jokes within the club.
• There’s a rival club that should be avoided at all costs.

These traits are common for the kinds of brand culture that clothing and electronics companies develop – the idea that through association with the brand, users take on the elements of the brand themselves.

This can often be a large, costly branding exercise, but the simplest way to develop this lifestyle is to create content that encourages the development of the culture that you want to build.

Take, for example, Beats by Dre.

It’s not the quality of the product that sells these items – the lifestyle that exist around them is what draws in customers.

• People want to be seen wearing Beats because the brand is associated with being young, exciting and popular.
• A large part of this success comes from the big name celebrity attached to the headphones (Dr Dre is a pretty decent businessman).
• However, its success also comes from the thousands of customers who treat the product like a status symbol, and who will do everything they can to show off their Beats.

So how can you encourage the development of a lifestyle around your brand?

One of the best ways is to provide content for your customers that shows them the way your products can be used to enrich all aspects of their lives.

This can mean:

• Blog articles pointing out the many uses of your products.
• Social media posts linking your brand to current affairs and showing your products in different real world scenarios.
• Portraying your brand as an important, essential part of your customers’ culture.

Coming back to Coca-Cola, the company used a slogan for many years in Britain during important soccer tournaments to create a link between their brand and the national sport:

“Eat Football, Sleep Football, Drink Coca-Cola”.

• This campaign enforced a link in viewers minds between obsessive soccer supporter and Coca-Cola.
• It lead people to believe that soccer fans drink Coca-Cola to support their game.
• To back this up, Coca-Cola also sponsored a series of soccer tournaments to get their branding everywhere.

This is the kind of connection you want to build: your customers should see your product as a vital part of their lifestyle.

When this connection has been made, everyone will expect people like them to buy into your product, because it’s a key part of their identity within their friendship circles.

Evangelism is Contagious

If all of this sounds like a large leap, don’t worry: the hardest part is finding your first few evangelists.

• Enthusiasm for your brand will grow quicker the more people are singing your praises.
• Once you’ve got a few evangelists, it will become exponentially easier to convert more customers.

Think of your army of evangelists as minor celebrities – if you have enough, they’ll add up to the cumulative effect of Dr Dre or other large, popular endorsers.

Love Your Employees

Perhaps you’re looking at your current customer base, and you’re wondering how you can begin starting to turn your existing pool of users into evangelists.

If this is the case, it’s worth considering the perfect team of brand evangelists you already have at your disposal: your employees.

• If your employees are invested in the company, they’ll be eager to tell everyone they meet about how wonderful your brand is.
• They also present a good first impressions for people associating with your brand for the first time, making them crucial to creating a positive company image.

In order to help your employees become enthusiastic about your brand, you need to:

• Listen to their needs and provide an enjoyable working environment
• Give them a reason to feel personally interested in the future of the company
• Let them know what the company goals are and what the plan is for reaching them.

Employee loyalty isn’t something that can be forced, though: any time when a company attempts to control what employees post on social media, it tends to backfire.

Instead, you need to focus on making sure your employees are as happy as possible, and they’ll develop loyalty and excitement about your brand as a result.

Be Nice, Reap the Rewards

Above all, the most important step in encouraging customer evangelists is giving them a good reason to love your brand.

This can be done through:

• High quality products
• Great customer service
• Happy employees
• A positive culture surrounding your company

If you can use these tools to develop strong brand loyalty, your customers will naturally want to shout your praises from the rooftops.

Have another suggestion for driving sales with customer evangelists? Leave your best battle-tested tips in the comments section below:

Images:

Flickr, Content Marketing Institute, Flickr, Wikipedia, Flickr, Wikipedia, Microsoft Answers, Flickr, Flickr, Wikipedia, Pixabay, Flickr, Flickr, Google, Wikipedia, Flickr.

“The Challenger Sale” by Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson has been one of the most talked-about sales books of the past decade – and has been described by no less an authority than SPIN-Selling author Neil Rackham as “the most important advance in selling for many years”.

Based on an impressive body of research, the book sets out an attractive and seductive formula for achieving sales success – and it’s attracted the attention of a significant number of CEOs who are looking for a way to differentiate their organisation from the competition and accelerate revenue growth.

But as many have discovered, adopting Challenger is neither a miracle cure nor a sure-fire recipe for success. In a number of instances, Challenger Selling has transformed sales performance – but in others, it has failed to achieve the hoped-for results. How can these differences be explained?

The first thing to make clear is that you can’t hope to successfully implement any sales methodology by simply sending people on a training course or (even worse) giving them a book to read, but this is particularly true for Challenger. It requires the full commitment of both sales and marketing if it is to succeed.

THE ESSENCE OF CHALLENGER SELLING

Here’s what the authors have to say: “Instead of bludgeoning customers with endless facts and features about their company and products, Challenger sales people are supposed to approach customers with unique insights about how they can make or save money, and then tailor their sales message to the customer’s specific needs and objectives.”

They go on: “Rather than acquiescing to the customer’s every demand or objection, they are assertive, pushing back when necessary and taking control of the sale”. This mantra is often summarised as teach > tailor > take control. Finally, they confront the traditional idea that sales is primarily about relationships – and conclude that “the best sales people don’t just build relationships with customers – they challenge them”.

Unfortunately, a number of naïve and simplistic summaries of the book have concluded that relationships don’t matter in selling (they do!), and that because the average prospect is 57% through their buying cycle before they want to engage a sales person, that we should not try to get involved any earlier (we must!).

But even for the organisations that have guzzled the Challenger Selling Kool-Aid and avoided these dangerous misinterpretations, there are still a number – maybe even a majority – of Challenger Sales projects that haven’t come close to achieving their potential. Here are a few of the most common reasons…

WHAT IF MARKETING ISN’T UP TO THE TASK?

Challenger Selling is a mind-set that must be adopted and embraced by everyone in marketing as well as everyone in sales, because marketing has to provide the fuel – in the form of compelling insights – that drives the Challenger Selling engine.

One of the most common reasons for failure is that marketing isn’t up to the task: it remains fixated on traditional feature-function-benefit product marketing and simply isn’t close enough to either their customers or the sales people to craft the necessary compelling insights.

Or, even if they do manage to create some insightful pieces, they see the job as being done when the material is published, and do nothing to equip the sales people to conduct the subsequent sales conversation in a way that personalises the problem or dramatises the opportunity for the prospect.

To compound the issue, marketing is often still measured and rewarded by the number of leads they generate and not on the number of qualified opportunities that end up in the sales pipeline. And sometimes – speak it softly – they simply aren’t smart enough to grasp the new realities of marketing.

Any of these factors by themselves can scupper a Challenger Selling initiative, but if they are compounded together, you’ve probably got no chance of pulling the initiative off. A handful of your smartest sales people will find ways of coping without, but the bulk of your sales people are going to struggle.

WHAT IF YOUR SALES PEOPLE AREN’T UP TO THE TASK?

Challenger Selling, by its very nature, requires a level of intelligence, curiosity, cognitive capability and agility that isn’t present in all sales people. Unfortunately, in many organisations, such sales people are in the minority. The research actually concluded that around a quarter of the sales population are natural challengers.

Others might have the potential to be developed to act more like Challengers if given the necessary coaching. But it’s an unfortunate truth that many sales people lack some of the basic attributes to ever adopt a Challenger mentality. It’s better to recognise this and reassign them to other responsibilities than to expect them to make the transition, no matter how much training they are exposed to.

In a way, Challenger is simply a response to increasing customer expectations. Your prospects expect more from every sales interaction. They have become immune to traditional “always be closing” sales tactics. They enjoy having a stimulating conversation with a sales person, and they resent being subjected to yet another ineptly delivered product pitch.

The uncomfortable consequence is that there are a group of sales people who may have been effective in less demanding times, but will increasingly and progressively struggle to cope with a more demanding prospect base. Implementing Challenger simply highlights their shortcomings a little ahead of time and brings forward the inevitable.

WHAT IF YOUR ORGANIZATION ISN’T SUFFICIENTLY COMMITTED?

Implementing a Challenger Selling initiative can generate truly transformative rewards, but it requires a non-trivial company-wide commitment to make it work. If you’re prepared to seek out and confront any weaknesses in your marketing and sales organisations, you stand a great chance of reaping the benefits.

Maybe you’re uncomfortable about the consequences. But how much more uncomfortable might it be if a competitor seized the opportunity to build an unbridgeable advantage in their go-to-market strategy? In this, as in so many other matters, great rewards are often founded on tough choices…

Lead scoring—the ranking of prospective clients (i.e., leads) according to the value each might bring to the firm—is one of the most valuable tools in business development (BD) and marketing. Unfortunately, most BD folks don’t know where to begin with lead scoring, let alone how to get the most out of it.

What is lead scoring?

BD and marketing teams use lead scoring to assess a lead’s interest based on the frequency and consistency of their engagement. There are two major goals for lead scoring:

1. Identify and target leads by the actions they have as taken (such as downloading guides, responding to offers, or attending webinars).
2. Prioritize and sort inbound leads according to their lead score.

By “bubbling up” these leads in your CRM, you can identify good prospects, better understand their behavior, and interests and strategically market to them.

Why is lead scoring important?

So what are the key benefits to lead scoring?

1. Increase in revenue. In a study conducted by Aberdeen Research, top performing organizations using lead scoring demonstrated 192% higher average lead qualification rate and their conversion rate.
2. Increased business development proficiency and success. You turn your attention to leads that the firm considers most valuable. While not entirely disqualifying leads automatically, lead scoring ensures leads with a higher value will get more attention. Note: lead scoring isn’t always accurate so evaluating leads using other methods for vetting is still suggested for uncertain leads.
3. Stronger marketing and business development alignment. Lead scoring helps strengthen the bridge between marketing and business development by implementing a process by which marketing and business development leaders can work together to enhance quality and quantity of leads generated through marketing.
4. Increased marketing efficiency. Lead scoring identifies highly engaged prospects that have not raised their hand yet, which helps marketing target its prospects better through inbound and outbound strategies and converts more highly qualified prospects to clients.

Where to start?

Step 1: Define what criteria classifies as a qualified lead. The reality is, there is no single, perfect formula for lead scoring, despite what people might be selling you. Lead scoring depends on so many different variables, and those variables change all the time. So, before you start with any scoring method, you must identify that criteria and data that matter to you.

Remember, you will want to capture both implicit and explicit data when looking to identify leads. Explicit data is information about your prospect (their name, company they work for, role, size of company, etc). Implicit data helps you measure the level of engagement of a prospect. You can capture explicit data using forms on your website. You can capture more implicit data by tracking certain actions and creating tags within your CRM to organize contacts based those actions.

These are just a few examples of different actions:

• Email opens
• Email click-throughs
• Web page visit
• Consultation requests
• Form submission and downloads
• Webinar registrant.

Step 2: Determine and customize point values

Having identified leads and created your tags, you can start to set and assign point values to actions that can later use to determine the overall value of your lead. These actions equal a predetermined value by your business development team. Once the scoring is implemented, leads scores are updated by either adding or subtracting points to a prospect’s contact record.

Using the sample actions above, you can begin to score each prospect.

Every CRM is different, so it’s important that you learn what kind of lead scoring service your CRM has to offer. Most common CRMs have a 5-level lead score ranking, with 1 being the lowest rank and 5 the highest. Each level is usually measured by a number of points.

For example, if 50 is the maximum number of points a person can receive then your lead scoring scale would look like this:

01­–10 points = 1 Tier

11–20 points = 2 Tier

21–30 points= 3 Tier

31–40 points= 4 Tier

41–50 points = 5 Tier

Remember, it’s up to you and your BD team to decide the number of points you will measure each action taken.

You would then score each action tagged in step 1. Different tags fall under different categories. To come up with a strategy for scoring leads, it might be helpful to categorize tags under certain actions and scoring them. You can also set rules for these scores that expire after a few months.

You can also give negative scores to prospects that unsubscribe or opt out of offers. Below is one example of a lead scoring strategy.

Using lead scoring in your BD process

Below are a few ways you can use lead scoring to enhance your BD process.

• Prioritize. An inbound lead’s score determines priority of attention. For example, if your sales representative has 10 prospects to contact, she can prioritize the list leads based on lead score.
• Strategize. Lead scoring can be used to strategize outbound marketing campaigns and help target prospects that have not “raised their hand.”
• Connect. Set up your CRM to notify your sales team when a lead reaches a certain score. This will prompt you to reach out to prospects that are actively engaging with your company.

Lead scoring is not the be-all, end-all for your sales process. It is not always accurate and will need to be updated. Some prospects may rank higher based on engagement, but may not be a fully qualified lead based on other criteria.

Despite its imperfection, lead scoring has real benefits in the constantly connected marketplace of today. When used properly, lead scoring can increase sales and the overall success of your BD and marketing efforts.

Perhaps more than any marketing role today, the range from which a content marketer must stretch his or her skill sets continues to expand. We have to be both strategic marketers and creative artists, with analytical minds and prolific pens. Yet more and more, these two worlds of thought collide as the art and science of storytelling becomes a unified function within enterprise businesses.

Marketing isn’t just about telling a compelling story through a campaign or strategy, but about embedding story form into the culture and minds of every employee. It’s all one big production these days, and as content leaders pushing the boundaries at our respective stations, we have to become the directors on set; the artists orchestrating all the moving parts.

Customer personas have long been a staple of marketing teams. These profiles help bucket buyers into boxes so that we can align what we create to what we think people want. There’s still value in developing personas at a high level, but when it comes to the creation of new marketing materials, we have to dig deeper as authors to bring out the best in our writing and creativity.

So rather than thinking of our audience in personas, let’s focus on the basics of character development to ensure that every person, place, or thing included in a story plays a specific role. Here’s how to apply the art of character development to your marketing strategy.

4 Examples of Character Development in Action

While we may not be aware of the individual decisions made when developing characters in popular movies and stories, we all can recognize examples in pop culture when we learned the history of a main character, watched as relationships blossomed or dissolved, related to an individual, and spent a few hours in a fictional person’s head.

In business storytelling, it’s harder to recall these moments, but they’re there just below the surface. Here are four examples of when businesses executed proper character development in marketing.

Progressive Gives a Behind-the-Scenes Look at Flo’s Family Life

One-off advertisements rarely provide a canvas big enough for deep character development, but when companies go all in and construct a spokesperson to represent the product or service, true magic happens.

Progressive’s main character Flo isn’t just a deal-wielding Robin Hood of insurance; she’s a person trying to win the praise of her family, just like us. Whether we’re learning about new Progressive products or opportunities to save, the company cleverly weaves in personal narratives that provide historical context into Flo’s personal life. In the clip below, you get a glimpse of her family, and the interactions they have with one another.

Coca-Cola Shows the Power of True Friendship in El SMS

In July 2015, The Coca-Cola Company worked with Academy Award winning director Dustin Lance Black to produce a series of stories that focus on the turning point in childhood friendships. In his breakout spot, “El SMS,” Lance Black tells the story of a friendship between two young boys when one has a secret to hide. What draws the audience into the clip isn’t the stunning videography—it’s the relationship between the two main characters.

You can read my full interview with Lance Black to learn more about his work with Coca-Cola and beyond.

Student-Produced Johnnie Walker Advertisement Defines Empathy in Story

Your main character needs to be relatable–if your audience can’t see itself in your hero, then they can’t make an emotional connection. This student-produced Johnnie Walker ad pulls you into the story of two brothers on an adventure together, and it ends with a surprising (and tear-jerking) conclusion.

LinkedIn Brings Viewers’ Inner Dialogue Out Through Clever Art Direction

LinkedIn isn’t one to spend a lot of TV advertising, but in its “Closer Than You Think” spot, readers become the main character as the narrator delivers a short call to arms about reaching your full potential in life.

Here, the first-person narration gives a look into the mind of a character as he goes about his day-to-day work miles above our heads. While we’re hearing the main character deliver his inner dialogue, recalling advice he got from his father, the delivery quickly brings out our own ambition and puts us at the center of the story.

Why Character Development Matters

Your product or service is, it doesn’t have an interesting history. It doesn’t form relationships with people. It’s not relatable, and it has no inner dialogue. No matter how much you try and humanize what you sell, the true story and impact your offering has is on the people you sell to.

When you tell stories, on whatever channel works best for your brand, remember that your customers are your main characters. The harder you try to tell their stories, the closer you’ll get to being a truly memorable brand storyteller.

The post Storytelling Lessons from Film: Developing Dynamic Characters appeared first on Ceros Blog – Interactive Content Marketing & Design Tips.

Deciding how much research funding gets allocated to each disease is a perpetually contentious issue.

Every year, doctors, scientist and policymakers at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the health research arm of the U.S. government — must make critical decisions and evaluate which diseases pose the biggest public health threat and, therefore, which get the most money.

Though some believe mortality rate is the primary concern, the NIH considers many other factors. Morbidity, financial cost and disability worldwide, both current and projected, all play into the evaluated burden of disease.

While the NIH commits billions of dollars to fighting diseases around the world, the organization is funded by U.S. taxpayer dollars. Some point out that the organization’s funding doesn’t always match the need at home in the U.S.

Take malaria, for example. While this disease caused 438,000 deaths worldwide in 2015, it only killed 10 in the U.S. in 2013. But, American taxpayers paid roughly $163 million in NIH malaria research funding in 2015. That’s $16.3 million in funding per American death to malaria. In comparison, consider that the average funding per death in America — when accounting for the NIH’s full $30.4 billion budget — is a mere $11,691. In the scope of the U.S., that makes malaria, at approximately 1,362 times the average funding, disproportionately overfunded.

On the flip side, many deadly diseases in the U.S. could be considered underfunded — receiving less funding per death than the average of $11,691.

Lung cancer is notorious for this. In 2008, the New York Times noted the limited funding per death, and that still holds today. This disease killed 156,252 people in 2013 and in 2015 it received $348,755,072 in funding. That shakes out to only $2,232 per death. And a few other common diseases receive even less still.

Commenting on a 2011 study he did, Clairborne Johnston, the dean of the Dell Medical School, noted that it appears “we underfund things where we blame the victim.” Given the connection between smoking and lung cancer, this might explain the disease’s current funding, or lack thereof.

Using data from the NIH and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the experts at HealthGrove discovered the 18 deadliest, underfunded diseases in the U.S. These diseases all receive less funding per death than the $11,691 average.

It is important to note that many diseases not listed may be underfunded considering the pain and disability they cause. For example, migraines negatively affect the lives of many people, but they are not included on this list because they do not directly cause death.

#18. Prostate Cancer

Funding per Death: $10,395
Deaths in 2013: 27,682
Total Funding in 2015: $287,746,995
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#17. Ovarian Cancer

Funding per Death: $8,282
Deaths in 2013: 14,276
Total Funding in 2015: $118,228,637
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#16. Chronic Liver Disease and Cirrhosis

Funding per Death: $8,087
Deaths in 2013: 36,427
Total Funding in 2015: $294,592,023
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#15. Alzheimer’s Disease

Funding per Death: $6,951
Deaths in 2013: 84,767
Total Funding in 2015: $589,204,366
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#14. Colo-Rectal Cancer

Funding per Death: $5,905
Deaths in 2013: 52,252
Total Funding in 2015: $308,539,973
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#13. Parkinson’s Disease

Funding per Death: $5,804
Deaths in 2013: 25,196
Total Funding in 2015: $146,226,134
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#12. Hypertension

Funding per Death: $5,763
Deaths in 2013: 37,144
Total Funding in 2015: $214,050,133
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#11. Uterine Cancer

Funding per Death: $5,598
Deaths in 2013: 9,325
Total Funding in 2015: $52,205,435
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#10. Digestive Diseases – (Peptic Ulcer)

Funding per Death: $5,191
Deaths in 2013: 2,988
Total Funding in 2015: $15,510,306
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#9. Pancreatic Cancer

Funding per Death: $4,460
Deaths in 2013: 38,996
Total Funding in 2015: $173,911,461
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#8. Liver Cancer

Funding per Death: $3,539
Deaths in 2013: 24,032
Total Funding in 2015: $85,058,323
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#7. Septicemia

Funding per Death: $2,711
Deaths in 2013: 38,156
Total Funding in 2015: $103,427,554
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#6. Digestive Diseases – (Gallbladder)

Funding per Death: $2,374
Deaths in 2013: 3,377
Total Funding in 2015: $8,015,404
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#5. Stroke

Funding per Death: $2,233
Deaths in 2013: 128,978
Total Funding in 2015: $287,984,427
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#4. Lung Cancer

Funding per Death: $2,232
Deaths in 2013: 156,252
Total Funding in 2015: $348,755,072
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#3. Pneumonia

Funding per Death: $2,100
Deaths in 2013: 53,282
Total Funding in 2015: $111,914,006
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#2. Heart Disease

Funding per Death: $2,065
Deaths in 2013: 611,105
Total Funding in 2015: $1,261,640,505
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

#1. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease

Funding per Death: $663
Deaths in 2013: 145,575
Total Funding in 2015: $96,584,162
Average Funding Per Death for All Diseases (in the U.S.): $11,691

Research Diseases on HealthGrove

When you’re looking for a new job, you’re probably not heading to Facebook first. However, the biggest social network might still be important for finding new jobs. After all, everyone you know is there.

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One of the most critical components of any good content marketing plan is having a strong distribution strategy. After all, what’s the use in producing content if you don’t have an audience to consume it?

Yet, content distribution can often be tricky, especially if your business has a very niche or difficult-to-target audience.

For example, let’s say you run a maternity clothing company and your target audience is pregnant women. This is by no means a small audience, but there’s no option in Facebook ads to target women who are pregnant. You might try using other indicators, like Interests in “Pregnancy” or “Motherhood,” but this still doesn’t give you a well-defined audience.

Or, let’s say you’re running a business targeting beauty professionals in Boston. You’re easily able to define your audience using the available criteria, but because you’re targeting a small niche in a small geographical radius, your distribution potential is quite limited.

So if you are a business with a small or hard-to-reach audience, what are your options when it comes to distributing content and increasing awareness of your brand?

Here are 4 ideas to help you grow your reach.

1. Retargeting Campaigns

The whole idea of retargeting campaigns is that you’re targeting folks who have already interacted with or expressed interest in your business. In other words, you have some way of identifying them – whether they’ve visited your website or signed up for your email list – which eliminates the need to try to define your audience with loose targeting criteria that might not be fitting for them.

Because your retargeting audiences have already self-identified themselves as a good fit for your product or service, retargeting campaigns offer a much better targeting option. They also typically yield significantly higher conversion rates compared to other ad campaigns for this same reason.

Not sure where to get started with retargeting? Here are a few ideas to help you dive in.

Retargeting audiences to test:

• Visitors to your website
• Visitors to your demo request, trial request, or pricing page
• People who have downloaded a specific piece (or category) of content
• Your email subscribers
• Your blog subscribers
• Your churned customers
• Your existing customers (to upsell them)

Types of retargeting to test:

• Facebook ad retargeting
• Display retargeting
• Remarketing lists for search ads

Don’t wait to start testing, especially if your current audience targeting isn’t yielding the results you want. You have these retargeting audiences at your fingertips – why not start leveraging them?

2. Partnership Marketing

If your marketing efforts are limited by your own small audience, one strategy to expand your reach is to seek out some partnership marketing opportunities.

Start by making a list of other companies that target a similar audience, but are not direct competitors with your business.

Next, brainstorm some ways that you could do co-marketing with them. Co-marketing is when you partner with another brand to execute a marketing campaign that benefits both of you. For example, you might author an eBook or host a webinar or event together, and then you both get the leads you generate from it.

Get creative with it! Chances are, if the company you’re pitching a partnership to is already doing content creation themselves, they’ll be more excited about a new angle or opportunity that partnering with your brand might provide.

Reach out to the top several companies on your list and suggest some ideas. Be sure to emphasize how they stand to benefit from the arrangement, not just what you’re hoping to get out of it.

3. Influencer Marketing

This one is a little trickier than partnership marketing, but if you can pull it off, you’ll likely get some really good results from it.

The idea behind influencer marketing is to identify people in your industry who are considered to be thought leaders and have a large following. Social media influencers, for example, likely have hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers or tons of Facebook fans. Other influencers might include reputable conference speakers, high-profile bloggers, media outlets, executives at top companies, etc.

Begin with a list of influencers in your industry, or who represent your audience in some way. For example, that might be the CEO of Revlon for the beauty professionals company. Or, for the maternity clothing company, it might be a well-known business woman who published a blog post arguing for better maternity leave policies in the US, which received millions of views.

There are also different tiers of influence, and you don’t have to shoot for the highest-profile people. Lay out your different options and think of how you might approach reaching out to them.

Because influencers tend to be very busy people who receive a lot of requests like yours, you might choose to take a more subtle approach. For instance, you could write a blog post that aggregates quotes or ideas from the top 20 influencers in your industry. Once you publish it, you can tweet the post to each of the influencers (or email them) to let them know you included them, and ask if they’d be willing to share the post with their followers.

Again, there’s plenty of room to get creative here, so be sure to try out a few different ideas!

4. Referral Incentives

If you’re having trouble reaching the audience you want, who better to turn to than your existing customers?

First of all, they’ve already experienced your product or service, and if they have a high NPS score, they’re probably willing to recommend you to others.

Secondly, they likely know at least a handful of other people like them, who would also be a great fit for your business.

Why not leverage these two qualities to your benefit? Set up a referral program to incentivize your current users or customers to share your content or recommend your business to others.

Or, just start with a simple ask. Send an email to your best customers to let them know that they’re among your top 100 customers, and ask if they’d be willing to share your latest piece of content with their network. These emails usually work best when written with a very personalized tone. You might still find that referral incentives yield better results, but this is always an option you can test too.
Remember, just because your audience is tricky to define or target, doesn’t mean you can’t still do smart marketing. These suggestions are just a start; get creative and keep the ideas coming!

Getting to connect with people everyday. The autonomy and flexibility. The potential for high commission. 

Ultimately, there are plenty of exciting reasons to start your career in sales. 

Working in sales will enable you to learn the skills you need to sell anything — even yourself for future career moves. You'll also become a master of communication, increase your confidence through closed deals, and build an impressive professional network that will benefit your career now, and into the future. 

Here, let's dive into six reasons you should start your career in sales, according to HubSpot sales professionals.

1. Sales offers a crash course in business acumen.

Heather Baynes, an Enterprise Account Executive at HubSpot, told me one of the biggest benefits to starting your career in sales is the learning opportunities it presents, which will set you up for long-term success in any role.

As she puts it, "Sales offers a crash course in business acumen … In many environments, you can skip the MBA and go with what you learn in sales."

Baynes adds, "Working in sales also offers exposure to all divisions and levels of an organization, which offers unparalleled learning and networking opportunities from the CEO down. A sales person will have this exposure within their organization and in many client/prospect organizations."

If you're a recent graduate with no prior business experience, sales can be a fantastic opportunity for learning more about how an organization runs, what matters most in a business setting, and how to conduct yourself professionally with both peers and even C-level executives.

2. Sales allows you to strengthen your communication skills.

Regardless of which career path you choose (and even outside of the office), communication is undoubtedly one of the most important skills you can strengthen to succeed professionally.

Strong communication skills helps you connect with colleagues, managers, and customers. And, as you move up in your career, communication skills is also a vital trait for enabling you to lead others more effectively.

HubSpot's Manager of North America Business Development, Advika Mukherjee, told me, "Sales is a great first job for folks who are trying to hone their communication and active listening skills."

"You have to listen and communicate effectively every day to be successful. Those are two major transferrable soft skills that you can apply to other roles (and even personally) as you progress throughout your career."

Mukherjee adds, "Sales wasn't the career I thought I'd be in when I graduated college, but I'm glad I stumbled upon it!"

(Mukherjee isn't alone — only 39% of salespeople intend to go into sales. The remaining 61% become salespeople a bit more accidentally!) 

Additionally, when I surveyed 300+ individuals, I found a little over half (51%) marked "communication and listening skills" as the number one most important trait to succeed in sales. 

HubSpot BDR Hallie Thompson agrees that starting a career in allows you to foster plenty of transferable soft skills, including communication and listening skills. 

Thompson says, "I onboarded a little later in the game after working in various other roles and I sure wish I had started my career in sales! If I could go back, I would choose sales for the sheer amount of transferable skills. Among other skills, sales forces you to adapt to various people and situations, which strengthens interpersonal communication."

Thompson adds, "I would also say that sales encourages you to network, network, network! Which ultimately puts you in a stronger position down the road should you choose to switch career paths."

3. Sales will help you gain confidence. 

"The #1 thing I've gained from working in sales is confidence," HubSpot Solutions Engineer Carrie Buth told me. 

Buth continues, "Sales has allowed me to gain confidence in speaking to large groups or very senior prospects, in presenting demos and solutions, in navigating difficult situations and conversations, and, ultimately, in advocating for myself."

Unsure how to build confidence in sales? Take a look at our The Ultimate Guide to Confidence to begin exploring resources that will help.

4. Sales helps you increase your resiliency. 

"Everyone should do a stint in sales to learn that rejection doesn't debilitate you, that hearing 'no' isn't a bad thing, and that someone's work ethic and drive has a direct impact on how much they can earn," says Anya Taschner, a HubSpot Inbound Success Coach Manager. 

Taschner continues, "Sales helps develop social skills, ability to negotiate, conflict resolution, and, above all else, resiliency."

"If you can resist defeat and withstand the pressure, working in sales is a crash course in many of the most critical things you need to navigate the human experience."

HubSpot BDR Matthew Healey seconds Taschner's point, telling me, "For a recent grad, moving into sales is a strategic way to start your career because it builds resilience (or grit, as we like to say) to overcome obstacles, and forces you to be quick on your feet to strategize/find a resolution."

5. Sales will enhance your collaborative skills. 

Inbound Success Coach at HubSpot Sahil Rikhy told me he believes starting a career in sales can help you develop three critical skills. 

These include: 

• Collaborative skills
• Consultive skills
• Conversational skills 

As Rikhy puts it, "These are three skills that no matter where you go or what you do (even outside your professional life), will always play a part in giving you an edge. A sales role puts us in front of the customer, so we have to learn how to be comfortable talking to others and how to navigate conversations, and of course guide them through to the end."

"Mastering these skills first in your career will make future opportunities a lot easier to tackle, since you've already gotten your hands dirty before."

6. Sales can offer financial freedom. 

Baynes told me another big benefit of starting your career in sales is the financial freedom sales can offer. 

For instance, median on-target earnings for a B2B AE is $132,000, and is $156,000 for an AE Manager.

She told me, "When you work hard in sales, you can achieve anything. You can build personal and generational wealth if you ask questions of those who have gone before you and put some investment strategies in place."

Baynes adds, "All of this is said with a big 'must have'. It has to be the right culture where you can be free to do your best, where you feel supported and where you can be your most authentic self. The alternative makes sales a tough place to be."

Of course, your salary varies widely depending on your specific sales role — a sales development rep (SDR) will make a different salary than a account executive (AE) will make, and an AE will make a different salary than a sales engineer.

But one thing is certain about any sales role: Your performance largely dictates your pay. The more deals you close, the more potential financial rewards. 

Why Sales is the Best First Job

Ultimately, starting your career in sales can help you whether you stay in sales for the long-run, or eventually switch to a different career trajectory. 

As we've covered, sales can help you foster and strengthen both soft and hard skills that are critical for any professional role.

Additionally, being in sales will help your personal life, as well — particularly as it comes to both communication and listening skills, and confidence. 

As Senior Account Executive Chris Locke puts it, "For me personally, sales has put me in a position to exponentially grow my career and expand my network. Whether you choose to stay in a selling role or move to a different profession, sales will give you an invaluable skillset that will be helpful in all facets of your life."

Locke adds, "If I had to go back and do it all over again, I would pick sales every time." 

Ready to start your career in sales but unsure where to start? Take a look at Which Type of Sales Job Is Right for You? to explore which specific career path is best for your unique strengths. 

Author: Ellen Gomes

Great marketers are filled with all kinds of marketing wisdom: keep your database clean, be personal and relevant to engage your audience, adopt the right technology to scale and optimize your efforts, measure your campaigns, and that’s just to name a few. Some are lessons we’ve learned the hard way through trial and error; others are legendary, passed on from one marketer to another over time.

But marketing isn’t just for brands, and all the big names—from movie stars to fashion designers, presidents, and singers—have been preaching the value of it for decades. Flip through this slide deck as we shine a light on 10 famous marketing quotes from iconic figures that still ring true for marketers to this day:

10 Famous Marketing Quotes To Live By from Marketo

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[Slide Deck] 10 Famous Marketing Quotes to Live By was posted at Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership. | http://blog.marketo.com

The post [Slide Deck] 10 Famous Marketing Quotes to Live By appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

  Welcome to the Executive Sales Leader Briefing, a new blog series I am doing every Friday. If you want to receive the Executive Sales Leader Briefing in text form in an email early Friday morning before it is published on the website, go to this page to sign up or complete the below information: Being […]

Content marketing is getting harder. Why? Ironically, it’s because of the content itself. There’s just a crazy amount of content available right now. And there’s more of it being published every day.

Here’s what the increase looks like year over year:

That rate of content publishing – sometimes called content “velocity” – isn’t going to stop. 76% of B2B marketers and 77% of B2C marketers plan to create more content this year than they did last year.

Trouble is, it may not work. At least, not like we want it to. Because it appears the more content we publish, the less engagement we get. That’s what a recent study from TrackMaven found. Here’s how that data looks:

We’re getting fewer shares and links from the content we publish, too. You might have seen this chart from BuzzSumo and Moz’s study of 1 million articles. 75% of those articles got 39 or fewer social shares. Half of them got eight shares or less. Even worse, most of those articles produced not one inbound link.

The end of content marketing? Or just the end of bad content marketing?

Is all this just too darn depressing? Are you ready to give up? I hope not. You shouldn’t. And though some might say these different data points spell the end of content marketing, I don’t think that’s what we’re seeing.

I hope what we’re seeing is the end of bad content marketing. Forgive me, but I do hope that some of the people just blasting out awful content will go away. I hope the rest of us will consider publishing less content, but better content. Content with far more planning and strategy and promotion.

In other words, it’s time to up our game.

Fortunately, that isn’t out of reach. While some companies do struggle with content marketing, there are others who are simply knocking it out of the park. These firms get great ROI and delight their audiences. They use the whole engine of content not just do better at marketing, but to do better with their overall business.

It’s time to be like them. So while I am about to walk you through a list of “don’ts” and other warnings, I’ve paired each one with a positive. Something you should do, and a company that’s doing it.

1. You’re creating low-quality content.

Let’s be honest. If you didn’t work at your company, would you read or share the content you publish? And – if you wouldn’t read it – why should you expect your audience to?

I apologize if that sounds harsh. Consider it tough love. Use it – as a motivation and as a yardstick – to define the kind of content you (and all the rest of us) should create. Because with the overabundance of content we’re dealing with, it’s time to stop publishing “filler” content.

The first implication of this is to fire your $10-an-article writers. Go find a subject expert and partner with them. And know you’ve got Google’s blessing.

The next thing is to create some quality standards for your content. No one expects your site to become a world-class journalism outlet, but you do need to meet basic criteria:

• Don’t publish content with misspellings.
• Format your content for scanners: Use subheaders and bullet points where you can.
• Use images every 300-500 words.
• Aim to write at a 7^th-grade reading level.
• Extra credit: Reach out to smart people in your industry and get their take on your topic. This adds enormous value, gets you friendly with influential people, and means your content is more likely to get shared, sometimes by them.

There are many other aspects to good content. If you want to know more, take a look at our video, Creating Killer Marketing Content.

By the way… don’t give us no lip about not being able to create good content because you’re in a boring industry. The B2B firm PerkinElmer, which “creates technologies in life sciences, diagnostics, and environmental health” has figured it out. They enjoy engagement rates more than six times the average, even while publishing less often than their peers.

2. You don’t have a content marketing strategy.

Most of us wouldn’t run a marketing department with random acts of marketing. So why are so many content marketers still practicing “random acts of content”?

Maybe they’re doing it because it used to work. But those times are passing. And you know what? Having a strategy actually works.

Marketers are significantly more likely to say their content marketing is successful if they have a written-out content marketing strategy. They do even better if they have a documented editorial statement, too.

In the 2016 Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs’ Content Marketing Trends – North America report for B2B marketers, more than half of the most effective marketers had a documented content marketing strategy. Among the least effective marketers, 40% had no strategy at all.

This is actually good news. Want to increase your odds of success with content marketing? Buckle down and hash out a plan. The free ebook, Creating a Content Marketing Strategy: 6 Best Practices That Work can help.

3. You aren’t promoting your content.

This one underlies what is probably the biggest mistake content marketers have been making. We’ve been so focused on creating content that many of us have skipped over the marketing part of content marketing.

So let’s be clear here: We have to market our content. In other words (more familiar words): We have to promote our content.

The first step is just sharing your content on social media. But you’ve got to do it more than once. Unfortunately, as CoSchedule notes in this graphic, 77% of bloggers share their posts three times or fewer on social media.

That’s awful. That breaks my heart. Even if you only spent one or two hours on a piece of content, please – share it more than three times.

How? Don’t just post once after you publish stuff. Post again a couple days later, then a week later, then a month later.

That’s just promotion 101. The best content marketers practically have a college degree in marketing their content. See our blog post, 26 Ways to Promote Your Blog Post to get started. You can use those tips to promote more than just blog posts.

4. You aren’t dialed into your audience.

This requires a blend of skills. You’ll need:

• A bit of SEO acumen to find out which words your audience uses, and which topics are associated with them.
• To know your subject inside and out, so you can actually help them and be worth listening to.
• To know where they gather online.
• …and which content formats they like.
• …and what they want.
• …and which problems they haven’t been able to solve. This will show you how to create the content they crave, but haven’t been able to find anywhere else.

Not sure how to get that information? A survey can help.

This is a nice email asking subscribers to complete a survey. It’d be even better if it said exactly how many questions people would have to answer.

5. You aren’t creating content for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Do you like TOFU maybe a little too much? I’m not talking soy. I’m talking “Top of the Funnel” content. The “Beginner’s Guide to” and the other types of content you can use to attract the attention of someone who’s never heard of your company before.

There are two things to consider with TOFU content (and with MOFU – mid-funnel and BOFU – bottom of funnel, too): What the content topics are for this introductory content, and what the content formats should be.

The graphic below is mostly focused on the format side of things.

Image by permission of Digital Marketer, from their blog post, Content Marketing: How Content Generates Leads and Sales at Every Step of the Funnel.

For the content topics, only you can know what’s best for your particular audience. But I have a place to start: Answer every question you’ve ever been asked about your company or product. Answer those questions in as detailed and useful a way as you can.

The blog that started it all: This is Marcus Sheridan’s blog on the River Pools website. Marcus pretty much re-invented content marketing by just answering every single question he’d ever been asked about fiberglass pools.

6. You’re not paying enough attention to SEO.

Good SEO is critical to a successful content marketing program. And while it’s a good start to just learn how to optimize your blog posts, that’s not really enough. SEO should come in long before you hit publish. It’s so core to your strategy – and to your content production, promotion, and planning – that it really belongs all the way back at the content strategy drafting table.

The good news is that this doesn’t have to feel like a punishment. It’s actually an opportunity. With savvy use of a keyword tool, you can figure out how to rank for long tail keywords that can generate fab conversion rates – but with far less competition. With proper formatting of schema data and meta tags, you can almost double your content’s click-through rates.

Pause here. What that last paragraph means is that – without any additional content or any change in your current ranking positions – if you get the schema formatting and the copy in the title and description tags right, you could almost double your traffic. What’s that worth to you?

Want to get started? You can improve your SEO knowledge in an hour by watching the webinar, 3 Tactics for Creating SEO Content. Don’t have an hour? Print out our 5 SEO Strategies infographic.

7. You’re not paying enough attention to tracking.

I love good content marketing research and great case studies, but every time I share one I have misgivings. Because while that research is useful, it’s really only a starting point.

It’s for a generalized audience, but you need company-specific stats. Fortunately, we have this great thing called analytics. And while ROI may still be challenging to measure, digital marketers are blessed with more tracking and reports than almost any other sales channel.

All those reports are your company-specific stats. So while you might want to try the different tactics various studies suggest, don’t use them blindly. Check your reports to see if they actually work for you.

If you’re already doing that, kudos to you. But I’ve got some extra credit: Do a content audit. There are several detailed examples of how to do one online, or flip through our own ebook on how to do a social media audit. It’ll show you want you need to know.

Conclusion

There’s no way around it – bad content marketing gets less effective all the time. It may even do more harm than good, as low-quality content could be perceived as a reflection of your company’s standards.

But good content marketing still works. It works really well, actually. And the good news is it doesn’t require a massive budget, or a large staff, or even a superior intellect or a fancy degree to make it work.

Just stay focused on the “do’s” of the list above. And don’t expect miracles overnight. Content marketing is a patient person’s tactic. For many marketers, it takes 2-3 years to make it all work.

What do you think about all this? Want to share your thoughts? Drop a line in the comment box.

Want some advice? You probably do.

Whether it’s to eat healthier, run faster, work smarter, love better, or simply get that bathroom door to stop squeaking, we are a culture that devours practical information and advice.

The proof is all around us. It’s why weight loss is a $60 billion industry; why self-help experts still dominate daytime television; and why media brands devoted to health, gardening, fitness, and money continue to publish the same listicles on every magazine cover.

The evidence is equally powerful online. According to a 2008 Pew Research survey, 83 percent of American Internet users seek out information on their hobbies and interests, 75 percent seek health information and advice, and 55 percent look for how-to information. Providing useful tips is a now critical part of what most major publications offer, whether it’s BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, or The Wall Street Journal.

But giving good advice isn’t as easy as it seems. There is an art and science to service journalism that’s easy to overlook. And as a result, much of the advice being doled out by businesses, governments, nonprofits, and even established editorial outlets isn’t as effective as it could be with a few strategic tweaks.

1. Offer more than one way out

Offer readers a single solution to a problem, and it’s your fix, not theirs. But give a number of approaches and you empower the audience to identify their own path forward. When they are successful, they’ll appreciate your brand more. Providing long numbered lists of tips is a tactic that publications like Prevention, Men’s Health, BuzzFeed, and Real Simple have turned into an art form.

Let’s say you just got stung by a bee. You know you’re not allergic, but you still want a quick home remedy for the pain. Go to WebMD or Mayo Clinic websites, and you will get formal medical checklists on how to proceed, including whether or not to call 911. But that’s not relevant to your situation. However, on Mother Earth News, you can read “8 Natural Bee Sting Treatment Options,” which is far more interesting and useful. The content gives sound advice for the initial treatment, letting you pick and choose as you see fit.

Which gets to another important reason to give readers options: Consumers love to browse advice in the same way that cooks browse recipes. No chef plans on cooking all the recipes they look at, but there’s entertainment, value, and motivation in seeing all the possibilities.

2. Keep the format simple

If consumers love to browse advice, then you need to arrange your advice in a format that’s easy to consume. That’s why listicles are so ubiquitous—a consumer can quickly scan the advice before diving into those tips that most appeal to them.

Ease of usage is also why infographics are so popular. While graphics are best known for bringing data to life, they are a smart way to advice giving as well. For example, if you’re about to go on an job interview, you could read a lengthy article on how to prepare or you could spend a few minutes on “Acing the Job Interview,” a colorful infographic from Mint that features a step-by-step approach and important statistics.

3. Practice “maniacal specificity”

Eat less sugar. Get more exercise. Relax. These are vague generalities that most people hear repeatedly—meaning they have zero value. The art of advice lies in “maniacal specificity,” or giving people ways to take action without the need for any further research.

Consider “The Traveler’s Guide to Tipping Internationally,” published on Tailwinds, which is the digital magazine for the travel service Hipmunk. The article breaks down the topic by country and service, telling the reader exactly how much to tip depending on the culture. It’s extremely useful information, and by the time you’re done, you won’t have to look elsewhere.

4. Make your menu enticing

An appealing restaurant menu should offer both classic dishes and new variations. Think of your expertise the same way. If your advice is all intuitive, then the reader probably won’t come to you the next time there’s a problem. Create a mixture of tips that are interesting and entertaining—some tried and true, and some unconventional.

If you’re trying to plan a first date, there are thousands of listicles online, many of which are unoriginal. But Psychology Today took a fresh approach, asking several psychiatrists and psychologists for their recommendations. The resulting collection of 21 first-date ideas makes for a creative menu, featuring suggestions like dining in the dark and hiring an expert to teach you a skill or hobby.

5. Choose the right sources

Consumers are open to getting information and advice from companies, but that trust is fragile. If the content includes a product pitch, isn’t supported by independent sources, or fails to address a range of viewpoints, consumer trust drops quickly, per a 2014 Kentico survey. Strengthen that trust in your advice content by using independent sources and expert interviews from people who aren’t overtly biased.

What are the best practices when it comes to attribution? First, explain how you compiled your advice in the introductory paragraphs. Are the tips based on interviews with experts? A review of .gov and .org websites? Your internal expert team? Let the audience know so there’s no need for skepticism.

6. Give context and be honest

Some advice is more proven than others. If one tip represents the gold standard approach that most professionals recommend, say so. If another tip isn’t backed by science but is considered safe and effective, include that background information. It’s just an easy way to respect the audience’s intelligence.

“Natural Remedy Options for Asthma Treatment,” from Everyday Health, does a good job of walking the line between advocacy and caution. The author is honest about which cures have been backed by scientific studies but still offers alternatives and lets medical sources provide guidance and insight when necessary.

7. Remember the fundamental benefits

In a narrow sense, your content might be about clever ways to decorate a room or how to throw a great party, but there are underlying benefits to most examples of service journalism that should be addressed whenever possible. The big four are: saving money, saving time, reducing hassle, and improving health. If your advice can deliver on one or more of these fundamental benefits while still addressing a specific topic, there’s a good chance consumers will give it a chance. If you’re operating outside of those four fundamental benefits, that’s not a problem, it just means you’ll probably appeal to more of a niche audience.

8. Don’t fix people—enable them

Why is Oprah Winfrey still so popular after decades of being at the forefront of giving advice? Because she makes people feel good about themselves. She empowers them regardless of the topic.

The same should be true of your advice content. One of the truisms of great marketing is not to insult your consumers or make them feel incompetent. Content that feels condescending or talks down to the reader will struggle to break through. Make sure your language frames the topic with positivity so people don’t get discouraged. This BuzzFeed article about studying for finals is irreverent, direct, and goofy, but, most importantly, it makes a connection with the reader built on motivation and encouragement when it very easily could’ve gone negative.

Remember, getting traction may depend more on how you position your insights rather than the insights themselves. So the next time you’re ready to write a how-to, make sure you take my advice.

Beijing (AFP) - Chinese factories ramped up activity in March for the first time in nine months, official data showed Friday, offering a positive signal for the health of the world's second-largest economy.

The result surprised observers and suggested Beijing's efforts to boost demand were having a bigger-than-expected impact.

Zhao Yang, China economist for Nomura, said the data was "much stronger" than forecast and showed "across the board" improvement.

This "means a rebound could be stronger and more lasting than we initially thought".

China's economy is a vital driver of global expansion. But it grew only 6.9 percent last year, its weakest rate in a quarter of a century.

The key manufacturing sector has been struggling for months in the face of sagging global demand for Chinese products.

But the official Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), which tracks activity in factories and workshops across the vast nation, rebounded to 50.2 for March, showing that it was ticking up.

It was the highest number and first expansion since June 2015. The result also surpassed the median expectation of 49.4 predicted by economists in a Bloomberg News survey.

A reading above 50 signals expanding activity in the sector, while anything below indicates contraction. 

Beijing has been trying to re-tool its economy to encourage domestic consumption, and move away from reliance on investment and overseas buyers.

But recent policy easing as it seeks to avoid a hard landing has encouraged a resurgence of investment, and ratings agency Standard & Poor's lowered its outlook for China Thursday as credit floods the economy.  

The PMI figure follows February's 49.0. 

Investors watch the index closely as the first available official indicator of the country's economic health each month.

NBS analyst Zhao Qinghe said the March number showed "some positive signs have started to emerge" following the Lunar New Year holiday.

"Manufacturing production and the market warmed up as companies started working after the Spring Festival and supply-side reform accelerated."

- 'Upside surprise' -

There was also some relatively good news from the private Caixin Purchasing Managers' Index, which puts a greater emphasis on smaller firms.

That came in at 49.7, its highest reading in 13 months, the Chinese financial magazine said in a joint statement with data compiler Markit.

It said the figure showed "only a fractional deterioration in the health of the sector", as companies cited an improvement in orders. Although weak foreign demand "remained a drag" on growth, it added.

The market reaction was muted, with the benchmark Shanghai Composite Index closing up just 0.19 percent.

NBS analyst Zhao cautioned the PMI figures could be partially attributed to seasonal factors, as well as to a rebound in fixed-asset investment and the property market.

Economists have long said one of China's main structural problems is an over-reliance on government infrastructure projects.

"We should be aware that there remain many difficulties in companies' production and operation," he said.

Firms were still facing tight financing, insufficient demand and rising labour costs, Zhao added.

Analysts pointed to an increase in government investment as signalled at the March National People's Congress, with ANZ attributing the "upside surprise" to "an acceleration of infrastructure spending and recent pickup in electronic supply chains".

The positive results implied China could achieve 6.5 percent economic growth for the quarter, they added. 

But Caixin pointed out: "Firms continued to cut their staff numbers, with the rate of job shedding easing only slightly from February’s seven-year record." 

Its surveyed manufacturers have shed jobs every month since November 2013 as they downsize to cut costs. 

Join the conversation about this story »

Every once in awhile, change happens. Over the last few decades, selling and buying have changed -- albeit, very slightly. Today, prospects have become less empowered as the world has gotten less connected and information gradually moves from free and instantly available to trade secrets locked securely in file cabinets.

Further, buyers are becoming more and more dependent on salespeople. Salespeople are increasingly in the driver's seat. Prospects need their local field salesperson to evaluate options and make purchasing decisions for them, from the safety of their board room.

In today's economy, the geeks shall not inherit the earth -- unless they go back to school to get their sales degree. This is a world where salespeople can take what they want when they want it. Here are nine sales activities and approaches to adopt so you can get yours.

1) Buy lists.

Long gone are the days when you should spend time and effort attracting prospects to you. They need you more than you need them and they know it. Just purchase a list, then ....

2) Smile and dial.

Prospects are eager to take your call. After all, they have no other way to diagnose their needs or research solutions. But no need to put pressure on yourself unnecessarily. Since prospecting is like shooting fish in a barrel, you only need to make a few dials per day.

3) Spam.

Believe it or not, spam used to be a bad thing. Of course, now prospects love spam. They'd have it for every meal if they could, as it's their main way to learn about products and services these days. To make this really easy, work with your marketing team to blast out a mass message. No need to customize your approach to each individual; that's a huge waste of time. Use the chart below to time your messages:

4) Pitch right away.

Go for it. Your prospects need it. Just blurt out your value proposition. If you want to be really efficient, include a few case studies and a generic PowerPoint in your spam blast.

5) Look good.

Pinstripe suits and a different Rolex for every day of the week. Both are critical selling skills to keep in your toolbox. Why? People want to do business with people who appear successful. Doesn’t matter whether you can actually help. For prospects, it’s really all about associating with successful people. So, play the part. Below is some research into how successful salespeople invest their money:

6) Get aggressive. 

Prospects love it when you take control. The last thing they want to do is think for themselves. As soon as you can (and as aggressively as possible), tell them what they should be thinking and doing. Don't bother learning how they're doing things now or even if they want to change what they're doing. Remember, they need you more than you need them.

If you're not a naturally aggressive person, just remember that speaking loudly is a great way to get people to agree with you (no matter what you’re actually saying):

7) Cold call.

Who doesn't love a good interruption? Chances are your prospect is just sitting there commiserating with a coworker about how they can't get X done. Bam! Here you are with the solution that makes X easy. They want that call. They need that call. Just call them cold so you can get them what they need.

8) Disqualify quickly.

There is absolutely no need to develop relationships with prospects today. Skip past rapport building and needs assessment and get right to the important stuff, like budget and authority. Engaging buyers like people is frankly a waste of time. Better yet, just close ...

9) Close hard.

If there's one thing that hasn't changed since the early 1990s, it's that sales is all about closing. In fact, as Alec Baldwin's character, Blake, in "Glengarry Glen Ross" says so well, "Always be closing."

Close early. Close often. Close Hard. Make it your motto.

Even though it's unlikely in today's buyer-beware world, if you're having trouble getting someone to make that final decision, use a discount to seal the deal. As the chart below shows, it's the best way to make a prospect feel special.

Just make sure they know that the best deals expire quickly.

For more data-backed timeless sales best practices, sign up here. 

What activities help you crush your quota? Share your thoughts in the comments on this fine first day of April.

“Social media marketing” means different things depending on who you ask. For some, it’s a great method of providing top-notch customer service and engaging one-on-one with fans. For others, it’s all about promoting deals and products to a wide audience. And for others still, it’s just one of many tools in the sales and marketing toolbox. For many marketers, it’s all of the above and more.

But is there a clear distinction between social media marketing for B2B (business-to-business) marketers and social media marketing for B2C (business-to-consumer) marketers?

Ultimately, the answer has to do with goals. The goal of a social media marketing campaign will largely define how that campaign materializes, regardless of whether businesses or consumers are the target audience.

When it comes to B2B, the goal of marketing is often driving leads and sales. So it makes sense that social media efforts be geared towards this goal: promoting thought leadership to entice leads at the top of the funnel, or pushing gated content like ebooks and whitepapers to capture a lead and eventually convert it to a sale.

B2C, on the other hand, might not rely on social media for leads as much as for increased visibility, reach and brand awareness. Social media activities, then, will be in support of this goal: creating bite-sized, highly sharable images to increase reach, or running flash sales and campaigns to generate buzz.

However, B2B marketers have a unique opportunity on social media that B2C marketers don’t. Because a single sale in the B2B world is typically much higher in value than a sale in the B2C world, the one-on-one relationship arguably becomes even more important for B2B marketers.

This means that the sales and marketing team can use social media to develop rich relationships with the individual decision-makers they are selling to. They can connect on Twitter and share their content. They can connect on Instagram and like their photos. Or, even more powerfully, they can leverage all of these social touchpoints into a CRM platform and develop a complete picture of the likes, dislikes and lifestyle of each customer.

Of course, B2C marketers have the opportunity to develop these rich profiles as well. The only trouble is, it usually isn’t worth it – after all, if you are selling a $1.50 candy bar, the numbers just don’t add up. But if you’re selling a $10,000 software subscription, it makes sense to dedicate time and resources to integrating social data with customer profiles.

On the high, strategic level, B2B and B2C marketers will approach social media in much the same way. Both want to increase their brand’s exposure among their target audience, develop positive reputations, and generate interest in their product or service. When diving below the strategy into tactics, however, the scale shifts and B2B marketers increasingly focus on the one-to-one while B2C focuses on the one-to-many (with some key instances of one-to-one sprinkled in).

A few weeks ago, I asked my boss if I could hire a public relations intern.

“Sure, no problem,” he said, before adding, “but Gavin will have to sign off.”

Gavin, a serious Irish dude, is our VP of finance. Here are three things he doesn’t care about: soft ROI, brand awareness, and summer Fridays. Here are three things he does care about: hard ROI, telling the board we’ve increased our revenue, and workplace efficiency.

So while I was racking my brain to remember how many three-day weekends I took last summer, I was also trying to think if I’d brought in any business for Contently through my efforts as communications manager.

But I couldn’t make a half-assed case. It’s great from a PR perspective if Digiday covers our company, or if I get a VP to speak at Content Marketing World, but how does that directly affect Gavin? He has one clear question: For every dollar that Contently allocates to PR, how much money will Contently get back?

To answer that question and get the okay for an intern, I set out to prove that my work has helped the company get leads in the pipeline.

A bit of math

Earned speaking engagements are huge lead generators and an important part of PR initiatives. The best part is they’re usually free. To calculate the ROI of a speaking opportunity, you need to decide how your company determines attribution.

There are three main types of content attribution:

• First-touch: All the credit goes to the content that the prospect engaged with first.
• Last-touch: All the credit goes to the content that the prospect engaged with last before signing the deal.
• Multi-touch: The credit is doled out to each piece of content the prospect engaged with during the customer journey—either divided equally or weighted.

Since there are different approaches, the process can get tricky depending on individual preferences.

Here’s a simplified example of how we do things at Contently with a multi-touch model, courtesy of Sam Slaughter, Contently’s VP of content and my boss: If we sign a $100 contract from an inbound lead that first encountered Contently when our CEO spoke at a conference, $50 is attributed to PR and $50 gets attributed to sales. (If there are multiple PR touch points, those are weighted accordingly.)

But do you really get leads from speaking?

Marketers tend to consider earned media coverage more valuable than an ad because earned media implies that your company is relevant and newsworthy enough for publicity that doesn’t require any payment. The same can be said for earned speaking engagements.

Sponsoring an event is like being the kid in high school whose wealthy parents are always out of town—you’re being used for your resources. Receiving an invitation to speak at a conference is like being the popular kid who always gets invited because your presence will boost the party’s reputation. Audiences pick up on this dynamic at conferences.

Sure, speakers won’t get a list of 500 attendees to cold call just from giving a keynote presentation, but that one person who comes up to your executive after the speech and asks to connect at a later date could be worth more than 100 paid ads.

Why? Two reasons: There’s usually no cost besides time, since conferences often cover travel expenses. And speaking opps generate inbound leads, which means people are already interested enough to proactively seek out your services.

In 2015, Contently executives participated in 42 earned speaking engagements. We paid roughly $10,000 for travel costs (these were some events with great audiences, so we covered the hotel and airfare). Three contracts closed from these events with a total value of $220,000. After subtract the $10,000 in expenses, we’re left with net value of $210,000. So using our initial equation we borrowed from Sam:

$210,000 = $105,000 attributed to earned speaking + $105,000 attributed to sales

Then, to calculate ROI, you plug that PR attribution into another simple equation:

ROI = return / cost

10.5x ROI on earned speaking = $105,000 / $10,000

Note that this doesn’t factor in my salary or the potential salary of the intern, but I (and any PR person worth her salt) have many more responsibilities than just pursuing speaking opportunities, so I’ll leave that up to you to factor it in as you see fit.

Securing speaking opportunities

If you’re interested in getting more appearances for your employees, the first step you need to take is compiling a master list of events. It helps to set up a scoring system to prioritize the conference calendar. Who will be at the event? Where is it located? What topics are the organizers planning to cover? There are hundreds of conferences out there, so grading them will save you a lot of time.

Via welcometobusinesstown.tumblr.com

Contently’s PR opportunities ultimately come from one of two ways. Either I reach out to my contacts or I handle inbound requests. That’s where good content makes a significant impact—an important part of speaking that people often ignore is having something new and noteworthy to say.

Regardless of whether I’m pitching a speech or evaluating an inbound request, I need to be able to provide interesting information to close the deal. The most useful way to do this is through guest bylines. When executives write for reputable media outlets, it demonstrates they actually have thoughts they can articulate. Here’s a recent example from our CTO, Dave Goldberg, that was published by NextView Ventures: “How to Found a Startup in a New Industry.”

Press mentions also work well, specifically interviews, which show that other people care what your executives think. Here’s an example of an interview that turned into a feature article in First Round Review: “Content is Eating the World — Contently’s CEO on Winning at Marketing’s New Hotness.”

When I pitch the appearance, I’ve found that mentioning past speaking opportunities can make a difference. Presumably, doing so will put the organizers at ease. But to make sure I don’t burden them, I typically offer a pithy headline and a 100-word description. The goal is to clearly convey the topic, not outline the entire speech.

And once you’ve scheduled a few speeches, the last step is to create a speaker highlight reel, which is actually becoming a requirement for a lot of opportunities I come across. The reel can be specific to one person or include all of your executives. The clip should be brief—no longer than two minutes—and exciting, with strong sound bites from past speeches.

Once I secure the speaking opportunity, my job isn’t over, either. I have to help the speakers to make sure they’re ready to make a good impression. This can include putting together the deck for them, prepping them on the audience and the other speakers, going through practice runs, and providing critical feedback. The level of your involvement will vary depending on the public speaking abilities of the executive, but the last thing you want to do is sit back and say, “It’s up to them now.” They only have one chance to make an impression on an audience to drive those leads. And their success will have a direct impact on your success. Eventually, your biggest problem should be vetting inbound requests and being cognizant of the fact that the executives (supposedly) have real jobs to do.

To bring it all full circle, Gavin is one executive who almost always has a real job to do—besides that one time he live-streamed the Europa League during the workday. After I showed him the ROI of our speaking engagements, he had no problem signing off on a PR intern.

B2B marketing is going through a big change. Marketers are realizing that the broad scale lead generation approach isn’t as effective as it once was. At the same time, B2B companies have moved almost entirely to inside sales. Generating leads and blasting them with marketing automation emails is no longer enough to build pipeline for inside sales teams.

These new realities led to two major changes in B2B marketing strategy: the Account-Based Marketing (ABM) movement and a renaissance of Field Marketing. Account-Based Marketing is gaining momentum because it changes marketing’s focus away from lead generation and towards pipeline creation and acceleration within the right accounts. Field Marketing is making a comeback because inside sales teams need to connect with their prospects in more meaningful ways.

One major component of both ABM and the new Field Marketing is hosting strategic events to to engage your target accounts. This event strategy, called Revenue Event Marketing, focuses on building and accelerating pipeline to drive more revenue through in-person events. In Revenue Event Marketing, the emphasis becomes targeting and attracting the right attendees, maximizing face-to-face interactions, and driving timely follow-up. There are a few strategy changes that need to happen to make way for this new approach to events.

Shift Focus From Leads to Pipeline

Despite the shift toward ABM, the top metric for determining event success is still lead generation, according to Regalix’s State of B2B Event Marketing. When you only look at the number of leads generated through events, you miss the opportunity to use events as a strategic way to to create and accelerate pipeline with your target accounts. Events become much more valuable when the focus shifts away from just generating as many leads as possible.

In B2B, events are better suited as targeted efforts to drive conversion among a known group of prospects and customers. A recent study reports that events are the best method for engaging with c-suite decision makers, where high-touch relationship selling is critical.

For businesses that have adopted any part of Account-Based Marketing, Revenue Event Marketing is an extension of that approach focused on engaging your target accounts with events. This new approach requires a change in expectations and measurement related to marketing events.

Sponsor Less, Host More

Revenue Event Marketing moves away from sponsored conferences and trade shows to self-hosted events. Sponsoring trade shows and conferences can help generate top-of-funnel leads, but those leads are only valuable if they convert. Booth conversations are usually short and meaningless. They often only accomplish an explanation of what your product does to people who aren’t a fit. The trade show environment can also be wildly unpredictable as there is no way to guarantee traffic to your booth.

As a reaction to these issues, 40% of businesses are cutting back on larger sponsored events in favor of more targeted gatherings according to the CMO Council. This trend is being driven by a realization that smaller, more intimate events allow you make better use of your event budget while prioritizing on the accounts and contacts that will help you drive revenue.

There will still be some industry events you’ll want to sponsor because the attendees fit your ideal customer profiles and personas. But your event strategy shouldn’t be made up entirely of sponsoring booths at trade shows. At the very least, you should be hosting events like dinners or cocktail hours around the conferences you sponsor.

Align Marketing and Sales

While marketing and sales alignment has been a battle for years, the shift toward Account-Based Marketing is helping to change the rivalry into a partnership. Of any area where sales and marketing intersect, events are the most critical. The stakes are higher given that events are the biggest spend in the marketing budget and sales and marketing need to interact in-person in front of your target audience. That makes Field Marketing’s role as the link between sales and the marketing team even more important.

Sales used to view events as a waste of time when the focus was on lead generation. Reps would complain about being forced to make conversation with bad leads when they could have spent that time going after their targets. When sales starts to see that events can help them close deals at those target accounts, things change.

Companies with marketing and sales alignment are 67% better at closing deals and extract 208% more value from marketing according to Marketo’s research. Knowing that, you should start thinking of your sales and marketing teams as one “Revenue Team.” When Field Marketing aligns marketing and sales to work together on a Revenue Event Marketing strategy, events can become the biggest driver of revenue for your business.

These strategy changes make events more than just another way to collect contact info for top of the funnel leads. Revenue focused events provide an effective way to engage your target accounts and win deals. When you align marketing and sales, host events highly targeted events, and make pipeline acceleration the end goal, events have the opportunity to become your top revenue driving activity.

To learn more about how to drive revenue with events, check out Attend’s free eBook, The Complete Guide To Revenue Event Marketing.

The post How To Craft An Event Strategy That Sales Will Love appeared first on OpenView Labs.

When was the last time you purchased something on a whim? We all make impulse buys at the checkout line (“Do I need batteries? Better grab some just in case.”) However, when it comes to B2B purchases, buyers tend to be much slower to commit.

In fact, according to one source:

75% of B2B companies take one to six months to make a purchasing decision. ~ Pardot

This doesn’t spell gloom and doom for your B2B firm, however. If your prospects don’t buy on their first website visit, you’re in good company. That is the norm.

Let’s talk about:

• Various types of B2B Leads
• Setting goals for each type of lead
• How you can nurture each type of lead with low-pressure emails

Different Types of B2B Leads

Sales funnel. Buyer’s journey. Sales process. Marketing pipeline.

These are all terms used to refer to how you view your leads. I prefer “sales funnel.” To me, this conjures up the image of a literal funnel, where the top is very wide, and the bottom very narrow.

This mimics buying behavior; your audience may be large, but the number who commit to buying is relatively small.

That being said, we can’t say that there are only two stages (the top and the bottom) of the sales funnel. Let’s define this a little bit more.

Hubspot marketing manager, Pamela Vaughan has provided this graphic of the sales funnel:

Let’s explain.

1. Visits.

These are the folks who enter your website. They may have found you through an organic search, social media, or another referral source.

2. Leads

We divide leads into categories depending on where they are in the buying process. People who download brief, free piece of content are likely in the beginning stages of the buyer’s journey. Whereas those that download a white paper or attend a webinar are typically further along in the buying process.

3. Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), also known as MOFUs

Unlike those who have downloaded a piece of free content, these are leads that are engaging with your company. They follow you on social media channels, they frequent your site often, their brand fits with your brand, and they regularly interact with your company. Someone who raises his hand for a free demo is typically ready to be turned over to sales.

4. Opportunities

These are the leads that sales is working on. They are qualified and demonstrated interest.

5. Customers

They’ve signed on the dotted line and they’re now happy customers. This is the part of the sales funnel that everyone loves.

How to Set Goals for Each Type of B2B Lead

Logically, you can’t treat everyone that falls into your sales funnel in the same manner. Each one needs a personalized touch.

1. Goals for Visitors

Your goals to attract visitors should revolve around visibility and brand awareness. How to do so is a topic for a future post but for now here are two tactics to keep in mind. Social media is a good way to create visibility and awareness; keyword optimization is a way to stream people to your site.

2. Goals for Leads

In order to gain leads, you’ll need to create value for your visitors. You can do this by creating free content, such as infographics, eBooks, SlideShares, videos, and webinars.

I recommend gating this content, meaning that your visitor will have to give away some personal information in return for the content. You can usually ask for just a name and email address to start.

3. Goals for MQLs

Marketing qualified leads need to gain trust in your brand. This doesn’t happen overnight.

Rather, you’ll want to continue to provide them with valuable content that is tailored to their needs.

4. Goals for Customers

You don’t want to stop setting goals just because someone has reached the neck of the sales funnel.

Your goal at this point should be to turn happy customers into promoters of your business. You can do this by offering incentives through email and on social media.

How to Nurture Leads with Low-Pressure Emails

Whether prospects are at the top of the sales funnel, or at the bottom, none want to receive a high-pressure email. Let’s go through some best practices for nurturing those leads with an email workflow.

1. Best Practices for Emailing Leads

Imagine Joe Buyer downloads your eBook. He receives the content in his inbox. Later that afternoon, he receives an email from your company telling him that you hope he’s enjoying your eBook and that if he wants to sign up for your webinar (for a fee), to click on this link.

How likely is it that Joe Buyer will click on the link? Not at all likely.

However, let’s say three days after receiving his eBook, Joe receives an email from you personally, Jim Seller. You tell him that you really hope he’s enjoying the eBook he downloaded. In fact, if he’d like more free content, he can subscribe to your blog.

That’s a little better, isn’t it?

Here are a few tips to getting people to read your emails:

• Make the subject line direct and brief so that it appears, even on mobile. Don’t make someone guess why you’re emailing. Isn’t it annoying to get this type of email subject line –“I’ve found the best solution to your mobile marketing needs and I’ll reveal it to you here”? Make that a no-no.
• Don’t include too many images. They can take too long to load.
• Set a conversational tone. The email shouldn’t sound like a sales brochure. It should sound like a letter from someone with whom the reader has a mutual friend in common.
• Include a clear call to action
• Don’t send during busy hours or days. Studies have shown that Tuesday is the best day to send emails, followed by Thursday, then Wednesday.
• Don’t inundate them with emails. Wait at least several days before reaching out again.

“If your main call-to-action falls below the fold, then as many as 70% of recipients won’t see it.” ~Jamie Turner, The 60-Second Marketer

2. Best Practices for Emailing MQLs

Many of the same rules apply to sending emails to MQLs. However, now we’re going to talk about content and offers you should extend to MQLs.

Since MQLs are typically those with whom you’ve had some engagement on social media, and who have downloaded several offers, or visited your site repeatedly, you now want to start helping them to build trust in your brand.

At this point, you can email them with promotional offers like free trials, coupons, or introductory rates.

A word of caution, though. You still want to take a more conversational tone in your emails. You don’t want to come across as someone who is using them, being friendly at first only so you can land a sale.

3. Best Practices for Emailing Customers

Customers shouldn’t be ignored either. Although you won’t send them offers with a view to converting, you can still send them valuable content to show you appreciate their loyalty.

Your tone for emailing customers should always be gracious, showing them how appreciative you are for their patronage.

More Ways to Land Leads

Emailing marketing doesn’t have to be the used-car-salesman approach it once was. Remember, your goal is simply to be there for your audience and to provide them with valuable knowledge.

Since 80% of all B2B leads begin with LinkedIn, it makes sense to have an attractive LinkedIn Company Page. Not sure how to do that? Check out my latest guide, How to Create the Perfect LinkedIn Company Page.