Rnordman

Google is adding a new feature to it search engine that shows you the busiest times of the week for a bunch of different places and businesses. This should make it a little easier to avoid the crowds.

Read more...

As we all know by now, Facebook is betting big on video, and video advertisers love it. The rate of new video features, both for users and advertisers are at the moment quite staggering. It feels like not a week goes by before another feature is announced. And with new features comes new possibilities for marketers and advertisers. Staying on top of the different tools and options is crucial for the marketer who wants to up their video marketing game. Here are a brief rundown of the latest new Facebook newsfeed updates regarding video features, and what it means for you as a marketer, brand or advertiser.

New Feed Ranking Factors – More Video Abound

Facebook has tweaked its news feed algorithm to include more than just engagement actions on videos. Previously only engagement (liking, sharing, commenting, etc.) with a post would indicate that a video was “liked” by its viewers. Now Facebook has decided that other factors like how long people watch a video, choosing to turn on sound or making the video full screen are also factors that deem the video to be good and worthy of further spread. Liking a video is not longer the only thing that will boost a video’s spread.

What does it mean for marketers?

A potential higher organic boost if people are watching your videos but not liking or engaging with them.

New Video Ad Pricing

What a “view” on Facebook is worth have been discussed by marketers ever since Facebook introduced video ads on its platform. Up until now Facebook has deemed a view to be anytime a video is autoplayed to a user in their newsfeed. Thus a Facebook user could have gotten a video served to them, quickly scrolled past it, but it would still have been counted as a “view” for Facebook, and more crucially, the advertiser who’d have to pay for it. It seems like Facebook have reacted to angry marketers and advertisers and are set to change the policy. In the future, a view is registered only when a video is watched for 10 seconds or longer (which would incidentally be charged at a higher rate). More at The Wall Street Journal.

What does it mean for marketers?

Better knowledge of what you’re paying for and less wasted advertising money (presumably).

More Video Ad Metrics!

A very welcome to the Facebook Page Insights is the new Video tab that is being rolled out globally over the coming few weeks. This further emphasizes the importance Facebook put on video, and will make it easier for marketers to evaluate the performance of their videos. In the video tab, page owners will have access to the following insights:

• Views and 30-second views at a Page level
• Top videos within a certain date range
• Metrics for videos shared from other Pages

Instead of being limited to only seeing the statistics of a single video, page owners can now access all their videos at the aggregate level, and compare it over time. The new metrics are a gold mine for a video marketer, so head over to Facebook to read the full breakdown, and explore it when you get it.

What does it mean for marketers?

Better understanding on which of your video work and which doesn’t. Ditch that excel spreadsheet and compare your videos performance directly from your Facebook page. Comparing video distribution of Organic vs. Paid, Auto-Played vs. Clicked-to-Play, and Unique vs. Repeat — gives a unique insight into the viewing behavior of your page’s audience.

“Floating” Video Player

This new feature lets you detach a video from the newsfeed, and keep it anywhere in your browser while you continue scrolling. The feature that can be seen as a bit gimmicky is quietly being tested by Facebook on various Facebook accounts, but if deployed to all Facebook accounts is sure to bump up the viewing numbers.

Gif courtesy of The Verge – http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2015/07/07/watch-out-youtube/

What does it mean for marketers?

Higher chances that people watch your full video, which brings us to the next point…

Facebook Opens The Door To Sharing Ad Revenue With Content Creators

Facebook is finally starting to get its feet wet in the ad revenue sharing world, something that has been dominated by YouTube for a long time. For now, only big publishers and brands like NBA, Fox Sports and Funny or Die will get a piece of the pie but surely this is just a step on the way before Facebook takes on YouTube for real? Coupled with the big sharing capabilities, a full ad revenue split could entice all content creators to put their videos on YouTube.

What does it mean for marketers?

More videos on Facebook = more ad capabilities. Everything Facebook does to increase video usage on Facebook should be seen as a positive for video marketers.

Conclusion

Facebook is innovating its video products at a staggering rate, to the excitement of video marketers everywhere. Are you putting more money into distributing your brand’s videos on Facebook? Do you think these 5 Facebook newsfeed updates will affect your marketing game? Let us know in the comments.

Want to create amazing videos for your products, sales, listings or business? Try out Shakr now, it’s free and will take you less than 15 minutes to create a professional looking video for your business. Use Facebook’s hyper surgical targeting capabilities to reach your preferred audience.

Amazon announced Prime Day with a shout of “more deals than on Black Friday.” Quickly on the heels of Amazon’s announcement, Walmart fired back with roll-back prices on 2,000 products for the same time period. And while Prime Day didn’t wow consumers as Amazon had hoped, one thing is certain: the “Store Wars” have begun, and this begs some big questions for the future of retail:

Will the traditional sales events lose their luster?

We have already seen that Black Friday and Cyber Monday aren’t what they used to be, as the holidays have become one constant sale after another. In an effort to catch more of the wallet share, retailers and brands are starting those promotional deals earlier and earlier — as in the case of Amazon and Walmart.

New, fabricated retail holidays are changing the retail landscape. There is a new crop of “Christmas in July” sales, sales-tax holiday weekends typically in August and then retailers roll right into back-to-school and holiday shopping season. Halloween will be in stores in September. Thanksgiving will appear beginning of October – both “starting” two months before the respective holidays. The reality is, these once-celebrated sales events have indeed lost their luster as consumers have come to expect similar door-busters throughout the year.

Have we trained consumers to look for deals daily?

With technology and smartphones in the palm of their hands, shoppers have an easily-accessible tool to search for sales information and to identify which store is offering the best product value for the price. Plus, the growing prevalence of the in-store technology such as beacons, also reinforces shoppers’ thirst for deals by rewarding customers as they enter the store in real-time.

While the days of direct mail and paper couponing are coming to an end, this new rise of “digital couponing” reaches today’s shoppers with ever more personal and unique offers – and most importantly, through their native devices. Today’s push-coupons have trained consumers to not only look, but to expect, deals upon entry to any store, be it brick and mortar or online.

Does any shopper pay full price anymore?

Shoppers have become smarter. Many sites allow the user to create alerts that will notify them when their coveted item goes on sale. Comparison shopping has become simpler, as well, with different applications available on an array of mobile devices that can help check different prices at different retailers. Luxury items can now be rented or purchased over time. Bulk purchasing is embraced by everyone, regardless of their personal economics. And stores like Marshall’s, which changes merchandise every week, encourages shoppers to return frequently to discover incredible deals and steals.

Quite simply, full price has become an antiquated term when it comes to today’s digital shopper. And retailers that fail to adjust their pricing and promotional models based on this fact will soon become antiquated themselves.

Though Prime Day wasn’t as successful as anticipated, it did prove that traditional shopping “events” are becoming a thing of the past, as in-store or online sales crop up on a seemingly daily basis, and retailers all clamoring for a piece of the sales event pie. Today’s consumers, and digital-first millennial shoppers in particular, have grown accustomed to flashy retail holidays, and they spend their money at stores that can deliver on that concept. Those brands and retailers with ready-built, loyal consumer bases — like Amazon or Walmart — will find success outside of Black Friday by honing in on convenience and savings.

When we eat a snack in the afternoon or grab a big lunch, we’re usually pretty good at making up for that by eating less food later in the day. However, we rarely consider how many calories our favorite Starbucks drink, happy hour cocktail or even glass of juice is adding to our diets. One of the biggest liquid calorie culprits is alcoholic drinks, with carb and calorie-heavy beer leading the way.

At HealthGrove, we translated all those beer calories into popular fast food items like doughnuts, pizza and french fries. This comparison will likely shock you more than the numeric facts on the can.

Note: The caloric value we used for a standard 12 oz. beer was 148 calories. All nutrition values for food items were sourced from the manufacturers’ websites.

Subway Meatball Marinara

You may not be hungry for a meal after dinner, but drinking a couple of beers will deliver the same amount of calories as eating a Subway sandwich. Coming in at just under 300 calories per sandwich, two beers is equivalent to a single 6″ Subway Meatball Marinara.

Coca-Cola

A standard 8 oz. Coke has a pretty similar number of calories to the average beer. Drinking three beers is the same as drinking just over three cans of Coke.

The key here is that you never drink three cans of Coke in one sitting—but beer? Pretty much every weekend.

French Fries

Notorious for their greasiness and addictive salty crunch, one serving of McDonald’s french fries carries as many calories as a small meal. With a single basket coming in at nearly 350 calories, your five-beer night is the same as eating two full baskets of fries.

Ben and Jerry’s Vanilla Ice Cream

With a single scoop coming in at a whopping 230 calories, you might be shocked to find out that drinking five beers is the equivalent of eating about three scoops of ice cream.

Taco Bell

Drinking four beers is the caloric equivalent to wolfing down almost three full Taco Bell beef tacos. You might want to think twice about the beers if you’re going to end up at Taco Bell later in the night anyway.

Hamburgers

The standard burger from In-N-Out packs a whopping 243 calories each. Going out for happy hour after work? If you grab three beers, you may as well have just eaten about two hamburgers.

Doughnuts

Having six beers on a Saturday night gives you as many calories as eating nearly five deep-fried, sugar-glazed Krispy Kreme doughnuts. Doing either is probably equally likely to make you throw up, though.

Popcorn

Drinking three beers is the same as eating nearly eight cups of Orville Redenbacher’s buttered popcorn. If you’re trying to watch your weight, you may want to stick with the popcorn—it’s way easier to accidentally drink three beers than to eat so much popcorn you want to cry.

Oreos

Getting just a couple of beers with the gals translates to nearly eight Oreo cookies. Having a wilder night? Drinking six beers gives you the same number of calories as eating more than 22 Oreos.

Pizza

A slice of Domino’s pizza comes in at about the same number of calories as a beer. That might not sound too bad, but think about it this way: if you eat at Domino’s for dinner before hitting up the bars, you could end up consuming the equivalent of a full pizza before the night is through.

Fundamental go-to-market strategies are based upon asking the right questions as early as possible to align and focus scarce resources for maximum impact. Unfortunately, while this sounds reasonable, many nod their head in agreement only to act in a manner that is diametrically opposed to the premise.

Executives look to those employees who get things done. In today’s competitive markets there is not enough time to train, coach and mentor the masses. However, organizations seek out those that can hit the ground running and figure out how to get things done. One thing this group holds in common is that they ask the right questions early and often while the rest of the pack does not.

The key is to ask good questions upfront – i.e. know what to ask and when to ask for it.

• How can you know what you don’t know?
• How can you not be a burden to others to get up to speed?
• How do you not burn yourself out trying to get things done?
• How do you not miss the mark?

Why doesn’t everyone ask good questions? The top three reasons include: assuming, using bad information and not addressing the root problem.

ASSUMING

Often times, people prefer to assume – some say this word is actually comprised of three words that provide a good explanation of why things went wrong. But why do some people assume?

Talking – some people confuse talking with communicating. Here, meeting times (formal or informal) usually mean the bulk of time is spent talking about things that are not core to the topic at hand. Individuals leave the meeting without clear direction and rely on their own interpretation of what was “talked about” as they move ahead.

Intimidation – there’s an old adage that says, “It is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and reveal all doubt.” This may happen because the requestor is more powerful or simply louder than others in the group — and the doers are afraid to ask questions.

Too Busy – there is almost always too much to do and too little time to do it. In this scenario, an initial or partial thought is floated and others run to figure it out.

USING BAD INFORMATION

Garbage in, Garbage out – regardless of whether the problem was framed correctly, if inaccurate or incomplete data is used then it is almost certain that the results or findings will be flawed.

NOT ADDRESSING THE ROOT PROBLEM

Not the Root Problem – sometimes, what is thought to be the issue is actually a symptom and not the root problem. Solving for a symptom is frustrating for the owner of the pain as their problem is not solved. It is also defeating for the doers as they exerted time and effort that was in vain.

Asking good questions will help navigate to the core of a request so that resources can be efficiently and effectively allocated in order to provide the desired results — without the trial and error approach.

Fundamental Go-to-Market Strategies Requires Asking Meaningful & Relevant Questions Around:

• What is the fundamental marketing strategy?
• Is value being delivered to customers?
• What is the role of product, solution and industry marketing?
• Are there managed, repeatable processes in place?
• What is the integrated demand creation and management plan?
• Are we optimizing our investment in marketing?
• What is the overall go-to-market plan?
• Is the sales team enabled?
• What is the social media plan?
• What is the unique selling proposition?

In many instances, the initial question is not the root problem. When this happens, solving for this symptom stimulates an iterative process by the requestor until they figure out what they really need. Sometimes however this will result in an endless loop. Before launching a project, it’s important to know what is being asked for and why, before jumping into execution mode. Learning what is not a desired outcome is many times as valuable as understanding what is a desired outcome.

Download the questions to ask when developing fundamental go to market strategies.

Moscow (AFP) - The Russian ruble on Tuesday plummeted past 60 against the dollar for the first time since March on falling oil prices, complicating the central bank's efforts to jump-start the battered economy.

The ruble reached 60.30 per dollar in early afternoon trading in Moscow after having lost two percent of its value on Monday. 

The new weakening of the ruble, which comes after the embattled currency bounced back somewhat in recent months, is expected to further erode consumption and fuel inflation, which stood at 15.3 percent last month.  

"Inflation is already extremely high, and another sharp fall in the ruble would fuel it even further, which, in turn, would intensify the squeeze on households’ real incomes," Liza Ermolenko, an emerging markets economist at Capital Economics, told AFP.

Low energy prices, brought on by the global oversupply of crude oil, have sent the Russian currency into its most recent decline, causing it to lose more than 15 percent of its value against the dollar in just over two months. 

"Looking ahead, the outlook for the ruble depends on what happens to oil next," Ermolenko said in emailed comments.

"For now we expect oil to end the year at $55 per barrel, meaning the ruble should stabilise around its current level."

The central bank is expected to announce on Friday whether it will cut interest rates further, but the ruble's plunge could lead the authorities to decide against it to prevent inflation from spiralling out of control.

Last month, the Bank of Russia cut its interest rate for the fourth time this year to support the struggling economy. 

The Ukrainian crisis has led to unprecedented Western sanctions on the Russian economy, and last year's collapse of oil prices plunged Russia into a monetary crisis at the end of 2014 that has led to a deep recession.

Join the conversation about this story »

China's stock markets look like they could be heading for free fall again, after collapsing around 30% in just four weeks starting in mid-June.

That collapse was compared to the Wall Street Crash of 1929, with Bloomberg pointing out the similarity in the trajectory of the fall.

But Deutsche Bank says a better analogy for China's meltdown is the bursting of the dotcom bubble in 2000.

While the fall mirrors the Wall Street Crash, Deutsche Bank says the rise is closer to the surge of the NASDAQ in the late '90s. And, as with the bursting of the dotcom bubble, it's the rise that's key to understanding the undoing of China's stock markets.

The Shanghai Composite rose over 150% between mid-2014 and its peak in mid-June 2015. The surge was down to huge numbers of ordinary Chinese people putting money into shares — 66 million new retail investment accounts have been opened so far this year, according to Deutsche Bank.

Many of these investors also used borrowed money for so-called "leveraged investing." Deutsche Bank say around 10% of the value of Chinese stocks are held by leveraged investors. 

The flow of all this cash into stock markets pushed up prices because demand was greater than supply. But the rising prices didn't mirror improving company performance and prices are now crashing because many businesses are overvalued.

All the borrowed money tied up in shares in exacerbating the slump. People are being forced to sell to pay back the money rather than potentially wait the meltdown out and hope prices pick up again before cashing out.

While all this may explain the initial slump, Deutsche Bank's Jim Reid says separately on Tuesday that the return of nosediving stocks on Monday looks "pretty random" — the mechanics of the market are so screwed that it's hard to tell what's going on anymore.

That means that while we can look to history for useful comparisons for China's meltdown, they're unlikely to be much good in helping us predict what's going to happen next.

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The cheapest new Ferrari money can buy is absolutely gorgeous

“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”
― Socrates

Imagine a group of people in a business meeting who are discussing a certain topic that seems to be familiar to everybody. But somehow, the meeting goes on and on. Then it ends with – no decision. We all know those unproductive scenarios. People assume that all others have the same (their own) understanding of a certain term. But this is often not the case. Then meetings end nowhere, the time has been wasted, and no decisions have been made.

This is why definitions are so important. Definitions are a productivity booster rather than a waste of time. Most important in our ever-changing and complex world of selling and buying is that definitions have to be adjusted, changed, and evolved to remain valuable.

And that’s exactly the case with sales enablement. How enablement began its journey several years ago may no longer be appropriate to create sustainable and scalable business value in today’s ever-changing environments.

Let’s analyze how a world of rising buyer expectations requires that enablement evolve to a more dynamic, strategic and holistic discipline.

Our 2015 MHI Sales Best Practices Study shows that world-class sales performers involve an average of 5.8 stakeholders at the customer, and 4.6 within their own organization. That’s significantly more than average performers, who only involve 4.4 stakeholders at the customer and 3.8 people internally. More people involved leads to more complexity to be mastered. But more people involved also leads to better sales performance. That’s counterintuitive, but this world-class segment outperforms all others in terms of increasing customer retention rates (+5.8%) and sales performance (+23%), measured by various sales metrics. What are they doing differently?

World-class sales performers adapt better and faster to rising and changing buyer expectations in a customer-centric world.

World-class sales performers know that understanding the specific customer’s journey, and all involved stakeholders, is the foundation for providing valuable perspectives. World-class sales performers create value at each stage of the customer’s journey for all stakeholders, each of whose involvement may be different. They provide valuable perspectives on how to achieve even better results and wins, and collaborate with customers to calculate their specific business value. World-class sales performers know exactly how to navigate the different dynamics along the entire customer’s journey, and they don’t walk away after a deal has been closed.

That’s why enablement needs to be refreshed and redefined in a strategic and holistic way – Sales Force Enablement

All these findings on world-class sales performance require a dynamic, strategic and holistic enablement approach based on the customer’s journey as the main design point. That’s why I came up with a new and comprehensive definition. Many years in different sales roles, as an executive in the enablement space evolving the topic from a program to a strategic function in a large corporation; and working for many years with peers in the same space plus working with our clients, have led to this sharpened approach. Here we go:

A few soundbites for you on the definition:

• Strategic means that the business strategy is mapped to sales execution to derive a specific enablement scope that’s tailored to addresses an organization’s weaknesses, gaps and strengths to execute the business strategy successfully.
• We call it a discipline, as enablement can be organized in many different ways depending on your context and maturity. Enablement, whether it is a program or a function, is always cross-functional. The orchestration of tasks and processes – such as content creation and distribution or training design and delivery – always involves several functions and often external providers.
• Sales results and productivity are the quantitative metrics by which an organization assesses the performance of their sales function. Specific goals always have to be defined based on your organizational context and your specific point of departure. Make sure to cover both, effectiveness (first) and efficiency metrics.
• Providing integrated content, training and coaching services helps to ensure consistent messages across the sales force. There is no training without content, and no enablement content should be provided to the sales force without at least a “how-to-use” video.
• As a consequence of providing coaching services, frontline sales managers are a key target group to ensure that coaching can reinforce the enablement efforts. No sales leader can afford to put enablement investments at risk by not aligning enablement and coaching.
• As discussed above, what separates world-class performers from all others is their ability to make the customer’s journey and all involved stakeholders their main design point.
• Last but not least, sales force enablement is powered by technology from the creation and production of enablement services (content, training, and coaching) up to their distribution and integration in CRM systems with mechanisms that provide relevant services at salespeople’s fingertips.

As an MHI research member, please check out the related Research Note that explains the definition in detail. You can also have a look at my keynote from the SAVO Sales Enablement Summit 2015 to learn more about the underlying maturity model that covers a required level (where we have all started to organized certain domains), the recommended level (that’s the sales force enablement definition) and the world-class level (our ambition), which we call customer-core enablement.

This article was first published in Top Sales Magazine, July 28th 2015

————————————————————————————

Related blog posts:

Missing Something in Your Sales Enablement Approach?

Manage Mechanics, Navigate Dynamics

The Customer’s Journey Matters, Or How To Avoid Seller and Buyer Misalignment

Providing Perspectives – A Dynamic Customer-Core Engagement Principle

The post Redefining Enablement In A Dynamic, Strategic And Holistic Way appeared first on Sales Enablement Perspectives.

Marketers increasingly look to social media to evaluate the potential impact of even the most traditional media buys. You may think of print magazines as being as old-fashioned as it gets. However, a new report from Engagement Labs shows many men’s and women’s lifestyle mags have successfully evolved to find their social media sweet spot.

According to Bryan Segal, CEO of Engagement Labs, “People still love the touch and feel of print magazines. They’re still a great medium, even if they’re past their heyday. Let’s face it, content is still king and queen. Social just serves as a new distribution network. Magazines have already mastered developing great content, now their challenge is parlaying it into a great digital experience.”

According to the report, many have already achieved that goal.

Measuring Social Media Performance

Engagement Labs measured social media performance for several top men’s and women’s lifestyle magazines using their eValue tool. The eValue score is composed of Engagement, Impact and Responsiveness metrics.

• Engagement is the level of interaction content receives on a specific social network

• Impact is the reach content receives on a specific social network

• Responsiveness measures how much, how fast and how well a brand responds to actual conversations amongst its users.

The Results from the Study

Perhaps it shouldn’t be that surprising that these print magazines have adapted well to social media. For years, bloggers have used Cosmopolitan as the ultimate guide for creating attention-grabbing headlines. Prompting someone to make an impulse purchase at the checkout line demands the same understanding of human nature as getting them to click a link. Perhaps not surprisingly, Cosmo had the best performance ranking on Twitter and Facebook, and ranked #2 on Instagram.

From Then to Now

Prompting someone to make an impulse purchase at the checkout line demands the same understanding of human nature as getting them to click a link.

As a marketer, analyzing the options for your paid media dollars is more complex and nuanced than it’s ever been. Fortunately, we also have more hard data than we’ve ever had. It’s just important to think through the implications of that data holistically. What do the numbers represent, in terms of value to your brand?

What lifestyle magazines have to offer marketers now is intrinsically the same thing they’ve always had to offer. Not just eyeballs, but the positive association with their brand, which consumers emotionally relate to leisure, enjoyment and their personal passions.

That sense of loyalty and community is a natural fit with social media, and it looks like many men’s and women’s magazines have successfully translated their passionate community of readers to the social space.

The post How Lifestyle Mags Are Killing it on Social appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

      

10 Steps to Building a Repeatable Marketing System written by John Jantsch read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing is a system, plain and simple. Now, some people take that to mean that you simply create a one size fits all, turn-key set of tactics and call it a day.

The truth, however, lies not in the repeatable tactics, but in the repeatable process based on the right strategy.

There is, in my view, a very systematic way to come up with a predictable path for growing any business, but every business is different – so, their system is unique, while the process for getting there does not need to be.

So you see, you don’t need a marketing plan so much as you need a marketing process.

Below are the ten steps I’ve used over and over again to help grow every business I’ve worked with over the last two decades.

Strategy for where you are going

The fist step is to determine where you want to go. I know everyone says this, but few do it. Or, if they do, it’s based on some over the top world domination dream that nobody can buy in to.

In my experience, three years out is a long view for most and merely a target to get a sense of the vision for growth. You can surround this vision with things like revenue and hiring projections, but the main thing it to create something that can guide your decisions today based on even a murky map of the future.

Now, what’s this year need to look like to propel you towards the three-year picture?

Strategy for where you are

I like to work in 90-day chunks because few people can focus much beyond that and most of the time things are so fluid you need to remain nimble enough to change course throughout the year.

The key thing here is to identify the 2-3 highest priority initiatives and focus all of your efforts on meeting the goals you set for each.

So, for example if the highest priorities for the quarter are to grow a new revenue stream and to increase client retention then all of your efforts need to be focused on those priorities, even if some pet projects need to be put on hold.

Build community first

The secret to sustained growth lies in creating a loyal community, monetizing this community and leveraging this community for additional growth.

Many businesses focus only on trying to find people to sell to. Today’s most wildly successful companies build a following and then figure out what they want to buy. It’s a model that few get, but it is the most profitable way to grow a business.

Now, if you’re starting a business or in a business that you want to grow, you may have to make community building a priority while you do the things that generate cash flow for today.

You can, however, make the community building frame of mind, something that you use to evolve your content marketing efforts, customer service, and even product development.

Put a free version of your product out, create premium content and invite community members rather than subscribers, surprise the heck out of every customer by doing something they never imagined you would do.

Set your near-term goals

Set measurable goals for every aspect of your short-term priorities and use the scorecard for those objectives as a way to hold everyone accountable for the tasks and projects associated with the goals.

The discussions you have around why goals are met or not is how you course correct and keep everyone focused on the priorities you’ve already established rather than things that don’t matter beyond the day to day grind.

Decide on some bets

Here’s the fun part in my mind. It’s hard to know what will work and won’t work for sure when it comes to marketing, that’s the reality. The best marketers make informed bets, but they test and measure everything.

Now, what these bets or optimizations are for your business will vary largely depending where you are. If you’re in startup mode, you can try big things. If you’re locked down and just trying to acquire more market share you test little things.

These bets or tests should be based on your near term goals and some amount of educated brainstorming, but as a team you must commit to what they are going to be and see it through.

A bet might be a total repositioning of your value proposition. It might just be using a video on the homepage or trying lookalike audiences on Facebook.

Again, the key is that the bets are based on your priorities and will be fully developed rather than seen as the idea of the week.

Implement with tests

Once you have decided on your bets, you must figure out the proper plan to execute and perhaps more importantly test, retest and measure every element as though the life of the business depended upon it.

This is the difference between building a marketing system and simply throwing stuff at the wall.

This is how you prune that bets that fail and go all in on the bets that work.

Experiment and analyze

Now that you are starting to measure results you can begin to test a winning email subject line against another, a winning landing page against one with some element changed or even one sales page against another.

Once you have some things working, you always try to better through experimentation.

Document and delegate

Now, here’s the part that even successful marketers tend to gloss over.

Once your bets start to pay off and are headed towards long-term implementation, document the process or system or campaign in a way that allows you to delegate it to a marketing assistant type or even a VA so you can move on and make some more bets.

This is how marketing gain momentum and this is the essence of an effective marketing system.

Review and plan

Every 90 days review your priorities, your scorecard, and every bet you’ve made.

The goal of this review is to create a new set of priorities for the upcoming quarter and to start to learn what’s been working and what hasn’t been. This is how you start to develop patterns that make you better at making hunches for future bets

Repeat

You probably knew this was going to end this way, but marketing isn’t ever done – the process never really ends – what you optimize will certainly evolve but working the system is your real job.

Art Cashin is not a believer in the efficient-market hypothesis. 

In his morning note on Tuesday, Cashin responded to a question he'd been getting about why he includes lengthy, detailed chunks of what people were talking about during the previous day's trade in his morning note. 

"First and least important," Cashin wrote, "I think they give you a sense of what I and, by proxy, other traders are thinking and looking to as event unfold."

They are, in this way, a sort of "Monday Morning Quarterback" of the prior day.

But real value, Cashin admits, is how this look back informs Cashin's view on what markets are, and more importantly, what they aren't. 

"Second, and more importantly, I hope they convey that the market is not the random event that academics and other commentators would have you believe," Cashin writes. "They show the mileposts and targets that traders look to and also show how the markets react to those targets, whether they hold or are breached."

And so in this view, Cashin is broadly taking a swipe at the efficient-market hypothesis, a school of thought that basically argues markets are rational and unbeatable. The idea is that in an efficient market, prices either reflect all known information about a security or if prices don't reflect this information, they will soon revert to whatever the surfacing of this information dictates. 

This efficient market would, then, in a way, argue that stocks are going up for a reason unrelated to the people buying and selling those stocks. An efficient market is, in this sense, then merely a thing that acts not because of the people trading it, but almost in spite of these traders. 

The upshot, then, is that an individual will not be able, over time, to beat this efficient market. 

It is, of course, no surprise that Cashin, a 50-year veteran of the New York Stock Exchange floor, doesn't see things this way. 

"It would be easy to just tell you just what happened," Cashin wrote on Tuesday, "but I think it is useful to know what I and others are looking for or looking to as the process plays out." 

SEE ALSO: A hedge fund billionaire says there are only 2 things you need to remember about investing

Join the conversation about this story »

Buyers want personalized messages and conversations with salespeople. Generic selling just won't do. To have those conversations, companies must enable their sales teams. They must give sellers the tools, content, and support that allow them to speak to a specific persona, vertical, or even company, says Aberdeen Group's Peter Ostrow.

According to Gartner, a 2020 sales trend was that salespeople had to convince multiple stakeholders and evaluators at a company to buy their product.

These evaluators can be at any level and position within an organization, from team managers to CTOs. People in these different positions have varied interests, goals, and overall desires towards the products and services they use to meet their business needs.

Most critical, though, is that each stakeholder has a different level of power within their organization. Some are influencers that speak to the decision-makers and convince them to go in either direction, while others hold the final say on decisions.

As a salesperson, you need to be prepared for everything, regardless of the position of the person you’re selling to. However, the prospect of not knowing who you will be selling to can be nerve-wracking. In this post, we’ll explain how to identify sales leads you may be in conversation with, and give insight from expert sales leaders on how to sell to decision-makers and influencers.

Identifying Sales Leads

Below we’ll explain how to qualify different sales stakeholders.

The Gatekeeper

The gatekeeper is usually an executive assistant or associate of the decision-maker. In some instances, it is beneficial to work with the gatekeeper to build trust with them and have them vouch for you with the decision-maker. Enter gatekeeper marketing.

If the gatekeeper is an executive assistant, you should know immediately by their title. If they don't hold the title but are working in an assistant's capacity, ask questions like, "Do you work closely with [executive name]?" Or, "You wear a lot of hats; how do you prioritize your day?"

The gatekeeper is likely aware of their boss' pain points, and your solution might also benefit them. Talk to them as you would the decision-maker, and ask their advice on the best way to approach their manager when it's time.

The Influencer

The influencer is traditionally a junior-level employee who’s asked to research options before briefing a superior. They don’t have the budget or authority to make a final decision, but they do have the power to influence the decision-maker.

Influencers exist on a scale, and the more extreme side of influencers are sometimes called champions. These people have shared direct information with you about how products and services are reviewed and discussed within the company and may introduce you to the appropriate stakeholders throughout the sales process.

To find out how much power your influencer really has, ask questions like, "Have you done this before?" or "Are you confident the decision-maker will follow your recommendation?"

The answers to these questions tell you how experienced your influencer is in presenting product/service solutions to the decision-maker, and it signals how much help you'll need to offer throughout the process.

The Decision-Maker

The decision-maker is typically C-suite; the person who signs the check, re-allocates the budget on their own, and says "yes" without conferring with anyone. And, while it's not common, a decision-maker sometimes conducts research.

Often, the decision-maker delegates the sales process to an influencer until it's further along. In this case, work with the influencer but keep the CEO in the loop. Show you're happy to work with their team, but regularly check in with them.

When referring to a decision-maker, they might possess different titles or descriptions depending on the company they work for. Here are a few additional terms that may describe them, depending on their role: manager, executive, director, managing director, or vice president.

How to Sell to Decision-Makers & Influencers, According to Sales Leaders

Once you’ve qualified the person that you’ll be selling to, it’s essential to sell to them in a way that speaks to their role. Below we’ll discuss advice from expert sales leaders on how to sell to people in different positions.

Have themes for speaking to different personas.

Elle Midey, Head of Corporate Sales at HubSpot, gives general advice on how to sell to people at different levels of influence in an organization: “It’s great to have themes for how to talk to different personas as a starting point in a sales discussion.”

She adds, “It’s no secret that CMOs, CEOs, CTOs, all care about different things. However, at the end of the day, you are speaking to a specific person at a specific company about their specific pain. Instead of generalizing, do some research!”

To get the information you need, Midey suggests doing research into the individuals’ background and how it may affect what they think, what their specific role is in their current company, the company’s overall goals and how the individual fits into them, and whether their pain point is something you can actually fix with your solution.

She believes that it’s important to help any stakeholder you’re speaking to through the decision-making process with strategic and personalized information: “Sellers should act as extensions of their prospect’s team, and that starts with deep discovery into the above questions.”

Build trust with gatekeepers.

A gatekeeper can be a valuable ally. By talking directly to the individual instead of immediately asking to be passed off to leadership and expressing genuine interest in getting to know their organization and challenges, you can gain valuable insight to help you make a sale down the line. Creating a sense of familiarity with them also goes a long way in building trust and working with them to close a sale.

Here are some questions and talking points you can try to build trust and learn more about your prospect:

• "I see your company is preparing to launch XYZ product. How has that experience been?"
• "What are some of the challenges your organization has faced in launching XYZ?"
• "A previous client of mine worked through a similar challenge. I would be happy to talk to you about the solutions that worked for them."

Ask influencers about their day-to-day challenges.

Dan Imbriaco, SMB Manager on the HubSpot Sales team, says: “Influencers, I find, are much more focused on the ‘day in the life’ aspect of the product that you are selling as, oftentimes, they will be the actual users.” He says that the goal with these prospects should be to ask questions about the challenges they face with their current systems, toolsets, and day-to-day tasks.

Imbriaco’s strategy is to present the idea of a magic wand when speaking to influencers. He will ask them, “If you had a magic wand that could fix that challenge, what would that be?” He says that the question often helps you uncover a deep pain point that you may solve. At that point, you can present your product or service as a solution and demonstrate what a day in the life would look like if the sale were to go through.

Equip champions with the information they need to promote you to higher-level decision-makers.

As mentioned above, champions are high-powered influencers within a company that will introduce you to key stakeholders and promotes what you have to offer to get others on your side.

Champions are valuable people to be in conversation with at any given organization, which is why Travis Haninger, Co-Founder of SequoiaCX, says that it’s essential to focus on the stakeholders that have considerable influence because, if these individuals are on board, others will follow.

Haninger’s tip for selling to champions is to equip them with all of the information they need to promote you to higher-level decision-makers. He says, “Give them the knowledge and resources to counter other stakeholder objections, demonstrate ROI, and give assurances. Identify champions early in the process, and they will open doors and build consensus in ways that are impossible to you.”

Don’t sell to decision-makers, partner with them.

When selling to decision-makers, Hannah Ajikawo, Head of Europe at Sistas In Sales, says, “We shouldn’t be selling to decision-makers; we should be partnering with them.”

She says that this is important because senior decision-makers are usually in the positions they are in because, throughout their career, they have proven that they can take action, be trusted, and deliver results. She says it’s critical to help them build upon their perceived value in their org. Ajikawo says to focus on three key areas: insights, priorities, and the decision-making unit (DMU).

With insights, Ajikawo says you’ll want to ask yourself, “What do we know as salespeople that this decision-maker doesn’t have the time to find out and explore themselves?” Opt to share information with them that they may not be thinking about or have the time to uncover to build credibility.

With priorities, she says you must understand what strategic Objectives and Key Results (OKRs) and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) they have to identify opportunities where you can potentially fit in and present your product, service, or business as a solution to their pain points.

Minding the DMU means identifying who will be impacted by the sale. She says, “We need to multithread the deal even if our main influencer is adamant that they don’t need to be involved.” Since you’re a trusted source, you need to understand and prepare them for all aspects of the solution you’re selling so you can accurately inform them on what will happen and what they should expect if they follow through with the sale.

Aijkawo adds, “Do this right, and the sales engagement becomes super enjoyable.”

Selling to different stakeholders is a hallmark of B2B sales.

As a B2B salesperson, it’s more than likely you’ll be involved in a scenario where you are selling to different stakeholders, or maybe multiple at once.

It’s important to understand the different needs and intentions of each position you may be selling to, so you can maximize your influence. The more insight you have into each persona, the easier it will be to convince the necessary individuals and increase the likelihood of completing a sale.

Today’s technology-enabled buyers do their own research before calling a sales rep. They use blogs, discussion forums, Twitter, LinkedIn, and even Facebook to frame business issues, identify options, and evaluate solutions. 

Great salespeople need to look, sound, and act like experts on social media, which can often be a challenge to streamline and scale across an entire sales force. PeopleLinx’s State of Social Selling Report found that while 76% of B2B sales reps recognize the value, only 24% of B2B sales professionals feel they know how to use social media for selling. Yet when companies offer social selling training to their teams, the number of reps using social to sell skyrockets. 

We’ve taken the process of deploying social selling and boiled it down to 10 basic steps. Our new ebook, "How to Mobilize Your Sales Team on Social," lays out the step-by-step program for introducing social selling into a sales organization. It gives practical, hands-on advice based on the PeopleLinx team’s experience launching hundreds of social selling programs at the world’s largest companies and professional services firms. 

In this free ebook you'll learn:

• How to Communicate the Value of Social Selling: Tips to Share with Your Sales Leaders
• Best Practices on Building Online Profiles: What to Include, What Not to Include
• How to Measure ROI of Social Selling: The Metrics That Will Impress Your Executives 
• 10 Specific Steps to Mobilizing Your Team on Social Media

Download the free ebook and learn how to mobilize your team with social selling today. 

When copywriters imagine being replaced by a computer, they’re probably thinking of something like Persado.

Founded in 2012, the New York City-based company offers an enterprise-level platform that helps brands like American Express, Neiman Marcus, and Zipcar generate email and other marketing messages, assisted by human campaign and data experts. Today, the company is taking the next step, with its first self-service online module.

Called Persado Go, the new service is initially offering email subject line creation. With pricing starting at $3000/month, it’s intended for the mid-market as well as for larger companies that prefer to do their own email campaigns. Starting early next year, Persado Go will roll out other capabilities, like creating text for display ads and mobile push notifications.

As any marketer knows, subject lines are the most important part of an email, because they determine if it gets opened. To create a winner with Persado Go, you first choose selectors that define parameters such as audience and general purpose, and then upload an offer description that some human has written.

You also select the number of subject line alternatives you’d like, from one to 16. The setting with the highest number of alternatives, according to Persado, has a 90 percent likelihood of generating better-performing headings than actual writers would have written. Persado chief marketing officer David Atlas told me this is compared to data the company has on the effectiveness of writer-created copy.

VB just released Buyer’s guide: How to navigate the email marketing landscape
$299 on VB Insight, or free with your martech subscription

The probability declines as the number of alternatives decreases, and you’re left with a 55 percent chance of having a higher performance if you choose just one alternative. Some marketers, however, might choose fewer alternatives because their email marketing tool is more limited in its ability to test alternatives.

If you want to tweak the subject lines, you have a few choices: You can swap the machine-generated subject lines with phrases from a library of tested lines, such as:

Make your move!

You can’t waste it!

OMG

Not kidding!

You can also choose a selector that adjusts the “emotional tone” (either milder or stronger), or you can request personalization or a holiday greeting. But you can’t actually go in and change the language. If the subject lines got the meaning of the offer wrong, you have to revise your initial offer description and run the program again.

Above: A screen in Persado Go, showing subject line alternatives.

Image Credit: Persado

A Content Overview highlights which emotions were employed in the alternatives. A Linguistic Analysis shows the mix of emotional language, descriptive language about the product, call-to-actions, and formatting.

The alternative subject lines are then deployed in the email marketing campaign, with results returned on delivers, opens, and clicks. Persado Go is currently integrated with Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud, but if you use another email marketing tool you’ll have to export the campaign results from your tool and import them into Persado Go, or input the email campaign results by hand.

Persado Go’s machine learning then generates a single, winning subject line for your campaign, based on initial results.

What if that final subject line doesn’t work very well in email campaigns?

“That hasn’t happened,” Atlas told me.

The company says a dozen brands have already tested this new self-service tool. One, Angie’s List, reportedly achieved a 100 percent lift in order rates for its winning machine-written subject line, compared to previous email campaigns with the same human-created internal email message. In other words, the difference was the subject line.

On average, the company said, Persado Go demonstrates a 75 percent greater customer response rate for emails using its subject lines, compared to those created by actual wordsmiths.

Most email marketing systems allow for some form of testing for alternative campaigns so you can arrive at the most effective wording, and many companies sift communications for emotional content or sentiment.

But, Atlas said, Persado doesn’t “see anyone doing what we’re doing here.” The main competition, he added, are those who still do it “by hand.”

You know, with practitioners who actually have hands.

More information:

Powered by VBProfiles

*This post was first published in January 2015 via ANNUITAS.com

“There is nothing so terrible as activity without insight” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

It sounds pretty basic…getting to know your buyer before you build a Demand Generation program seems like common sense. Then why are so many Enterprise B2B marketers missing the mark?

ANNUITAS recently published the first B2B Enterprise Demand Generation Study to understand what drives this unique group of marketers. In it, the use of buyer personas was explored and surprisingly only 44% of enterprise B2B organizations use buyer personas as part of their Demand Generation planning. Combine that with the findings that two-thirds are running more than 15 programs a year and less than 3% rate themselves as effective, and a very reactive picture starts to emerge. As CMOs are being asked to do more and are required to drive more revenue for their organizations, they must become experts on the buyer to turn the situation around. Activity without insights will not get them there.

Include the Buyers
Demographic information is critical for most marketers using buyer personas according to the ANNUITAS research. About 60% also include buyer pain points, but how do they build these insights?

Marketing and sales roles provide most of the inputs to buyer personas with about half of respondents interviewing customers and a third interviewing prospects. Marketers should be wary of inside out thinking as the view of the buyer seen through internal filters can miss insights that impact the buying process.

This potential for internal bias has repercussions across Demand Generation programs. It shows up when only 43% of content is reported as aligning to buyer pain points and 28% report aligning content to the buyer journey stages. Speaking to buyers directly provides insights that can’t be gleaned from secondary research or internal sources alone.

Another key component of the buyer persona is understanding the buying process. However, according to the ANNUITAS study, only about 33% of B2B Enterprise marketers include this key insight in their efforts. The buying process information provides a critical link between pain points and the content consumption patterns of the buyer. This also indicates buying intent so it should not be overlooked.

Uncovering Insights
How should B2B Enterprise marketers approach buyer insights? There are four key areas of focus.

• Uncover environmental factors common in the industry and the marketplace. Secondary research is good for surfacing what issues are being discussed, but buyers can confirm whether something is vendor-hype or part of the critical challenges they face. Buyers will also provide stories that add color and dimension to your buyer personas that are often missing from facts and figures in analyst reports.

• Dig into business pain points, including the day-to-day. Sometimes even seemingly mundane issues lead to critical insights about how buyers consume content or delegate purchasing roles, to name a few.

• Buying process questions should cover the process itself, stakeholders and, in the case of customers, how the sales process matched up with their buying needs. Uncovering these internal barriers to conversion can be a valuable part of conducting buyer persona research.

• Get to know their content consumption preferences and patterns. Are they checking their Twitter feed multiple times a day or do they depend on local events and industry publications for most of their information? What type of information do they look for at different stages of the journey, and who do they trust to deliver it?

Buyer personas can be invaluable to B2B Enterprise marketers if they’re intentional and insightful instead of something that just “checks the box.” Becoming experts on the buyer will ensure that marketers build programs that have the right starting point, with clear guideposts along the way to building a Demand Generation program that delivers results.

Author: Lee Anne Wimberly @lwimberly Director of Strategy, ANNUITAS

GUEST:

Salespeople are seldom given a second chance in a company — unlike people in other roles. A developer, for example, may get behind on the latest software tools and languages but is never fired on the spot for lack of knowledge.

Today, companies often provide the opportunity to further employee education, even paying for classes to advance their careers. A company looking to give a current project manager a bigger role in the company may send that person to leadership development training. But, if a salesperson isn’t performing, we automatically consider that individual a bad salesperson. There are no classes, no development training programs, and no second chances. If you don’t make your quota, you will likely be considered incapable or a bad fit and be asked to leave.

A company’s sales department is crucial to its growth and resilience in any market, so why aren’t we trying to develop better salespeople?

A common technique in manufacturing, the “five whys,” is a method for understanding the underlying issues of any problem. For sales managers, the five whys can be a great technique for finding the root of the problem in the sales process. In sales, it is quite common for a sales manager to hear their sales representatives are receiving pushback from prospective clients. But if phrases such as, “It was bad timing,” or “I think we are too expensive,” are becoming too familiar, sales managers need to start asking, “Do I have a bad sales team, or is there a deeper issue?” These five whys can help you answer that question:

• Why did Salesperson ‘A’ lose Customer ‘Z’?

• The customer said it wasn’t the right time to purchase the product.

• Why wasn’t it the right time for Customer ‘Z’?

• Customer ‘Z’ didn’t consider the product a high enough priority.

• Why isn’t it a high priority for Customer ‘Z’?

• Customer ‘Z’ didn’t understand the value of the product to the business.

• Why didn’t Customer ‘Z’ understand the value?

• Salesperson ‘A’ didn’t know the needs of Customer ‘Z’, even though the lead was already qualified by a development representative before Customer ‘Z’ was transferred to Salesperson ‘A.’

• Why didn’t Salesperson ‘A’ know Customer ‘Z’s’ needs from the sales development representative?

• The sales development representative had not noted Customer ‘Z’s’ issues anywhere in the company’s CRM database.

With the five whys, a sales manager not only has insight into the specific reason for a given lost sale, but also any possible long-term communication concern that could be detrimental to future sales if internal issues are not resolved. A further internal look into how the company’s CRM system is run wouldn’t hurt; however, in this case, the missed sales opportunity is not the result of a “bad salesperson.” Rather, it’s the result of an internal sales process that isn’t promoting effective communication between sales development representatives and salespeople. Asking the five whys allows a sales manager to get to the root of the problem, which is often easily fixed with a little sales education.

In its simplest form, sales is a process that needs to be constantly reassessed, refined, and developed. Doing so enables the people who rely on it to do their job to the best of their ability. There will be times when the root issue is human, but by asking why and focusing on the problem, you’ll find many times it’s a lack of process, information, or structure that leads to a breakdown.

Hampus Jakobsson is CEO of Brisk, a Salesforce compatible sales productivity software provider with customers such as Evernote, Say Media, and Intercom. Prior to founding Brisk, he cofounded TAT, which was acquired by Blackberry for $150 million in 2010. He also avidly invests in several different startups.

This post is part of a series to help B2B organizations understand and implement sales and marketing alignment. Part one was about getting started. Part two showed how to identify the target buyer and their journey. Part three outlined the steps to designing a successful lead process. Now we’ll outline what defines a qualified lead.

The “qualified lead” definition is the point at which marketing determines that a lead is ready to be handed to sales. Without a shared definition, sales usually complains that marketing is sending them bad leads and marketing complains that sales isn’t following up on their hard-won leads. Establishing this definition is one of the most important things you can do to foster cooperation between sales and marketing. The qualified lead definition should cover demographic information (such as company size), situational information (such as their current pains or challenges) and behavioral information (such as webinars watched, specific pages visited, papers downloaded). It’s good to include information that shows clearly why the lead is ready for sales.

A qualified lead must be a demographic fit

The first step is to identify the demographic parameters of a qualified lead. Analyze your current customer base to find common denominators. Look for demographic parameters such as company size (employees or revenue), industry, job title, business model, and geographic location.

A qualified lead must have demonstrated relevant engagement

Look to the lead’s activity history. Did they open and click on an email? Attend a webinar? Fill out a form? Download a competitive analysis? Which web pages have they looked at, and for how long? A genuinely qualified lead will display proactive engagement.

A qualified lead must be ready to speak to sales

Don’t send unqualified leads to sales, even if you’re striving to make a benchmark number. This damages trust and inhibits their desire to follow up on marketing-generated leads. For full cooperation, sales must be able to trust the leads marketing sends. When you did your buyer persona research, you should have uncovered the steps that your best buyers took to become your customers. Be very aware of the late-stage steps that amount to buying signals and score them as such. This will let sales know why you’ve sent them the lead and will foster confidence in your process.

Create an agreement and have both sides sign it

Document the qualified lead definition using a service level agreement (SLA) and have both marketing and sales sign it. This clarifies the understanding and uncovers doubts about the definitions if the parties aren’t willing to sign. The document should include the demographic and behavioral traits a qualified lead must have. It should also include marketing’s responsibilities (develop qualified lead, provide required information, hand-off to sales) and sales’ responsibilities (follow up on leads in a timely and thorough manner, provide regular feedback).

Here’s an example of what an SLA for lead qualification might look like:

Here’s what’s needed for a successful lead qualification SLA:

1. Required Lead Information. Marketing is responsible for providing correct contact information with their qualified leads. Required information should be limited to information that sales must have in order to sell. Any non-essential information should be optional or left out completely.
2. Demographic Qualifiers. Demographic filters ensure that the lead fits your target buyer profile. In this example, leads under 100 employees would be excluded. Most companies choose to filter leads based on either company size or annual revenue, but not both.
3. Behavioral Qualifiers. Behavioral qualifiers include any activity that shows buying intent. These can (and should) be adjusted and optimized over time.
4. Both sales and marketing must sign the SLA.

Here are the steps to developing your own own process.

1. Commit to developing a qualified lead definition. Sales and marketing must commit to developing a qualified lead definition. In many organizations, marketing creates a qualified lead definition but sales never sees it – or agrees to it.
2. Use your buyer personas as a starting point. Make sure you refer to your target buyer personas as a starting point for your qualified lead definition.
3. Get anecdotal feedback on the qualified lead definition from sales. When designing the qualified lead definition, it’s essential to sit down with individual sales reps and ask them: “What is a qualified lead for you?” That doesn’t mean that the organization will have to agree to deliver these types of leads, but it is critical to find a way to get as close as possible to creating a qualified lead definition that sales is willing to work with.
4. Determine demographic qualification information. Demographic characteristics that are often used in qualified lead definitions include company size, location, the buyer’s role, or industry.
5. Determine behavioral qualification information. Decide what actions the buyer can take that will qualify them to speak to sales. For example, marketing might pass on any leads that download certain whitepapers or attend a specific webinar. Some organizations ask the question “Would you like to be contacted by sales?” on their registration form to determine whether a lead is truly ready and willing to talk to sales.
6. Forecast whether marketing can deliver enough qualified leads. If the parameters are too narrow, what may look like the best possible lead definition might not work because marketing won’t be able to supply sales with enough leads to fill the pipeline. This is a critical part of the qualified lead definition phase and may require some negotiation between sales and marketing. In some cases, sales will need to accept a broader qualified lead definition in order to fill the funnel with a sufficient number of leads.
7. Create a service level agreement for marketing. Marketing’s SLA should specify that it will pass only leads that fit the qualified lead definition. Marketing should also agree that all the required fields are filled out, and that qualified leads will be delivered to sales in a timely manner. Marketing needs to commit to deliver a certain number of qualified leads each quarter. The qualified lead number should be tracked on a weekly basis.
8. Create a service level agreement for sales. Sales should agree to follow up on leads in a timely fashion. Best practices recommend that sales follow up on leads within 30 minutes of receipt and no longer than one day. Sales should also agree to a minimum amount of touches over a defined period of time. How many, and for how long, depends on your business model and sales cycle. For example, if you’re selling a low-priced service that requires no capital outlay, andhe typical sales cycle is about 30 days. In that case, the sales organization could agree to three phone calls and three emails over two weeks for every qualified lead they receive. Higher-priced items and complex sales could take much longer and require many more touches across multiple channels. Sales should also agree to update the status of every qualified lead that is passed to them.
9. Sign and publish the qualified lead definition. The qualified lead definition is like a contract and should be treated as such, which means it should be shared with everyone who takes part in it.
10. Revisit the qualified lead definition. Each quarter, sales and marketing should meet to determine whether the qualified lead definition should be modified. For example, the company might be launching a new product that serves a new demographic and the definition should be updated to reflect that.

Defining, scoring, and nurturing can be a complex process, but when you implement sales and marketing alignment, the result can be a streamlined, efficient lead nurturing machine.

Stay tuned for the next blog post in this series, where you’ll get an up-close look at the lead handoff process.

Want to know more about lead scoring? Read this eBook to learn how to prioritize your leads by segmenting and scoring your audience.

Too often marketers talk about activities instead of outcomes—for example, how many campaigns they ran, how many trade shows they participated in, how many new names they added to the lead database. These are metrics that reinforce the perception that marketing is a cost center, not a revenue driver.

To change that perception, marketers need to start talking about how their programs impact the whole sales process, with revenue being the core focus.

Instead of seeing marketing activities in isolation, marketers need an end-to-end view of buyer engagement. It’s not about the first “touch” that brings a prospect into the sales funnel, or the last “touch” before signing a deal. It’s about tracking all the touch points at which a prospect connects with your marketing programs, and measuring those multi-touch impacts.

So how do you do it? Here are four marketing analytics for demonstrating marketing’s ability to drive revenue:

• Flow: Where are prospects connecting with your marketing programs?
• Balance: How many prospects are in each stage of the sales funnel?
• Conversion: What’s the ratio of movement from stage to stage?
• Velocity: What’s the rate of movement from stage to stage?

By tracking these metrics and mapping them to your programs, you gain the quantitative data that shows marketing ROI. Let’s dive in deeper:

1. Flow: The Value of Every Touch Point

Too often marketers measure the flow of leads as simply adding new names to the database. But that misses the value of subsequent connections with that person or company.

For example, someone first connects with your company through a webinar and then visits you at a conference. Each step of the way, you can track their engagement with your company. Do they return to your website? Do they download a white paper? The earlier you can dig into that engagement, the more insight you have into the process that moves a lead to a buyer.

Measuring marketing impact starts with capturing all those interactions—or multi-touches—across people and accounts. Then you can see how many prospects entered each stage of the sales pipeline in a given period and whether those numbers are trending up or down. Armed with this insight, you can allocate value to those individual interactions for a more revenue-driven picture of marketing programs.

2. Balance: The Landmarks on the Revenue Map

Sales organizations—especially in businesses that have long sales cycles—break the sales cycle into discrete stages. And they track how deals move through those stages, so they know their conversion rates. They know if they have X prospects in the pipeline, they’ll convert Y percent to revenue, and how long it takes to do that.

Marketers need to measure in the same way. Call it the revenue cycle. It tracks prospects from being anonymous to being known, to being engaged, to being qualified, to being a marketing generated lead, to being a sales qualified lead, to being a sales opportunity, to being a customer. Knowing how many contacts or accounts are in each stage provides insight into which types of marketing programs will have the most impact in the short-term.

3. Conversion: The Journey from Lead to Sale

The next step is measuring the percentage of prospects moving between stages. You gain a clear picture (rather than a gut feeling) of which types of leads have the best conversion rates. For example, by company size, lead source, channel, geographic areas, specific business units, or product lines.

Tracking the movement is key. Taken in isolation, some marketing programs are immediate winners, while others may look like losers at the start. But some of those losers could be extremely influential further down the sales funnel. Once you track that waterfall of conversion from stage to stage, you can make a science of understanding each of those steps and understand how much budget you’re going to need in order to achieve certain outcomes.

Knowing where you get the most “bang” for your marketing investment gives you leverage to improve the ROI and show a direct impact on sales and revenue. If you can track prospects moving to the next stage because of a certain program, you’re more able to predict future behavior and assess the revenue that a program will ultimately generate. This gives you a solid basis for making the most productive marketing investments.

4. Velocity: The Calculus of Revenue

Finally, you need to track how quickly each type of lead is moving from stage to stage through the sales funnel. While your company probably knows the average time from identifying a lead to closing the sale, marketers need to know the rate at which leads move through each stage of the funnel to become a sale.

Tracking the velocity between stages highlights opportunities for investing marketing resources to most effectively reduce time-to-revenue. It also makes sales and revenue forecasts more reliable, because you can combine that velocity knowledge with information about how many prospects are in each stage. Further, you can see places in the process where sales may be stalling and, by digging deeper into the data, target programs to those specific points.

The Bottom Line

Once you start tracking these marketing analytics—flow, balance, conversion, and velocity—you can really start looking at ROI on multiple levels, from marketing programs, to marketing channels, to business units. And you can track a variety of metadata about different programs, such as event locations, types of events, attendance mix, and even event agendas. Then you can correlate this to movement through the sales funnel.

But the benefits don’t stop there! Here’s what else you can do:

• You can slice and dice the data to create a sharp picture of what the overall mix of investments to drive your business looks like.
• You can also begin correlating marketing programs to other sales metrics like average selling price and how long it takes new sales reps to become productive.
• You can pinpoint the impact of marketing investments on sales effectiveness and productivity.

The bottom line is that you’re no longer talking about cost—you’re now talking about revenue. You’re demonstrating that marketing is an investment that delivers value over time, and you can articulate exactly how much value. And that’s language your CEO definitely wants to hear!

Creating content is hard work—and juggling all those tasks and responsibilities keeps even the most seasoned professionals on their toes.

Luckily, many industry leaders have created helpful resources to make the content chaos more manageable. From top tips to eBooks, here are 14 guides that every content marketer should bookmark.

The Essentials of a Documented Content Marketing Strategy: 36 Questions to Answer

The Content Marketing Institute is a valuable resource for the industry, and this is just one of its excellent cheat sheets. If you’re getting ready to put your content strategy on paper, this guide should be required reading. It’ll help set you on the right path and improve the effectiveness of your campaigns.

The Viral Marketing Cheat Sheet

Everyone secretly hopes to have their marketing campaign go viral. While you may not be able to engineer an Internet sensation every time, KISSmetrics has analyzed the elements that go into most viral content. Even if you don’t get millions of views or shares, these ideas will still up the quality of your material.

The Content Preferences of B2B Marketers

It’s easy for B2B marketers to assume they know everything about each other. But when you want to reach your peers and encourage them to share your content, you can’t leave anything to chance. This infographic breaks down what B2B marketers are most likely to read and share so you can reach out to them in the most effective way.

Marketing Automation Success Kit

Marketing automation can yield great improvements to your team’s results, but you still need to make smart choices in how you implement these changes. With this resource from Pardot, you can streamline your automation by setting smart goals and maximizing workflow.

The Blueprint of Product Launch Marketing

Any major event at your company has a different set of marketing needs. If you’re gearing up for a product launch, this guide will help you hit all of the important points. Get all of the insights you need to build a content strategy that will keep people aware and excited about your business’ latest release.

5 Keys for Strategic Marketing-Sales Alignment

The various departments within a business need to be able to work together in order to achieve the best possible success. Get your marketing and sales teams in sync with these tips from Salesforce.

30 Things to A/B Test for Lead Generation

Many marketers are tasked with generating leads for the business. To make sure you’re on the right track, Marketo has a comprehensive list of A/B test ideas. This cheat sheet will ensure that your efforts to bring new customers into the fold aren’t just shots in the dark.

Strike a Chord: Lessons for Making Your Web Content Resonate

No matter how long you’ve been in the business, it’s worth revisiting the basics every now and then. Is the content you’re making really reaching and impacting your desired audience? Feldman Creative has the insights to make sure you’re on the right track.

The Free Templates You Need for Visual Content Design

Striking images are a must for your content. It might be the perfect photo to accompany a blog post or a PowerPoint presentation of research data. In any case, you’ll want to nail the design of your visual content, and HubSpot can help. This set of free templates can give extra pizzazz to your infographics, eBooks, and calls to action.

7 Sites for Free & Beautiful Public Domain Photos

Marketers need a constant influx of photos, but don’t always have access to an art team or a skilled photographer. Fortunately, there are sites where your team can find free and legal pictures for your business needs. Here’s a collection of seven favorite photo resources.

7 Cardinal Sins of Chartmaking

Visual representations of data should be easy to process and easy to share. To make sure that any charts in your content check those two boxes, review Visually’s list of seven common errors. From simple math mistakes to smarter choices in the display, these will help every chart to shine.

6 Social Media Templates to Save You Hours of Work

Social sharing is often a key factor of success in a content marketing plan, but it’s a big investment of time to nurture those conversations and prep posts. Being able to save some time on the tasks happening behind the scenes can be a big help to your social and marketing teams. Hootsuite has made six templates available to assist with everything from planning an editorial calendar to correctly sizing social images.

Social Media Data Cheat Sheet: What Executives Actually Want to Know

Execs always want to know about the bottom line. If your marketing strategy involves social media at all, then make sure that you collect data for these important metrics. You’ll be able to deliver the information that the higher-ups need to hear and prove your worth to the business.

Marketing Metrics That Matter

Whether you’re focused on paid search or email, make sure that you and your team cut through the vanity metrics to focus on the numbers that really matter to your performance.

Say you’ve created an amazing white paper that’s jam-packed with important information for your audience. You know there’s some serious value there, but your readers just aren’t very engaged with the material. What do you do?

Maybe it’s time to make your white paper interactive.

What does that even mean? At a basic level, an interactive white paper is a dialogue, whereas static long-form content is a monologue. Adding interactivity takes your traditional content and transforms it into a two-way conversation.

What Is an Interactive White Paper?

Interactive white papers can take several forms. Marketers can embed questions and other interactive elements directly into a full-length long form asset, engaging readers in a conversation about the content

It begins with the existing white paper. Content from there is then condensed into the most important nuggets of information and paired up with an assessment, survey, calculator, or knowledge test. With the right tools, it can go way beyond the spectrum of a simple quiz and become an essential creative asset that drives new leads into your sales funnel on a regular basis.

Here’s the gist: Rather than just acting as a megaphone saying, “Hey! Read my information!” an interactive white paper instead invites the reader to become an active participant in the education process.

It really works, too. Just by adding interactive content to your marketing mix, you can dramatically improve prospect engagement—attaining as much as 50% click rates, 80% completion rates, and 40% lead form conversions.

Why Do Interactive White Papers Work?

The interactive version of a white paper is all about user value. That means that while there is still a moderate amount of reading required, the user is presented with a unique, custom result at the end of the experience.

Not only do interactive white papers keep the reader interested, but they also tap into people’s natural desire to test their knowledge, share opinions, and benchmark themselves against their peers. They create an opportunity to build a human-to-human relationship rather than to purely educate.

Really, it’s a win-win for both parties. The marketer gets to provide education and collect user data, and the user gets a fun, engaging experience with an interesting solution provided at the conclusion.

Here’s an example: NetProspex, a marketing data and contact management company, wanted to generate new leads with an interactive white paper. They used an existing piece of research about record completeness and offered it to users as an interactive white paper that asks survey questions throughout.

Not only have they created a more engaging piece of content with serious value for the reader, but now they see how each prospect answered the questions and have a deeper understanding of their new leads.

Why Are White Papers Valuable?

We know that regular white papers are valuable. With beginnings as early as 1922 during Winston Churchill’s time, they’ve long been a trusted medium. Since the 1990s, they’ve been used in B2B application.

And in 2015, they’re still relevant. The 2015 Content Preferences Survey from DemandGen Report showed that white papers were the most popular form of content for researching B2B purchasing decisions—used by more than 83% of those surveyed (up from 78% last year.)

The issue now is that there are so many white papers out there that each new one simply gets lost in the noise. They all begin to blend together. Think about it: The numbers paint a clear picture—everyone is using them.

When everyone is doing something the same way—that’s the time when you should run in the other direction if you want to stand out.

Enter the interactive white paper. The highly evolved sister of its original format, the interactive white paper allows users to step into the content and use it for their benefit.

What Kind of Data do Marketers Get From Interactive White Papers?

The value of an interactive white paper goes deeper still. Not only are marketers able to learn more about the way their audience would answer certain questions, but they can also use interactive white papers to develop rich profile data around participants, study read through rates, and more.

Plus, when the user then reaches the lead form at the end of their interactive experience, they’re more engaged with the content (and therefore more apt to follow through.) In a way, you’re grabbing the user’s attention with the interactive content and then holding on to it until they’re right at the conversion point.

You could loosely compare this tactic to Gary Vaynerchuk’s “Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook” strategy in which you consistently give value to the user (the jabs) and then follow through with a solid ask (the right hook.)

Your interactive white paper acts as the jabs (providing value and entertaining them with some engaging feature like a quiz), and then presenting the right hook at the end (the conversion point.)

In the book, Vaynerchuk says,

“The emotional connection you build through jabbing pays off on the day you decide to throw the right hook. Remember when you were a kid, and you’d go to your mom and ask her to take you out for an ice-cream cone, or to the video arcade? Nine times out of ten, she said no. But then, every now and then, out of the blue, she would say yes. Why? In the days or weeks prior, something about how you interacted with your mother before the unexpected outing to the ice-cream shop or arcade made your mom feel like she wanted to do something for you. You made her happy, or maybe even proud, by giving her something she valued, whether it was doing extra chores or good grades or just one day of peace with your sibling. You gave so much that when you finally asked, she was emotionally primed to say yes.”

Now think back to the regular white paper. It’s all right hook and no jabs. See why the reader would be less compelled to act? The conversation is one-sided and has provided little value—instead it’s just another piece of educational content to be glazed over.

Is It Time for Something New?

Maybe as a marketer, you’re tired of pushing the same old content that’s no longer producing results. The material within is still important—but it needs to be repackaged in a way that’s more interesting for the user. Interactivity is a route that has to be considered when talking about changing up the strategy.

Learn more about interactive white papers in our interactive guide, What is Interactive Content & Why it Works.

Google Analytics is a valuable tool for website owners that can give you so much useful insight into your visitors and how they are using your site. This information allows us to be constantly improving our marketing strategies and making them better. However many feel overwhelmed with all the data available in their analytics. They […]

Author information

Leah Mazur

Leah Mazur contributes a monthly column on Social Media Traffic Generation. With over a decade of web design experience and an education in marketing, Leah knows what it takes to help your business succeed on the web. Founder of Loop Digital Marketing, she works with small businesses to help them develop a successful presence online. Leah believes in a strategy-first approach to ensure that her clients see real business results from their digital marketing efforts. She also loves event planning, traveling, and cooking.

| Twitter | Facebook | LinkedIn | Pinterest |

Use Google Analytics to Discover the Quality of Your Social Media Traffic by Leah Mazur -Maximize Social Business

          

In the age of social media, it is said that your network is your most important asset. But unlike financial assets, where we invest a lot of time and effort, our relationships are not often granted enough of our attention. This mix up of values comes at a cost, as a healthy social capital is a crucial component of a healthy business. Enter LinkedIn: The world’s largest professional network and the most effective way to form and nurture your relationships.

LinkedIn requires a different approach from other social networks, where relationships built on weak links and ‘Likes’ are commonplace. To build a network of truly valuable connections, it is first important to redefine how you value your online relationships, and only then you can move on to the next step: growing your network.

In this quick guide we will cover the four main steps in the process: optimising your profile, making new connections, personalising invitations, and nurturing your relationships.

Optimising Your Profile

The first thing most people do when they receive an invitation is to check out the invitee’s profile. But even before that, a decision could possibly be made based solely on your headline. It should be short—less than the maximum 120 characters—and succinctly describe what you do, for example ‘Web Developer Who Works With SMEs to Create Amazing Online Experiences | Company Name’.

You may have noticed the use of keywords in the headline, and this is by no coincidence. LinkedIn search operates in the same way as Google does, filtering results based on authority and relevance. Therefore, make sure you include keywords in your description and other profile sections to improve your chances of being found. A great way of doing this is to add a ‘specialty’ section at the bottom of your profile description. Here you can list any skills or associated phrases commonly found in job descriptions that will help those looking for your skills find you.

The next step to take for SEO is to personalise your URL. By default LinkedIn generates a URL full of numbers which only hinders your online visibility. It is best practice to change this to your full name—either first name before your surname or, if already taken, first name after.

Making New Connections

We all know LinkedIn’s unique feature that allows you to see who has viewed your page. This is a great place to find connections that may already be interested in your business or services, but if you are just starting out on LinkedIn and building up your network, you first need to establish your presence. Luckily you can do this quickly by doing two things: connecting with your clients, and joining groups. The former is pretty self-explanatory; Say you have just secured a deal with a new client, you can immediately follow up with a LinkedIn request. Groups take a little bit more explaining. You can become a member of up to 50 groups on LinkedIn, allowing you to spread yourself between those that are industry related, networking focused, and learning centered. Becoming a member of a group gives you a commonality with all other people in that group, and thus a greater chance of making a connection.

Once you’re in the group, you will want to start engaging: sharing your own content and that of others, participating in discussions, and generally making yourself known. When you feel you are ready to reach out to one of the members, you can do so by running a filtered search and creating a list of prospects based on job titles, physical location, or a range of other criteria. Once you’ve found a potential connection, click ‘connect’ and select the groups option under ‘How do you know this person?’

Personalising Invitations

Now it’s time to craft your invitation. As mentioned, if you are connecting with someone who is a member of a common group, you already have a shared interest to work with. This is a good rule to stick by when reaching out to someone you don’t really know, simply do a bit of research by digging into their profile and finding something interesting to comment on. Your invite may then sound something like this: ‘Hi Jene, I noticed you have also been a marketing professional for more than fifteen years, we are a rare breed! It would be a pleasure to connect with you.’ Adding a simple personalised touch like this is a sure fire way to increase your invitation’s conversation rate.

Nurturing Your Relationships

A network is as dormant or as valuable as you make it. With LinkedIn it’s easy to keep in touch with your connections through the ‘LinkedIn Contacts Feature’, which monitors updates and encourages you to interact with your connections on a regular basis. You can also take advantage of their dedicated publishing platform where users post original and curated content. The platform allows you to follow and engage with publishers, as well post your own content, and build your own followers in the process.

Your network may be your most important asset, but much like money, the value comes in how you use it. Whether you are looking for a consistent stream of inbound leads, or maybe a change of career, LinkedIn provides the tools for growing a wide network of valuable connections that can support you in reaching your professional objectives.

Images:

CC by A Name Like Shields Can Make You Defensive

CC by brand0con

CC by flazingo_photos

CC by marina guimarães

In today’s marketplace, salespeople and field reps are now expected to take on the role of customers’ trusted advisors. In her article “Why Trust Is The New Buzzword For Sales”, LiveHive Inc. CMO Micheline Nijmeh explains the importance of customer trust in today’s marketplace. Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger stated at the organization’s annual meeting that “trust surpasses knowledge” as a modern tool for success.

Nijmeh believes that in order for organizations to foster trust with customers, they must be able to accommodate and tailor to their customers’ unique needs.  To accomplish this, organizations must adopt sales practices that do the following: understand where the customer is in the buying process, respond to customers at the moment of interest, and leverage automated systems that increase agility. There are mobile solutions that can provide field reps with the tools necessary to gather detailed information allowing them to more effectively serve customers. Examples of this type of softwares’ features include access to information about past client visits, instant messaging and photo sharing capabilities, and custom digital forms that can be saved in the mobile application for repeated use.

Understanding Where the Customer Is in the Buying Process

It has been said that in order to know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been. Salespeople need access to information that is relevant for a particular customer. Field activity management solutions provide its users with access to client histories and information about past visits with that client. Additionally, contact information for key customer contacts can be stored right in the software application.  These features can be essential, as Nijmeh recommends that salespeople must have the ability to quickly identify all those involved in the decision-making process at given company. Salespeople are better able to engage customers when they possess insightful knowledge. Proving that your organization is “client-driven” will resonate with customers.

Responding to Customers at the Moment of Interest

Nijmeh emphasizes the need for sales reps to react to customer behaviors in real-time.  It is important to ensure your field reps have access to clients’ visit history without having to rely on their managers for this information. Managers working from the main office can respond to field reps’ concerns as they arise in real-time without delaying business activities. Certain technologies enable reps to send high-resolution photos straight from their mobile device to management, which proves useful for defying the limitations of verbal communication. Customers are more likely to trust an organization that puts them first by addressing their problems quickly. Furthermore, organizations that solve problems in real-time possess an advantage over their competition.

Leveraging Automated Systems that Increase Agility

As indicated in the point above, customers are more willing to trust organizations that address their needs as quickly as possible. Having processes in place that allow for agility will help sales reps work more efficiently. For example, giving reps instant access to custom client-specific forms not only saves time, but also demonstrates the rep’s commitment to servicing that client’s unique requests. Similarly, mobile solutions are available that provide reps with access to clients’ past purchase orders and merchandising audits. Reps can use these historical forms as templates upon each visit to a client without having to reinvent the wheel.

Bottom Line

Customers want to know that they are a priority. Gartner, Inc. analyst Tiffani Bova commented at the recent Sales 2.0 Conference that if buyers don’t believe salespeople understand their needs, they lose trust. By applying these three techniques to their current work practices, field reps are better equipped to establish trust with clients.  Managers should aim to implement technologies and processes that enable reps to  employ these techniques with great ease.

Google has finally announced the Google+ news that everyone has been waiting for: Your Google+ profile will no longer be your identity in all Google products. This change will be trickling out “in the coming months,” and the first product to enjoy the change will be the one that was most negatively affected by Google’s Google+ obsession: YouTube.

Bradley Horowitz, Google’s vice president of streams, photos, and sharing, says the changes are a response to user feedback (much like LinkedIn did this weekend): “We’ve also heard that it doesn’t make sense for your Google+ profile to be your identity in all the other Google products you use.” No shit.

The move means you’ll soon be able to use your standard Google account to share content, communicate with contacts, create a YouTube channel, and so on. Unlike your public Google+ profile, your Google account is not searchable or followable.

In fact, if you already created a Google+ profile (read: Google conned you into doing it) but don’t plan to use Google+, the company says it will “offer better options for managing and removing” your public profile. Horowitz says the changes are meant to strike a balance between the select few who actually like using Google+ and everyone else whom Google forced to sign up for its social network.

YouTube

The YouTube team has shared how these changes will affect comments and channels on the video site. In short: Google+ will slowly but surely be going away.

Starting today, the comments you make on YouTube will no longer appear on Google+. The same applies the other way: Nothing you post on Google+ will appear on YouTube.

That said, YouTube says its creator community did like Google+’s moderation options on channels, such as reviewing comments before they’re posted, blocking certain words, and auto-approving comments from certain fans. These features will remain, just sans Google+.

In related news, YouTube has been improving the ranking system that reduces the visibility of junk comments. The Google-owned company says the rate of dislikes on comments “has dropped by more than 35 percent across YouTube.”

In the “coming weeks,” YouTube will no longer require a Google+ profile when you want to upload, comment, or create a channel. That means if you want to remove your Google+ profile, you’ll be able to do so “in the coming months.”

That said, Google does offer a warning to YouTube users: Do not delete your Google+ account now “or you’ll delete your YouTube channel (no bueno).” In other words, the changes are finally coming, but you still have to be patient or Google+ will still screw you.

Google+

Horowitz made a point to emphasize, once again, that Google+ isn’t going away. Instead, he reiterated that the company will be offering “a more focused Google+ experience.”

In other words, Google+ has a core set of users that really do enjoy using the service. “Google+ is quickly becoming a place where people engage around their shared interests, with the content and people who inspire them,” Horowitz said.

More specifically, Google plans to continue to offer new features in Google+ and move “features that aren’t essential to an interest-based social experience” into existing products.

In May, Google launched Google+ Collections, a way to share videos, links, and photos on different category boards. Later that month, the company also introduced Google Photos, and moved many elements of Google+ Photos into that new app. Next, Google will be bringing location sharing into Hangouts and other apps, “where it really belongs.”

Google has been talking about these changes for months. In March, Google’s senior vice president Sundar Pichai hinted at splitting Google+ apart.

Today is just another part of the plan. It’s just that Google is finally executing the best part.

Update: Horowitz has posted his thoughts on Google+, describing in more detail what the move which he describes as a pivot. Again, this has been in the works for a while. You’ll still hear about Google+ going forward, but increasingly Google’s social strategy, for better or for worse, will be a three-pronged push: Streams, Photos, and Sharing.

Here’s the post in full:

It’s been a little more than a quarter since I took on leadership of a newly formed team, which we’ve christened SPS: Streams, Photos, and Sharing.

In that short time, I’ve had some time to reflect on the products we’ve built over the last few years, and also the opportunity to oversee the launch of our new Google Photos product. I’ve concluded that it’s time for a “pivot”… or more precisely time to talk more openly about a pivot that’s been underway for some time (and in fact is reflected in the name of the new team). We’re going to continue focusing Google+ on helping users connect around the interest they love, and retire it as the mechanism by which people share and engage within other Google products.

Four years ago when we conceived of the “Google+ Project”, we made it clear that our goals were always two-fold: Google+ aspired to be both a “platform layer that unified Google’s sharing models”, and a product / stream / app in its own right.

This was a well-intentioned goal, but as realized it led to some product experiences that users sometimes found confusing. For instance, and perhaps most controversially, integration with YouTube implied that leaving a comment on YouTube (something users had obviously been doing successfully for years) suddenly and unexpectedly required “joining Google+.”

We decided it’s time to fix this, not only in YouTube, but across a user’s entire experience at Google. We want to formally retire the notion that a Google+ membership is required for anything at Google… other than using Google+ itself.

Some of the consequences of this shift in thinking have already been deployed. Others we’re rolling out as fast as possible (e.g. the changes to YouTube we referenced today). And many more will roll out over the rest of the year.

What does this mean for Google+ the product? Relieved of the notion of integrating with every other product at Google, Google+ can now focus on doing what it’s already doing quite well: helping millions of users around the world connect around the interest they love. Aspects of the product that don’t serve this agenda have been, or will be, retired. But you’ll also see a slew of improvements that make this use case shine (like the recent launch of Collections – https://plus.google.com/collections/featured).

It’s been incredibly gratifying to see how this strategy has played out as realized in the recent Google Photos launch, a product which in many ways embodies and telegraphs the changes discussed above. Google Photos not only doesn’t require a Google+ account, but as much of the functionality as possible doesn’t even require an account at all. It was important to me that when we launched Google Photos, we stressed the product implements sharing by any means a user prefers… without compromise or agenda. This is the right thing for users and the feedback and usage has been extremely validating.

I’m excited to share this strategy with the world, excited about what it means for Google+, and most of all for all of Google’s users.

More information:

Powered by VBProfiles