Russia's big plan to build the Turkish Stream might have hit a snag as Russia and Turkey can't agree on gas prices.

Russia's Gazprom and Turkey's BOTAŞ had a six-month period to agree on the prices for gas supplies. That time frame expired on Monday without a deal.

"The dispute over prices means there’s no immediate prospect of signing a binding pact for the new pipeline ... An agreement could now be delayed until at least October," people familiar with the situation told Bloomberg. 

Back in May, Russia gave permission to commence the construction of the pipeline, although it had "not yet signed intergovernmental agreements with Turkey and Greece, and [was] acting on the basis of old documents relation to the South Stream project," according to RBTH.

One anonymous source told Bloomberg that the deal was delayed in part because the ruling party in Turkey lost its parliamentary majority in last month's election. Prior to it, Gazprom and Turkey's officials reportedly "said they had agreed on pricing."

Relatedly, an anonymous Russian source "familiar with the situation" told Kommersant in late May that the delay was tied to the Turkish elections.

However, also back in May, a Turkish source "familiar with the situation" told Kommersant that it was about the prices, not politics.

The director of Turkey's EPPEN Institute for Energy Markets and Policies, Volkan Özdemir, expressed a similar sentiment.

"We figure that with the 'Turkish Stream' Turkey will become a strategic partner, but so far Gazprom is not acting like such a partner," the anonymous Turkish source told Kommersant.

This delay will no doubt irritate Russia, especially given the pipeline's geopolitical importance. 

The so-called Turkish stream was announced in January after Gazprom abandoned the $45 billion South Stream project in December. The key takeaway regarding both projects is that they're supposed to bypass Ukraine, which would allow Russia to maintain its gas leverage over the EU and to hurt Kiev.

Gazprom is "is in a hurry to bring gas to Turkey and Southeastern Europe before the EU can implement its counter-strategy for the supply of Turkmen and Iranian gas," according to RBTH.

“To help Gazprom reach Central European markets, Russia has advocated the construction of a pipeline that would run from Greece to Macedonia, Serbia and Hungary,” analysts from Texas-based consulting firm Stratfor wrote in a report, according to Bloomberg.

“These four countries are at the center of a Russian diplomatic offensive."Meanwhile, two weeks ago Russia signed a preliminary $2.27 billion (2 billion euro) agreement on building a section of the Turkish Stream through Greece.

Construction for this chunk will start in 2016 and is expected to be completed by 2019, according to Russian Energy Minister Alexander Novak.

“The pipeline is not against anyone in Europe or the world,” Greek Energy Minister Panagiotis Lafazanis said in St. Petersburg. “It is here to serve people, peace and stability. Energy can bring people together and not feed Cold War situations.”

SEE ALSO: Puerto Rico is not Greece

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: This animated map shows the largest company by revenue for every state

Launching the Business of Story Podcast

Park Howell, the founder of ad agency Park & Co. and author and entrepreneur, is joined by guest and long time friend Jay Baer to launch the new Business of Story podcast. This inaugural episode helps listeners discover the backstory of why the show was created, why storytelling matters, and how to structure a narrative to “communicate and connect” with your community.

“It’s not what you make, it’s what you make happen.” —@ParkHowell (highlight to tweet)

Park Howell: Innovative Storyteller, Teacher, Creator

The Business of Story is a concept and podcast created and designed by Park Howell. The goal of this program is to help listeners craft and tell compelling stories that sell. Park is an expert on storytelling and sustainability. In addition to his work with Park&Co, he created and teaches the communications curriculum for Arizona State University’s Executive Master’s Program for Sustainability Leadership program.

Park’s agency uses compelling storytelling to create movements that ignite the growth of purpose-driven people, products, companies, and causes. The goal is to use storytelling to help create abundance for all.

And now, with the Business of Story, Park has compiled a series of incredible interviews with some of the best storytellers in writing, marketing, business, and more to help you unlock your storytelling potential. Complete with tools and resources, Park makes it easier than ever to share your story today.

To kick off the podcast, Park has a conversation with Jay Baer, New York Times Best Selling Author, venture capitalist, and one of the creators of Convince & Convert Media. You know him well!

“Content is fire. Social media is gasoline.” —@JayBaer (highlight to tweet)

Why Story?

What is it about story that works? What pulls the listener in? What tugs at the heartstrings?

The basic elements of story seem almost too simple. What are they? Why, the beginning, middle, and end, of course. This three part structure “connects with how the brain is hard-wired to take in story. To pull in events and create meaning.”

The Freytag Pyramid: A five part construction with three primary elements.

Through extensive research and implementing the story cycle into his ad own campaigns, Park discovered that if you are an entrepreneur, a marketer, a brand strategist, a writer, a musician, or a participant in any field, your work will always, without fail, be more successful when the core elements of narrative are applied.

“Reignite your innate storyteller.” —@ParkHowell

Empathy Matters

Two words we hear often in content marketing are empathy and humanity. And the same rings true for storytelling. But you may be wondering why empathy in storytelling is so important.

Recognizing the humanity in a story helps consumers connect and empathize with the content. They become absorbed by your product, design, or message.

The crux of this practice is tension. “When we add a little bit of conflict, where the tension is in the story, then you truly have the brain’s attention.” So often in marketing, we tend to gloss over the difficult stuff, the sloppy, problematic, human aspect of life which is personal conflict.

“Stories help you move your cause, your mission, your product or service further, faster, by helping your customers intertwine their story with your story. That’s what The Business of Story is all about,” explains Park.

Tools & Resources

Each bi-weekly episode will contain interviews with fascinating individuals who have successfully implemented the story cycle into their work.

In addition, each podcast contains actionable resources to help you take your first steps towards implementing the story cycle into your own process.

Park’s tools and tips will allow you to become the best storyteller you can be and will help you connect on a deeper level with your community and collaborators.

Share Your Story

Park makes the point in this first episode that many of us have been trained by a standardized educational system to value story at a lower denominator than is actually necessary.  We need to rewire our brains and train ourselves to develop that sense of rhythm and tension and release that stories offer.

Tune in every other week to absorb these fascinating narratives and to “reignite that innate storyteller” within. And keep your ears peeled for new episodes

       

During a recent trip to the Philippines, I had the great pleasure to encounter some amazing people working within the fields of social innovation and development. One of these people, Aisa Mijeno, is a female entrepreneur and engineer whose first hand experience living with an indigenous tribe in the Philippines led her to identify a serious social problem and then create a business to solve it.

Like in so many other areas of the world, there is a lack of efficient light sources in regions without electricity in the Philippines. Aisa teamed up with her brother Raphael, and together they developed SALt (Sustainable Alternative Lighting). Below, Aisa shares the story behind founding SALt, the challenges of finding the right investors, and learnings from developing a product from idea to launch.

Founder Aisa Mijeno with the SALt light.

Core77: Tell us a bit about your background. What lead you to the path you are on right now?

Aisa Mijeno: I am a part-time engineering instructor and have been teaching for almost 6 years now, but before that I used to work for Greenpeace Philippines. There I learned so many thing about the effects of climate change. Ever since then I've been dreaming of creating something that would somehow help minimize carbon footprints, but didn't have enough time to really ideate due to numerous campaigns I was involved in.

This one experience though, made me realize something. When I was still working for Greenpeace we made this case study.

And what was that?

A few of the common things we noticed in marginalized island communities are the staple supplies of salt, water and rice. Almost all of the household we have been stationed in consist of these common elements in their homes. I just hadn't figured out what type of application I should create out of it, until I did a personal immersion with the tribe in the northern Philippines.

Buscalan, Kalinga, the Philippines

The foster family who let me stay in their home for almost a month is literally living on top of a mountain. These families do not have access to electricity. They use fuel-based lamps as their main source of lighting. There I learned that people had to go down the mountain and continue on their journey to the nearest town about 30km away on foot because they do not have the financial capacity to ride public transportation just to get kerosene for lamps.

And even before that, we have also studied and made observations with the living conditions, developing the correlation between geographical location, status quo and the use of fuel-based lamps, we have come up with a hypothetical conclusion that the practice of using such light sources had been passed on from generations. Thus, these people never deviated from using fuel-based lamps. The method of refilling kerosene in lamps (according to a native southwest of the Philippines) brings about emotional security despite its many cases of fire accidents caused by tipped over lamps and candles.

Why did you decide on focusing on this issue?

The link and conceptualisation of the lamp is very personal and deep because I experienced the hardship first hand. I connected the dots between salt and water and the act of filling liquid into the lamp and made an application so important it may affect the country's economy.

These encouraged me to develop a lighting system that runs on the very basic items seen on every household—water and salt, or for the islanders—seawater.

How did you develop this idea into a product?

Ever since the realization of an application based on saltwater as the main catalyst, I have been working on it in my university lab. The influence of making it into a product actually happened after Ideaspace, a local incubator, went to our university to held a competition in which we were selected. This incubator made us realise that turning it into a product and building a startup would be the best path for our innovation and we will be able to help more people with it.

Why did you find it so important to create a light source to begin with?

There are over 7,000 island in the Philippines, most of these islands do not have access to electricity, and kerosene had become a commodity to households in marginalized communities without electricity. In places like these, all activities usually end before the sun sets and people are unproductive at night—children cannot do their homework. After going to class, these children have to help their parents earn money in the afternoon until the sun sets so the only time they could do their school work is at night.

We also wanted to decrease fire accidents by replacing kerosene and candles as the main source of lighting. We found out that kerosene lamps are dangerous to children's health. When I was in Oriental Mindoro, most of the Mangyan kids were afflicted with lung disease and this might be a cause of kerosene lamp's black carbon.

Now that you have developed a lamp, what sort of response do you get from people you have developed it for?

We haven't launched the product yet. We plan to launch it before the year ends of first quarter next year but so far we are overwhelmed with positive response.

Have you been out and worked together with the people living in these sort of conditions?

We reached out to a few barangays (villages) who expressed their willingness to become one of the beneficiaries of the lamp.

What our business model looks like is we will partner with NGOs, foundations and local government units to purchase the lamp from us and distribute it to communities they are supporting.

But we also handpick communities to receive certain lamp units. That will come from the retail sale—similar to TOMS' model of one for one. So for every lamp you buy, we give one lamp to a family who needs it.

What was the process from idea to product?

Being a hardware startup is hard as what most people involved in product development say, and yes, it is really very challenging. One thing is you need to raise more capital.

Finding investors in the Philippines willing to take risks is very challenging.

Aisa and Raphael Mijeno at Ideaspace Manila

A couple of other startups and VCs we've met during our international excursion told us that we shouldn't get anxious to set a higher value of the startup. That's the tendency of most SEA startups compared to startups in the US and Europe.

How did you solve this little, but important, obstacle?

We were able to overcome this by really screening out willing investors who would give value to what we do. Fortunately, we found one and their contribution to the process is really very huge. They are a local manufacturer—100% Filipino owned.

It's easy to find investors, but hard to find ones who are willing to go all the way with your startup. You have to find someone who shares the same vision, morals, intent, and someone who can contribute to really developing your product, not just contribute and give you capital and funding.

What has been your most important lesson throughout this process?

Important lesson: follow your gut instinct and never second guess yourself. Never decide on things when you are filled with emotions, sleep on it and let emotions pass. Have the grit to keep on pushing forward no matter what the hurdle is. Be optimistic at all times, but still know when to give up.

You mentioned that you were seeking a solution that minimizes the carbon footprint. Do you feel like you have reached this goal with SALt?

I guess I can say I did my best and am doing everything to make it happen. The only time I feel that I will have achieved the goal when people finally use the lamp and make it a staple item, and seeing the effects of using our product to hopefully make their lives a little better.

Is anything you would like the reader to know about SALt, the Philippines or yourself?

I guess I just want to say that there are so many remarkable and creative people in rural Philippines. Their resilience, no matter their condition in life, motivates me to overcome all hurdles. We just need to give these people the chance at life through education by providing them the basic things: the means to provide food to their family, clean water and light.

Follow SALt on Facebook, Twitter  and Instagram, or contact the SALt team directly via info@salt.ph

Proofreading is simple.

That may seem like a sacrilegious statement coming from someone who spent years justifying that proofreading is a specialized skill to condescending critics.

But I want to show you a simple proofreading trick, so you are able to review your writing like a professional proofreader — even if you only have time to proofread your writing once.

This underutilized technique will help you spot and correct errors in your digital content that you’ve previously glossed over.

The difference between proofreading and just reading

A common misconception is that proofreading is the same activity as reading. Why would someone pay a professional proofreader when anyone who knows how to read could point out mistakes in a piece of writing?

This attitude can be an obstacle for freelance proofreaders looking for work.

But ultimately, as many proofreaders discover, rather than trying to attract writers who “don’t get it,” it’s more effective to speak to those who already understand the value of a thorough, professional proofreading.

It’s a lesson that can be applied to any type of digital business:

Appeal to people who already want and understand the value of your product or service — the right prospects. Don’t try to win over people who are not interested in what you do — the wrong prospects.

This proofreading trick is a clear example of why the activity of proofreading is unlike just reading.

Now, take off your writer beret and put on your proofreader fedora, so you can view your writing like someone who has never seen it before.

Proofread from the end to the beginning

When you’re satisfied with your final draft, here’s how you can give your content a professional polish.

Up until now, you’ve (presumably) been reading your writing from the beginning of the text to the end. We want to trick your brain into looking at everything you’ve written in a different way.

Start at the end of your document and read the last sentence backwards — slowly.

For example, you would read the sentence, “Start at the end of your document an read the last sentence backwards — slowly” as “slowly — backwards sentence last the read an document your of end the at Start.”

Do you see any word choice errors, missing words, or incomplete thoughts that weaken the sentence?

It’s easier to spot writing mishaps when you view your words in a different order.

In this example, the word “an” should have been “and.”

Then, for good measure, read the same sentence as you normally would — but slowly. Spot any mistakes?

Let’s add on.

Stop proofreading at each punctuation mark

As you review each sentence backwards, and then forwards, stop reading any time you encounter a punctuation mark to make sure it is used correctly.

Does each period end a complete sentence? Is each comma used appropriately? Each dash? Each quotation mark? Each apostrophe?

Here are two examples:

Did you write “it’s” instead of “its?”

“It’s” is a contraction of “it is.” “Its” is a possessive form of the pronoun “it.”

Since you’re carefully evaluating your punctuation choices, it will become clear if “it’s” or “its” is correct.

Did you write “you’re” when you intended to write “you’ve?” (Here’s a secret: I made that mistake in the first draft of this post. Shhhhh: don’t tell anyone.)

When used correctly, punctuation marks help guide the reader through your content. The reader will take his effortless comprehension of your writing for granted.

With this proofreading activity, the words you read don’t make a casual, light imprint in your mind, and you don’t overlook punctuation marks.

Here, each punctuation mark and word are tattooed on your brain.

Proofread each sentence like this until you reach the beginning of your content, correcting mistakes that pop out along the way.

Present your readers with a distraction-free experience

Proofreading is simple, but it requires patience, which many people lack.

If you have the patience to review your writing slowly just once, the time you spend proofreading will be much more effective than if you rush the process but are able to skim through your text multiple times.

Treat proofreading as a specialized activity, and you’ll see the quality of your writing improve — so your readers can focus on your content without distractions.

If you found this post useful, make sure to also check out The Traffic Light Revision Technique for Meticulously Editing Your Own Writing.

About the author

Stefanie Flaxman

Stefanie Flaxman is Copyblogger Media's Editor-in-Chief. Don't follow her on Twitter.

The post Catch More Writing Mistakes With This Underutilized Proofreading Trick appeared first on Copyblogger.

The very last thing you do before bed tends to have a significant impact on your mood and energy level the next day, as it often determines how well and how much you sleep.

Successful people understand that their success starts and ends with their mental and physical health, which is almost entirely dependent upon their getting enough sleep.

That is why bedtime routines are a key ritual for so many of them — and why the very last thing most successful people do before bed is read.

1. They read.

Experts agree that reading is the very last thing most successful people do before going to sleep.

Michael Kerr, an international business speaker and author of "You Can't Be Serious! Putting Humor to Work," says he knows numerous business leaders who block off time just before bed for reading, going so far as to schedule it as a "non-negotiable item" on their calendar. "This isn't necessarily reserved just for business reading or inspirational reading. Many successful people find value in being browsers of information from a variety of sources, believing it helps fuel greater creativity and passion in their lives."

For example, while some successful people use this time catch up on news stories from the day, skim tech blogs, or browse Reddit and Twitter, others enjoy reading fiction novels and ancient philosophy just before bed. 

2. They make a to-do list.

"Clearing the mind for a good night sleep is critical for a lot of successful people," Kerr says. "Often they will take this time to write down a list of any unattended items to address the following day, so these thoughts don't end up invading their head space during the night."

3. They spend time with family.

Michael Woodward, Ph.D., organizational psychologist and author of "The YOU Plan," says it's important to make some time to chat with your partner, talk to your kids, or play with your dog.

Laura Vanderkam, author of "What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast," says this is a common practice among the highly successful. "I realize not everyone can go to bed at the same time as his or her partner, but if you can, it's a great way to connect and talk about your days."

Read this closely.  It’s critical. It may make your stomach a little queasy but, you’ll get over it.

You don’t owe anyone a demo. Just because a prospect or buyer asks for a demo, you don’t owe it to them, and therefore you don’t have to give them one.

Demos are NOT webinars.  “Demos should not be used to demonstrate your product, but rather to show how your product can affect your buyer’s business.”  And it’s for this reason that you should never, ever give a demo if your prospect or buyer doesn’t agree to a discovery process first.

Without a robust discovery built into your demo process, you CAN’T give a powerful demo.

I know, I know, you’re thinking, what it if the prospect or buyer won’t do a discovery process? Then don’t schedule the demo and politely let them know that a 30-minute discovery call is required before the demo, to ensure an effective demo that maps to their needs and requirements.

A demo without a discovery process is a waste of time.  If a buyer wants to see the product, but won’t give you the time to do discovery first, point them to your company’s weekly product webinar. If your company doesn’t do a weekly product demo webinar, ask them to start.

A robust discovery process is about understanding the needs, motivations, issues, problems and challenges of your buyers current situation. It gives you the foundation for crafting a customized, targeted demo that allows the buyer to see how the product will fit into their organization and how it will solve their personal and unique issues.

There is one additional element to this demo thing.  Do NOT attempt to do the discovery at the same time of the demo. Doing discovery for 5 or 10 minutes at the beginning of the demo is foolish. It steals valuable demo time, and it’s almost impossible to customize the demo on the fly.  It’s a messy approach. You can’t get enough information about their business, they often eat up more than five or ten minutes of the call, making the demo feel rushed. Schedule the demo separately and set up the discovery process at few days before the demo. This way you have adequate time to evaluate the information and create a killer, customized demo from what you learn.

A sick demo process looks like this:

1) A weekly “open” demo via webinar – This is an open webinar that walks prospects through the basics of your product. It highlights key differentiators, features, and benefits. Its purpose is to give buyers early in the process a chance to “see it,” without burning too sales time.  It’s open to multiple participants, and folks can sign up via the web. It also acts as a lead generator, capturing names and contact info of participants.

2) Discovery process -The objective of the call is to get a solid understanding of what’s driving the buyers interest in your product and service and what problems they are experiencing. What do they want to fix? The discovery process should be 30 minutes for most companies. Longer than 30 minutes is a big ask for that early in the sales cycle, shorter than 30 minutes makes it difficult to get enough information.  I’ve heard of some companies having success with 20-minute discovery calls, you just have to be very diligent to make them work.

3) Demo – The demo is your chance to show the value of your product or service to your buyer. It should be no more than an hour.  It should focus on no more than 3 or 4 key features that directly align with your customers needs as identified by the discovery process.  It should anchor the customer in the value of your solution for solving their unique problems and challenges.

I recommend scheduling the discovery and the demo at the same time. This makes it feel like a complete process or program, not two separate meetings. It’s best to schedule the discovery process three days before the demo.  For ex: “It would be my pleasure to do a demo for you. Our demo process consists of two steps, a 30-minute discovery process to understand your business and how you’re currently doing (insert business process here), and then a customized demo afterward. This ensures we maximize the demo experience showing you only the features and capabilities that matter most to you and your business.”

If the prospect says no to the discovery process, then politely send them to the webinar. Suggest that if, after that, they want to see more, it might make sense to them to the discovery. Whatever you do, do NOT do a demo without a discovery call.

You don’t owe your buyer or prospect a demo. Just because they ask, doesn’t mean you have to give them one. Don’t get out of wack, your buyer needs to invest in the sales process just as much as you.

No discovery, no demo!

Great B2B content writers are a dime a dozen, right?

Ha! Funny.

If you’re an experienced content marketer, you know how hard it is to find good writing talent. I hear this from my clients time and again. Sure, there are oodles of people out there selling their writing services. That doesn’t mean they’re great at it. Or even passable.

Truth is, far too many B2B content writers fall short of their clients’ expectations. Maybe you’ve experienced one or more of these firsthand.

• Writers who turn in sloppy, error-filled work.
• Writers who don’t respond to inquiries or requests in a timely fashion.
• Writers who bristle at criticism.
• Writers who can’t seem to grasp (or seem disinterested in) a company’s unique value proposition, its industry, its target audience, or the point of the project.
• Writers who can’t (or won’t) adapt to unfamiliar channels, tools, workflows, or demands.
• Writers who just can’t tell a good story.

Don’t you wish you could identify top B2B content writers right off the bat?

Actually, you can. You just need to look for signs of a great writer (as well as red flags that indicate the opposite).

And—more importantly—once you have great writers in the door, you must help them succeed and give them a reason to stick around.

Here’s how.

6 Signs Of Greatness

Great B2B content writers have diverse backgrounds. But they all share a profound dedication to their clients and their profession. Here’s how those attributes shine through.

1. Diverse portfolio. A wide range of work—across industry verticals and/or funnel stages—demonstrates versatility and adaptability.
2. An outstanding website. Flashy design or no, it should be clear, concise, attractive, and user friendly. Ideally, you’ll find compelling client testimonials there.
3. Professional, polished, letter-perfect communications. Just what you’d expect from someone who lives and dies by the English language (and its correct usage).
4. Complete honesty. Great writers are candid about their experience (or lack thereof) in a particular area. That’s because they don’t want to commit to anything they can’t truly deliver. Writers worth their salt aren’t interested in shoehorning something in, and winging it, just to maximize income.
5. Obvious interest in your company and brand. When you first reached out to them, did they do their homework? Visit your site? Check out your portfolio? Read your blog? Follow you on social media channels? You’ll know they’re into you if they bring up interesting facts or project work that resonated with them or piqued their interest.
6. Ongoing pursuit of knowledge. What, if any, are their industry certifications? Are they curating content for their social media communities? Does their blog reflect an awareness and deeper consideration of salient topics? A great B2B content writer is an avid student of marketing, business, and life.

4 Red Flags You Can’t Ignore

I’d be leery of any writer who exhibits the following.

1. Poor online presence. An amateurish website and little or no social media presence spells trouble. Particularly for a writer who supposedly specializes in content.
2. Sloppy and/or spotty communications. Writers who don’t correspond professionally, or in a timely way, are like people who show up late to interviews wearing tuxedo t-shirts. It’s hard to take them seriously. I wouldn’t.
3. Jack of all trades, master of none. Claiming they know it all, have done it all, and can do it all, with no particular niche or specialty area. This indicates one of two things: 1) They’re overselling (and will surely underdeliver); or 2) they haven’t worked enough in a particular area to master it.
4. Rock-bottom prices. At best, this one smacks of desperation. Great writers charge what they know they’re worth. (One caveat: Negotiation based on the particulars of a job or an extended working relationship is never out of the question.)

What Your Writers Need From You

Great B2B content writers won’t stick around if there’s no incentive. You have to treat them like the hardcore professionals they are. Impersonal transactions don’t interest them; they want to partner with you on a strategic level.

Here’s how to build a lasting partnership that will benefit you both.

• Regular, responsive communication. This one is huge. Seems like common sense, right? Not for all organizations. I’ve experienced radio silence myself, and it’s incredibly frustrating and demeaning. Ignoring your writers’ questions and concerns is the fastest way to slough them off.
• Proper guidance. You need to convey everything you know and understand about the job (and the context for it). Great B2B writers can’t perform at their peak without the right tools. They need both the finer details and a lay of the land.
• Commensurate pay. Great B2B writers deliver results. When that happens, consider a rate increase. It will serve as a reward for good work—and a sign of how much you value your writers and their contributions.

Bottom Line: Vet Them Well, Treat Them Even Better

If you outsource content writing, you need to screen your writers carefully. And you need to treat them like true, valued partners. You have to do both to get the results you want—and to avoid the constant scramble to locate new writing talent.

What kinds of experiences have you had with freelance B2B content writers (good and bad)? How do you screen new writers, and how do you solidify your relationship with them? I’d love to read your thoughts below.

sex - quarrels = x

x > 0 = happy marriage

x < 0 = unhappy marriage

In other words, you should be having sex more often than you quarrel.

The formula was derived from a series of studies in the 1970s. One unpublished study of married students at University of Missouri-Kansas City found that 28 out of 30 self-described happy couples had sex more than they argued, while all 12 self-described unhappy couples argued more. These results were corroborated by a 1974 study by John Howard and Robyn Dawes, in which all 23 happy couples had a positive score and all 3 unhappy couples had a negative score. Two 1977 studies offered further confirmation of this idea. 

Now it's worth noting that these studies are a few decades old and relied on very small sample sizes, though many of their conclusions square with more recent research. Also, college-aged students who are married are not necessarily an accurate representation of all married couples, and perhaps sex is less important at some stages of some relationships.

Still, it remains a powerful and useful concept.

We came across this formula in "Thinking, Fast And Slow," the 2011 book by Nobel laureate psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in a discussion of the value of simple formulas.

SEE ALSO: Scientists have found a surprising key to happy relationships

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: How much sex you should be having in a healthy relationship

Targeted outreach. Influencer marketing. Blogger relations. In the field of classic advertising, they’d probably refer to it as testimonials. Even with so many different terms for this one concept, the driving force behind them all is the same: relationships.

Relationships have the power to multiply the trust and authority of a company’s message. Relationships can also provide reach and influence within a certain group of people. For these reasons, building relationships is a strategy employed by big enterprises, non-governmental organizations, start-ups and middle-sized companies alike.

The image above depicts one of the most crucial things to consider when researching influencers in your industry vertical: You need to share the same type of audience. An influencer’s trust, authority, reach and influence are only valuable if they’re applicable to the group of people you are targeting. Thus, you have to think through a few things before getting started with the actual outreach process.

1. Who Do I Want to Reach?

One way to find thematically relevant websites and the key influencers behind them is through media monitoring. The goal of media monitoring is to filter online chatter for relevant discussions that identify especially vivid participants, blogs and websites with a focus on the desired topic.

Selection criteria for potential partners should include:

• frequently tackled topics
• inbound and outbound links of the respective website
• reach and interaction on social channels

Note that social media value should not necessarily be measured by the number of followers, but rather on the following-follower-ratio, list mentions and interaction rates.

2. What Do I Want to Achieve?

This question actually includes two in one.

What Type of Response Do I Want From the Recipient?

Each touch with the targeted influencer should have a clear call to action (CTA) that’s both striking and prominently placed. The reader should not be confronted with a flood of text when opening an email, but they should understand immediately what you’d like them to do.

Are you asking them to give feedback on content or share something via social media? Are you urging them to download a resource? Are you seeking media coverage with a backlink? Looking to negotiate a guest posting opportunity? Asking to interview the recipient?

Whatever the goal of your outreach, the CTA needs to be phrased as a polite “ask”, not as a pushy instruction or demand. Leading with the benefits of the proposed engagement will differentiate you, as it demonstrates that you have taken the time to research their interests and aspirations. It proves that you understand the influencer’s unique wants and needs.

What Kind of Benefit Do I Want to Communicate?

Before drafting the pitch (typically via an email), spend time thinking about what kind of real and tangible benefit you could offer the recipient. The fact that you are pointedly asking them to take action is not an incentive and does not in any way equate to the effort they’ll spend fulfilling the desired action. What will motivate the influencer to comply with the CTA?

Can the recipient position himself as an expert in his peer group by sharing the piece? Is participating crucial for developing competitive intelligence? Could he possibly be the first in his industry to exclusively report about the news? Does he get high-quality content for his own website or blog for free? These are all common stimuli in influencer marketing.

3. How Will I Contact Them?

Once the goals are set, you can then start contacting the chosen influencers. This is the most sensitive part of the outreach process since it determines success or failure of your efforts. Accordingly, it’s a good idea to spend a fair amount of time preparing before you hit the “Send” button. Think of your outreach email as a love letter in which you’re trying to win the heart of your soul mate. You wouldn’t want to mess that up, would you?

Where Can I Find the Right Contact Details?

The goals are set, but the research is not completely done yet. You’ve got to make sure your message gets to the right inbox. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a love letter wrongly delivered.

A website’s imprint would be the first logical place to look, but a simple info@company.com or press@company.com email address, in most cases, won’t do the job. To personalize your outreach as much as possible, try to target one specific person.

However, generic email addresses could still be helpful. It takes a bit of sleuth work, but sometimes it’s possible to guess the corporate email convention from a generic address, too.

What Should My Outreach Mail Look Like?

Relationships start with people, which means the first point of contact is all about individuality. A personal salutation and the presentation of yourself and your company are thus indispensable parts of your first paragraph.

Refer to any kind of previous contact in your outreach mail. If you’ve previously corresponded with them, follow them on social media, are a regular visitor of their blog or were referred by a mutual contact, tell them so. It helps customize your message and build an emotional bond with your counterpart.

Emphasize your own authority and reputation by pointing to your own published thought leadership, as well as mentions of your name or organization on renowned websites.

To make the outreach process more efficient, try using e-mail templates. Design a flexible structure that only needs to be adjusted and customized for each new campaign. Such templates will also allow you to experiment with A/B testing for continuous optimization of layout and language.

Last, but not least, close with the expected level of effort the request will require and the timeline to complete it. This should effectively demonstrate that only a little time is required for a considerably positive outcome.

4. How Can I Raise Attention?

When conducting influencer outreach, it is important to make your e-mail stand out from the crowd. The subject line is the first (and most important) hurdle to take in this regard.

Personalization is one factor that can make all the difference. Cialdini’s ‘Six Principles of Persuasion’ offers a great framework for writing individualized, enticing subject lines. Here’s how to apply the six principles to your outreach mail:

Liking

Establish contact with the influencer beforehand and begin to build a relationship before even starting your outreach. Then, later, refer to those previous communications in your e-mail. The recipient is more likely to accept your offer if they already know and like you, or if you’re at least familiar to them.

“Thanks for the vivid Twitter discussion the other day. In fact, I’ve created a resource on [this very topic] and thought you might be interested in sharing it with your followers.”

Commitment & Consistency

Draw a connection between your content and the influencer’s activities. Describe why this specific person perfectly matches your cause. People are more likely to engage in things that reflect their own values and identity and are, thus, consistent with what they (want to) represent.

“I really enjoyed your talk at [conference name] last month. You’ve been saying interesting things about [a certain topic] and I’d love to include your expert opinion in my roundup on [a matching topic].”

Authority

If you’ve already got renowned testimonials or references don’t be afraid to make use of them. People are more likely to follow a CTA if it is uttered by an authority. So have experts review and evaluate your content and (hopefully) suggest that others should check it out, too.

“[Renowned company] already uses our new feature and thinks ‘it is absolutely worth trying!’ But please see for yourself. I’d really appreciate your feedback on this new functionality, too.”

Reciprocity

Always emphasize benefit for the recipient. Give and take is the name of the game. If you do a favor for an acquaintance, you likely also expect something in return. The same is true for influencers. Benefit has to be mutual. The least you can give back is honest appreciation and gratefulness.

“I’m an avid visitor of your blog and often recommend your content to my own readers. Would you be interested in writing a guest article for my audience?”

Social Proof

Mention already-generated links, social signals or media coverage and leverage those facts as social proof. The basic principle “If many others are doing it, it has to be worth doing,” still works. So if many people have been sharing your content, others are more likely to do the same.

“The whitepaper has already generated 150 Twitter shares, 70 Facebook likes and has been featured in [a renowned magazine]. I’d be honored if you’d consider coverage on your website, too.”

Scarcity

Include an exclusive offer in your outreach. Give your contact the opportunity to be the one and only person to benefit from your proposal. Another way to leverage scarcity is to set a deadline for getting back to you. This limits the offer and provokes urgency. The deadline doesn’t have to be set in stone, however, and should be more of a flexible time frame designed to speed up a reply.

“I’d like to offer you the attached infographic for exclusive publication on your website only. If I haven’t heard from you in three business days, I’ll assume you’re not interested and make this offer available to other contacts.”

5. How Can I Evaluate My Efforts?

You eventually need to evaluate the success of your outreach efforts. A thorough reflection of processes can help to identify opportunities for improvement and ways to optimize workflows for future projects.

Have I Achieved My Targets?

There are many different ways to find out if you’ve achieved your goals.

Continuous brand monitoring will track linked and unlinked mentions that were generated from the campaign. Regular backlink checking unveils which websites have recommended your content, while traffic reports will reveal if you’ve been able to gain more visitors and tracking codes help you find out where these visitors have been coming from. You can also use individual hashtags for a specific campaign to evaluate engagement on social media. And in the best case, of course, lead generation and conversions have benefited from your outreach as well.

For a comprehensive evaluation, thus, you need to consider quantitative data such as results from A/B testing and response rates, as well as qualitative analysis of replies and feedback received.

However, the most important key performance indicator to measure is the overall progress of your entire project. Look at the big picture and match the outcome of your outreach activities with previously defined goals. Any activities resulting in exceptional results that required minimal effort should be identified as best practices at this point. Finally, implement those best practices into the workflow to increase efficiency in the long run and make your next outreach campaign even more successful.

Your headline is the most important part of your sales copy, whether you’re writing copy for direct-mail postcards, emails, or website landing pages. In fact, some copywriters report at least half of the time they spend writing any given marketing piece is devoted the headline – and some spend as much as 90 percent of their time on headlines. Unfortunately, many small businesses don’t devote nearly as much time to headlines as they should; resulting in missed opportunities and lost sales. The following details why writing headlines is worth 90 percent of your time.

Headlines dictate read rates

Copyblogger states that eight out of ten people read headlines, but only two out of ten read the rest of any given copy. That powerful statistic illuminates the critical nature of headlines: the better your headline, the more people will read your postcard/email/web page body copy. All that’s left is for your body copy to reinforce and expand upon the ideas presented in your headline, reveal a special offer, then deliver a call to action.

Great headlines make money

The more people that read your body copy, the greater your response rate. The greater your response rate, the more money you make; thus, we can surmise the better your headline, the more profitable your campaign.

Quicksprout quotes acclaimed copywriter David Ogilvy, who said five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. The piece goes on to state that headlines are worth 90 percent of every advertising dollar.

Ninety percent sounds like a lot, even hyperbole, but consider this: Upworthy co-founder Peter Koechley says a great headline can increase click-through rates by as much as 500 percent. Now consider the implications of that statement: if you can get your headline in front of 1,000 people and you have five clicks, then make a headline revision that increases click-through rate 500 percent will result in 25 new clicks for a total of 30.

Let’s say you routinely generate 100 clicks from your headlines and net an average of two percent conversions from those clicks, with a $5 ROI per click. So, 100 clicks nets you $10. Now, let’s say you can increase your click rate by 500 percent – a total of 600 clicks. At a two percent conversion rate, you would net twelve sales instead of two and generate profits totaling $60. In this scenario you could increase profits 500 percent simply by changing your headline.

Now, let’s apply that at mass scale. Say you currently generate an average of 1,000 clicks and profit $200. Increase click rates by 500 percent and you get 6,000 clicks and profit $1,200. Starting at 10,000 clicks? You’d be making $2,000. Increase clicks by 500 percent and you’d be making $12,000.

As you can see, your headline can be the difference between a lackluster campaign and thousands of dollars in profits – and that’s not including the lifetime value of a customer.

The four “U’s” of headline writing

It’s far easier to see the power of a great headline than it is to actually write one. Some copywriters are known to spend several days – even a week or more – perfecting their headlines. That doesn’t mean you can’t craft a great headline in a few hours; in fact, there’s no reason to overcomplicate matters. Many copywriters ascribe to the four “U’s” of headline writing, which state headlines must be Unique, Ultra-specific, convey a sense of Urgency, and be Useful.

Let’s say you’re a financial advisor and you have a planning package that helps public employees retire early. You set up a seminar to introduce potential clients to your service. You could go with a headline such as:

“Get sound retirement planning from ABC Financial Advisors”

This headline is accurate, but does it really inspire potential customers to take action? Not really. It’s not unique, it’s not ultra-specific, there is no sense of urgency, and though it’s useful, it doesn’t differentiate your company from so many competitors. Now, try this:

“Teachers, Skip School Next Thursday and Retire 5 Years Early!”

This headline is unique because it asks teachers to skip school (to attend your seminar). It’s ultra-specific in three ways: first, it’s only for teachers; second, it’s specific to “next Thursday;” third, it delivers a clear benefit (“retire 5 years early”). It creates a sense of urgency with a specific date in the near future (“next Thursday”). Finally, it’s useful – who wouldn’t want to retire early?

Both headlines are advertising the same thing, but the second is far more likely to generate response.

Conduct a bit of research to learn more about how to craft winning headlines, then put your own to the test – literally. Test different versions of your headlines and measure response rates. Over time, you’ll learn what works best so you can continually market your business with reliable results and predictable profits.

Taking the time to write great headlines isn’t just about improving isolated campaigns, it’s a long-term business growth strategy. The better you become at writing headlines, the more your business will grow. That’s why writing headlines is worth 90 percent of your copywriting time.

How to Use Infographics Effectively written by Guest Post read more at Small Business Marketing Blog from Duct Tape Marketing

Because of the constant bombardment of information we experience on a daily basis, the average human being now has a shorter attention span than a goldfish! In the digital era, marketers have to change and adapt their strategies in order to get their messages heard amongst the many other competing voices. Because humans are wired to respond more positively to visuals than text, infographics tend to get far more shares than traditional text-based content.

Additionally, infographics allow you to create an emotive story around a seemingly meaningless sea of data, allowing people to swiftly understand the key points without having to do any of the tedious reading. While anyone can pay to commission an infographic, there are certain factors you need to consider if you want your infographic to become a viral success!

Choosing the right topic

It’s important to remember that your infographic should never be a tout for your company; instead you should aim to tackle a contentious issue in your industry or cover a hot topic that you know will encourage sharing. In other words, aim to provide genuine value to people instead of simply promoting yourself. With resources such as Google Trends, Twitter hashtags, and numerous RSS aggregators, you’re sure to be able to find a topic that people will love to see encapsulated in a stunning infographic.

Content creation

When researching the facts for your infographic, always use reputable sources and ensure that they are airtight – particularly if your infographic is about a contentious issue – someone is bound to want to point out the flaws in your argument! You may wish to incorporate some quotes from industry specialists to serve as proof elements for your argument. Also, a few interesting lesser-known facts and quirky anecdotes may help to provide some light entertainment for readers.

When organizing your content, thinking visually is crucial. It’s important to remember that not every fact and statistic will make a good visualization, and conversely, not every great visualization will fit within the narrative of your infographic. In order for the infographic to work, the visuals must support the content and help to drive the narrative home. Never be tempted to sacrifice substance for style! As with any form of content marketing, well-researched, high-quality content is the cornerstone of an effective infographic.

Design

You may wish to design an infographic to match the branding of your company, and this may be a good idea if you are creating the piece for company presentations or other internal purposes. However, you should always avoid “over branding” the piece – in most cases you only need to include your company’s logo and website discretely in the footer.

In the design phase, less is more; if you’re used to creating long-winded text content, you may feel reluctant to omit certain pieces of data, even if they aren’t propelling the narrative forward. However, leaving in extraneous elements will only serve to clutter the infographic and confuse people. Always design from a holistic perspective and be prepared to sacrifice elements that aren’t contributing to the clarity and argument of the infographic.

Promotion

You may wish to create a specific landing page for your infographic, or you can simply post it as part of a blog post. Either way, you should make sure that the page has complete social media functionality so that people can share with ease. Additionally, it helps to include the HTML embed code directly beneath the infographic so people can post it on their websites with ease – this is particularly useful for bloggers within your niche who may wish to incorporate your infographic into their own unique content.

There are numerous infographic submission sites that will be happy to host your infographic and if you’re lucky you could even have it featured on Mashable. However, to get your infographic to go viral you’re probably going to have to do a lot of hustling. Promoting using social media is highly recommended, but don’t forget to leverage your personal network. If you know someone who has a large following online, persuading them to share your infographic can result in huge amounts of exposure, expanding your audience and bringing you new business!

Jack Knopfler is the Lead Content Editor at Mammoth Infographics. He has a background in digital marketing and has helped clients in a range industries to improve their presence online.

This blog will detail how you can use a content pillar as your launchpad for microcontent.

First, let’s do a quick refresher about what microcontent is and what it can do.

Think of microcontent as bite-sized information that counterbalances your high-value evergreen assets like whitepapers, eBooks, and case studies. Microcontent ensures a steady stream of original, real-time, and snackable content sandwiched between your content heavy-hitters. It’s meant to be super shareable and trackable. Exceptional microcontent allows you to not only contribute to an ongoing and engaging conversation, it helps you own it, moving you closer to achieving your marketing and sales goals.

The Marketer’s Staple: The Content Pillar

The content pillar approach is a working roadmap for driving engagement and action, and the perfect inspiration for microcontent. The goal of an effective pillar is to provide your prospects with exactly what they need when they need it, thus driving lead conversions and boosting sales.

Content pillar assets tend to be large, expansive resources. And while top-of-funnel prospects may consider lengthy whitepapers too much of a time investment, they are far more likely engage with interesting stats, inspiring quotes, or funny GIFs. This is where microcontent comes in handy for proving value and attracting prospects to these bigger assets.

Let’s Get Practical and Tactical

Step 1: Pillar Strategy

Creating a content pillar—the inspiration for all your microcontent—starts with collaborative theme planning. This theme, or themes, reflect a major product, service, organizational initiative, or a key customer pain point. Check out The Multi-Channel Content Distribution Guide. This eBook will give you step-by-step instructions on pulling together your team to create audience-centric themes. These approved themes then form the blueprint for your working pillars.

Step 2: Pillar Creation—Top, Middle, and Bottom

Each of your content pillars should contain three pieces that serve the top, middle, and bottom of the funnel. These are like the appetizer, entree, and dessert of a meal. This is your evergreen content. Let’s review each one.

Appetizer. This piece is a fun, engaging, curiosity-provoking asset like an infographic, SlideShare, or free webinar. The goal of this piece is to engage a lot of prospects and drive them toward a related, gated content asset. This content is meant to be optimized by channels like your blog and website, social channels (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.), and video channels like YouTube and Vimeo.

Entree This piece is the major, hefty content asset. The asset could be an eBook, a whitepaper, or a how-to guide. Marketers can distribute this content through email or marketing automation and support it with paid email and online or social advertising.

Dessert. This is your product or service-centric asset, like a PDF, video or demo. This asset is meant to concisely reveal how your product or service solves core pain points for your target audience. It can be distributed through marketing automation as part of your nurturing efforts, hosted on video channels or webinar platforms, and should be provided to your sales team to help accelerate the deal cycle.

Step 3: Riff Off Your Three Evergreen Assets

These assets are rich resources for you. And if you’ve done your persona homework, this should be a fun and creative venture. Dig back into each of your three evergreens and extract bite-sized excerpts you know will be engaging and shareable like data or stats, micrographics, a customer quote, an image with a caption, etc. Make sure it continues to take your prospect along your differentiated storyline. Drop these excerpts into your content publishing calendar.

Step 4: Create Original Microcontent

This step is especially suited to anyone on your team who is super creative and an out-of-the-box thinker. Remember that microcontent can be just about anything—topical factoids, data or stats, cool illustrations, photo images, small infographics, memorable quotes, memes, tips, minigraphics, GIFS, diagrams, charts, video snips, to anything else your imaginations conjure up—in direct support of your pillared storyline.

Have fun with this but don’t forget to stick close to the pain point relief of your target audiences. When you get this right, your microcontent will be highly shareable and should spark an analytics uptrend.

As you get better and faster at producing microcontent, you’ll begin to appreciate its power to own the discussion, elevate your brand, increase awareness for your products or services, and grow your sales.

Often you will find yourself wondering why your social media marketing strategies are bringing you back to square one. You are not seeing an increase in the amount of conversions and you are definitely not getting your business noticed the way you wanted. When you look around at other brands, you see a large fan following, numerous conversions and high engagement overall. So, you think to yourself why you’re not getting what you expected out of your own marketing strategy.

Well, there are a few secret ingredients that complete a social media marketing strategy and give it that extra zing. Here are a few out-of-the-box tactics you can adopt to give your marketing strategy a little boost.

Post content after business hours

You might think that posting your content during regular office hours might attract more eyeballs, but that is not necessarily the case. During office hours, your target audience might be busy with their daily tasks and might not be able to spare a glance at their social media pages. However, people are more likely to browse through their social media accounts after working hours. It is during this time, that your content will get noticed and shared.

Publish meaningful content

Publishing consistently good content will place your brand in a positive light, and your audience will want to willingly visit your page for the posts that you share. By publishing fresh content regularly, you can keep your social media pages active. It can be difficult to come up with relevant and valuable content all the time, and if you think you have hit a roadblock in terms of content, try out a content discovery tool which can make finding content simple.

Don’t try to sell in every post

The content you choose to post on your social media pages should vary from post to post. Avoid marketing your product in every single post. Instead, share informative posts with your audience. People enjoy reading humorous posts that are informative but are presented in a funnier way. The popular ice-cream brand, Ben & Jerry’s, tends to keep most of the posts on their Facebook page on the quirkier side.

Give your audience a break from the formal marketing posts, and publish videos, audio clips, infographics, or relevant memes. Your audience will definitely want to come back for more.

Reward loyal customers

Take an in-depth look at your social media pages, and pick out customers who are constantly engaging with your brand – giving suggestions, providing feedback and participating in discussions. Choose a loyal customer at random, and reward them for their loyalty and support. It will pay off in the long run as it will lead to people appreciating your brand, and will also help bring in new customers.

Run contests and giveaways

There are many brands out there that are using this tactic to their utmost advantage. Running contests, giveaways or asking questions will give your audience an opportunity to interact with you, and it will also give you a chance to show that you are listening to what your customers have to say. The woman’s deodorant brand, Secret, often publishes engaging posts, giving its customers a chance to engage with the brand.

By getting your audience to share their opinions and suggestions, you are showing that you value their opinions, and welcome their suggestions for your brand. Your audience will also feel wanted and appreciated.

Use promotional words

Words like “free”, “offers” and “sale” tend to attract attention immediately. Use these words in your posts whenever possible, but make sure it fits the context. Incorporate these words in the post creatively, and add an image along with the post so that these posts are easily noticeable.

For social media marketing strategies to work to your advantage, they need to be refurbished from time to time. Instead of applying the usual run-of-the-mill tactics, try out something fresh every time. This will energize your marketing strategy and give your audience something to look forward each time they visit your social media pages.

Image Credit: Narciso1 via Pixabay

When I studied abroad in London in 2008, the British pound was worth roughly 1.7 times the US dollar.

Visiting my friends in continental Europe, where the Euro was worth about 1.3 USD, felt like a bargain at the time.

So when EUR and USD inched closer to equal value over this past winter, Americans started to get excited. "Thanks to a strong dollar, it is now the best time for Americans to travel abroad," headlines exclaimed. "It's now cheaper to travel to Europe than it has been in years."

I took the advice of the internet at large and booked an 11 day trip to the Balearic Islands off the southern coast of Spain with a friend: Ibiza, Formentera, Mallorca, and Menorca.

Before I tell you how it went, let me be upfront about one thing: I could have done it cheaper. I could have stayed in hostels and spent eight hours on a ferry between islands instead of shelling out more for flights. I could have begrudged every 10€ admission, refused to rent a car, and never set foot in a restaurant.

But I didn't do any of that.

SEE ALSO: I lived in Europe for 5 years — these are the places I tell all my friends to visit

In the fall of 2014, I started setting up email alerts for flights in May 2015. In December, a $777 round trip, with a short layover in Switzerland, came available and I grabbed it. Summer is the high season, so by traveling in May, the "shoulder season," we avoided the highest prices.

The Balearic Islands — Ibiza, the party island, and Mallorca, the island of vacation villas, in particular — are known for being luxury resorts and favorites of celebrities and millionaires alike. They are also extremely beautiful, which is why we wanted to go.

Our first stop was Ibiza, where we stayed for three nights in the most expensive accommodations of our trip: an oceanview AirBnb flat in Platja d'en Bossa for $860. My friend and I split every hotel cost, and we paid for flights and hotels from the US, which is why they're listed in USD. It didn't end up being anything too special, so I won't show it here.

Business Blogging Helps Customers

Business blogging is a great way to drive traffic to your website. An established blog delivers value to prospective customers and helps you establish yourself as a thought leader within your industry.

This is the information age, people! Customers know they can find information at any moment’s notice at the touch of their fingertips and they are searching diligently. With an effective blogging strategy that helps answer questions your future customers might have, your blog should bring you thousands of new prospects into the sales funnel. Some business blogs are quickly becoming the biggest generator of new customers.

With that being said, here are the 7 most common “sins” made in business blogging today that prevent legions of potentially interested customers from converting:

1. Slothfulness – Not Understanding How to Use Your Blogging Platform

Come on, people. Not much has to be said here. This is a great first step. No matter what platform you choose, there are plenty of resources available to help you learn the basics of blogging.

More important than just how to post a blog, there is also pertinent information such as, how to link posts to other related posts within the blog in order to boost SEO and give the reader an “optimized” experience. Look into these things. Every little bit helps!

2. Lust – Not Optimizing Correctly

Speaking of optimizing, the only way your blog is going to be successful is if people can find it. Let’s be careful here though. You don’t want to write your blog solely for SEO purposes. Write for the customers! Focusing too heavily on SEO can take the human element out of your post. Customers like to be treated like humans. Find out what your customer is talking about and then give them what they want with a creative post. The keywords will appear. If you don’t know what your customer is talking about, you’ll miss the mark.

3. Ignorance – Not Knowing Your Audience

In order to give the reader what they are searching for and talking about, you have to know them, almost personally. Who are your top 3 buyer personas? What are they usually looking for before they find your product? How can you give them the free information they are searching for? What are some hot topics they are interested in within the industry? These are just a few questions to consider before brainstorming blog content. Don’t point and shoot with your posts. Narrow your sites onto a popular target of conversation that a future potential buyer might be interested in.

4. Greed – Making a Giant Sales Pitch

Posts should be an educational resource for readers looking for information or answers to questions. The reading they do should help them. If your blog is just one giant sales pitch telling the reader what to do, then they will tune you out. Give the reader just enough information to graze their hairs, leaving them wanting more. If you explain the benefits of your products and services, be tactful about it and for the love of all things, use hyperlinks!

5. Pride – Not Using Effective Images

Using powerful images brings personality to your blog and makes it more visually appealing. Try and stay away from the “that’ll do” approach. There are many stock image sites out there. Don’t settle for photos that scream, “I AM A STOCK PHOTO.” Look for something that evokes emotion and has high contrast. More often than not, the image will be the first thing a reader sees and while they might be scrolling ferociously through their news feed, you’ll want something that catches their eye.

6. Laziness – Not Posting Consistently

Posting consistently is the key to driving future customers to your site. If you post sporadically, you might as well be giving half-hearted suggestions for customers to come to your site. They’ll take their business to more confident thought leaders. At a minimum, you should post once a week

7. Selfishness – Not Sharing Your Posts

Sharing is caring. Tell the world about it! Take pride in your work but don’t spend too much time writing. Allocate your time better so that you are spending just as much time promoting your content as you do writing it. Don’t keep it a secret. Contrary to popular belief, there are no “blogging fairies” that pick up the best and most interesting blogs on the Internet and spread them to the masses. Post links to individual blog posts throughout all social media channels. Social media has become the global sharing hub. Adding social sharing buttons helps readers share with just a click of a button. Social media has compounding interest power!

Creating an effective business blogs comes over time but if you avoid these mistakes, you might start to see traffic come quicker than you ever imagined. Starting is the hardest part and learning comes along the way but those who underestimate the power of this content tool are missing out. Now you know what to avoid, go out and DO IT! MAKE YOUR DREAMS COME TRUE!

Fracking is the perfect metaphor for the service-charge, extraction oriented economy: "suck up a sky’s worth of valuable gas through a massive crack pipe, then pack up and lumber off to fracture and steal someone else’s underground treasure."

Ian Martin is incandescent on the financialized casino economy and the greed-is-good, all-the-market-will-bear ethic that says the you can tell that someone is doing something good if they're doing well.

But once you’ve mined the earth and milked the service industries, what is there left to frack? Us, that’s what. Heard of Kwasi Kwarteng? He’s a rising star in the Tory party. Always a danger signal, this. To qualify as a rising star in this context you have to make Judge Dredd look like the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Kwarteng’s suggestion, which has gone down very well with literally everyone I hate, is that a young person who hasn’t got a job and therefore hasn’t paid any national insurance contributions should get their unemployment benefit in the form of a repayable loan. Even if someone was out of work for the entire seven years between 18 and 25, he says, “the total sum repayable would be £20,475 – considerably less than the tuition fees loan repayable by many of his or her peers”. The clincher, there. You might be unemployed, but think yourself lucky you’re not going to university.

Redefining citizens as frackable units is precisely where all this current terrifying unpleasantness with the NHS is leading. Once you apply the laws of fracketeering to the NHS it’s a short step from monetising cataract operations to privatising them. Procedures that are highly profitable for shareholders, however, may be out of reach for the poor. Perhaps we can come to some arrangement. You owe us for restoring your eyesight, but you can’t seriously expect to see and get a full state pension …

Fracketeering: how capitalism is power-hosing the last drops of value out of us all [Ian Martin/The Guardian]

(via Seanan McGuire)

((Image: Gasbohrung "Völkersen-Nord Z6", Battenbrook, CC-BY-SA)

This application management deal is a “must-win” deal. We have the best solution, we have a great relationship with the customer and we save them a lot of money with this new cloud-based service. We all know overconfident sales statements like this one, don’t we? But then, all of a sudden, the deal goes south. The customer makes a decision for a competitor. Why? Because this competitor offered a much bigger business impact, connected to the customer’s relevant financial metrics. It’s a disaster for the sales team, the funnel and the quarter.

Cost savings are a translation of features and functions into a financial equivalent. Cost savings don’t connect to the customer’s desired business results per se. They are a prerequisite for getting to their specific business value.

Cost savings are still in the category of what a product, a service or a solution IS (features and functions) and what it DOES (saving money), but not what these cost savings MEAN to the customer. The typical question of a CFO kind of role will be: “So what?” In our 2015 MHI Sales Best Practices Study, we identified critical customer behaviors. One of these behaviors is that customers decide how they calculate value. In this year’s study, 61% of the world-class sales performers indicated that their customers require formal calculations on business value (ROI, TCO, and specific business cases, etc.) before making a buying decision, compared to 39% the year before. Look at this huge hike from 2014 to 2015, and consider that only 35% of all respondents indicated the same customer requirement (versus 26% in 2014). Now, what are world-class sales performers doing differently?

World-class sales performers know that their products, services, and solutions are only one element in the customer’s approach to solving a problem or mastering a challenge.

Value always lies in the eyes of the beholder, the customer. As customers make every decision differently, every time, the customer’s desired business value has to be different from the provider’s product-oriented cost savings. There is a natural gap by definition. This gap is one of the reasons why traditional ROI calculators never impress a customer stakeholder who has a financial focus. Those ROI calculators are, most of the time, product-oriented, which means they only cover one element of the customer’s solution, the provider’s offerings.

World-class sales performers map their product’s cost savings to their customers’ broader business value calculation.

That means that in the customer’s business case, the offered product’s cost savings will often be only one line item. World-class sales performers know how their cost savings can impact other financial metrics in general. Their expertise in understanding the customer’s context and the stakeholders’ different concepts allows them to figure out which financial metrics are important for this buying team, this time. They also identify the strategic business initiatives and connect the dots between their product-based cost savings, the directly impacted financial metrics and their impact on the customer’s strategic business initiatives.

Understand your customer’s financial performance and identify financial metrics that matter to them

Many sales professionals were trained to focus on their ROI and TCO as discussed above. That worked as long as (in our example of a cloud-based application management), IT departments and technical buyers made the decisions alone. Now, as we observe a huge shift to business buyers and cross-functional and complex buying teams, business value calculations become very different. Why is this the case? Because there are no IT projects anymore. Every IT project that exists has at least one business reason, why it exists. Consequently, business values are calculated differently. In general there is a switch from efficiency and budget optimization to effectiveness and investment thinking.

Understanding your customers’ current financial performance and their goals are the first step to identifying metrics that make a difference to them. Financial reports, analyst views, strategic initiatives are great sources to educate yourself. Learning additional financial metrics such as e.g. return on assets (ROA), return on equity (ROE), operating costs, cash flow, EBIT and EBITDA, as well as net and gross profit margins are essential to create outstanding value for your customers next time.

Create a value mapping chart for the entire buying team

Such a document includes the business reasons for every buyer, their desired solution and their desired tangible results and intangible wins, and how they measure success. Then, map back to the relevant metrics of the strategic initiatives, identify alignments, gaps and maybe inconsistencies. Then, come up with an overall approach to your customer’s business value calculation, integrating the stakeholders’ relevant metrics. Being prepared like this shows that you work backward from the customer’s context, and the stakeholders’ different concepts and that you made a lot of efforts to create extraordinary value for them. That’s the entry ticket to have effectiveness and investment focused conversations on eye-level. This is where you should be to win the next deals.

Related blog posts:

Providing Perspectives – A Dynamic Customer-Core Engagement Principle

Manage Mechanics, Navigate Dynamics

How Sales Professionals Create Value for Customers 

This article was initially written for the Top Sales Magazine June 30th, 2015

The post How To Get From Cost Savings To Business Value appeared first on Sales Enablement Perspectives.

One of the greatest things about social selling is how it enables reps to reach their target buyers in numbers one could only dream of less than a decade ago. Unfortunately, this also means it’s easy to take shortcuts and deploy a shotgun approach that actually does more harm than good.

Here is an example of an absolutely terrible InMail I received. It’s messages like this that ruin the system for everyone.

Let’s take a look at what was wrong with this message.

• The subject line was completely irrelevant. The message had no tie-in back to the subject line.
• Poor grammar. If you’re a manager I expect you to be able to use "your" and "you’re" properly. If you’re in doubt, have someone double check your spelling before your message goes out to a client.
• Bad formatting. The InMail is one big block of text that’s hard to read.
• What’s the name of my company? Using a template is a great idea to save time, but sales reps should customize the parts that matter. If you’re not willing to take the time to address who I am, why should I give you my time?
• What are you looking to learn about my company or my role? Throw me a bone here.
• No contact information. Just as closing for next steps is important, sales reps must make it easy for buyers to contact them. 

Here is how I would have written the message:

Hi Lucas,

Noticed that you’ve started Treats Happen -- your site looks great! We actually help a number of growing ecommerce companies with their IT solutions to make sure their shop is always up and running, and they can manage from their mobile on the go.

Would you be free for a quick (5-10 min) chat early next week to talk about how we might be able to help you out?

[Name]

BTW if you want to chat sooner call me at (555) 555-5555.

Why is my approach better? Generally speaking, it adheres to some important sales guidelines:

• It’s quick and to the point. Writing a short but effective message is a tough skill to learn, but it’s one of the most important that any sales rep can have.
• It shows I’ve done my homework. I’m sending you (not everyone) a message not just to hit a quota, but because I truly think I can help your business.
• It’s properly written. I’m far from the best writer, but for a sales guy, I’m pretty decent. I also know the difference between "your" and "you’re" and "there," "their," and "they’re." (I realize I just opened myself up to have this post critiqued.)

Drilling down a bit more, every sentence, and even every word, has meaning:

1. "Hi Lucas" This is important. They spelled my name correctly and they used the form of my name that I use. If I get a cold message in which the sales rep calls me Luke (which I never go by) or spells my name "Lukus/Lukas/Lickias," I ignore it. Always make sure you’ve spelled your recipient's name and the name of their company correctly.
2. "Noticed that you’ve started Treats Happen -- your site looks great!" This tells me you’re not just bombarding me with a generic, templated message; you’ve done your homework. A (genuine) compliment also goes a long way.
3. "We actually help a number of growing ecommerce companies with their IT solutions to make sure their shop is always up and running, and they can manage from their mobile on the go." This sentence gets right to the point and shows how the rep can help the message recipient. In addition, the idea of managing an ecommerce store on mobile might be a pain point the buyer had not thought of yet.
4. "Would you be free for a quick (5-10 min) chat early next week to talk about how we might be able to help you out?" Far too many reps ask for something big out of the gate, like a 30- or 60-minute demonstration. Five to 10 minutes is a reasonable amount of time, and it sets the expectation of what “quick” means. I also suggest a date for the call that's not too far in the future, but far enough out that there's likely some wiggle room in the buyer's schedule.
5. "BTW if you want to chat sooner call me at (555) 555-5555."Just in case the message has hit on a serious pain point, I’ve given my contact information where the prospect can reach me right away.

The variances between my InMail and the one I received might be small, but they make the difference between 10 people responding to you or 10% responding to you. Take the time to review your messaging, and when you do reach out -- regardless of which channel you use -- make your outreach genuine and personal.

Social selling takes place when salespeople use social media as a channel to optimize and impact revenue, return, and results of their sales process. Since salespeople are directly responsible for company revenue, it is essential that their activities are closely measured and optimized.

As a marketer, or data scientist, we need to be concerned with “link-ability”. This is the ability or ease of a marketer to link one piece of data with another piece of data – and by collecting and linking data together over time – we have what is called meta-data. Meta-data gives us a really accurate picture over time. Companies practicing social selling today aren’t using tools that provide the necessary “link-ability” for marketers to understand how to best help sales.

If we look at this in a marketing and sales context – marketing needs to know which pieces of content are working best in which situations and with what buyers. This will enhance the buyer’s journey by giving them the best timely content, increase the number of SQLs, and to effectively bridge the gap with sales using data.

SocialPort provides the “link-ability” necessary for marketing and sales to optimize the buyer’s journey with digital content. Having a platform that links rep-buyer engagement on social media directly to your CRM will help gather the meta-data needed to make informed content strategy decisions. SocialPort’s reporting system is specifically built to give companies an unfair advantage in the sales process by linking a rep’s social activities and sharing of digital marketing assets directly to established sales metrics in real-time.

As a marketer, a tool like SocialPort will help you answer:

What marketing can learn by using SocialPort to syndicate content to sales:

1. Which types of content is being best received by buyers and on which channel?
2. Which pieces of content are having the biggest impact on the buyer’s journey?
3. Which pieces of content work best at different stages of the funnel?
4. Which piece of content is responsible for the most revenue?
5. Which content is responsible for the most opportunities created?

This article was originally posted on Leopard.com

Think that everything between buyers and sellers is all sweetness and light?

A recent study of buyers by Leopard reports that salespeople may not be as popular as they think they are. And, while it’s true that 80% of buyers consider sellers to be a strategic business resource, the research illuminates a significant disconnect:

55% of survey respondents feel that they waste a lot of time in sales meetings—or even dread encounters with salespeople. Their verbatims definitely point to trouble in paradise. Here’s a look at the negative perceptions that can kill sales, and a few tips for remedy…

One idea rose to the top again and again in our survey: People want to buy, not to be sold to. Yet, too many seller conversations continue to be me focused, not buyer focused. When sellers spend the sales call in a monologue about themselves, their products and their capabilities, they miss the opportunity to discover what the prospect really wants: the essential “what’s in it for me” information that’s the only reason anybody buys anything. The wrong solution starts with the question you don’t ask.

“Please tell me something that will help me with my situation, not only what’s beneficial to you and your company.”

“Listen to me!”

This is a close cousin to the sin of the me-focused conversation: the sellers’ presumption that they know everything about the buyers’ business…and the subsequent attempt to force fit an offering into a situation they don’t fully understand. Buyers want conversations focused on their businesses, their needs, their goals. They want to hear how your organization and your offering will speak to what’s individually relevant to them. Few blunders will turn a buyer off faster than the presumption that you know it all.

“The worst thing a seller could do is to feel that they know what we need better than we do.”

If there’s one complaint we heard more than any other, it’s this: pushiness, the polar opposite of the buyer-centric encounter.

Whether you’re guilty of the hard sell, relentless pricing discussions, endless callbacks or attempts to shove products down the buyer’s throat, customers will inevitably push back—in fact, they’ll push you right out of competitive consideration. How good your product or service is won’t matter; high-pressure selling is one sure way to put yourself out of the running.

“I feel like they are trying to distract me from making an intelligent decision.”

On our survey verbatims of top seller transgressions, one came up high on nearly every list: Dishonesty.

Is this a surprise to you? It was to us. Integrity ought to be table stakes, but buyers often find that sellers fall far short of that requirement. Exaggerated claims. Lying. Shady pricing ploys. Sellers who think that integrity is a flexible concept had better think again. Few things will kill a budding relationship faster than playing fast and loose with the truth. Once damaged, reputations are nearly impossible to heal.

“Be real!”

“Lying or fabricating data is the worst thing a seller can do.”

There’s a big difference between being unprepared and underprepared. 91% of our surveyed buyers say that sellers bring materials on sales calls…but are they the right ones that address the buyers’ needs? Do they speak in the voice of your brand? Do they persuade with eloquent simplicity or are they dazzlingly complicated? Do they address the prospect’s stage in the buying cycle? Do they help buyers make your case to their decision makers?

Preparedness takes many unexpected forms. And none of them happen by accident. How will you be ready before you step through the door?

“Do your homework before you arrive.”

“Please be prepared. Do not waste my time.”

According to our survey, more than half of buyers say that sellers don’t follow up. Or, if they do, they follow up with information that doesn’t cover what was discussed. Or they simply take too long to close the loop. What kind of message does that neglect send about the treatment the buyer can expect in the future? Slow followup, no followup: Either way, it’s like holding the door open for the competition to walk through.

“Not following up with me on requests for information—honestly, it happens way too often.”

“Taking a long time to return my messages or e-mails will make me find someone else as quickly as possible.”

Rudeness? Really? Why would any good seller want to come across that way? This sin ought to be a no-brainer, but a surprising number of buyers say that they see it all the time. Rudeness. Impatience. Displays of irritation. Interrupting the customer. Even yelling. True, sellers are under greater pressure than ever to deliver results…but copping an attitude is one sure way to deliver nothing.

“When sellers are rude, I’m reluctant to deal with them again.”

“We’re not your colleagues. We could be your future clients, and that depends on your behavior in this initial meeting.”

Rules for better selling encounters

For businesses of every size, building successful selling encounters requires a frank examination of the status quo and a reshaping of ingrained behaviors. Expanded understanding of seller and buyer environments, and knowledge of current selling practices and buying cycles can bring more value to every engagement.

“Listen to what I need, not what you think I need.”

“Don’t treat me like your customer, treat me like a company you want to see succeed.”

In these pursuits, specialists can help marketing and sales rethink the buyer/seller landscape—a major jumpstart in moving organizations toward these goals.

• Listen first. Ask second. Speak last.
• Practice customer-first selling. Everything is about the person who buys. Everything. Every feature, every solution in every engagement.
• Have conversations, not sales pitches.
• Have standardized processes and materials in place that help sellers sell in the way they do best.
• Sell from a common playbook. One company, one message.
• Sell products or services from an unsiloed perspective. Sell the bigger vision; the strengths of an entire company.
• Never let your integrity be in question.
• Read your audience; they’ll tell you when you’re pushing too hard.
• Remember, this is your customer, not your pal.
• Make buyers’ lives easier. Prepare the ground for them. Help them do the research, including a sampling of competitive information. Show that you’re in the hunt for the best solutions for them.
• Follow up effectively, with a recap and information that reflect your discussion.

Dawn-Marie Kerper is Executive Consultant at Leopard.

Trying to win the business of every lead that comes your way is futile. You will end up wasting precious time on people who have no interest in buying. Instead focus on those who will give you a fair hearing. Doing so will decrease sales time and increase close rates.

Salespeople can stand to learn something from hypnotists. For example, the next time a prospect brings up an objection on the phone, simply interject "You are getting sleeeeepy ... very, very sleeeeepy ... "

Okay, you shouldn't really do that. But a degree of overlap does exist between the worlds of sales and hypnotism, according to Aircall.

Think about how hypnosis makes people feel -- relaxed and at ease. That sounds like a good state of mind for a prospect to receive a sales call in, doesn't it? Hypnotists also advise their clients in the form of suggestions. Instead of saying "I demand you go to sleep right now!" they gently whisper "Imagine that your eyelids are getting heavier and heavier." And as any good salesperson can tell you, making demands of buyers is not a smart idea -- kindly suggestions are much more palatable.

The SlideShare below lists five sales call tips inspired by hypnosis. Discover how to calm your nerves and persuade your prospect with soothing tones and stories. No swinging watch required. 

Your marketing team has an incredibly important job: to keep your clients pleased and signing, and your prospects engaged and biting. And in the age of knowledge-empowered buyers, you must keep on top of your sales and marketing content.

It goes without saying that the modern marketing team is always in the weeds – on a continuous quest of content creation, curation, publication and augmentation.

Marketing’s biggest content pain: the updates.

… Those time-consuming, yet all-important overhauls to pitchbooks, sales presentations and other client-facing marketing materials that keep information consistent, current, correct and compelling – directly affecting a firm’s ability to retain and nurture existing client relationships, as well as acquire new business.

But you can get that time back for your marketing team. You can take the burden out of content updates. You can make things easier, smarter and much more effective.

How? With automated updates.

“Making Updates Suck Less” The Abridged Version

1. You know this: Bad content doesn’t fly.

Inconsistent, outdated, inaccurate and uninspiring materials are a huge liability – risking the trust, respect and success of your sales reps; insulting and repelling well-informed buyers and lowering expectations for your brand.

2. You hate this: Content updating is tedious and draining.

The process not only steals time, people and resources – swapping marketing productivity for administration – but it also puts a huge dent in workplace satisfaction.

3. You get this: Marketing is already overwhelmed.

Enough said.

4. You love this: Automation saves 400% in marketing hours.

Marketing can spend more time creating content (instead of updating it), connecting with buyers and optimizing campaigns. Plus, workplace satisfaction gets a nice little bump.

5. You need this: An easy way to leverage automated updates

With the right sales enablement platform, you can give your marketing team the tools they need to leverage automated updates and re-focus their time on high value activities. Automation updates 3x the content in half the time.

Automated updating strikes gold in lots of places, with lots of people.

From the marketing team that works smarter to the sales reps who sell smarter – plus the executives/managers who see it all materialize as tangible results and bottom-line gains – update automation is an all-around win.

Time Saver

Update entire books and presentations, or just certain parts, quickly, easily and seamlessly.Productivity and time savings grow exponentially as updates to one section of a presentation or book cascade throughout the material’s slides and sections, as needed.

Brand Defender

Ensure current and consistent branding – from value messaging to design – across all client-facing materials, even throughout the course of massive content updates and information overhauls.

Information Preserver

Guarantee that teams are using the most up-to-date, accurate information available. Not only are all updates instantaneous, inclusive and accessible on all devices, but relevant team members are also immediately notified when updated messaging and new materials come online.

Be consistent, current, correct and compelling with your content – and make it easier, smarter and much more effective to do so. That’s how you turn your content into currency, and start selling with consistency

This guest post comes from Charles Obinna Onwugbene of www.franchargroup.com. Charles is a small business owner and registered civil engineer, specifying the right class of American porcelain tiles for projects.

New businesses decide what road to take when they begin. Many businesses look for the easy road and invariably end up not achieving success because the best road to starting a business is like the narrow road that leads to a happy life… and those who find it are few.

Most businesses believe if they can develop or market a superior product by describing its numerous benefits and features, the road to success is around the corner. This is true only if the business owner fully understand its competitors and customers.

Ironically, most businesses seek to develop and market products by describing the advantages they have over competitive products, with their sole strategy being to beat their current competitors. Pretty much all products that enter the market follow a standard rollout model.

The model entails four stages:

• (a) Concept,
• (b) Product development,
• (c) Testing, and
• (d) Product launch

Asking what is wrong with this model seems as heretical as asking ‘’what’s wrong with fish staying out of water?” The answer lies in countless businesses that have failed with this approach.

The flaw in this model lies in a simple question…where is the customer?

In a market where an existing products has a strong hold, developing a superior product without customer feedback is a fundamental flaw that leads to the road that is wide and broad, which eventually leads to destruction. To develop a new product, and market it successfully in a market where an existing product reins supreme, customer involvement must take precedence.

The customer development model entails:

1. Customer Awareness
2. Customer Validation
3. Customer Building
4. Company Building

For a new product to gain a market share and be adopted, a process for discovering the market needs, locating the customer and validating any assumptions must be designed.

The following overview will get you started in this design process.

(1) Customer Awareness

The primary aim of connecting with potential customers is to find out if your new product can satisfy their most important needs. This involves validating the value proposition of your business. Does your product provide value to the customer? This is not about guess work, this process takes place “outside the office” in order for you to learn what your customers’ problems are and if your new product solves these problems.

This also gives you an idea of who your customers and users are. If you told porcelain tiles this might be engineers, home owners, architects, builders, contractors, hotels, real estate developers, etc.

(2) Customer Validation

This is key to understanding if the rate of adoption of your new product will be fast and eventually replace the existing leading product. The goal of customer validation is to build a repeatable sales road map for the sales and marketing of your product. This process, if successful, proves you have found a set of customers and a market that responds positively to your product.

The customer awareness and customer validation process corroborate your business model. Successfully completing these two processes (customer awareness and validation) verifies your market, identifies your customers, tests the perceived value of your product, and identifies its commercial buyers.

This is the tipping point in most businesses. In this process, if you cannot find a group of customers with a repeatable sales process, you do not move on to the next step.

(3) Customer Building

This is a unique process, as most businesses are not all alike. Some businesses enter existing markets well-defined by their competitors, some create blue ocean markets (markets where no such product exist) and some attempt a hybrid of these two. Each of these market types requires a distinct strategy of customer building activity.

(4) Company Building

Customer building is where the company transitions from its informal learning into formal departments of sales, marketing and business development. These departments now focus on building teams with a mission, harnessing the company’s early market success.

This process of customer development design should take precedence over the product development model as all businesses and products exist because there is a customer.

Attempting to go into the reverse direction is the flaw that leads to most businesses to failure. The rate of adoption of any new product will be speedy and successful if that product can meet the most most urgent needs of the customers.

So it’s been six months since you launched your Instagram Account.

In theory, its purpose was to connect your brand with the thousands of millennials that ‘gram it up’ every day while somehow turning those followers into cash. In reality, you’re failing to convert all those millennials and their double tap love hearts into actual paying customers. The worst part is, you have no idea why you’re failing.

Well I’m here to help. In this 5 minute read, you’ll find a list of 8 Instagram Hacks & Secrets That Will Drive Sales From Millennials; transforming your Instagram Account into a lead gen machine on steroids.

So let’s get started.

1. Create Call To Actions That Actually Result In Action

One of the beautiful things about Instagram is it restricts your ability to link off site and spam your follower’s feeds with BS.

From a user’s point of view, this is a feature of sheer brilliance. From a marketers point of view, it’s a massive road block on the Lead Gen Highway.

Luckily for you, the work around is simple. Simply place the link you want traffic driven to in your website address field in your bio. Then, all you need to do is reference this link on your next post through a call to action. Something as basic as “To find out more, click the link in our bio” will suffice.

This is an awesome work around and it only require your followers to click twice (once on your profile link and once on the website link) to be connected with your desired website. Gone are the days of pasting a non clickable, text heavy, boredom inspiring chunk of dirty text that no one will go to the effort of typing into their mobile browsers, especially not ADD centric millennials.

2. Increase Exposure By Placing Call To Actions As A Location Extension

Placing extra information or even a web address as a call to action in the location extension field (that appears above your image in your follower’s feeds) can be a great way to capture extra attention.

Personally, I’m not a massive fan of this method, however, I have seen other account’s action this effectively. Do heed this warning though: do not over do it, too much of any good thing is always a bad thing (AKA don’t spam your audience, nobody has time for that).

3. Add Line Breaks To Your Instagram Captions

Nothing will bore your users into swiping away from your image more than lengthy captions that are not separated by any line breaks.

There is no doubt in my mind that white space is an extremely powerful tool for cultivating increased attention and engagement, or simply making an caption look neater (see screenshot above). The problem with line breaks is, you have to be sneaky in order to create them.

So how do you do it?

1. Create your desired text, complete with the line breaks / white space you want
2. In order for your paragraph to work, you need to remove any characters, spaces or emojis following your text
3. Publish the image and BOOM, you now have spaces breaking up your text heavy caption – just nobody call the grammar police

4. Get More Instagram Followers

Your goal should always be to make it as EASY as possible for your customers to learn more about you.

One of the most frequent questions I get as a digital strategist is, “Paul, can you tell me how to get more Instagram followers?”

1. Follow the followers of accounts that are homogenous to yours
The idea behind this is simple. By following those people that Like / Comment or Follow account’s that are similar to yours, you will get roughly 10 – 20% of these people following you back.

This plays on the curiosity that many people have when someone follows them. More often than not, when someone follows you, you feel inclined to see who that person is. This results in you checking out their account, and if you like what you see (which is likely given you already follow a similar account) you may follow them back.

2. Follow accounts from relevant hashtags
This works on exactly the same premise as part 1, expect you find accounts to follow based on the hashtags they are using.

My tests show that, as of the date this article was published, Instagram limits you yo following 50 people, per account, per hour.

Please note that one main disadvantage of this (almost spammy) method is the fact that your feed will now be inundated with accounts that you do not know, hindering your ability to be authentic and engage with your community accordingly.

5. Why Your “Thanks for following” Test Just Won’t Cut It Anymore

One of Instagram’s defining points of difference from other social networks is it’s user experience. Namely, what makes Instagram so great is it’s built on a foundation on highly engaging, high value, image and video content.

Whilst I commend those that go to the effort of posting a “thanks for following” comment in response to being followed (here have a cookie), I do believe it’s time you up-the-anti and start thanking your new followers via video direct message.

Have no idea what i’m talking about? Play the video below to get a better understanding of what I mean.

“But Paul that looks like a lot of effort!”

It sure is, but that’s the beauty of it.

Think about receiving a video reply from someone you just followed. This person has gone out of their way to thank you, putting their ego on the line by putting themselves out there and actually taking the time to thank you personally for following them. If this strategy isn’t an example of sound community engagement, I don’t know what is.

6. Add Line Breaks To Your Bio

Just like I mentioned in Point 3, there is no doubt in my mind that white space is a powerful tool for cultivating increased attention and engagement in your posts. The same train of thought can be applied to your bio.
There is no reason why your bio should be an unattractive ugly mess of copy that is all on the same line. Your goal should always be to make it as EASY as possible for your customers to learn more about you. And one of the easiest ways to do this is by adding white space / line breaks to your bio.

Method:

1. Log into your Instagram Account on a computer
2. Edit your bio and add spaces / line breaks just like you would in a word document
3. Hit save and you’re done!

7. Track Your Call To Actions With bit.ly

Failing to track your social media analytics is up there with the Top 5 Digital Marketing No-No’s of all time. Just because Instagram doesn’t have an analytics suite (yet) doesn’t mean you can’t bootstrap your Account to measure your success and optimise it for the future.

Link shortening services like bit.ly are an essential weapon in your digital marketing analytics arsenal. These services allow you to:

• shorten long, ugly, naked URLs
• track the amount of traffic the link receives
• track your link performance over time
• track where your links occurred geographically
• plus many other useful features

By simply turning the website link in your bio into a bit.ly link, you unlock a new world of content and copy analytics and optimisation which will improve and refine your Instagram strategy over time… ultimately leading to more sales from your Instagram Account.

8. Talk Your Target’s Talk

The big thing about millennials is… they are immune to your sleazy, stale, old school, almost embarrassing call to actions.

Don’t know what i’m talking about? Maybe these golden oldies will ring some bells…

“CAN’T WAIT FOR THE WEEKEND”
“WHAT A GREAT NIGHT”
“BOOK NOW SO YOU DON’T MISS OUT”

Let me share a secret with you. Millennials are tired. Really tired. Like, really really tired of you trying to push your shitty sales messages at them in an attempt to push your product.

If you address your community with copy and call to actions that don’t align to your demographic’s lingo, you will only serve to alienate and annoy your potential customers.

This ultimately diminishes your ability to create leads and monetise your channel, which is the OPPOSITE of what we are trying to achieve. Still confused? Feel free to come learn more here on my personal blog.

The post 8 Instagram Hacks That Will Drive Sales From Millennials appeared first on Social Media Explorer.

Let’s be honest, nobody likes cold calls. It is painful for the sales person and even worse for the person on the other end. In fact, even though I’m personally passionate about sales, I still tend to immediately delete voicemails from cold callers.

Although cold calling is one of the least appealing aspects of a sales career, failing to learn this skill limits salespeople to only focusing on the leads that have been acquired by the marketing team. In my experience, salespeople who consistently surpass quotas are those that have mastered cold calling and thus hold their destiny in their own hands.

So where do you start? Some people believe that cold calling requires a thick skin, or refusing to take no for an answer. But there are techniques that can make you more appealing to the person on the other end of the call. Here are my best tips and technique for cold calling:

Warm the Lead, Start With a Referral

The best way to open up a call is by warming the lead and starting with a referral. By listing the name of a person who referred you, it automatically legitimizes your call. Once the lead feels the connection, the call is likely to start off on a more positive note.

So how can you get the referral in the first place? Sales expert Aaron Ross, the author of Predictable Revenue, recommends sending a “short and sweet” email, simply asking for a referral. Using this method, he suggests reaching out to someone at the organization who can help you reach the contact that you actually want to speak with. This method works because folks usually respond with, “You need to speak with this person.” This scenario is really a win-win because it is an easy task for that person and a reasonable response to an unsolicited email.

Once you have your referral, make sure to use that person’s name when you open your call, stating, “Hi Paul, I was exchanging notes with John Smith and he said that I should speak to you about X.” This technique lends you a little more credibility than a pure cold caller. and at worst the recipient will ask you how you know the referrer.

Make Your Voicemails Count

All cold callers have to deal with voicemail at some point. People often question if they should leave voicemail messages, and my answer is that they absolutely should. When leaving a voicemail, there needs to be a thoughtful approach to elicit a call back. I have found that the most effective voicemails are short, 20 seconds or less, and start with a connection point, such as a referral or a comment that is specific to their business. For example, my voicemail might sound like this:

“Hi John, this is Nick Hedges. Mark Brown on your business development team said that I should speak with you. I’m impressed to see sales are going so well that you are expanding your team. My company’s software platform helps new team members generate revenue more quickly through a scientific, guided selling process. I’d love to tell you about it. I’ll call again, but if you want to reach me, my phone number is …”

Find Another Way In

Often times, sales people spend way too much time trying to reach the decision makers, when in reality, they will have a better chance of getting hold of an influencer. Decision makers often sit behind assistants, who screen calls before they ever reach their intended target. An influencer, however, is far easier to get hold of and is usually willing to speak longer and provide you with an introduction to the decision maker.

One of the best ways to identify an influencer is on LinkedIn. On the right hand side of a profile, there is a column titled “People Also Viewed.” Oftentimes, this list includes junior executives who are in the circle of the decision maker and are likely to make an introduction.

Choose Your Timing Wisely

If you choose to move forward with reaching out directly to the decision maker, it is important to be strategic with the time of day that you call. Decision makers are often unavailable to speak with sales people from 9 to 5. Your best shot at reaching a decision maker is to target them from 7-8 a.m. or 6-8 p.m.

At the end of the day, there are several techniques that sales people can utilize in order to make cold calling a success. Even if you’re a seasoned sales executive, it is important to keep these skills fresh. And if you see a missed call from me, call me back – I was referred by someone you trust.

SPONSORED:

This sponsored post is produced in association with Autopilot. 

Between social media, email, and the plethora of platforms designed to support a business in 2015, many companies assume marketing will be a slam-dunk. Yet even with a website, blog, Twitter, and Facebook, they find e-blasts can generate more unsubscribes than orders, and the bottom line is stagnant. What gives?

Marketers may be out of touch, according to an in-depth study by Autopilot, which revealed that across all industries, 65 percent of companies felt their marketing department could be doing a better job of staying connected with and marketing to their customers. But the typical marketing team is under siege: stretched, gauzelike, between ambitious growth targets, multiple programs, and the need to satisfy diverse stakeholders.

They need an adaptable and integrated way to automate the customer journey, one that’s personal and purposeful, and can be replicated thousands of times over, automatically.

The survey found companies that stay in touch with customers every two to four weeks generate twice the leads of companies who touch base less frequently. Marketing automation, or lead nurturing, can help improve customer contact. However, most businesses haven’t heard of it, or don’t understand how it can help them.

And for those who are interested, the cost, access and complexity of existing marketing automation software has placed it beyond the reach of the average business.

Personalized agility

The key to marketing automation success is personalizing the customer journey so companies enjoy a remarkable experience. With this approach, a business will:

1. Attract: Turn strangers and contacts into leads.
2. Acquire: Convert leads to sales, e.g.: a SaaS 30-day product trial.
3. Grow: Onboard and educate new customers about how to achieve long-term success, or grow customer loyalty through engagement, customer feedback surveys, or regular newsletters.

Transforming obstacles Into opportunity

Like all innovation, marketing automation, done well, can turn potential pitfalls into a strategic advantage:

• Marketing automation isn’t email marketing in designer clothes. Traditional marketing automation platforms have been souped-up email automation, sending “one size fits all” messages to many different segments — which may be why there hasn’t been broader adoption before now. This approach leads to high unsubscribe rates, lower brand recognition, and user discontent. Nobody wants to receive a one-to-many message.
• Getting to know Milkshake Joe. Best practices marketing means developing a more integrated view of your customers. By pulling together various aspects of customer identity, from how often they visit your site to what support information they’re searching for, to how often they open an email newsletter, you can easily send messages tailored to where your customers are in their journey. So instead of just knowing your site visitor as Joe, you’ll know he’s Joe who visits your site once a week, always clicks the hamburger page, and always clicks on the special deal page offering a free milkshake with burger purchase. Deliciously simple.
• Like Legos for marketers. To create a customer-centric, multi-channel marketing solution, automation needs to be as easy as using a whiteboard, not just for the “tech elite”. As an example, the Autopilot platform is built like a video game, which appeals to marketers, drives adoption and usage, and lowers costs.
• The sweetest spot. Finally, automated marketing must be affordable. Identity, agility, and ease of use are moot if a business can’t automate the customer journey within a lean marketing budget. A low-cost, try-before-you-buy, SMB-friendly model will appeal to the 96 percent of global companies who have yet to adopt marketing automation.

Nobody does it better…

Who’s mastered the new generation of marketing automation? Dropbox, for one. When you create a Dropbox account you immediately receive helpful onboarding educational content to teach you how to get the most out of Dropbox. If you cross a certain usage threshold, you’ll receive information about ways to take it to the next level, and a look at paid plans. If you purchase a plan and begin to use it regularly, sharing with other Dropbox users, they’ll suggest you consider a Dropbox for Business plan. And if you’re heavily using a Dropbox for Business plan, you’ll receive an email suggesting a call with one of their customer success teams. Clearly, Dropbox is focused on ease of use and the customer journey, and has integrated this into an automated approach that drives onboarding adoption and purchasing.

Swedish-based Narrative, which launched one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in history, markets a small wearable camera that takes a picture every thirty seconds and compiles a time capsule of your life; the founders wanted to create a family record of “moments that matter”. They’ve built an onboarding journey integrating Autopilot with The Clip (their wearable camera) that pulls a customer’s product usage into their marketing automation. A user receives marketing messages based on whether they’ve achieved certain new user events and activities with The Clip once it’s been purchased, downloaded, and used. Narrative is seeing significant results with personalization. Travelers, athletes, and new parents all receive tailored messages and support in creating their unique life histories, with the help of optimized marketing.

Sealed with a KISS

The acronym KISS — Keep It Super Simple — applies to marketing SaaS. Affordability paired with accessibility creates a “pay as you grow” model that appeals to companies of every size and stage of development. The moment is ripe for marketers who love the whiteboard to get onboard with marketing automation. 

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LinkedIn lead generation and engagement approaches that worked 5 years ago when I founded my firm, Get LinkedIn Help, are only working with minimal results today. The buying process has changed drastically:

• Buyers don’t want to be hunted. Afraid of getting harassed with too much sales and marketing information is one of the top 5 reasons buyers don’t connect with vendors.

• Buyers don’t want a sales/buyer relationship. In fact, recent reports show that up to 75% of the buying decision is made before there is a sales conversation. Buyers want a subject matter expert/interested party relationship that’s built on upfront value. They want to be shown how you’re going to take their specific vision and turn it into a path to value before any there’s any talk about a sales a conversation.

This requires a new approach to lead generation and engagement using LinkedIn. Here are three new approaches to start trying:

1. Go From a “Hunter” Approach to a Fisherman Approach on LinkedIn

Hunters love to “spray and pray”. They are quick and don’t like to wait a long time to make a catch. They will move on to new game if the prey is running too fast.  On LinkedIn, they’ll connect with anyone and everyone (even ducks to get a quick meal) and move right in with the pitch. If there’s no response, they move on to the next prey.  It’s all about numbers with them. There is no prospect and customer development.

Suresh Vittal, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, says that sales and marketing professionals can no longer just act as hunters. They have to be fishermen. On LinkedIn, the Fishermen are sharp. They understand what their prey likes; what types of fish are in the nearby waters (LinkedIn communities) and then stealthily prepares  content and tools necessary to make a successful catch.

These fishermen on LinkedIn are patient, never rushing the process and focused on the big catch (the enterprise sale).They know that they have the time to reel that big fish in, especially because they know how to manipulate the fish with more line (content and information) and reel the fish in at just the right time.

2. Go From a Value-After-the-Fact Approach to a Value-First Approach

In a recent webinar hosted by LinkedIn where they discussed Inmail strategies, they mentioned that an Inmail sent from a specific person at LinkedIn had an open rate that was 10% to 20% better than an Inmail sent from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. This tells me that b2b buyers are looking to engage with experts within a company rather than the corporation itself (even if it is LinkedIn!)

The click-through rate to the webinar opt-in page that the Inmail promoted was 50% less for the message sent by the individual at LinkedIn than the one sent by LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. This tells me that if you want to reach, connect and engage with more key decision makers, then experts need to reach out (not the company) and provide up-front value.

B2B buyers want you to work harder to earn their trust and interest before they give you an opt-in and a right to market to them further.

When I promote my webinars (including this one: 6 Ways Sales & Marketing Leaders Can Generate More Revenue Opportunities Using LinkedIn), I create specific content around the topic of the webinar to drive demand.  In my invitations to my LinkedIn group members and connections, I lead with my content that’s on my blog or on the LinkedIn Publishing Platform- not the webinar. My discussions in different groups (which had stand-alone value) link to my content not the landing pages themselves. Yes, the posts have links to my landing pages but it’s a subtle call-to-action after prospects gained real informational value. Notice, I said real informational value – not sales copy for the webinar disguised as a LinkedIn publishing platform post, which marketers are doing now.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud has also taken a very unique approach to using gated content with LinkedIn. As a digital marketing company themselves, the Salesforce Marketing Cloud team knows it’s never been more important to develop real relationships with your customers. The team distributes valuable content (like their in-depth report on the state of marketing) to prospects and customers through social media platforms like LinkedIn as a way to build great relationships and generate quality leads.

Now, instead of using the traditional gated landing page they used Docalytics to put an in-document form several pages into the report. They pulled prospects in with real, upfront value before asking for their information. They were actually able to create value-added discussions in the different LinkedIn groups and link to the report for additional value (something you can’t do with traditional gated pages because your discussions would be thrown into the promotions tab.) The value-first approach achieved a 43.1% conversion compared to 14.8% conversion using the traditional landing page form. Additionally, leads from LinkedIn who accessed the content via the in-document form were 37.5% more engaged based on time spent, navigation activity, and number of pages read.

3. Go From Taking a Blind, Scattershot Lead Engagement Approach to an On-Target, Relevant 1:1 Lead Engagement Approach

I just had a conversation with a logistics company owner who was gun shy about starting with a LinkedIn program because the last firm provided him with unqualified marketing leads. He was getting 8 to 12 calls per week but with people that were not decision makers and those that were just in the very beginning stages of the buying journey.

You see, the marketing firm used a standard, drip LinkedIn message campaign. They were playing a guessing game on which content they should give next and when they should invite for a sales call. They weren’t messaging based on how the prospects were engaging with the content. There’s software, including the Docalytics sales platform that goes along with their marketing platform, which gives you complete tracking and visibility into the content pieces your prospects are engaging with. This allows you to see the full picture of prospect’s interest.

For example, engagement can be tracked down to the specific page to help you get actionable data about the sections of content your prospects are interested in so you know what type of content you should provide next to reel them in closer. You can get granular data such as time on page, link clicks, print/download/share activities, and even mouse activity which allows you to do user engagement scoring.  This way you can quickly and easily identify high-value prospects that you should be spending your time on (and you’ll know how you should be engaging them instead of shooting blindly and hoping and praying that something will hit the target!)

As I mentioned your prospects are calling for a new approach on how you engage with them on LinkedIn. I shared with you just three approaches that need to be changed and showed you how. Inside my LinkedIn group 445+ sales and marketing leaders are exchanging additional approaches to help you engage with buyers more effectively on LinkedIn. Join the Get Help with Linked Strategies group here.

Content Marketing is the beautiful art of making work that matters — and then, finding ways to share it with people who want to see it. It’s defined as any type of marketing that involves creation and sharing of text/media and publishing content in order to achieve campaign goals (for example: acquiring and retaining customers).

Content Marketing Institute defines it as “A strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly-defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.”

Owing to its very effectiveness, companies invested over $118bn in content marketing and related exercises last year. We all know that Content marketing has come a long way and there are now definitive metrics measure the effectiveness of your content.

Recently, Curata has published a comprehensive Guide to Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics. It provides a detailed guide to proving the effectiveness of content through various metrics. Curata compiled 29 of the most essential content marketing metrics into an infographics.

These metrics have been divided into 7 key categories:

1. Consumption
2. Retention
3. Sharing
4. Engagement
5. Leads
6. Sales
7. Production/cost .

On the basis of these factors, you can measure the success rate of your campaigns and pick up the most effective tool/channel for your business. These matrices can be used as a guide if you’re looking to expand your level of measurement or if you’re just getting started. For example; “In order to track retention of existing email list subscribers, you can watch closely unsubscribes and opt-outs option.”

Check out the infographic below.

Content.

We can’t escape it.

Even that little communication device we store in our pocket, or the big one on our desk.

They’re swarming with it.

No longer are the latest headlines constrained to the local news stand – they are there to be consumed, anywhere we go.

For us as marketers, this means more opportunity to find potential customers and show off what we’ve got.

But how can we effectively measure the impact this is having on our bottom line?

According to recent research by Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, 83% of marketers have a content marketing strategy.

The point of all of this?

To get more leads.

The challenge then becomes finding a way to measure ROI within the context of lead generation.

Finding a way to determine content ROI can be a long and arduous process.

The shortest path to figuring this all out is to measure the impact your content has on your audience – then focusing on maximising lead conversions from that content.

Below are three content marketing tactics that when integrated with your content strategy, will help you have a bigger impact on your audience and convert more leads:

1. Tap into social media to understand your audience

It doesn’t matter how good your writing staff are.

If your content isn’t seen or shared, you will naturally find it difficult to close deals.

That means we should develop a social media strategy to better understand our audience and get our content found.

While the importance of this kind of exposure may seem obvious, it will take resources and an understanding of how to repurpose content. It helps to look at how other brands have done this well as part of their content marketing efforts.

Uber, one of today’s leading transportation apps, has successfully managed to implement localized and targeted social media campaigns.

They’ve done this based on different country expectations across their many global locations.

For instance, they display country-specific holiday greetings, promotions with relevant images, as well as announce partnerships with local organizations to increase their influence among specific sectors.

Here’s a quick look at how Uber_NYC partnered with a local New York based food rescue nonprofit:

Image source: https://instagram.com/p/z28sSlSrYs/?taken-by=uber_nyc

These types of strategies are successful because they encourage us to focus on our prospective customers, thus attracting valuable views and increasing our reputation.

While you likely already consider social media a significant opportunity to get more leads, it is up to you to truly understand how to leverage the various existing channels.

2. Use calls-to-action (CTAs) with caution

No doubt you are keen on maintaining relationships and contact with current and potential customers.

But with the abundance of competing products and players in the marketplace, the need to find clever ways to engage customers and encourage them to carry on with their purchase is increasingly complex.

Enter CTAs.

While call-to-actions have a variety of purposes, they all aim to attract customers to a specific item or direction within the sales funnel.

Whether your objective is to gather a list of emails or to get your website visitor to complete the checkout experience – CTAs must be used with caution.

This is because CTAs may hinder your ability to convert leads if not used correctly – backfiring and pushing leads away from your product or service.

Therefore, look for tools that will help you better segment customers so that the CTAs you choose to present to customers will help, not hinder lead generation.

3. Use tools to personalize your content

Mastered the first two tactics?

This one is a little more challenging to implement.

We need to personalize content for our target audience. There is no way around it, content performance is often defined as one’s ability to turn engaging content into ROI, and this third strategy requires digging deeper into our customers’ minds.

For enterprises, this can require investing in interactive tools, bringing in branding experts to join the team, or outsourcing this challenge to an external provider.

Below are three tools that are worth noting for their potential to personalize your content and optimize ROI:

As mentioned, your content is only as valuable as your ability to locate the most appropriate audience for your product or service.

Keywee uses data-driven techniques to analyze your contextual text and present relevant paid advertisements across various social media channels to reach your target audience.

This 4-step process sums up how it works:

Image source: http://www.keywee.co/index.html

One of the main difficulties in effective content marketing relates to presenting targeted and relevant displays to specific customers at different parts of the sales funnel. This challenge requires us to consider unique approaches to identifying user behaviour; such things as past browsing history or time spent on a specific webpage.

If we understand the importance of presenting customer-specific messages to convert leads, BrightInfo has developed a content optimization tool that is able to analyze user behavior patterns to facilitate more conversions.

Last but not least, Roojoom is a highly engaging and interactive platform for presenting, optimizing, and measuring your brand’s content performance.

With user-friendly features to display your brand’s content and product offerings, this tool effortlessly creates a customer journey process that incoming user traffic will want to be a part of.

One great feature of this tool is its ability to be uniquely integrated at various online locations according to the client’s preferences. From a company blog, social media channels or newsletters, to a newly launched website pop-up.

For instance, here’s a look at how leading financial player Payoneer utilized Roojoom to power their content:

Wrapping it up

Content has evolved from catchy one-liners, to more engaging and targeted text used to generate leads.

This transition means that successful content campaigns will not only require creative teams and writing hustlers, but also the adoption of tools and strategies to measure content performance.