This is a preview of a research report from Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider's premium research service. To learn more about Business Insider Intelligence, click here. Current subscribers can read the report here.

Blockchain is seemingly being explored by innovation teams in every corner of every industry. This includes the logistics industry, which, despite continuing on an impressive upward trajectory — the market is expected to reach $15.5 trillion by 2023, up from $8.1 trillion in 2015 — is filled with inefficiencies that the distributed ledger technology (DLT) is potentially well suited to fix.

As a result, the DLT has become one of the most attractive investment opportunities for companies in the logistics space; in fact, the market for blockchain technology in supply chain management is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 49% from $41 million in 2017 to $667 million in 2024, according to Zion Market Research.

This is leading some of the largest firms in the logistics industry to explore blockchain and its potential use cases. For example, in 2017, a group of technology, transportation, and supply chain executives formed the Blockchain in Transport Alliance (BiTA) to create a forum for the development of blockchain standards and education for the freight industry. BiTA now has over 450 members, including global heavyweights UPS, FedEx, SAP, Google, Cisco, and Daimler.

 However, there are still major hurdles to overcome before the technology can become commonplace. Many companies, especially small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), are still unaware of what blockchain is, how it works, or what the benefits of the technology are. 

In this report, Business Insider Intelligence explores how blockchain can provide value to the global logistics industry. We break down some of the inefficiencies in the logistics industry that are leading firms to explore blockchain and explain how the technology can be used to solve these issues. Additionally, we examine some specific use cases along the supply chain and identify some of the hurdles to adoption. And finally, we take a look at what needs to occur in the logistics industry for blockchain to be deployed widely. 

The companies mentioned in this report are: BiTA, FedEx, IBM, Maersk, Modum, SAP, Volt Technology, and Walmart.

Here are some of the key takeaways from the report:

Join the conversation about this story »

This story was delivered to Business Insider Intelligence Apps and Platforms Briefing subscribers hours before appearing on Business Insider. To be the first to know, please click here.

Immersive technology, including AR and VR, is starting to have a larger impact on the enterprise as more businesses realize the value it can provide.

That’s in part why Business Insider intelligence expects enterprise VR hardware and software revenue to jump 587% to $12.6 billion by 2023. While immersive technology is set to have rippling effects across many industries in the years ahead, from logistics to food processing, the auto market is among the first to jump into the space.

Here’s an overview of automakers that have recently implemented immersive tech into their workplaces:

• Ford opened a new manufacturing facility that leverages VR to build more efficient assembly lines. The $45 million Advanced Manufacturing Center provides equipment that enables engineers to design and build car assembly lines in VR at full scale. This allows them to identify potentially hazardous maneuvers and fine-tune workflows before the assembly lines are implemented in the real world. For instance, the tech enables engineers to see if a parts bin is too high for workers to reach, saving time that would otherwise be wasted by employees struggling to reach the bin and the process of replacing that bin later on.
• Audi expanded its VR showrooms to 1,000 dealerships globally to improve the customer car-buying experience. VR showrooms, which began rolling out to select Audi dealerships starting in 2016, allow consumers to configure cars with Audi’s entire library of models, equipment, and accessories using the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive headsets. This enables Audi dealerships to showcase car variations that they can’t physically fit on site. It also provides consumers with more immersive customization and viewing experiences for those models as opposed to on a computer, which is the alternative.
• Tesla filed a patent for AR technology that could improve its car assembly processes. The patent describes an AR application that can be used in AR-enabled glasses or smartphones. The AR app identifies real-world auto parts and overlays data corresponding to features of those objects. As a result, the app will likely eliminate human errors such as misidentifying parts or part placements, which will help employees perform manufacturing tasks more efficiently.

As immersive tech continues to gain traction in the auto industry, automakers that haven't invested in it yet will need to in order to stay competitive in the field. VR can address many crucial challenges automakers face, making the technology important for companies looking to stay ahead of the curve.

For instance, 93% of global auto manufacturers face issues in shortening their go-to-market strategy. Immersive tech can address issues like this by enabling more efficient car assembly and manufacturing processes, meaning that players that adopt this tech earlier are better positioned to tackle that problem and turn out cars faster as a result.

 

SEE ALSO: When it comes to VR hardware, consumers are balancing price point and experience

Join the conversation about this story »

When I visited the GE Global Research Center in Niskayuna, New York in April 2017, I thought I saw a company that was working hard to avoid disruption, but perhaps the leafy campus, the labs and experimental projects hid much larger problems inside the company. Yesterday GE announced that it is spinning out its Industrial IoT business and selling most of its stake in ServiceMax, the company it bought in 2016 for $915 million.

For one thing, Jeff Immelt, the CEO who was leading that modernization charge, stepped down six months after my visit and was replaced by John Flannery, who was himself replaced just a year into his tenure by C. Lawrence Culp, Jr. It didn’t seem to matter who was in charge, nobody could stop the bleeding stock price, which has fallen this year from a high of $18.76 in January to $7.20 this morning before the markets opened (and had already lost another .15 a share as we went to publication).

Immelt at least recognized that the company needed to shift to a data-centered Industrial Internet of Things future where sensors fed data that provided ways to understand the health of a machine or how to drive the most efficient use from it. This was centered around the company’s Predix platform where developers could build applications using that data. The company purchased ServiceMax in 2016 to extend that idea and feed service providers the data they needed to anticipate when service was needed even before the customer was aware of it.

As Immelt put it in a 2014 quote on Twitter:

“If you went to bed last night as an industrial company you’re going to wake up a software & analytics company.” – @JeffImmelt

— General Electric (@generalelectric) October 9, 2014

That entire approach had substance. In fact, if you look at what Salesforce announced earlier this month around service and the Internet of Things, you will see a similar strategy. As Salesforce’s SVP and GM for Salesforce Field Service Lightning Paolo Bergamo described in a blog post, “Drawing on IoT signals surfaced in the Service Cloud console, agents can gauge whether device failure is imminent, quickly determine the source of the problem (often before the customer is even aware a problem exists) and dispatch the right mobile worker with the right skill set.”

The ServiceMax acquisition and the Predix Platform were central to this, and while the idea was sound, Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research says that the execution was poor and the company needed to change. “The vision for GE Digital made sense as they crafted a digital industrial strategy, yet the execution inside GE was not the best. As GE spins out many of its units, this move is designed to free up the unit to deliver its services beyond GE and into the larger ecosystem,” Wang told TechCrunch.

Current CEO Culp sees the spin-out as a way to breathe new life into the business “As an independently operated company, our digital business will be best positioned to advance our strategy to focus on our core verticals to deliver greater value for our customers and generate new value for shareholders,” Culp explained in a statement.

Maybe so, but it seems it should be at the center of what the company is doing, not a spin-off — and with only a 10 percent stake left in ServiceMax, the service business component all but goes away. Bill Ruh, GE Digital CEO, the man who was charged with implementing the mission (and apparently failed) has decided to leave the company with this announcement. In fact, the new Industrial IoT company will operate as a wholly owned GE subsidiary with its own financials and board of directors, separate from the main company.

With this move though, GE is clearly moving the Industrial IoT out of the core business as it continues to struggle to find a combination that brings its stock price back to life. While the Industrial Internet of Things idea may have been poorly executed, selling and spinning off the pieces that need to be part of the digital future seem like a short-sighted way to achieve the company’s longer term goals.

SNC-Lavalin Group Inc. is vulnerable to a takeover and Quebec should take steps to ensure that the engineering and construction company remains based in the province, Premier Francois Legault said.

SNC shares have dropped about 18 per cent this year. Most of the decline occurred after Canadian prosecutors in October ruled out a negotiated settlement with the company over past corruption charges.

“We have indications” that foreign buyers may be looking at Montreal-based SNC, Legault told Montreal’s 98.5 FM radio station Thursday in an interview. Because of its inability to bid on certain federal contracts, SNC is “in a vulnerable situation. There is no controlling shareholder.”

• Is there value amid the uncertainty facing SNC-Lavalin?
• SNC-Lavalin falls most in 6 years as prosecutors rule out negotiated deal on graft charges
• Lowe’s closing 31 Canadian stores and other locations, 20 stores in U.S.

Corporate head-office flight is a sensitive issue in Quebec after foreign buyers acquired locally based companies such as home improvement retailer Rona Inc. in recent years.

Local investors such as the Caisse de Depot et Placement du Quebec and Investissement Quebec — an arm of the provincial government — could team up to amass a “blocking” stake of at least 33 per cent in SNC, Legault said. SNC could also look to adopt a dual-class share structure to prevent unwanted takeovers, the premier said.

Legault said in the interview that he and Economy Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon recently met with Caisse chief executive Michael Sabia to discuss SNC and other files, which he didn’t identify.

SNC is one of 10 Quebec-based companies that the government “must monitor,” Legault added.

Daniela Pizzuto, a spokeswoman for SNC, said in an e-mail Thursday that the company has nothing to say with respect to Legault’s comments. Maxime Chagnon, a spokesman for the Caisse in Montreal, declined to comment.

Caisse de Depot, SNC’s biggest shareholder, recently boosted its stake in the company. It now owns about 20 per cent of the outstanding shares, having purchased about 4.1 million shares in recent months, Bloomberg data show.

“It’s important to keep our head offices” in Quebec, Legault said. “We can’t do what the previous governments did.”

Bloomberg.com

Keep your friends close and your enemies closer. That’s the strategy e-tailers will have to adopt if they want to compete with Amazon. To fight back against the e-commerce giant’s expanding dominance, other online retailers must understand exactly why and how customers are buying on Amazon — and which aspects of the Amazon shopping experience they can incorporate into their own strategic frameworks to win back customers.

Business Insider Intelligence, Business Insider’s premium research service, has obtained exclusive survey data to give e-tailers the tools to figure out how to do just that with its latest Enterprise Edge Report: The Amazon Commerce Competitive Edge Report.

Enterprise Edge Reports are the very best research Business Insider Intelligence has to offer in terms of actionable recommendations and proprietary data, and they are only available to Enterprise clients.

Business Insider Intelligence fielded the Amazon study to members of its proprietary panel in March 2018, reaching over 1,000 US consumers – primarily hand-picked digital professionals and early-adopters – to gather their insights on Amazon’s role in the online shopping experience.

In full, the study:

• Uses exclusive survey data to analyze the factors behind Amazon’s success with consumers.
• Segments three types of Amazon customers that e-tailers should be targeting.
• Shares strategies on how e-tailers can attract shoppers at key moments.

First, why is Amazon so popular?

Amazon is ubiquitous. In fact, a whopping 94% of those surveyed said they’d made a purchase on the site in the last twelve months. And of those who did, the vast majority believed Amazon’s customer experience was simply better than its leading competitors’ — specifically eBay, Walmart, Best Buy, and Target.

The biggest contributor to Amazon’s superior experience? Free shipping, of course. According to Amazon’s 2017 annual report, the company actually spent $21.7 billion last year covering customers’ shipping costs, a number that’s been compounding over the past few years.

Not only is free shipping included for all Prime members as part of their subscriptions but, of all e-tailers listed in the survey, Amazon also offers the lowest minimum order value for non-subscription members to qualify for the perk (just $25). The pervasiveness of free (and fast) shipping is steadily heightening customer expectations for the online shopping experience — and forcing competitors to offer similar programs and benefits.

Who exactly is shopping on Amazon?

The survey results showed that across generations for a large minority of respondents, Amazon is a standard part of their typical shopping process. Nearly a third (32%) of respondents said they begin their online shopping process on Amazon. Of those who do start their journeys elsewhere, 100% ended up purchasing something from Amazon at some point over the last 12 months.

Based on the trends in responses, Business Insider Intelligence segmented out three different types of Amazon shoppers, each with unique implications for how competitors could evolve their strategies:

• Amazon loyalists: This group of consumers is most committed to shopping on Amazon. E-tailers must understand what has made Amazon their default experience — and how they could be pried away.
• Comparison shoppers: This consumer segment looks at other sites before ultimately completing a purchase with Amazon, which could allow e-tailers to find success at the bottom of the purchase funnel. E-tailers should focus on what they can do more of to steal sales away at the end of the purchasing process.
• Open-search shoppers: These consumers start their online product search away from Amazon, often with specific reasons including what they’re looking for and why they’re not looking on Amazon. Other e-tailers have the opportunity to attract these shoppers from the beginning of the purchase funnel — keeping them from ever venturing to Amazon.

Want to learn more?

Business Insider Intelligence has compiled the complete survey findings into the four-part Amazon Commerce Competitive Edge Report, which dives deeper into each of these consumer segments to give e-tailers an intricate understanding of Amazon’s role in their purchasing processes.

The report presents actionable strategies for retail strategists and executives to zero in on three individual consumer segments at critical shopping moments, and empower them to win sales in an Amazon-dominated world.

Join the conversation about this story »

At its most basic level, digital marketing tries to keep your business top of mind when someone is looking to buy. It may take months for them to reach that point so just pushing a message of ‘BUY NOW’ won’t have the desired effect. Instead, content that helps solve a problem, entertains or makes them laugh will keep them engaged and you top of mind when they are ready.

Coming up with creative content ideas for a business can often be the most time consuming and difficult part of digital marketing but it doesn’t have to be that way.

A great content marketing plan is built on the idea that by providing value in the form of content will build trust and position you as an expert. The audience that consumes it will likely be more interested in purchasing their product down the line.

Issues arise when businesses want quick results and default back into a sellers mentality. The reality is that most people on social platforms don’t go there to buy something. They want to connect, learn, be inspired or be entertained.

In an ideal world, organisations will look at their products and services and try and think of ideas they can talk about that will provide value to their potential customers and solve problems.

Too often we get suckered back into ‘selling’ rather than providing value because that part is easy. It’s simple to talk about your business and why someone should buy from you. Unfortunately, those pieces of content aren’t what people want to see. It can be tough to consistently come up with new concepts beyond this though.

A strategy that has worked for many businesses is to develop key areas that they have ‘permission’ to talk about.

Think of it like this — if you’re a travel agent, someone would rightly expect to hear you talk about vacations, travel destinations and hotel reviews. But if the same travel agent suddenly posts about residential interest rate rises their audience would rightly be a little perplexed.

In essence, every business has certain topics that they could reasonably talk about. What becomes difficult is when you feel like those topics have been covered at length and you’re looking for variation and diversity.

This is where you can begin to expand your content topics and get a little more creative in your thinking.

Consider a mortgage broker for example. They help customers find a low interest rate for their mortgage. Their usual content would probably be around the current housing market, tips for first home buyers, or how to save for a deposit. Not terribly exciting perhaps, but relevant and useful for their customers.

To push their marketing further, they could produce content outside of their core business area but still in the same industry. For example, they might write a blog post about the 5 best lounge suits for couples.

First of all, they’re speaking to their core audience. Couples are more likely to buy a house than single people so creating the headline to appeal to couples is a good move.

With some research (and some quality time watching Netflix on the recliner) they could come up with a great article that would engage a new audience.

While it may not result in someone walking through their door right away, it’s likely to build trust in their brand and give value to their target audience. It will get people excited about the possibilities once they own their own home and picture what that will be like.

Remember that content marketing is a long-term strategy so it only works when you commit to producing quality content over a period of time. It may take someone years to commit to buying their first home but in that time, you’ve given them fantastic ideas and inspiration for when they do.

Who do you think they’ll want advice from when they finally decide they’re ready? Certainly not the business that just screams “use our services!’ five times a day. Chances are they’ve already ignored them anyway.

To put this into practice, write down your core business expertise and industry. Then begin to brainstorm all the other segments within that industry.

For our mortgage broker example, their core business is home loans and their industry is consumer finance and housing.

Within those two industries, there are countless possibilities:

• Renovation inspiration
• How to turn your new house into an Airbnb income generator
• Interior decorating ideas
• Space saving tips
• Ways to make your house pet-friendly
• Ideas to make your house energy efficient
• How to convert your old home into a smart home

The list is almost endless! Once you start down this track you’ll begin to see just how much great content you’ll be able to produce that people will actually want to read. Your audience will love it because it’s practical, fun and they can implement it themselves.

Now you’ve got a never-ending list of content possibilities, you’ll be able to keep top of mind and be the business of choice when your audience wants to buy.

IBM’s Modern Marketing Mandate posited that “CMOs have always needed to take their industry’s pulse and devise appropriate competitive responses … today, the mission needs to extend beyond market research and marketing campaigns. CMOs have a broader responsibility to analyze and predict trends.” Betsy Rohtbart, vice president of Digital Marketing at Vonage, described this as being “prepared for the expected unexpected.” Being able to deliver on these broader responsibilities, to deliver insights from the vast continuous flow of data, and to respond quickly to customer demands, requires an agile Marketing organization. Operational excellence is the fuel behind an agile Marketing organization and its ability to help the organization achieve growth and deliver on customer value.

A study by The Economist Intelligence Unit found that the processes associated with operational excellence are successful in driving growth revenues, margins and customers satisfaction. There’s no better time to revisit, reimagine, and reinvest in the processes that facilitate Marketing’s operational excellence. One systematic, proven method for doing this kind of work resides in the realm of Six Sigma and its DMAIC – define, measure, analyze, improve, and control – methodology. Six Sigma provides an approach for enabling operational excellence.

It’s All About the Data

You are probably familiar with the concept of Six Sigma. Introduced in the early 1980s, Six Sigma is a disciplined, statistics-based, data-driven approach and continuous improvement methodology. It differs from traditional quality improvement programs in its focus on input variables. While traditional process improvement methods depend upon measuring outputs and establishing control plans to shield customers from organizational defects, Six Sigma addresses problems at the input root cause level, thereby eliminating the need for unnecessary inspection and added costs for rework.

According to General Electric, an early adopter of the program, Six Sigma is a “disciplined methodology of defining, measuring, analyzing, improving and controlling the quality in every one of the company’s products, processes and transactions – with the ultimate goal of virtually eliminating all defects.” Originally used to improve engineering and manufacturing, the Six Sigma approach has expanded to include all aspects of organizational performance.

Customer value is derived from both tangibles and intangibles. Defects that reduce your value can exist in both. The Six Sigma approach identifies and eliminates defects with a structured, data-driven problem-solving method involving rigorous data gathering and statistical analysis. The statistical representation of Six Sigma describes quantitatively how a process is performing. To achieve Six Sigma, a process must not produce more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. The philosophy behind the Six Sigma approach is that if you can reduce process variation you can improve organizational effectiveness and efficiencies.

In their 2006 book, Six Sigma for Marketing Processes: An Overview for Marketing Executives, Leaders, and Managers, Clyde M. Creveling, Lynne Hambleton, and Burke McCarthy wrote that “nearly half of the top one hundred Fortune 500 companies use Six Sigma methodology in some part of their business.” They found that 70 of the top 100 companies have been in the top 100 for five or more years and that 44, or 63%, of these 70 companies implement Six Sigma to some degree. In their analysis, they found that these 44 Six Sigma users report on average 49% higher profits (compounded annually) and 2% higher Compounded Annual Growth Revenue than their peers. So, it pays to embrace Six Sigma.

Six Sigma enables companies to improve Marketing’s strategic, tactical and operational processes as a way to enhance the top line to drive revenue. By applying Six Sigma to marketing you can develop a lean efficient marketing workflow, identify leading indicators of growth and become proactive about performance improvement. Six Sigma provides both a methodology for process improvement and a way to prove its value.

Six Sigma has two methodologies: DMAIC and DMADV. DMAIC is used to improve existing business processes and DMADV is used to create new process or product designs that result in more predictable, mature, and defect free performance. This post focuses on the DMAIC process.

How to Apply the DMAIC Process For Operational Excellence

DMAIC includes five steps:

• define roles, goals, and deliverables consistent with customer demands and the organization’s strategy
• measure current performance and processes, and collect relevant data for future comparison and improvement
• analyze the relationship and causality factors
• improve the process to eliminate defects
• control and correct any variances before they result in defects and thereby improve performance.

Let’s consider how we can apply the DMAIC process to Marketing and use this process to help drive growth.

1. Define

The role of marketing is to create predictable streams of revenue growth by enabling the organization to profitably identify and secure new customers, and to keep and grow the value of these customers. Therefore, Marketing must establish goals and deliverables designed to achieve these outcomes. This will require most organizations to broaden the role of Marketing beyond sales support and/or marketing communications to a more strategic role. Marketing must create a comprehensive and integrated workflow process across the various Marketing functions and the internal and external groups with which it collaborates. It must also map this process.

2. Measure

Once you begin measuring marketing performance, you can begin to make modifications and improvements. Marketing needs to have access to data about its efforts and expenditures. This involves a collaborative relationship with Finance, Sales, and Customer Service because these organizations are often the keepers of critical data related to performance and outcomes.

Marketing also needs to deploy tools and systems for capturing and monitoring data. During this step, the team needs to make key decisions related to the data including how it will be managed, how it will be shared, and what processes will be used for evaluation.

There is no escaping the fact that to be successful in measurement, Marketing needs good data. Without data, you cannot measure performance and, therefore, you cannot make improvements. Measurement suggests a comparison of current and future performance to past performance. Being able to establish a benchmark using past data is an important step that eludes most marketing organizations because of the lack of quality data. It may take considerable efforts to establish the initial data points, but this step is essential to the process.

Marketing also needs to identify and standardize new metrics across the Marketing organization that tie Marketing to the business outcomes, which will provide insight into performance and facilitate strategic decisions. Tying marketing metrics to business outcomes forces Marketing to transform from a transactional function to a strategic contributor; by knowing the business outcomes, Marketing knows what objectives it needs to achieve and within what parameters and can therefore measure its performance.

Identify metrics not just in terms of cost but in terms of how these investments contribute to the company’s ability to achieve its goals and generate profitable revenue. Business outcomes, for example, may be related to the specific number of customers to be acquired and at what cost, the specific rate of customer acquisition, the specific lifetime value of a customer, customer loyalty, and specifically how quickly customers adopt new products.

3. Analyze

Simply measuring performance not result in improvement. Performance improvement results from deriving insight through data analysis. By analyzing the data and understanding what it means, Marketing can determine the degree of impact it is having on the organization, and redesign processes that will improve performance. Creating a Marketing dashboard of key business initiatives can help process the data and make it easier to visualize both the impact and opportunities for improvement. Analyzing Marketing performance and processes has impact beyond the Marketing organization. The analysis may yield information that will impact Sales, Product Development, Customer Service, Finance, and IT. Marketing exists as a component within the overall company organizational system and changes to this part of the system can serve as a catalyst for changes to another part of the business system. This leads right into the next step.

4. Improve

The main purpose of applying Six Sigma to marketing is to determine how to improve performance and processes. Data analysis should result in valuable insights that generate possibilities for improvement. These can include enhancements in tools, systems, processes, and skills. A performance-driven Marketing organization welcomes opportunities for improvement. Even though change is disruptive, developing new ways to approach the market enables the Marketing organization to play a more strategic role.

[Nota Bene: As you have probably surmised, an organization repeats the Measure-Analyze-Improve steps until the optimal processes are defined and the optimal performance is achieve. These iterated steps enable continuous improvement.]

5. Change and Control

Often Marketing prides itself on its creativity, even at the expense of control. But the time has come for Marketing to document its processes and best practices and to apply these consistently. A lack of standards control will result in less-than-optimal marketing execution.

The role of Marketing Operations is evolving. This role provides the organization with a function and people responsible for ensuring that the knowledge gained through process improvement is documented and implemented. Regardless of whether your company establishes this role, everyone on the team needs to be formally trained on the processes and performance metrics. The entire team must understand how the processes enable Marketing to demonstrate its value and improve its performance.

Applying Six Sigma to your Marketing organization deliver on customer value. It will also improve your Marketing processes enabling you to increase your ability to deliver on customer and market requirements and the customer experience. When you address operational excellence, you improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the Marketing planning process, successfully manage Marketing operations, provide transparency into Marketing processes, and improve the collaboration between Marketing and other groups within the business. In their book The Discipline of Market Leadership, Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema suggest that operational excellence is one of three “value disciplines” that a successful organization must chose from as its underlying operational model.

Today’s marketers are in the early stages of transforming how they identify, execute, and evaluate campaigns leveraging new and innovative technology: artificial intelligence (AI). As digital-savvy customers expect more sophisticated and personalized experiences, marketers can lean on AI advancements to seamlessly deliver what they crave.

From AI-enabled chatbots that offer specific recommendations based on past behavior to intelligent solutions that improve decision making by analyzing reams of data, AI can be a critical driver of better conversions and marketing ROI.

But with all the hype surrounding AI, there are bound to be disappointments. It is not uncommon that a new technology will be subject to overpromising and under delivering, which leads to disillusionment and skepticism. In fact, research firm Gartner calls this the “trough of disillusionment” as part of their Hype Cycle model. And missteps, like data breaches and disconcerting levels of personalization, can turn potential customers cold.

Let’s take a look at potential opportunities where marketers can successfully improve their operations with AI.

It’s not about the technology—It’s about the strategy

The tools, coding, and the endless stream of technical jargon around AI can be intimidating for anyone without a computer or data science background. But marketers don’t need to know the specific algorithms used in an AI solution. They simply need to understand how to strategically leverage AI and how it helps drive business outcomes.

Once marketers realize the business applications, they can confidently buy and deploy the necessary tools or work with data science teams to develop the capabilities. For marketers, it’s all about identifying the problems that represent the biggest opportunity, not building the solutions.

Using AI in marketing 101

Marketing today can be boiled down to five basic steps, and AI can help enhance each one.

1. Audience

It can make you smarter about your customers and inform improved audience selection and segmentation. One common use case is by analyzing billions of data points, AI can predict lookalike audiences: individuals who share characteristics with those who’ve already converted. Armed with tools to identify a target audience based on past behaviors, marketers can offer tailored experiences that will resonate with potential customers.

2. Message

Customers want compelling and relevant experiences, and they expect all communications to demonstrate a deep understanding of their needs. AI can help marketers deliver greater value to potential customers by applying machine learning to the content selection and delivery process. This includes creative, formats, and offers. By creating personalized messages based on previous choices and behavior, marketers are able to engage in ways that resonate every time.

3. Channel

Channels aren’t just where you distribute your content—they’re also living organisms that can produce different outcomes. So, the same message in the same channel may be received differently depending on the timing and the context. AI can help marketers determine the best time and place to engage with potential customers based on past channel performance and what you know about the individual.

4. Analysis

An intelligent platform can track performance and attribute results across the marketing mix. With this feedback, marketers can quickly understand what’s working and what’s not so they can make adjustments to improve performance and drive a better return on their investments.

5. Optimization

With a constant focus on success rates and changing trends, AI can help marketers continually improve efficiency and performance—both immediately and in the long-term. By analyzing massive quantities of data over a substantial period of time, AI learns from historic data and gives marketers the tools to make smarter decisions faster.

4 Areas for Strategic Application

1. Identify opportunities to leverage AI

Rather than trying to understand the technology behind AI solutions, savvy marketers should focus instead on finding opportunities to use them. A red flag for efficiency is any data that’s not being used to drive insights or decision making—and AI can help. The more complex a data set, the more difficult it is to extrapolate any meaningful conclusions. So, if you catch yourself saying, “If only I could figure how to put all this data to use,” consider an AI application.

2. Automate manual applications

Marketers constantly have to decide what they should or shouldn’t do next. But what if there was a way to leverage historical data to automate that decision making? Using AI to automate manual or rules-based sequences can increase efficiency and reduce errors often created by manual processes. With a dizzying array of content options and parameters, AI can test every combination to determine the ideal track and optimize it over time.

3. Predict future behavior

Taking an AI approach to predicting behavior can forecast important figures like conversion rates and customer lifetime value while helping give customers more personalized experiences. Marketo Content^AI uses machine learning to deliver engaging content based on past buyer behavior. It can even predict the ten most interesting pieces of content for a particular audience in real time. And the more a customer engages, the smarter and more tailored the technology becomes.

4. Know when to say no

Despite everything that can be achieved by strategically implementing AI, there are still areas where AI solutions are not appropriate: those lacking data. It won’t matter how good the models are—if you don’t provide enough data with enough discrimination for AI to test different outcomes, the technology won’t be very accurate. AI is, after all, artificial intelligence. It’s only as good as the data you feed it.

AI can be an extremely powerful tool for any marketing engagement platform. Equipped with actionable, data-driven insights, organizations can optimize internal operations while driving more meaningful customer experiences. In the end, isn’t that what it’s all about?

The post The Practical Guide to Artificial Intelligence for Marketers appeared first on Marketo Marketing Blog - Best Practices and Thought Leadership.

Content creation remains one of the biggest ongoing challenges that marketers face. So as many firms have started to focus more on creating quality content and not just large volumes of content, getting the most out of your B2B content marketing efforts is essential.

Creating new, quality content is a big investment of time, resources and even budget. So it’s important to make sure you get the most mileage you possible can from the content you create. In other words, don’t forget that the content you already have offers a myriad of opportunities for additional uses. Here are 10 simple ideas to get more mileage from your content:

1. Create an eBook from a series of blog posts and vice versa

Developing an eBook can take a lot of effort, especially to do it right. But leveraging content that already exists in the form of blog posts can jumpstart the process. As your blog becomes more populated with quality posts, it’s likely that those posts can be woven together (obviously with some editing) to form the basis for an eBook or guide. In fact, it’s a great idea to create a series of blog posts on a particular topic with an eBook in mind. And it can also work the other way around. Take the copy from an existing eBook or whitepaper and reverse-engineer that into a series of blog posts.

2. Turn a whitepaper into a more visually engaging eBook

Long before marketers were calling it content marketing, companies were creating whitepapers as a way to educate their audience about a particular topic. In fact, many B2B firms have a virtual library of whitepapers. Many of these whitepapers are still relevant; they just lack the visual appeal that has made eBooks so popular. Break up the text, add in some stunning design, use larger type treatments and include more visuals, and you’ll breathe life into those old whitepapers.

3. Revive and update old blog posts

One way to supplement your blogging efforts and to keep your content fresh, is to revive older, mostly evergreen, posts that need to be updated. If your firm has been blogging for some time, you’re likely to have plenty of posts over a year old that are still very relevant; they simply need to be refreshed. This could include updating facts and figures, supporting graphics or points where the thinking has evolved. Or perhaps you could add some additional items to an existing list or expand further on an idea. The point is, keep your evergreen content as green as possible and extend the shelf life. Once the post has been updated, you can change the post date and promote like you would a new article.

4. Revise eBooks starting to show some age and re-launch

Borrowing an idea from the book publishing industry, revising eBooks starting to show age can be a great way to extend their usefulness. Similar to older blog posts, it’s highly likely that most of the content in an older eBook is still relevant; it just needs some updating and tweaking. Try revising not only the copy, but the cover, design and graphics as well. It doesn’t need to be a wholesale update, but as with books, take out what’s no longer relevant, add in what’s missing and re-launch as a newly revised edition.

5. Create a series of “how-to” videos using blog content

Video for content marketing has become incredibly popular and is on our list of B2B marketing trends for 2019. A very easy idea to execute is to use content from your blog, webinar or other formats as the basis for short “how-to” videos. These don’t have to be professionally produced, but they do need to have a professional feel. As visual content becomes more essential to your content marketing efforts, these “how-tos” are a simple way to add video into to the mix.

6. Use snippets from blogs and eBooks for social media posts

Coming up with the right kind of content for social media is always an ongoing challenge for marketers. Don’t miss out on the wellspring of social media posts that your existing content offers. Try pulling compelling quotes, statistics and other snippets from your blog posts, ebooks, etc. and use those to engage your followers on social media. Also, instead of just using the blog or eBook title to promote your content, try testing snippets that are compelling and intriguing as a way to attract clicks.

7. Use blog posts for lead nurturing emails

Lead nurturing emails are a great way to engage prospects that aren’t ready to engage with your sales team. Using marketing automation software, the process to build these campaigns is quite simple. The challenge lies in creating the various email messages that will be used for each campaign. In addition to other content offers, using existing blog content is a great way to fuel your lead nurturing campaigns. Choose blog posts that are relevant based on what a lead has already expressed interest in and break those into “teaser” emails that drive leads back to your blog. Lists of relevant posts that leads would find interesting are also a great way to leverage the quality content on your blog.

8. Repurpose webinars into a multitude of other content formats

A lot of hard work goes into putting together a great webinar. So don’t let all that hard work and great content fade away. Past webinars can be an ongoing source of lead generation and new content too. For starters, be sure to record your webinars and offer them to new audiences as on-demand webinars using landing pages and calls-to-action. Webinars can also form the basis for a series of blog posts or a guide by leveraging slide content as well as presenter notes.

9. Turn a conference presentation into a webinar

Many B2B firms have thought leaders and subject matter experts speaking at various conferences, tradeshows and other industry programs. Don’t let that valuable presentation go to waste! Turn those presentations into webinars and expand your audience. With some help from the marketing team, your firm’s subject matter experts can minimize their additional time investment and maximize the return on the time they invested in putting together the presentation in the first place.

10. Lift “thought leadership” copy from proposals and client presentations

Believe it or not, proposals and client presentations—especially for A/E/C and professional services firms—contain a wealth of good “thought leadership” content. Once you get past the elevator speeches, a good proposal is likely to have some well-written, educational and informative copy that firm principals and subject matter experts have taken the time to write. This content can be easily lifted, tweaked and repurposed for uses in everything from blog posts, emails and guides to name a few.

Don’t always reinvent the wheel

Marketers are all pressed for time and it often seems as though there is never enough time in the day, week, month or year to create all the content that is necessary to fuel your company’s content marketing and demand generation efforts. But you don’t always have to reinvent the wheel, just the content.

Research shows that businesses that reach or surmount their revenue goals are more aligned on sales and marketing than those that fail to meet their objectives. And although we’ve heard the mantra about the importance of aligning sales and marketing for years, in many companies this vision remains elusive. Why? Because it’s easier said than done. Without purposeful intervention, sales and marketing teams will continue to march to a different beat. To ensure alignment, you have to put mechanisms in place to point the sales and marketing teams in the same direction.

To do so, you can implement some of these initiatives:

1. Create a Shared Sales and Marketing Strategy

Together, sales and marketing associates should create a strategy for building business, which all team members buy into. It ought to lay out target markets and audiences, products or services, pricing, distribution channels, marketing and sales techniques and their shared revenue objectives.
All these elements are essential as each one can lead to disagreements. For example, The State of Sales and Marketing Alignment 2018 study discovered that the most significant reason for misalignment was disagreement on the primary target market.

2. Concur on Lead Definitions

Leads are where misalignment between sales and marketing most frequently raises its ugly head. Sale reps say the leads marketing provides are “no good.” Marketing frets that they lose time and money generating leads that go to waste because salespeople fail to pursue them.

You can avoid these rifts between the two disciplines by creating a shared definition of marketing and sales leads. First, what delineates a marketing-qualified lead — one worthy of marketing’s time, energy and investment? Describe these leads using firmographic and demographic measures. For example, you might specify industry, potential sales value, company size, function and level.

The above criteria alone are not enough, however, to be considered sales qualified leads. Before salespeople are eager to follow up on leads, they want marketing to ensure they have the money and authority to make a purchase, interest in solving the problem your product or solution can resolve, and urgency to act soon.

Shared lead definitions force marketing to do the hard work of nurturing and qualifying leads before distributing them to sales. Plus, they give salespeople no excuse for passing over leads that come their way.

3. Define the Lead Handoff Process

Even if a lead is sales qualified, if it does not arrive in a salesperson’s hands with all the information they need to do their jobs, it slows them down. That’s because before following up, they need to look for the missing information or call marketing to attain it. Given their time constraints, salespeople may decide instead to take the path of least resistance, pursuing the next lead, which includes all the crucial data. To avert this problem, sales and marketing need to decide what data needs to be included with the lead when marketing forwards it to sales. Basic information involves name, phone number, email and firmographics. Beyond that, you might want to include insights gained about the problem the contact faces, their authority to make decision, other parties to that decision, budget levels, competitive solutions they’re considering and when he or she expects to choose a product.

4. Take a Walk in Each Other’s Shoes

There’s something to be said for understanding the daily challenges faced by the other team. The 2016 B2B Sales & Marketing Collaboration Study showed that companies that surpass their revenue objectives are twice as likely to have marketers who take part in prospect and customer meetings than those that fail to hit their goals.

Marketing associates should invest a few days every year working with their colleagues in sales. Perhaps, they take a field trip or two to make face-to-face sales calls with field sales reps. This gives marketers a chance to hear directly from customers plus work with and develop a relationship with the salespeople. Alternatively, they can listen in to inside sales calls.

It also helps for sales to have some involvement with marketing decisions. Perhaps they can collaborate with them on marketing content, data selection, and other sales materials. Another option is to meet with marketers. These processes provide an opportunity to get a feel for the hard work involved in executing marketing programs and the budget tradeoffs involved when deciding how best to generate leads.

5. Merge the Sales and Marketing Organization

A powerful way to ensure an integrated effort is to bring sales and marketing into one function, under a chief sales and marketing officer. One person is in charge of creating a cohesive team responsible for optimizing the entire customer journey and lifetime value as well as meeting annual sales revenue goals.

Sales and marketing alignment is unlikely to happen unless there is a concerted effort to bring the two teams together. To help with this, your organization should create a shared sales and marketing strategy. Then agree on lead definitions and the lead handoff process. Sales and marketing associates should reserve time to work together. Finally, uniting the two disciplines under one leader can bring them together.

How To Convert An Infographic Into A Gifographic Using Adobe Photoshop

How To Convert An Infographic Into A Gifographic Using Adobe Photoshop

Manish Dudharejia

2018-12-13T14:00:11+01:00 2019-01-07T10:25:20+00:00

Visuals have played a critical role in the marketing and advertising industry since their inception. For years, marketers have relied on images, videos, and infographics to better sell products and services. The importance of visual media has increased further with the rise of the Internet and consequently, of social media.

Lately, gifographics (animated infographics) have also joined the list of popular visual media formats. If you are a marketer, a designer, or even a consumer, you must have come across them. What you may not know, however, is how to make gifographics, and why you should try to add them to your marketing mix. This practical tutorial should give you answers to both questions.

In this tutorial, we’ll be taking a closer look at how a static infographic can be animated using Adobe Photoshop, so some Photoshop knowledge (at least the basics) is required.

What Is A Gifographic?

Some History

The word gifographic is a combination of two words: GIF and infographic. The term gifographic was popularized by marketing experts (and among them, by Neil Patel) around 2014. Let’s dive a little bit into history.

CompuServe introduced the GIF ( Graphics Interchange Format) on June 15, 1987, and the format became a hit almost instantly. Initially the use of the format remained somewhat restricted owing to patent disputes in the early years (related to the compression algorithm used in GIF files — LZW) but later, when most GIF patents expired, and owing to their wide support and portability, GIFs gained a lot in popularity which even lead the word “GIF” to become “Word of the year” in 2012. Even today, GIFs are still very popular on the web and on social media(*).

The GIF is a bitmap image format. It supports up to 8 bits per pixel so a single GIF can use a limited palette of up to 256 different colors (including — optionally — one transparent color). The Lempel–Ziv–Welch (LZW) is a lossless data compression technique that is used to compress GIF images, which in turn, reduces the file size without affecting their visual quality. What’s more interesting though, is that the format also supports animations and allows a separate palette of up to 256 colors for each animation frame.

Tracing back in history as to when the first infographic was created is much more difficult, but the definition is easy — the word “infographic” comes from “information” and “graphics,” and, as the name implies, an infographic serves the main purpose of presenting information (data, knowledge, etc.) quickly and clearly, in a graphical way.

In his 1983 book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Edward Tufte gives a very detailed definition for “graphical displays” which many consider today to be one of the first definitions of what infographics are, and what they do: to condense large amounts of information into a form where it will be more easily absorbed by the reader.

A Note On GIFs Posted On The Web (*)

Animated GIF images posted to Twitter, Imgur, and other services most often end up as H.264 encoded video files (HTML5 video), and are technically not GIFs anymore when viewed online. The reason behind this is pretty obvious — animated GIFs are perhaps the worst possible format to store video, even for very short clips, as unlike actual video files, GIF cannot use any of the modern video compression techniques. (Also, you can check this article: “Improve Animated GIF Performance With HTML5 Video” which explains how with HTML5 video you can reduce the size of GIF content by up to 98% while still retaining the unique qualities of the GIF format.)

On the other hand, it’s worth noting that gifographics most often remain in their original format (as animated GIF files), and are not encoded to video. While this leads to not-so-optimal file sizes (as an example, a single animated GIF in this “How engines work?” popular infographic page is between ~ 500 KB and 5 MB in size), on the plus side, the gifographics remain very easy to share and embed, which is their primary purpose.

Why Use Animated Infographics In Your Digital Marketing Mix?

Infographics are visually compelling media. A well-designed infographic not only can help you present a complex subject in a simple and enticing way, but it can also be a very effective mean of increasing your brand awareness as part of your digital marketing campaign.

Remember the popular saying, “A picture is worth a thousand words”? There is a lot of evidence that animated pictures can be even more successful and so recently motion infographics have witnessed an increase in popularity owing to the element of animation.

From Boring To Beautiful

They can breathe life into sheets of boring facts and mundane numbers with the help of animated charts and graphics. Motion infographics are also the right means to illustrate complex processes or systems with moving parts to make them more palatable and meaningful. Thus, you can easily turn boring topics into visually-engaging treats. For example, we created the gifographic "The Most Important Google Search Algorithm Updates Of 2015" elaborating the changes Google made to its search algorithm in 2015.

Cost-Effective

Gifographics are perhaps the most cost-effective alternative to video content. You don't need expensive cameras, video editing, sound mixing software, and a shooting crew to create animated infographics. All it takes is a designer who knows how to make animations by using Photoshop or similar graphic design tools.

Works For Just About Anything

You can use a gifographic to illustrate just about anything in bite-sized sequential chunks. From product explainer videos to numbers and stats, you can share anything through a GIF infographic. Animated infographics can also be interactive. For example, you can adjust a variable to see how it affects the data in an animated chart.

Note: An excellent example of an interactive infographic is “Building An Interactive Infographic With Vue.js” written by Krutie Patel. It was built with the help of Vue.js, SVG and GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform).

SEO Boost

As a marketer, you are probably aware that infographics can provide a substantial boost to your SEO. People love visual media. As a result, they are more likely to share a gifographic if they liked it. The more your animated infographics are shared, the higher will be the boost in site traffic. Thus, gifographics can indirectly help improve your SEO and, therefore, your search engine rankings.

How To Create A Gifographic From An Infographic In Photoshop

Now that you know the importance of motion in infographics, let’s get practical and see how you can create your first gifographic in Photoshop. And if you already know how to make infographics in Photoshop, it will be even easier for you to convert your existing static infographic into an animated one.

Step 1: Select (Or Prepare) An Infographic

The first thing you need to do is to choose the static infographic that you would like to transform into a gifographic. For learning purposes you can animate any infographic, but I recommend you to pick up an image that has elements that are suitable for animation. Explainers, tutorials, and process overviews are easy to convert into motion infographics.

If you are going to start from scratch, make sure you have first finished the static infographic to the last detail before proceeding to the animation stage as this will save you a lot of time and resources — if the original infographic keeps changing you will also need to rework your gifographic.

Next, once you have finalized the infographic, the next step is to decide which parts you are going to animate.

Step 2: Decide What The Animation Story Will Be

You can include some — or all — parts of the infographic in the animation. However, as there are different ways to create animations, you must first decide on the elements you intend to animate, and how. In my opinion, sketching (outlining) various animation case scenarios on paper is the best way to pick your storyline. It will save you a lot of time and confusion down the road.

Start by deciding which “frames” you would like to include in the animation. At this stage, frames will be nothing else but rough sketches made on sheets of paper. The higher the number of frames, the better the quality of your gifographic will be.

You may need to divide the animated infographic into different sections. So, be sure to choose an equal count of frames for all parts. If not, the gifographic will look uneven with each GIF file moving at a different speed.

Step 3: Create The Frames In Photoshop

Open Adobe Photoshop to create different frames for each section of the gifographic. You will need to cut, rotate, and move the images painstakingly. You will need to remember the ultimate change you made to the last frame. You can use Photoshop ruler for the same.

You will need to build your animation from Layers in Photoshop. But, in this case, you will be copying all Photoshop layers together and editing each layer individually.

You can check the frames one by one by hiding/showing different layers. Once you have finished creating all the frames, check them for possible errors.

You can also create a short Frame Animation using just the first and the last frame. You need to select both frames by holding the Ctrl/Cmd key (Windows/Mac). Now click on “Tween.” Select the number of frames you want to add in between. Select First frame if you want to add the new frames between the first and the last frames. Selecting “Previous Frame” option will add frames between your current selection and the one before it. Check the “All Layers” option to add all the layers from your selections.

Step 4: Save PNG (Or JPG) Files Into A New Folder

The next step is to export each animation frame individually into PNG or JPG format. (Note: JPG is a lossy format, so PNG would be usually a better choice.)

You should save these PNG files in a separate folder for the sake of convenience. I always number the saved images as per their sequence in the animation. It’s easy for me to remember that “Image-1” will be the first image in the sequence followed by “Image-2,” “Image-3,” and so on. Of course, you can save them in a way suitable for you.

Step 5: “Load Files Into Stack”

Next comes loading the saved PNG files to Photoshop.

Go to the Photoshop window and open File > Scripts > Load files into Stack...

A new dialog box will open. Click on the “Browse” button and open the folder where you saved the PNG files. You can select all files at once and click “OK.”

Note: You can check the “Attempt to Automatically Align Source Images” option to avoid alignment issues. However, if your source images are all the same size, this step is not needed. Furthermore, automatic alignment can also cause issues in some cases as Photoshop will move the layers around in an attempt to try to align them. So, use this option based on the specific situation — there is no “one size fits them all” recipe.

It may take a while to load the files, depending on their size and number. While Photoshop is busy loading these files, maybe you can grab a cup of coffee!

Step 6: Set The Frames

Once the loading is complete, go to Window > Layers (or you can press F7) and you will see all the layers in the Layers panel. The number of Layers should match the number of frames loaded into Photoshop.

Once you have verified this, go to Window > Timeline. You will see the Timeline Panel at the bottom (the default display option for this panel). Choose “Create Frame Animation” option from the panel. Your first PNG file will appear on the Timeline.

Now, Select “Make Frames from Layers” from the right side menu (Palette Option) of the Animation Panel.

Note: Sometimes the PNG files get loaded in reverse, making your “Image-1” appear at the end and vice versa. If this happens, select “Reverse Layers” from Animation Panel Menu (Palette Option) to get the desired image sequence.

Step 7: Set The Animation Speed

The default display time for each image is 0.00 seconds. Toggling this time will determine the speed of your animation (or GIF file). If you select all the images, you can set the same display time for all of them. Alternatively, you can also set up different display time for each image or frame.

I recommend going with the former option though as using the same animation time is relatively easy. Also, setting up different display times for each frame may lead to a not-so-smooth animation.

You can also set custom display time if you don't want to choose from among the available choices. Click the “Other” option to set a customized animation speed.

You can also make the animation play in reverse. Copy the Frames from the Timeline Pallet and choose “Reverse Layers” option. You can drag frames with the Ctrl key (on Windows) or the Cmd key (on Mac).

You can set the number of times the animation should loop. The default option is “Once.” However, you can set a custom loop value using the “Other” option. Use the “Forever” option to keep your animation going in a non-stop loop.

To preview your GIF animation, press the Enter key or the “Play” button at the bottom of the Timeline Panel.

Step 8: Ready To Save/Export

If everything goes according to plan, the only thing left is to save (export) your GIF infographic.

To Export the animation as a GIF: Go to File > Export > Save for Web (Legacy)

1. Select “GIF 128 Dithered” from the “Preset” menu.
2. Select “256” from the “Colors” menu.
3. If you will be using the GIF online or want to limit the file size of the animation, change Width and Height fields in the “Image Size” options accordingly.
4. Select “Forever” from the “Looping Options” menu.

Click the “Preview” button in the lower left corner of the Export window to preview your GIF in a web browser. If you are happy with it, click “Save” and select a destination for your animated GIF file.

Note: There are lots of options that control the quality and file size of GIFs — number of colors, amount of dithering, etc. Feel free to experiment until you achieve the optimal GIF size and animation quality.

Your animated infographic is ready!

Step 9 (Optional): Optimization

Gifsicle (a free command-line program for creating, editing, and optimizing animated GIFs), and other similar GIF post-processing tools can help reduce the exported GIF file size beyond Photoshop’s abilities.

ImageOptim is also worth mentioning — dragging files to ImageOptim will directly run Gifsicle on them. (Note: ImageOptim is Mac-only but there are quite a few alternative apps available as well.)

Troubleshooting Tips

You are likely to run into trouble at two crucial stages.

Adding New Layers

Open the “Timeline Toolbar” drop-down menu and select the “New Layers Visible in all Frames” option. It will help tune your animation without any hiccups.

Layers Positioning

Sometimes, you may end up putting layers in the wrong frames. To fix this, you can select the same layer in a fresh frame and select “Match Layer Across Frames” option.

Gifographic Examples

Before wrapping this up, I would like to share a few good examples of gifographics. Hopefully, they will inspire you just as they did me.

1. Google’s Biggest Search Algorithm Updates Of 2016
   This one is my personal favorite. Incorporating Google algorithm updates in a gifographic is difficult owing to its complexity. But, with the use of the right animations and some to-the-point text, you can turn a seemingly complicated subject into an engaging piece of content.
2. Virtual Reality: A Fresh Perspective For Marketers
   This one turns a seemingly descriptive topic into a smashing gifographic. The gifographic breaks up the Virtual Reality topic into easy-to-understand numbers, graphs, and short paragraphs with perfect use of animation.
3. How Google Works
   I enjoy reading blog posts by Neil Patel. Just like his post, this gifographic is also comprehensive. The only difference is Neil conveys the essential message through accurately placed GIFs instead of short paragraphs. He uses only the colors that Google’s logo comprises.
4. The Author Rank Building Machine
   This one lists different tips to help you become an authoritative writer. The animation is simple with a motion backdrop of content creation factory. Everything else is broken down into static graphs, images, and short text paragraphs. But, the simple design works, resulting in a lucid gifographic.
5. How Car Engines Work
   Beautifully illustrated examples of how car engines work (petrol internal combustion engines and hybrid gas/electric engines). Btw, it’s worth noting that in some articles, Wikipedia is also using animated GIFs for some very similar purposes.

Wrapping Things Up

As you can see, turning your static infographic into an animated one is not very complicated. Armed with Adobe Photoshop and some creative ideas, you can create engaging and entertaining animations, even from scratch.

Of course, your gifographic can have multiple animated parts and you’ll need to work on them individually, which, in turn, will require more planning ahead and more time. (Again, a good example of a rather complex gifographic would be the one shown in “How Car Engines Work?” where different parts of the engine are explained in a series of connected animated images.) But if you plan well, sketch, create, and test, you will succeed and you will be able to make your own cool gifographics.

If you have any questions, ask me in the comments and I’ll be happy to help.

Further Resources

• “What Is An Infographic,” Customer Magnetism
  An infographic about infographics
• “How To Create Outstanding Modern Infographics In Illustrator,” Jonathan Patterson, EnvatoTuts
• “Build Expert Infographics For Your Next Presentation,” Adobe Creative Cloud blog
• “What’s In A GIF: Animation And Transparency,” Mike Flickinger, SourceForge
• “What Are Gifographics & 10 Ways To Use Them in Your Visual Content,” Julia McCoy, ExpressWriters
• “A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words,” Wikipedia
• “Improve Animated GIF Performance With HTML5 Video,” Ayo Isaiah, Smashing Magazine
• “Building An Interactive Infographic With Vue.js,” Krutie Patel, Smashing Magazine
• “How To Convert A Video File Into An Animated GIF In Photoshop,” Graphic Design Stack Exchange
• “SEO Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Guide,” Neil Patel
• “Using Photoshop To Create GIFs (Gifographic),” Shane Barker, Gifographics

Editor’s Note: This article first appeared on Fresh Tilled Soil’s blog here. 

Product managers mostly hate roadmaps, says Phil Terry, who put it even more bluntly in the title of his article product roadmapping sucks. Serial Boston entrepreneur and current Drift.com CEO David Cancel generally agrees:

Some have even gone so far as to write a “Dear John” letter to their roadmap/process! These letters and the countless conversations we have with product leaders in our workshops highlight the many problems with roadmaps that don’t work, including:

• • • Have no connection to business strategy
    • Don’t include enough customer feedback
    • Lack objective criteria for prioritization
    • Are too often used as a sales tool
    • Lead to broken promises (see Cancel above)
    • Are out of date almost as soon as they are published
    • Are all about solutions rather than the needs and the problems of your customers

But roadmaps are here to stay, so you might as well figure out how to make them work for you and your product teams. Your senior leadership and your customers are unlikely to stop asking for them.

To that end, we listed some of the key steps you should include as part of creating a successful product roadmap for your organization. You should note that every company, product, and set of stakeholders is different. So mix and match based on your situation and what works for your organization.

1. Gather inputs

The roadmap is often the final step in the strategic planning process, which means you’ll already have several assets to draw from to make it better. Among the required inputs of the roadmap planning process are:

• • • Clearly defined problem and solution. Why do you need this? You have to know what you’re doing and why that’s valuable before you start thinking about where you’re going.
    • Understand your user’s needs. Why do you need this knowledge? You need to be able to empathize with your users so you can understand and anticipate their needs. More on this below in Step #3.
    • User Journeys for the current experience. Why the current experience? You need to fully visualize or map how they are currently solving their problem in order to understand how it will be improved or replaced by your offering.

Make sure to develop and discuss these inputs with your stakeholders, or you’ll risk inserting your own biases and assumptions into the process.

2. Establish a product vision

You don’t have a product vision? Oh, that could be an issue. Not to worry, here’s a short visioning exercise from Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

• • • When: at a time when____
    • What: [our product] is the only____
    • How: that____
    • Who: for_____
    • Where: in______
    • Why: who_____

So when it’s complete the vision exercise will look something like this (this is an example from a travel advisory company):

At a time when travel is frequent, but travelers plan less…
TripAdvisor has the only international restaurant recommendation engine…
That gives immediate recommendations based on location and reviews…
For the everyday traveler…
From countries all over the world….
Who need to save time and energy on finding local eateries.

3. Uncover customer needs

This is the most important part of your roadmap process. When you are myopically focused on tasks, functions, and features, you are missing the opportunity to serve your customer’s true needs. So often, serving that need also becomes your competitive advantage. Jobs To Be Done is a good way to uncover these needs to ensure you are addressing them appropriately in your roadmap.

4. Dive deeper into these needs and potential solutions

Most companies can tell you the exact age, race, marital status, salary, and lifestyle preferences of their target customers, but many can’t tell you why their customers buy from them. This largely demographic data completely ignores the root of the customer need. For that you have to dig deeper to uncover the true reasons, many of which are more about emotion than function. In their HBR article, Christensen, Hall, Dillon, & Duncan posit that “Jobs aren’t just about function — they have powerful social and emotional dimensions”.

5. Master the art and science of prioritization

The biggest challenge to getting things done is knowing WHAT to get done — prioritization. Choosing one thing over another means saying ‘no’ to someone. That someone might be a customer, a salesperson or a board member. It doesn’t matter who you’re saying ‘no’ to, it’s still hard to do.

Product gurus like Rich Mironov, Ken Norton and Martin Eriksson have written about why product leaders are responsible for product success without having the requisite authority to drive those decisions through the organization.

6. Achieve buy-in and alignment

The best roadmap ever created will still likely fail to achieve the desired outcomes without achieving buy-in and alignment with the people who will fund it, execute it, and receive its outputs. The roadmap should help to create this alignment by getting the entire team working towards the same goals.

7. Present and share

A roadmap shouldn’t be considered complete unless and until it has been socialized and discussed with the broader team so that they have clarity on what their roles are and what their efforts will create. This includes all stakeholders including what is often the core product team of product owner(s), design, engineers but also including the broader team of QA, customer success, sales, senior leadership, strategic vendors/partners, and other product teams. Importantly, it also should include your customers and the market. After all, they are the ones who will need and want to know what value will be coming their way. Remember, at its core, a roadmap is a strategic communication artifact that is focused on the big picture and conveys the path you’ll take to fulfill your product vision.

8. Keep it fresh

A roadmap is not a static document. When conditions in the environment/market change, so too must your roadmap change in order to survive and remain relevant. It’s one of the biggest reasons roadmaps fail (and why so many product managers despise them) – when product teams publish a roadmap and consider it done.

One way to avoid this is to focus on themes rather than features and dates. Themes focus the team’s efforts on high-level customer needs, problems, or jobs to be done. And they are often best communicated in broad timeframes like Now, Next, and Later.

One thing is for sure – your roadmap will be out-of-date almost as soon as it’s published. So take care to constantly evaluate it against your market and your customers’ needs over time.

The post 8 Steps to Building a Successful Product Roadmap appeared first on OpenView Labs.

Any professional has likely heard about LinkedIn and even created a profile on the social media platform. However, with the wide reach of over 562 million users, LinkedIn is a valuable tool that should be utilized to promote your business. Below are ideas about how you can help your employees to use this platform not just for their personal needs, but to benefit your company:

Become Authority Figures

To set your company apart from the competition, an effective way is to facilitate your employees to becoming authority figures in their respective niches. LinkedIn is a platform that can help with this goal, allowing employees to post articles and blogs on their profiles.

A marketing expert can write about the latest trends, while a mechanic can write about tips on preserving a car’s value. When online viewers search for keywords related to the content, they read the articles and start to form trusting relationships with your employees.

If your team members can become known in their fields for their authoritative and informative content, you will improve your brand recognition and attract new customers.

Network

To find new clients, business partners or investors, you should encourage your employees to network. LinkedIn makes this objective easy by promoting online networking that transcends time and location constraints.

Your employees can join industry-specific groups where they can join conversations and make important connections. They can search for specific individuals and reach out to them on the platform.

LinkedIn Showcase Pages allows employees to create pages that highlight a certain area of the business, and then share that with a target audience. For example, if your business needs an investment to explore franchising opportunities, you can create a page that reflects your earnings and profits, as well as goals, and share that with interested investors.

If your team members are encouraged to make connections on LinkedIn, your company can leverage that for business opportunities.

Recruit

Increased competition has made it challenging for some businesses to recruit and retain employees. LinkedIn can offer an advantage to your HR department in this regard.

LinkedIn makes it easy to search for candidates based on their current position and experience. Instead of posting an ad on a general career site, such as Indeed, you are able to do a targeted search and view detailed information to make faster and more informed hiring decisions.

LinkedIn Career Page is another option for candidate searches, helping prospective candidates come to you. The Jobs tab on this page lists current openings as well as insights from current employees about the company and their positions.

The Life Tab helps candidates determine if your company would be the right fit for them. This tab offers photos and videos shared by your employees as well as any written content that can be shared about your company culture.

This helps your business share benefits that candidates can expect if they join your team, and allows your hiring managers to connect with potential employees on a more personal level.

A coalition of shipping industry associations has published The Guidelines on Cyber Security Onboard Ships, laying out best practices for the giant ships that ply the seas, and revealing that these behemoths are routinely infected with worms, ransomware, and malware spread by infected USB devices.

The document recounts incidents in which infected ships were stranded because malware caused their computerized navigation to fail, and there were no paper charts to fall back on; incidents where fleet owners paid off ransomware demands to keep ships at sea safe, and where the entire digital infrastructure of a ship at sea failed due to malware that spread thanks to weak passwords.

The report includes details of two incidents where USB thumb drives have led to a cyber-security incident, delays, and financial damage.

1) A dry bulk ship in port had just completed bunkering operations. The bunker surveyor boarded the ship and requested permission to access a computer in the engine control room to print documents for signature. The surveyor inserted a USB drive into the computer and unwittingly introduced malware onto the ship's administrative network. The malware went undetected until a cyber assessment was conducted on the ship later, and after the crew had reported a "computer issue" affecting the business networks. This emphasises the need for procedures to prevent or restrict the use of USB devices onboard, including those belonging to visitors.

2) A ship was equipped with a power management system that could be connected to the internet for software updates and patching, remote diagnostics, data collection, and remote operation. The ship was built recently, but this system was not connected to the internet by design. The company's IT department made the decision to visit the ship and performed vulnerability scans to determine if the system had evidence of infection and to determine if it was safe to connect. The team discovered a dormant worm that could have activated itself once the system was connected to the internet and this would have had severe consequences. The incident emphasizes that even air gapped systems can be compromised and underlines the value of proactive cyber risk management. The shipowner advised the producer about the discovery and requested procedures on how to erase the worm. The shipowner stated that before the discovery, a service technician had been aboard the ship. It was believed that the infection could potentially have been caused by the technician. The worm spread via USB devices into a running process, which executes a program into the memory. This program was designed to communicate with its command and control server to receive its next set of instructions. It could even create files and folders. The company asked cyber security professionals to conduct forensic analysis and remediation. It was determined that all servers associated with the equipment were infected and that the virus had been in the system undiscovered for 875 days. Scanning tools removed the virus. An analysis proved that the service provider was indeed the source and that the worm had introduced the malware into the ship's system via a USB flash drive during a software installation. Analysis also proved that this worm operated in the system memory and actively called out to the internet from the server. Since the worm was loaded into memory, it could affect the performance of the server and systems connected to the internet.

The Guidelines on Cyber Security Onboard Ships [International Chamber of Shipping et al]

Ships infected with ransomware, USB malware, worms [Catalin Cimpanu/Zdnet]

In the summer of 2012, I had just learned of a new service where a driver would pick you up in their own car, not a taxi or licensed town car. You’d be able to recognize the car by the pink mustache strapped to the front. I quickly downloaded the new app called Lyft and, intrigued, started to share it with others around the Airbnb offices.

Almost everyone gave me the same response: “I would never use it.” I asked why. “Well, I wouldn’t feel comfortable getting into someone else’s car.” I said, “Wait a minute, you are comfortable allowing others into your home and staying in others’ homes while you travel, but you don’t want to get into someone else’s car?” The reply was always a version of “Yeah, I guess that’s it — a car is different than a home.”

I was dumbfounded. Here was a collection of adventurous individuals — who spent their days at Airbnb expanding the boundaries of what it means to trust another person — but they were stuck on the subtle behavior change of riding shotgun with a stranger. I then had another quick reaction: this product was going to be huge.

Behavior shifts in consumer internet

Truly transformative consumer products require a behavior shift. Think back to the early days of the internet. Plenty of people said they would never put their credit card credentials online. But they did, and that behavior shift allowed e-commerce to flourish, creating the likes of Amazon.

Fast-forward to the era when Myspace, Facebook and other social networks were starting out. Again, individuals would commonly say they would never put their real names or photos of themselves online. It required only one to two years before the shift took hold and the majority of the population created social media profiles. The next wave included sharing-economy companies like Airbnb, Lyft and Uber, prompting individuals to proclaim they would never stay in someone else’s home or get into their car. In short order, times changed and those behaviors are now so commonplace, these companies are transforming how people travel and move about the world.

The behavior shifts were a change in socially accepted norms and previously learned behavior. They alone don’t create stratospheric outcomes, but they do signal that there could be something special at play.

Build an enhanced experience

Still, just because a product creates a behavior shift does not mean that it will be successful. Often, though a handful of loyal users may love them, there is ultimately no true advantage to these products or services.

One prime example comes to mind in the product Blippy. In late 2009, the team built a product to live stream a user’s credit card transactions. It would show the purchase details to the public, pretty much anyone on the internet, unlocking a new data stream. It was super interesting and definitely behavior shifting. This was another case where many people were thinking, “Wow, I would never do that,” even as others were happily publishing their credit card data. Ultimately there was little consumer value created, which led Blippy to fold. The founders have since gone on to continually build interesting startups.

In successful behavior-shifting products, the shift leads to a better product, unlocking new types of online interactions and sometimes offline activities in the real world. For instance, at Airbnb the behavior shift of staying in someone else’s home created a completely new experience that was 1) cheaper, 2) more authentic and 3) unique. Hotels could not compete, because their cost structure was different, their rooms were homogenized and the hotel experience was commonplace. The behavior shift enabled a new product experience. You can easily flip this statement, too: a better experience enabled the behavior shift. Overall, the benefits of the new product were far greater than the discomfort of adopting new behavior.

Revolutionary products succeed when they deliver demonstrable value to their users. The fact that a product creates a behavior shift is clearly not enough. It must create enormous value to overcome the initial skepticism. When users get over this hurdle, though, they will be extremely bought in, commonly becoming evangelists for the product.

Unlock greenfield opportunity

One key benefit of a behavior-shifting product is that it commonly creates a new market where there is no viable competition. Even in cases where several innovative players crop up at the same time, they’re vying for market share in a far more favorable environment, not trying to unseat entrenched corporations. The opportunity then becomes enormous, as the innovators can capture the vast majority of the market.

Other times, the market itself isn’t new, but the way the product or service operates in it is. Many behavior-shifting products were created in already enormous markets, but they shifted the definition of those markets. For instance, e-commerce is an extension of the regular goods market, which is in the trillions. Social media advertising is an extension of online advertising, which is in the hundreds of billions. Companies that innovated within those markets created new greenfield, but also continued to grow the existing market pie and take market share away from the incumbents. The innovators retrain the consumer to expect more, forcing the incumbents to respond to a new paradigm.

Shape the future

A behavior shift also allows the innovator to shape the future by creating a new product experience and pricing structure.

When it comes to product experience, there are no prior mental constructs. This is a huge advantage to product development, as it allows teams to be as creative as possible. For instance, the addition of ratings in Uber’s and Lyft’s products changed the dynamic between driver and rider. Taxi drivers and passengers could be extremely rude to each other. Reviews have altered that experience and made rudeness an edge case, as there are ramifications to behaving badly. Taxis can’t compete with this seemingly small innovation because there is no mechanism to do so. They can’t enhance quality of interaction without taking the more manual approach of driver education.

Another benefit to the innovator is that they can completely change the economics of the transaction, shaping the future of the market. Amazon dictated a new shopping experience with online purchasing, avoiding the costs of a brick-and-mortar location. They could undercut pricing across the board, focusing on scale instead of margin per product. This shifted the business model of the market, forcing others to respond to follow suit. In many cases, that shift ultimately eroded the competition’s existing economic structure, making it extremely challenging for them to participate in the new model.

Expect unintended consequences

It can be difficult to imagine at the outset, but if your product is encouraging massive behavior shifts, you will undoubtedly encounter many unintended consequences along the way. It is easy to brush off a problem you did not directly and intentionally create. But as the social media companies are learning today, very few problems go away by ignoring them. It is up to you to address these challenges, even if they are an unintended byproduct.

One of the most common unintended consequences nearly all behavior-shifting companies will run into is government regulation. Regulation is created to support the world as it is today. When you introduce a behavior shift into society, you will naturally be operating outside of previously created societal frameworks. The sharing-economy companies like Airbnb and Uber are prime examples. They push the boundaries of land-use regulation and employer-employee relationships and aggravate unions.

I want to emphasize that you should not ignore such matters or think that their regulation is silly. Regulation serves a purpose. Startups must work with regulators to help define new policy structures, and governments must be open to innovation. It’s a two-way street, and everyone wins when we work together.

What’s next

My advice is to start by thinking about existing categories that represent people’s biggest or most frequent expenditures. The amount of money you spend on your home, transportation and clothes, for example, is enormous. Is there an opportunity to grow and capture part of these markets by upending old commercial models and effecting a behavior shift?

Scooter networks are a real-time example of a behavior-shifting innovation that is just getting going. It has the same explosive opportunity of prior game-changing innovations. There are still many individuals who state that they will never commute on a scooter. But applying this framework tells me that it is just a matter of time before it is more widely adopted as the technology keeps evolving and maturing.

There is no magical formula for uncovering massive, behavior-shifting products. But if you come up with an innovative idea, and everyone initially tells you that they would never use it, think a little harder to make sure they are right…

Some brands have become so ingrained in society’s collective brain that they’ve reached icon status. As such, they pack meaningful emotional connotations among consumers, maybe becoming akin to family.

Yet as we all know, familiarity can breed both contentment and resistance. Thus, mature brands have to straddle the careful balance beam between staying relevant for legacy customers and wooing younger buyers with trendier options and selling techniques.

Those that succeed in walking this tightrope will have a distinctive leg up among other less flexible historical companies, as well as emerging industry disruptors.

Upshots and Downfalls of Legacy Brands

Obviously, being a classic has its serious benefits. According to Interbrand’s 2018 list of the best global brands, more than half of the top 20 companies are at least 50 years old. Businesses that have been around for generations — and, in some cases, more than a century — have finances and teams to figure out how to navigate the nuances in marketing, product development, and other areas.

For instance, when my company started advertising, there were just 165 local television markets and about four stations in each market. Now, we can choose from a plethora of traditional and digital media outlets and systematically target customers with personalized messaging. It’s not simple by any means, but when we leverage our past experiences to guide us, we connect with younger consumers who want to create custom products and support socially responsible organizations.

Of course, playing the part of the “big kid on the block” isn’t a cakewalk. Finding relevance among Millennials and Generation Zers can be challenging. Younger people now live with their parents longer and wait longer to have children; as a result, they have different purchasing triggers than more established, older buyers. If a company is bogged down with a “we’ve always done things that way” mentality or has layers of molasses-level bureaucracy, it’s ripe for eventual ruin.

Despite the downsides of being as seasoned as a Cajun gumbo, legacy brands do have an opportunity to rise above the rest and remain top dogs in their fields. If you’re representing a historically recognized entity, you’d be wise to take these strategic steps to heart:

1. Become a data enthusiast.

Imagine the insights available to a business that’s been around the block thousands of times versus one just picking up speed. Surprisingly, far too many legacy corporations don’t leverage the data they’ve accumulated, despite the fact that 65 percent of professional marketers told Econsultancy and Adobe that they were planning to increase their data analysis protocols last year. Truly, data from the past and present will hold the key to driving higher sales in the future, especially with the help of artificial intelligence and high-tech software.

2. Focus on authenticity.

Millennials have an inherent distrust of big business and the media. To that end, they strive to know where their money is going, what ingredients are in the products they use and consume, and what brands stand for. The best way to educate them on your historic name is to connect with them via people they trust through word-of-mouth referrals in person and on social media. Being genuine and fostering sincere two-way relationships is a good way to remain viable.

3. Meet customers where they are.

In the old days, we showed customers a problem and presented our product or service as the cure. Now, they self-identify issues and actively seek solutions. Because consumers have stopped being passive, brands have to follow suit and be where customers need them, when they need them. A good example is by creating messaging, such as a landing page or a blog post, written specifically for a target persona. Readers feel connected when they’re treated personally. Not sure what your audiences want? Gather them in-house or through an online chat forum and ask what they need. They’ll tell you.

The older a brand gets, the richer and more robust it should become. Ideally, it becomes a part of society as a whole, appealing to people at as many levels as possible. The end goal? To achieve a spot so dominant that it would be sincerely missed if it disappeared.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is mistakenly perceived by many beginners and non-marketing professionals to be a mystical art used to drive your blog post, page, or other piece of content up the magical list of search results into the knighted top 3 positions, regardless of the quality or value of the content contained within the item itself.

Imagine this conversation, which is a realistic amalgamation of questions from other newbies about SEO in online forums, attached to professional marketers’ blogs, and at the workshops I’ve attended:

Newbie: “How do I get my post to rank?”

Pro: “I’m not sure. Is it any good?”

Newbie: “I’m not really sure, but I just need to be sure it ranks in the top 3 on Google search results. Can you tell me how to do that in the next 5 minutes?”

Pro: “Ummm… So, is your content any good?”

Frustrated Newbie: “You’re missing the point. I don’t care if it’s good, I just want to rank and increase traffic to my site. How do I do that?”

Troubled Professional: “Is it really helpful? Does it solve some problem for your customers? Are you providing some value to the lives of your target audience?”

Highly-Irritated Newbie: “Could you just give me a list of requirements to rank? Thanks in advance.”

Somebody’s missing the point, and it isn’t the professional.

Despite the newbie’s suspicion and irritation, the professional isn’t holding out on them. Things just aren’t that black and white.

Many newbies are just going about this all wrong, but they’ve been bamboozled by the legend of SEO Best Practices.

Long-accepted SEO best practices, in the minds of many, are an assurance that if you master a certain set of Gutenberg sorcerer’s spells, some WordPress backend wand waving, and mix your magical Yoast potion with a keyword density of 2% or greater, your rather peasant content will mysteriously vanquish your industry’s dragons who have been ruling your niche for (what seems like) centuries.

Sounds LEGENDARY.

The bad news, newbies… It is.

“SEO best practices” has been mistakenly interpreted as a list of illusionary smoke-and-mirror tricks guaranteeing greater marketing success. I don’t believe the misconception was the original intention of SEO professionals, but rumors, legends, and myths can be taken for truth when retold again and again.

At best, the entire concept of conjuring a desired result by meeting requirements is out of date.

Format Over Value: Optimization as the Mistaken Priority

SEO best practices were intended to get the most out of the amazing content you’d written by identifying what parameters search engines were using to rank all content and making sure you’d met those standards. SEO was trying to help you get attention.

Remember the kid in class who raised their hand higher and more enthusiastically and ALWAYS got called on?

Similarly, SEO was trying to appeal to search engines to make sure you got called on.

But, something strange happened along the way.

Our industry priorities seem to have gotten way off track, and many people started focusing solely on how to get called on, without really developing a real and valuable idea to add to the discussion.

These flashy attention-getting tricks are now failing to live up to their legendary reputation, because the teacher is no longer a rookie educator so easily fooled. The teacher has learned to recognize value and credibility.

Yesterday is gone, and the rules have changed. If you’re going to raise your hand now, you’d better have the answer, or the teacher stops calling on you.

My Newbie Experience With Outdated SEO Best Practices

2 years ago, as a rookie part-time content writer, I was eager to make my bones. I wanted to write, and I needed to crack into an industry that would pay me to do so.

I got my chance. I was so excited.

Then, I got a list of SEO Best Practices that required me to do all sorts of unnatural things to my content. Here are a few examples:

• The primary keyword phrase should appear in 2-3% density throughout the copy, 2-3 times per 100 words
• Place all keyword phrases in the first 200 words of body copy — the first sentence is best
• Exact-match keyword phrases are the golden standard — if you stray, don’t stray very far

Adhering to best practices led to formulaic, stiff, and lifeless posts and pages that had very clearly been stuffed full of keywords.

I hated the final products I was producing, but my aesthetic aversion to them wasn’t the worst part: The whole thing was a failure in the long term.

Sometimes the posts would rank, but that ranking would often be short lived, and far worse, my writing had lost its voice, and through strict adherence to archaic standards, had sacrificed value to hit those bullet points above. What I was producing was NO LONGER HIGH QUALITY CONTENT.

As a newbie, it was disheartening to say the least — a humiliating defeat on all fronts.

This experiment was repeated more than once with “best practices” consistently producing less-than-spectacular outcomes.

So… I asked myself the magic question:

Are search engines really that blind?

SEO for Dummies

One of the most oft-repeated and damaging SEO myths claims that Google (and the other search engines) can be charmed into believing that really boring content is worthy of a top 3 ranking by performing a spell known as keyword density, which means putting a certain number of exact-match keyword phrases into a post.

This often just results in keyword stuffing — saturating a post with some particular phrase over and over and over, regardless of how bad your writing sounds to hit this arbitrary keyword density.

I just couldn’t believe that Google didn’t know that Austin and Austin, TX were probably the same place, especially when Texas was referenced elsewhere in the post and the post was on a website that had its address listed as in — you guessed it — Austin, TX.

Could search engines really not tell that spray foam insulation and insulating spray foam were referring to the same thing?

According to the SEO myth prescribed to me, none of this mattered — keyword concentration requirements were all.

In frustration, I finally did some research. I talked to some folks, and this is what I learned:

“Search engines really are smarter now than what people are giving them credit for, but everybody is convinced that you can still fool them, and they insist on continuing to try.”

It really seemed to me that they were not only convinced they could fool the search engines by applying a strict list of SEO best practices, but that they were terrified of failing to get any results at all if they didn’t.

I was dumbfounded that this could still be the case in 2016.

But, now it’s 2018, and I keep hearing the myth referenced again and again and again, particularly by people new to blogging or marketing their small business.

They’re newbies like I was, hearing the same myth.

Opposite Ends of the SEO “Best Practices” Spectrum

If you’re new to content marketing as an industry, or if you’re a small-business person who’s taking on his or her own marketing, I’m David, the new-ish guy who’s just a short 2 years or so ahead of you.

I’d really like let you in on what I’ve learned to save you some time and effort.

Mainly, I want you to know that, when examining modern SEO best practices, there’s a lot of opinion but very little absolute truth.

The SEO kingdom, as I’ve experienced it, is a battlefield shrouded by the fog of war. There’s so much we don’t know.

The Far Ends of the Battlefield

On the spectrum of SEO beliefs, at one end of the battlefield stand an army of people who insist that all those old SEO techniques you hear about work, and they will tell you those best practices are absolutely essential to success.

“Go ahead and raise the white flag if you don’t have that primary keyword in the first 100 words,” they say.

These folks still believe that (or at least refuse to let go of the idea that) your content will be dismissed or ignored by the search engines unless you follow the well-established SEO conventions. They say you need to run their “Best Practices Playbook” for every post, no matter what it does to your writing.

I was told things like:

“Please use the primary keyword phrase 6 more times in the document.”

The post was only 1,000 words, y’all…

On the opposite end of the field of battle stand a comparatively undisciplined mob of townspeople carrying torches and pitchforks, shouting that Google knows way more than we think it does, sees more than we think it does, and is making decisions at a higher level than we believe possible. They don’t seem to have a lot of structure or strategy at a glance.

They believe that quality, voice, and matching search intent matter most.

They believe that writing to answer your audience’s questions and using unique, attention-getting headlines and titles are more valuable best practices than some SEO formulas supposedly written in stone.

They advocate ignoring the concept of keywords almost entirely, and believe that everything will somehow magically work out on its own.

Honestly speaking, joining the growing mob and leaving things up to The Forces That Be isn’t always an easy course of action for those of us whose livelihoods are depending on rankings and conversions.

There are, of course, a wide variety of positions in between, and, like almost any situation we ever encounter, victory is likely going to be achieved somewhere in between.

All things in moderation.

My Experience Has Steered Me Closer to the Quality-Focused Townsfolk (But Not Too Close)

As a writer, I sympathize with the undisciplined townsfolk who think quality is all that matters, and I think you should, too.

I’d be happy to tell you why.

First things first: I have yet to have an experience that tells me I’m wrong.

Second: I’ve had a number of experiences that indicate I’m on the right track.

Let me explain a little more carefully.

The posts I have subjected to the strictest, most conservative SEO conventions (even when the posts are high quality) have failed to rank — some have actually ranked for a short period and then lost ranking, and they may even be suffering from a penalty for being keyword stuffed.

I’m now suffering for my illusions, much like the IRS will make me suffer if I fall under the illusion that I can take out improper deductions and they’ll never know.

(Spoiler alert — the IRS always knows.)

This tells me that SEO best practices have evolved, and the whole concept is on a steepening evolutionary curve. The search engines will become more intelligent at a faster and faster rate, making things less and less specific every day.

I can’t trick a search engine into ranking something. Keywords play a role, quality plays a role, but they are not guarantees. Strict adherence will not automatically make something rank.

Putting Legends to Rest: An Entirely New Conception of SEO Best Practices

I can’t speak with any experience about what was or wasn’t real prior to 2017, but I know what I was led to believe was required, and I’ve watched what has happened as a result over the last 2 years.

It’s not about “trickery” anymore. That’s now a fundamentally flawed approach to the whole affair. There ARE NO MAGIC TRICKS to beat the game.

Modern SEO is going to require you to adopt a new conception of how to rank.

That conception is simply, “Go forth and be amazing!”

In fact, John Meuller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google, recently boiled down some requests for advice on Twitter:

“Write something awesome & stand by it!”

I’d love to tell you what I’ve learned about THAT!

Modern SEO Requires That Content Be “Awesome!”

“Awesome” means I’m going to spend most of my time and resources on writing my post well.

I’m zipadeedoodah happy to not spend time and energy on stuffing my post and being sure the keyword appears at the start of the title and stuffed deep into almost every paragraph.

Instead, I am finally being given the freedom to invest my resources in talking about what I love.

But… it doesn’t hurt to be smart about it, to make an article’s topic as clear as possible, and if that aligns naturally with a keyword, a smart writer will find a non-intrusive way to work said keyword in.

All of this is good news for just about everyone.

Good News for Most of Us

Here are some things I think are good news for us as writers, bloggers, and business people who love what we do for a living, glad tidings for folks with passions and priorities other than the number of website clicks.

Can we all agree that sharing our passion with our audience should have always been the top priority, and that we never should have tried to sneak poor content under the radar with the only motive being to get them to our site?

Can we agree that our readers and our customers (and we, ourselves) deserve better?

Probably so.

But, I’ll bet we also can agree it was easy to fear being dropped to page 2 of the search results.

That fear often would lead us to abandon our writing instincts and cling to an SEO best practices checklist that legend said could prevent such a slide from happening.

However, we instinctively know people matter more than search engines, and people want QUALITY information.

Here’s where it gets good for the Knights of the Round Table (us) — search engines are also figuring out that people matter more, and that those people want quality.

Search engines are now scouring for the quality that the human masters demand. That means Google and the other search engines are behaving more like people.

Google is now forcing us to write for real people or be banished to the Search Result Basement.

In fact, they’ve made it complicated enough that hacks and cheats will get you nothing but wasted time!

Here’s the warning Google’s Search Console tool has for us:

“Filling pages with keywords or numbers results in a negative user experience and can harm your site’s ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context.”

Evolve or perish, y’all.

Learn more about writing great content that focuses on your audience here.

Let’s Go About This Another Way

“Content should satisfy the needs of the user for a page’s topic and purpose.” — Google

Here’s how 2 years of anecdotal evidence and comparing notes with others in the marketing industry has molded my views on SEO best practices.

Enthusiasm Leads to Quality and Value for Your Audience

Quality and value aren’t measured in keyword density.

In fact, high keyword density sounds terrible, it’s distracting and jarring, and most people hate reading posts written that way.

That’s actually good news because it frees you and me up to be excited again. We can now enthusiastically write our blog posts and website pages for our respective tribes and sound like real, authentic people in the process.

That’s freedom.

Speaking of freedom, here’s a list of suggestions for you to consider, but not chain yourself to:

• Research keyword phrases to see what people are searching for, use keyword phrases in reasonable, logical ways throughout your content, but don’t worry about keyword density, and never use a keyword phrase in a way that sounds inhuman or strange
• Write a headline that clearly tells people what you’re going to talk about — if you can get a keyword phrase in here, great, but if not, don’t sweat it
• Deliver on your headline’s promise
• Cover your topic in a length and depth that conveys why you’re passionate about it
• Use H2s and H3s that make the content easy for readers to scan and find the information they need quickly — remember that the search engines are acting more like people, so they can identify your content more easily with some structural help, too
• Use an appropriate tone for your topic and audience
• Use keyword phrases in your content where reasonable and logical and above all, natural, even if they don’t exactly match what your keyword research uncovered — but if you can’t get them in there, don’t sweat it
• Use clear, concise, easy-to-understand sentences as often as appropriate
• Use descriptive link text

But, let me be clear that these aren’t going to guarantee you a ranking. You won’t rank if your content isn’t awesome. Period.

How do we make our content awesome?

Aim for the X Factor

You achieve what I call the X Factor when you write a post that leaves your audience saying:

“I had no idea! That was really valuable and my life is better because I’ve read that!”

When we read a post that has the X Factor working, we just know.

Our trackable behaviors show it because we:

• Stay on your post longer
• Don’t “bounce”
• Link to it in our own writing
• Tweet about it and share it on Facebook
• Click on the CTA to go read more about what you or your business have going on.

In these ways, we demonstrate a desire to get to know you and your brand better.

How do you optimize for that?

Simple.

Write like you mean it.

No smoke-and-mirror illusions will get that done.

I’m going to be totally transparent by saying this “X Factor” is mostly a phenomenon I have observed that’s being confirmed by many others. Google’s folks just call it “awesome.” I don’t have any concrete data to support the difference that writing for our audience is making, but I’m not the only one who’s experiencing the effects.

Other writers and marketers are seeing signs that indicate value and quality are the new best practices.

Perhaps it would be more accurate to say this:

At least writing like you mean it and sounding authentic while ignoring arbitrary keyword requirements aren’t hurting us anymore.

What the X-Factor Means for You in Practice

Simply put, worry less about the old conventions. Free your mind by leaning on common sense instead:

• Say what you need to say, but structure it in a way that’s accessible to people
• Be helpful to your audience
• The search engines (now better at imitating people) will be able to recognize it’s a good piece of content and will rank it accordingly

I’ve probably gone and said too much about how ridiculous all these old conventions are, but I hate them, and I have trouble letting go of my vendetta.

“You killed my blog post. Prepare to die!”

In all seriousness, those old ideas haven’t served me well as a guiding principles in my short career of just 2 years. I feel like adherence to conservative SEO best practices has caused more harm than good during that time, and I’m hoping to save you a lot of time and frustration.

I want you to be more successful, more quickly. I want you to be left with more time to focus on what you love.

A Little Superstition Doesn’t Hurt

However, I do think some conventions can be applied like chalk on a gymnast’s hands. They’re a touch up that serves as a useful final stage of editing.

Nothing wrong with A LITTLE pixie dust, after all.

Another way to put it: Be mildly superstitious about SEO best practices, not fanatical.

Keyword Research

Keyword research is most useful when I have no idea what to write about. I treat it like polling my audience to find out what they want to know.

Identifying a keyword gives me a direction, but that’s about it. There’s not much more to see here, move on.

Keyword Density

If I keep it simple and just get a modest number of phrases that are based on my keyword in there, I accomplish these things:

• I continue to keep the audience (and the search engine) aware of what we’re talking about
• My writing sounds more like me while also clearly identifying the topic
• The whole endeavor becomes more human
• My work is unlikely to be penalized for over- or under-optimizing

In other words, just use variations of your keyword that work naturally. There’s no need to stress over some ridiculous percentage, and we never detract from our readers’ experience.

Writing for the search engines with artificial keyword stuffing loses readers, and Google is watching what your readers do. Search engines base some aspects of ranking on how users respond to content.

So if lots of readers are finding your page, not liking what they see, and aren’t spending much time on the page, search engines will recognize that your post may not be that awesome.

Keep your audience reading because it proves that there’s some value — it proves expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. After all, that’s what should matter most, shouldn’t it?

Every Knight Needs a Quest

The last thing of value that I can tell you is send your readers on a quest.

They’ve read your post and gotten to know you and your brand a little. Let them know what to do from there.

If your post is NOT THE LAST STEP THEY TAKE in their journey with your brand, if your post isn’t the exit page off your site, then you’ve proven value of some sort.

You’ve achieved some credibility or authority.

Finish up your post with a strong call to action (CTA) that clearly says, “If you liked learning about X, click the link to learn more about Y.”

Your Y post’s CTA should say something along the lines of, “We’d love to talk more about Y and how it connects to Z, so click here to read more,” and then the CTA at Z says something like, “If you found this helpful, we’d like to offer you more — join our mailing list here,” or, “If you’re finding that XYZ are helpful to you and your business, why not fill out our contact form and let’s start a more personal conversation!”

Any of those can take your reader to the next step of the sales funnel, which gets you closer to a conversion and the reader closer to meeting whatever need brought them to your content in the first place.

That’s how content marketing actually works.

The Attitude That Encapsulates “Amazing”

John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google mentioned earlier, gets asked all the time to provide SEO technical specifications and rules by people who can’t seem to let go of that old way of thinking. Here are couple of comments he made that perfectly demonstrate, in a very kind way, that the old ways have passed on:

He was asked specifically if it would be best practices to have both (or more) synonyms for a keyword on the page.

“If you see that people that you’re targeting are using both of them, then that might be an option.”

He was then asked if it would be acceptable to use two different words for the same product.

“Yeah, that would be fine. I think that could make sense.”

That’s how specific and rule-bound the guy who has forgotten more about SEO than the rest of us mortals will ever know feels he needs to be about these things:

That might be an option.

That could make sense.

So much for that 2-3 verbatim uses of the keyword phrase per 100 words.

Web content writing is finally becoming organic and based much more on common-sense principles, which is possibly making non-writers really nervous.

It possibly explains why they’re clinging to an outdated checklist of SEO best practices that aren’t “best” anymore.

Y’all, there are no more magic tricks that will make a poorly written post of little value rank in any sort of competitive niche.

It’s time to spread our wings.

So, Why Doesn’t My Post Rank? The Answer Is “Who Knows?”

From a content perspective, there’s not a person out there who could tell you for sure.

You’ve likely failed to meet the new SEO prime directive: Focus on VALUE and deliver the awesome sauce to your audience.

Any other possibilities are logical guesses — those nebulous options that could make sense.

From One SEO Newbie to the Other SEO Newbies

I’m just a beginner, but I’m repeatedly finding that SEO best practices mean more heart works better than conservative rules.

What matters is that you’re saying what’s on your mind, that your point matters to real people, and that it’s written in a common-sense and accessible manner.

My more experienced colleagues are seeing that phenomena, too.

Improve Conversions from Your Website Home Page

Your website’s home page is prime real estate where the leads and sales can be generated from.

Visitors should know that your brand is ready and able to answer their questions and solve their problems in addition to what you have to offer in your products or services.

Take a moment to look at your current website. Do you need a new design or are you starting from scratch with a brand new domain? What ideal action would you like your audience to take and why?

In order to attract more subscribers who you can nurture through helpful information and special offers there are several important key elements to include.

1 – Grab them with catchy titles

Headlines that are unique, specific, urgent and useful garner the most clicks and views, especially on mobile. Use a good headline checker like CoSchedule or Sharethrough to find out how effective your titles and keywords are. For example, emotional words rank the highest in addition to problem solving or how to phrases.

In the few seconds that a visitor has arrived to your landing page you will want to offer them a promise that catches their attention and matches what they have been searching for. The point is to compel them to want them to know more about how your business can help them in a way that is not being offered by your competition.

2 – Showcase the human side of your brand

After focusing on your audience first you can also write a story that keeps your prospects interested and tells the reason of why you’re producing products or services. Tell them in a video or powerful image exactly what is unique to your business and how you can best serve your customers.

3 – Make a personal connection

Include words and details that make the reader feel as if you know them personally, and that you understand exactly what they are looking for. This should also include any testimonials from actual clients that can be proven and verified. When you know your audience well enough through target market research, you will be able to include the exact keyword phrases that get you noticed. You can accomplish this in several ways:

• Social media interactions and polls
• Webinars, live video and podcasts
• Email marketing that engages the reader
• A survey on your website

4 – Include strong visuals and video

Keep it simple and avoid overloading your visitors with too many images or videos, which is very important to mobile readers who are using their data to surf the Internet. Here’s a good example from one of my clients, Rick Cesari, who has a featured video on the first page of his website:

5 – Communication is key

Make is easy for your visitors to get in touch with you either by phone, through email, a chat box, Facebook Messenger, and on social media. A business that is readily available is perceived as more trusted. It’s important to have a detailed subscribe box added to your website where you can provide a special offer and capture your prospect’s information.

6 – Be a solution provider not a sales person

Remember that you are selling solutions, not features, and you want your offer to communicate the benefits of what your brand has to offer. For example, you could provide them with the following:

• A free eBook or chapter
• A product sample or coupon for a sales page
• Free consultation
• Helpful tips in the form of an exclusive report or video

If you want to attract more interested buyers be sure that your are offering high value in exchange for their time and attention. This will help greatly increase your conversion rates and return buyers later.

7 – Include an important message before they leave

There are various plugins and website code you can use to remind your visitors about the benefits of your business for them. These can be set up by your developer and downloaded directly to WordPress, and provides another chance to answer any questions they might have and to remind them of what they can receive.

8 – Create a specific sales or lead page

Take advantage of software like LeadPages or Instapage so that you can have a simple lead magnet to include on your website, in your email marketing and on social media to increase the conversions. These are designed to lead your prospects through the process of finding out more about what you have to offer them quickly and easily with email integration through services like Aweber, MailChimp, Infusionsoft, ect.

A successful website is one that is well optimized, mobile-friendly, and speaks directly to your audience without a sales pitch. The best visitor experience is one which is simple, clear, friendly, and informative. Don’t be afraid to showcase who you are, and to include an easy way they can find your business online.

A skilled coach on the field has a game book of several tried and true plays that are designed to maximize the performance of his or her players. In the same way, every brand needs a “game book” of lead generation tactics to maximize the effectiveness of its campaigns.

In this post, we will discuss:

• A reliable lead generation marketing definition.
• What comprises a good lead generation and PR campaign.
• Specific tactics that will boost your marketing and lead generation efforts.

A Lead Generation Marketing Definition

Lead generation marketing is the creation of interest in your brand’s products and services. It uses several channels, including a company’s website, social media networks, and other platforms, to stimulate engagement and collect prospects’ information via forms and landing pages, in order to move them through the sales funnel.

There are several ways to prepare your brand for lead generation. Many include retooling your own website. With small adjustments and additions, your website can seamlessly flip interested prospects into leads.

A well-rounded lead generation strategy also includes other platforms, such as social media and media outlets, to promote your brand, establish thought leadership, and ultimately convert people into leads.

What do you need to know to create a productive lead generation strategy? Let’s look at 13 tactics that are guaranteed to explode your PR campaign and bring in more solid leads for your brand.

13 Lead Generation Tactics That Will Jumpstart Your PR Campaign

1. Craft Stunning Videos

Video is unparalleled when it comes to engagement — and, as it turns out, to lead generation. In fact, one study found that brands who used video marketing generate 65% more leads than their competitors who didn’t.

Now consider for a moment that the vast majority (65%)of people are visual learners. According to this statistic, the visual nature of video is going to appeal to the majority of your audience. And video can be used for almost anything — whether case studies or product demonstrations, video fits seamlessly into most strategies.

Granted, video seems like a overwhelming task when compared to simple content formats like blog posts or ebooks. But with new online tools like Animoto and Lumen5 constantly making it easier, that argument no longer holds water.

We created a video using one of our popular blog posts with the Lumen5 video platform. It was extremely easy to do, but gave us a professional product that we’ve been able to use for lead generation.

2. Commit to a Regular Blog

As anybody in a relationship will attest, commitment is much more than a promise. It is an action. Many people begin with good intentions to blog regularly. They get maybe 10 blogs into it, and then lose momentum. Unfortunately, you won’t see any benefits from this kind of half-hearted attitude.

This is the time when you are probably nodding your head — “Yes, we know blogging is good. We’ve known this for a long time.” But even with that knowledge, are you blogging consistently to make a difference?

The best advice I can give you is to create a content calendar and plan your content for the next six months. This will help to keep your content creation on track.

 

3. Cultivate Long-Form Evergreen Content

Evergreen content is content that never grows stale or expires. It is always applicable to your audience and industry. While it can be helpful to create non-evergreen content — particularly when it comes to the latest trends or tactics that are impacting your brand now. But you also need content that will be just as applicable five or 10 years from now.

The longer and more in-depth your evergreen content is, the better. Create an ebook or SlideShare on a topic that answers a key need within your audience. Try to ensure that most of the points of the content will be valuable in the future. Create it so that you’ll only need to make minor adjustments every year or so.

The last thing you want is to constantly creating new content offers. Your goal should be to create a few key pieces of content that you know your audience will always need and continue to update as necessary and promote them.

4. Answer Questions on Quora

How can this popular question and answer site impact your lead generation? It’s simple. A key business-friendly feature of Quora is that it allows you to build a profile about you and your company, with links back to your website and specific landing pages.

Once your profile is set up, your goal on Quora is to answer questions in a helpful way. These answers will show your audience your expertise and may pique their interest in your brand. There may even be questions about your brand on the site — which you can find using the search feature.

When people experience your engagement and expertise firsthand on Quora, it’s easy for them to visit your site or landing page for more information. Once there, they will be more likely to become leads.

5. Be Active on LinkedIn

LinkedIn is a network primarily focused on businesses. In fact, one study discovered it to be the top social network among CEOs. And true to its mission as a professional network, LinkedIn has a few tricks up its sleeve to help business users with lead generation.

One feature in particular that should be a part of your strategy is its publishing platform. Here you are free to write and publish any type of article you want so it can be read by LinkedIn’s large, professional audience.

Another feature that you should be aware of is LinkedIn groups. These groups are meant to facilitate conversations among people of similar interests, including certain industries. Find groups that fit your brand’s industry and the concerns of your audience.

But be aware that LinkedIn is not a platform for self-promotion. If this is your tactic, you won’t get very far. This is a place where you can engage with your audience, answer questions, and provide helpful advice through comments and engaging articles. In your profile and your articles, direct readers back to your brand and specific landing pages for more information. Do this matter of factly, not promotionally.

6. Become a Speaker

Every industry has specialized events. And these conferences are a great way to put you and your brand in the spotlight. It conveys that you are an industry authority who can be trusted.

New to public speaking? Start small with local events. Use one of your more popular blog posts as an outline for your speech. Most likely, it’s a subject you know well and its popularity signifies that it will resonate with your target audience.

Events are a great way to establish connections. Within your speech, sprinkle in little tidbits about your brand to whet your audience’s appetite to seek more information after the event is over.

7. Publish on SlideShare

SlideShare has over 80 million visitors to its site — a large audience that you can tap into with the right information.

The purpose of SlideShare is to showcase helpful presentation content. And you don’t need to start from scratch. Take a popular blog post and transform it into a visually appealing slide deck. Then upload it to SlideShare in order to access a new audience. It’s completely free and SlideShare’s platform makes it simple to upload decks and engage audiences.

Once you upload a presentation to SlideShare there are several features that you can leverage for lead generation. For starters, include links to landing pages within your bio, description, and right within the presentation itself. And once your deck is published, engage anyone who comments. Don’t forget to upload your SlideShare to your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn owns SlideShare and make that a snap to do.

8. Show Off Your Expertise

We’ve already covered how important it is to share your expertise on your blog, LinkedIn, and other platforms. But these are platforms where you are in control of publication and promotion. Another key tactic, however, involves leveraging your expertise on other platforms.

Can you guest post or contribute to an industry blog or print publication? A key to getting published is to have expertise and a point of view. Choose a topic that answers a key need of your customers, offers a distinctive outlook, and showcases your industry knowledge and expertise.

Then pitch this topic to the publication that best fits your industry and has access to your target audience.

This gets people curious about your brand and more likely to visit your site for further information. If possible, include a link in bio back to your site or a specific lead conversion landing page.

9. Form Partnerships

When done strategically, partnerships can boost your B2B marketing and lead generation results. They expand your reach and provide a stamp of approval.

Find a complementary company within your industry where you can combine forces. Discover common ground where you can work together. It may take time to build a relationship with a company before you introduce the idea of a partnership. But it’s a time investment that is well worth the effort.

10. Use Your Email Signature

Your email signature is prime real estate that often goes unused. Think about how many emails you send every week. Each email is an opportunity to get someone to your site.

Whether it’s your homepage or a landing page for one of your recent offers, a strategically placed URL or call to action in your email signature can increase traffic.

Don’t forget your employees. Have your employees include the same link within their email signature. Within the zillions of emails your business sends, there’s an opportunity for lead generation and PR.

11. Invest in Case Studies

A brand’s reputation is crucial — especially in lead generation B2B marketing, where price points are high and sales processes are long. A good reputation goes a long way toward building trust with potential customers.

If prospects are checking your case studies, they’re most likely interested in your brand and just a few steps away from becoming a lead. Make this an easy transition by including CTAs within your case studies.

It’s also possible that they are already leads, and further down the sales funnel than an average prospect. If so, sprinkle in CTAs for bottom of the funnel offers, such as a free demo.

12. Beef Up Your Newsroom

Won a recent award? Have breaking news that will cement you as a thought leader? These kinds of news deserve a special place within your website: a PR newsroom.

Such a newsroom can impact your lead generation. When prospects check out your site and discover that you’ve won industry awards or have been featured in noteworthy publications, it legitimizes you and builds trust.

13. Organize an Event

We spoke earlier about speaking at industry events. Another lead generation magnet is to organize and run your own event. Consider an online event. It’s less expensive and more of your audience is likely to attend.

Events give you a host of opportunities to promote your brand. For example, before the big day even arrives, you can use event webpages, sign-up confirmation emails, and other resources to include CTAs that promote offers and products.

Whether your event is in-person or online, you can take steps to prime it for lead generation. Any handouts or downloads that your audience gets as part of your event should also feature well-chosen CTAs.

In review…

These lead generation tactics are some of the best plays in marketing and lead generation. Whether you choose to implement a few or all of these strategies into your next campaign, we are confident you will see positive results.

Let us know what tactics you find helpful for lead generation in the comments below.

The early stages of content marketing saw marketers churning out blog after blog and hoping for the best – without knowing how or what to measure. Your content marketing should evolve as technology and people do. Search tools and how people utilize them have all changed, and your content and content strategy should reflect that. But where do you begin? Continue reading for some helpful tips on content marketing strategy and tools you can use to achieve success.

What is Content Strategy?

If you’re entirely new to content marketing, it may seem overwhelming. Let’s face it; content marketing stresses even the most seasoned marketers. However, breaking it down can minimize worries. Content strategy includes all your media – writings, videos, downloads, and more – and how you plan and manage it. You can create a quick “how-to” video, but if you don’t know why you made it or how you’ll use it, it quickly becomes less useful.

Developing a Content Strategy

Having a strategy in place helps every piece of content you create to serve a purpose in your overall marketing plan. When appropriately used, content grows your business and drives sales. Here are key questions to answer when developing your content strategy.

• Who is the content for and why are you making it? Think of your personas when you’re venturing into content strategy. You should have content in place for prospects as well as current clients or customers. You want to land more qualified leads, but you also want to nurture your existing customers.
• What are your personas’ pain points? How will this certain piece of content help? Your business creates its products to reduce problems for a certain industry – but how will they know you do just that? Your content moves buyers along a journey that ultimately brings them to your services, and continues to nurture and update them after you’ve made a sale.
• What content formats should you use? Content comes in a variety of forms, from tweets, blog posts, and informational videos. The format should reflect the message and the persona. If you have a persona that reacts more favorably to video, shoot it. If your buyer prefers infographics, design it.
• What sets you apart from your competition? Content is the most valuable resource you may have to outshine your competitors. Sure, you may have similar products. But yours is better. Showcasing it in a weekly Twitter chat or in-depth blog post can help prove you’re the expert.

Essential Items to Check Off for Implementation

After you’ve answered the questions surrounding your content strategy, you can begin checking off essential items for implementation. Here are actionable items when getting deeper into your plan.

• Define your goals. In marketing, it pays to be SMART. Or, rather, to have SMART goals. SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, and Timebound. This methodology helps create achievable goals. For example, if you want to increase your revenue by 60% before the end of the first quarter, that is a specific, measurable, and time-bound goal. Develop your strategy around it.
• Research/refine existing personas. Personas are your target audience for your business, and they change over time. Whether you’re just developing them or have them in place, it’s good to have a bevy of research built around them.
• Choose a content management system (CMS). If you’re an established company, you likely have one. A CMS manages your content, including creation, publication, and analytics.
• Audit your current content. What content already exists? Can you re-purpose it? Look at the results and see if you can improve. If you’re beginning, consider starting with blog posts. Create a blogging schedule that works best for your company, as it varies from business to business.
• Brainstorm new ideas. Set aside time with your team to focus on creating ideas for upcoming projects. If you want a different perspective, pull another member of your company into your meeting. A developer or office manager may have ideas you wouldn’t consider.
• Strategize your content ideas with Search Engine Optimization (SEO) in mind. To see higher-quality leads and more site traffic, consider SEO when brainstorming and auditing your ideas. Research keywords that hit your topics and target audiences you can rank for and seamlessly implement them into your content. Don’t forget to write concise title and meta tags and include anchor links to other pieces of your content.

Topic Clusters and Pillar Pages

Implementing an SEO strategy within your content strategy is essential. You create all this great content – you want the right people to discover it. As search algorithms advance, it can get tougher to keep up. But new content marketing initiatives are changing the game. A topic cluster is a content program that dives deep into a range of core topics relating to your business. But where do you house all this rich content? On a pillar page, which is a base on which you build your clusters. A pillar page covers all the aspects on a single, well-designed page. Pillar pages are broad, while topic clusters are niche. “Payroll compliance” is a pillar page, and “employer tax forms,” “employee withholding forms,” and “local tax laws” would be the topic clusters presented on it. On the pillar page, you’d see links or more information about each topic cluster.

What Tools Can Make Content Strategy Easier?

HubSpot offers models and diagrams on topic clusters and pillar pages and an advanced content strategy tool. HubSpot’s pillar page model includes a broad topic in the center, with more in-depth subtopics related to it branching off. The content strategy tool takes you through the more advanced topics discussed earlier through four steps.

1. Create a topic. Enter a topic into your HubSpot account under Content Strategy.
2. Add a pillar page. After entering your topic, you can attach a pillar page to it by clicking Attach content. Again, a pillar page is the source your cluster topic content links to.
3. Add cluster topics and subtopics. You add subtopics after your pillar page when in your HubSpot account. You’ll attach content to subtopics, such as blog posts.
4. Add related content. HubSpot’s tool can search for already published pages and articles related to your topic phrases. You can include them under Add Related Content.

A clear content strategy can drive your content marketing efforts. Well-developed strategies get your information in front of the right eyes. While it is undoubtedly a massive undertaking, it is crucial, and there are tools and resources to help you.

Yes, it’s crass. But the the truth is that without a sales team, or a physical person to close the deal, marketing alone is dumb – literally unable to speak. Here’s why.

Funnel Ownership

We’ve been starting to advocate for the creation of a revenue generation team with our clients – a team that combines the sales and marketing functions around the revenue generation funnel. Don’t get me started on funnels as a metaphor; they’ve taken some flak recently, but in any case, they’re fine for this example as an illustration of a comprehensive lead generation process.

Here’s the reality of lead generation: there are always more unaware prospects than aware prospects, more unqualified leads than qualified leads, etc.

So, a graduated funnel is a good visual example.

We are seeing far more success when teams take ownership of funnel tactics and numbers, but don’t relegate responsibilities to funnel “stages”. For example, if you rely on marketing to generate all of your leads, that could get expensive; if you rely on sales to do all of your nurture or contact follow up, you might be spreading them too thin.

The better approach is to assign funnel ownership at the tactic, not the stage. This has two good outcomes.

1. We start to focus on numbers around the tactics, not territories. No one team can be lauded or crushed if the funnel has a choke point. That reality breeds teamwork.
2. You start to expand your options as to what tactics can be done in each stage of the funnel. This is critical.

Both Teams Can’t Do It Alone

So, as I mentioned, the central challenge with the old way of divvying up funnel responsibilities was that the inefficiencies and skills sets of both teams were put into challenging contexts within the B2B space.

Sales teams are inherently bad at nurturing leads because it takes time; what they need to focus on is closing deals. Marketing can reach scale quickly, but can seldom close a deal unless that deal is a “buy now” opportunity or a direct response scenario.

Sales and marketing are great in their own ways, but they can accomplish much together than they can individually.

In fact, sales in the B2B space will always be reliant on having someone, in person, to close the deal. Relationships reign in B2B tech sales, and marketing can’t do that alone. Yes, marketing is dumb (literally without voice) in the final stages of the close – and that’s when a voice is needed.

To put it bluntly, you might be considered “not smart” if you don’t take sales seriously as you look to increase revenue.

Building a Revenue Generation Team

If you are interested in building this new type of team – one based around shared metrics of revenue generation – here are some key concepts for laying out the groundwork.

1. Build the right team. If you don’t have a marketing team, let’s talk. If you don’t have a sales team, hire someone right away. Making sure you have a full spectrum of talents and abilities will shape the overall outcome of this team.
2. Build your team with a shared goal. You might have metrics and quotas for the tactics and efforts, but keep a shared goal between both teams. This is very important to build unity between the teams and to keep everyone focused on what matters.
3. Determine your strategy. Picking a strategy for your overall revenue generation plan can take some time, but it’s well worth it. Choose a plan that is going to take advantage of the market, your budget, and your skills. Build the plan out to the point where you can make some projections and assess the level of effort. How will you know if you are on track or off track?
4. Create the scorecard. Now you’re ready to make the scorecard, which is the collection of metrics you will use to measure success. This could include web stats, contacts, leads, MQLs, appointments, revenue, etc. – whatever can help you understand the progress you’re making toward your goal.
5. Communicate often. Have regular weekly or at least bi-weekly team meetings to share metrics and news. Look to help each other out. Find ways to make the funnel grow and prosper.

The sale was made. The customer is on contract. Your job is to look for upsell opportunities, to keep the customer happy, and to renew the contract each year. So why bother to assess customer needs after the initial sale?

Too many people are wasting money on advertising (online and offline), failed content marketing and influencer marketing of dubious value.

But the waste of money and effort isn’t the worst part. The worst part is that you are sitting on the solution. You already HAVE what you need to grow your business dramatically. Did you know that between 50% and 90% of all purchases are influenced by word of mouth? But yet, you don’t have an actual word-of-mouth strategy. How is that possible?

---

Did you know between 50 and 90% of all purchases are influenced by word of mouth?
Click To Tweet

---

For most businesses, word of mouth creates more customers than any other acquisition mechanism. Yet, it’s also the acquisition mechanism that we take almost entirely for granted.

You have a marketing strategy, a sales strategy, a content strategy, a social media strategy and a hiring strategy. You have a whole desk full of strategies. But you don’t have a strategy for the MOST IMPORTANT thing you can do to grow your business: giving your customers a consistent story to tell about your company.

I want to fix that together. Let’s give you an actual word-of-mouth strategy that uses purposeful, operational differentiators to compel conversations. Let’s figure out ONE THING that you can do differently that your customers will notice and discuss.

I don’t know everything, but I do know this: the best way to grow your business – the very best way – is for your customers to grow it for you.

Daniel Lemin and I have launched a brand-new program to teach a proven system for doing just that. It’s called:

Word of Mouth Marketing Master Class: How to Grow Your Business and Get New Customers without Wasting Money on Ads

We’ve spent 8 years researching, building and testing this formula, and we’re ready to give it to you. We wrote a best-selling book called Talk Triggers that showcases the system and why it works.

Best-selling author Bob Burg called it “the best business book he’s ever read”.

Jessica Lorimer followed the system and made $15,000 dollars with it in the first seven days.

This word-of-mouth system simply WORKS.

If you’re a small company, it works. Solopreneuer? It works. Big company? Works. B2B? Works. Non-profit? Works. B2C? Yes, it works. You WILL grow your business. You WILL change how you think about marketing. You WILL NOT have to waste money on a bunch of ads.

About the Word-of-Mouth Marketing Master Class

It’s a 12-week program, with 99 memberships available, because Daniel and I want to be able to work with you very closely to guarantee you absolutely crush it with this system.

You’ll learn:

1. How to rapidly and consistently scale your company without spending more money on ads, or “influencer marketing”.
2. How to find ONE THING in your business you can do differently, that customers will notice.
3. Why people have the power and why their words are more important than ever.
4. How to strategically craft a simple, memorable story that your customers will tell their friends (online and offline) over and over and over and over again. We call that your talk trigger.
5. Why same is lame and why competency doesn’t create conversation, not to mention, why the more you try to fit in, the more your customers tune out.
6. How to build a reliable, effective word-of-mouth strategy that gets you new customers (for free).
7. The specific, repeatable, proven process that any business can use to grow with word of mouth.
8. The three reasons word of mouth fails and how you can avoid them.

Each week is taught by Daniel or me: the creators of the system. Each week includes a video lesson where we’ll take you through the specific steps to get your customers talking about your business over and over and over and over.

Each week, we’ll have a live question-and-answer session to help you put these principles into practice IMMEDIATELY.

Each week, you’ll have a workbook with lessons you’ll complete to build your word-of-mouth strategy and grow your business by turning your customers into volunteer marketers.

Go here to see how detailed and practical each session is. You’re going to love it. The word-of-mouth marketing master class is inspirational, relevant, fun, motivational and interesting.

How much do we believe this program will make a huge impact on you and your business? If you don’t like it, we’ll buy you any other training course – taught by anyone in the world – of equal or lesser value. Period.

How to Save $400

In addition, if you sign up before December 31st, you’ll save four hundred dollars. That’s no joke. Also, we’ll give you a free, signed copy of our best-selling book.

Plus, we’ll give you access to the course for all of 2019, at no extra cost. So, as we add new content, new workbooks, new examples and more, you’ll get it all for free.

As a bonus, if you’re one of the first 25 participants, Daniel or I will do a free 1:1 consultation with you.

Stop wasting money on stuff that doesn’t work and invest in what you know already works: word of mouth. You know it’s effective. Think about how many times you make decisions because someone told you about a product or service. What you need now is a PLAN. You need a proven system for compelling conversations among your customers, and that’s what we’ll give you with the Word of Mouth Marketing Master Class: How to Grow your Business and Get New Customers without Wasting Money on Ads.

The post A Proven Way to Multiply Customers without Wasting Money on Ads appeared first on Convince and Convert: Social Media Consulting and Content Marketing Consulting.

Editor’s Note: This post is co-authored by Todd Caponi and Jeff Rosset. 

After reading a number of end-of-year articles predicting the trends for the coming year, myself and Jeff Rosset recognized five trends which haven’t made the headlines – but believe require the attention of tech sales leaders in the coming year. Here they are:

The Rise of Feedback

The buying journey is all about the buyer’s need to predict what their experience is going to be like using your company’s products and services. The last two years have seen a dramatic proliferation in the availability of feedback on B2B companies’ offerings and working environments, evidenced by G2 Crowd’s recent $55m round (who collects and displays ratings & reviews for B2B tech companies), and Glassdoor (who not only posts open jobs, but provides the “inside scoop” through employee reviews) now valued at over $1B. Today, buyers know where to look for evidence of the pros AND CONS of your products, services and even your culture. And it has a big impact on recruiting, where your candidates know where to look to predict what their lives will be like working in your organization. This data is available to you, the sellers & marketers, too. In 2019, curating feedback from across the web, and arming sales to be prepared with it proactively will become as important as knowing what your competitors are saying about you.

The requirement to embrace “community” learning, sharing and collaboration

There was a time not long ago where sellers could, following a short orientation, actually “self-enable.” However, as the pace of information accessibility grew, so did the need for focused sales support. As such, we’ve seen an explosion of sales enablers, sales enablement departments, and now the considerable growth of sales associations, communities, societies and networking groups. Today, sales is evolving too rapidly for individuals and organizations to silo themselves, especially given the speed at which companies are scaling. In addition, companies are hiring (or promoting) sales people and leaders at record numbers into roles they’ve never actually done before; and in many cases, reps are being asked to sell new products within new markets with no industry or category experience. It’s creating a massive vacuum in knowledge, experience and strategy.

Sales-focused LMS systems like Lessonly or Learncore MUST now be a part of the sales stack. Perhaps even more important, sales leaders and enablers will need to commit time every week to connecting and collaborating with peers who are in similar roles at OTHER non-competing technology companies throughout their community. The idea of “all of us is smarter than any of us” has never been more true and relevant within the tech/SaaS sales world.

Importance of understanding decision science

The neuroscience community’s understanding of how the brain makes decisions has accelerated rapidly in just the past few years. Optimizing selling activities, tools and processes with how the buying brain makes decisions would be a really valuable thing to know, right? Yet most of that understanding has yet to make it into sales curriculum. In 2019, sales enablement and sales leadership will need to incorporate this incredible asset into their sales organizations, in areas like:

• • • Incorporating the role of transparency in disarming the brain’s resistance to influence
    • Understanding the role of how emotion binds during a consensus sale, whereas logic actually polarizes
    • Understanding the role of subconscious decision making in the way their team’s message in their prospecting, the way they communicate during presentations and demonstrations and even the role of trust in negotiations.

Sales stack overload

According to various reports, there are now upwards of 5,000 different sales & marketing related tech products and tools. Umm, that’s a lot! With this massive influx in tools, sales leaders need to do a better job in regards to a) choosing the right resources for their team, b) keeping tabs on what their reps are using/not using, and c) ensuring their technologies integrate and “talk to each other.”

Tools like Growlabs, Sigstr, ConnectAndSell, Gong.io, Clari, ChurnZero, Mediafly, Outreach, DiscoverOrg, etc. help to make a sales leader’s job easier, and improve their reps’ effectiveness. But as a whole, the stack can have a negative impact on productivity (and the bottom line in regards to ROI) if not managed properly. “Stack management” has quickly become a much more important job for sales leaders as well as their sales operations & enablement partners.

The war for sales talent is at an all-time high

The need for technology salespeople has never been higher. Between a record number of companies raising large rounds of capital (which translates into immediate positions to fill) and the trend of specialization within tech sales – the demand for sales talent far exceeds the supply.

So what’s the proactive solution? The best companies effectively recruit, train, develop and promote their reps – essentially building and curating their own pipeline of sales talent. First, they put a strong career path program in place (Inbound SDR to Enterprise SDR to AE to Leadership, etc). And then to feed that model, the best companies do a great job of bringing in reps – either entry level or industry transplants (think former financial services reps who want to get into tech sales) – and provide them with outstanding sales/product/industry training & ongoing education. This is more of a long term play and the company must be totally committed, but the end result is the ability to fill their own needs (on demand) with those on their “bench.”

 

About the authors

Todd Caponi is the author of the new book, The Transparency Sale. He spent the last almost four years building the revenue capacity of Chicago’s PowerReviews from the ground up as their Chief Revenue Officer. Prior to that, he’s held senior leadership roles with 3 other tech companies, including ExactTarget, where he helped drive the organization to a successful IPO and a $2.7B exit through the acquisition by Salesforce.com.

Jeff Rosset is the founder & CEO of Sales Assembly, the first and only fully dedicated resource & peer community for sales leaders from Chicago’s top Tech/SaaS companies.

The post Five “Not-So-Obvious” Sales Trends for 2019 appeared first on OpenView Labs.

The term “practice makes perfect” is often associated with coaches and their effort to persuade individuals on their team to train as much as possible during their free time, and it turns out that these coaches were on to something. Studies have found that in order to become an expert, individuals must spend no less than 10,000 hours practicing and honing their skills.

The idea that practice makes an individual better applies to far more than team sports: it is also applicable when discussing the ever-changing B2B sales landscape. Today’s buyers are more informed and demanding than ever and require that sellers are ready at a moment’s notice with value-added insights. Before this can occur, however, reps must be equipped with the proper training and tools to quickly navigate these complex buyer conversations. If not, sellers will find new opportunities at organizations they feel will provide the tools and support they need to thrive and evolve.

For these reasons, sales readiness has become a must-have capability for every sales organization. A critical component of sales enablement, sales readiness encompasses efficient onboarding, ongoing sales communication, and effective sales training and guidance.

Studies have shown that the average company spends $954,070 on sales training. It is clear that organizations seek to train their salespeople, but reps often complain that their sales training practices are overly complex, cumbersome and ineffective for real-world sales.

Sales Training of the Past

The typical sales training process 10 years ago revolved around human interaction: either one-on-one, in small groups, or during sales kickoff events. These trainings, which were typically led by the HR team, were not always cost-effective and were quite rigorous, taking sellers out of the field for days at a time. The long drawn-out sales trainings would hammer in the latest selling processes that reps had to follow, perhaps even including a video or two. Unfortunately, research has proved that after a presentation, 63% of attendees remember stories and only 5% remember statistics. Two days later, attendees can only recall 28% of the information they were given. When sales reps leave these trainings and go back to business as usual, they often don’t remember their training and essentially return to operating on a trial-and-error basis, which is far from effective.

Without the ability to access virtual training and guidance in real time and as often as necessary, sales reps are left to remember more than is psychologically possible. Organizations assume the resolution for poor sales results after rigorous training is to pack in more rigorous training, but this often results in little impact to the business and revenue. Reps do not need more hours of training; they need more effective training.

Present-Day Sales Training

The unfortunate thing is that for many businesses today, their sales training approach is still stuck in the past. Although sales technology has advanced rapidly in response to buyer demands, few businesses are utilizing these technological advances. There are numerous factors that may cause ineffective sales training, but ultimately it comes down to two things: technology and timing. Piecemeal training, coaching, and guidance technologies that are not efficient, effective, integrated, and well-timed — or, most importantly, real-time — will never amount to the readiness reps need to be successful selling to today’s modern buyers.

To illustrate further, companies who use effective video training are 120% more likely to achieve their annual sales quotas. Yet, surprisingly, simple solutions such as providing sales training videos that are available in an organized, dynamic, and digital format, are not often implemented in the most impactful manner. Often, these videos are left in file storage systems or intranets that are difficult to navigate and search. If sales readiness material is not readily available, no rep will ever take the time to seek it out.

Sales coaching also leaves a lot to be desired. CSO Insights finds that that only 30% of businesses have a formal or dynamic sales coaching process in place. This finding is startling as organizations with a dynamic sales coaching process enjoy higher-level customer relationships, and this, in turn, improves sales performance, such as win rates by double digits. These win rates can mean the difference between reps who consistently attain quota and those who fall behind each quarter.

As modern buyers continue to evolve along with the business landscape, reps can no longer rely on the selling practices of the past. Sales reps now require sales readiness that tightly integrates into their workflow. Sales enablement platforms provide reps with guidance while selling and offer real-time learning in the context of sales scenarios. These capabilities offer sales reps the support they need when navigating complex conversations with buyers without requiring them to leave their workflow. Sales enablement effectively combines training, coaching, analytics, and content to ensure that reps are properly equipped to close the sale.

To learn more about the evolution of sales readiness from classroom to in-context trainings, download our new whitepaper today.

There is a unique perspective required when it comes to creating effective sales training for women. There is a tremendous benefit to such training being created by women and for women. To discuss the topic it was only natural for Bernie to invite Cynthia Barnes, Founder and CEO of the National Association of Women Sales Professionals to be his guest on this episode of The Social Business Engine Podcast.

Cynthia has been recognized as one of the most influential women in sales. She is a former top 1% saleswoman and founded the NAWSP in 2016, which is the only organization in the US dedicated to helping women sales professionals reach the top 1% and Dance on the Glass Ceiling. In this episode, you’ll hear more from Cynthia on what it means to “dance on the glass ceiling.”

As you listen, you’ll also be inspired by hearing how the reality of gender discrimination in sales motivated her to launch an organization devoted to advancing women in their sales careers. Cynthia is an engaging and motivating speaker, so take the time to listen.

Cynthia’s Experience Motivated Her To Provide Sales Training For Women

It’s both inspiring and refreshing to hear a person so enthused and committed to their profession as Cynthia is. In her own words, she’s been selling since Girl Scout Cookies were $1.50 per box. Through sales, she discovered that she loved being in control of her own income and ability to rise through her personal effort and diligence. She has learned how to use her own experience of overcoming gender discrimination to help women who aspire to achieve success in the sales profession.

Her example is a large part of what makes her the outstanding leader of the National Association of Women Sales Professionals. Cynthia’s main goal is to level the playing field. That means providing women the sales training needed to be in the top 1% of sales professionals right alongside the outstanding men in the profession. Listen to this episode to hear Cynthia’s explanation of what needs to be included in sales training that is specific to women, how sales training for women empowers them to succeed, and how the NAWSP can help make it all happen.

An Inspiring Goal: Women Can Dance On The Glass Ceiling

We’ve all heard the phrase that women need to “break through the glass ceiling.” While it’s understood by most people that the phrase refers to the unseen career barrier many women experience based on their gender, Cynthia finds that there is a better, more women-centric way to address the issue.

Her approach is simple: acknowledge that the ceiling is there and strive to overcome it – and encourage it with language that resonates with women. Rather than using language that is aggressive or violent, such as “breaking” the glass ceiling, she likes to talk about “dancing on” the glass ceiling. It’s imagery that communicates powerfully to women that they can not only overcome the barriers that exist but that they can do so in uniquely womanly ways.

Sales Training For Women Means Helping Where Women Are Not As Strong

Cynthia is not one to say that women and men are the same in every way. In fact, she’s well-known for admitting that women in sales tend to have particular areas where they are not as strong. In her mind, sales training for women has to address these realities head-on.

She says one of the first areas to be addressed is the issue of confidence. Women tend to discount their product or service for the sake of getting the sale. But Cynthia says it’s not at all necessary. The sales training NAWSP provides teaches women how to deal with price objections and other pressures in ways that increase and enhance their confidence – which in turn allows them to close more sales at standard pricing levels.

According to Cynthia, a second area where women need help is in dealing with the tendency toward perfectionism. She cites the example of women sales professionals being hesitant to actually make sales calls until they have their sales script down pat. But she’s learned that they shouldn’t wait for mastery of the script. Instead, women should write down their script, word-for-word, and use it as needed – even reading it if necessary. This enables them to overcome the perfectionistic tendency that often holds them back.

The Best Outcome Is For the NAWSP To Become Obsolete

The National Association of Women Sales Professionals has many goals:

• A national conference in October of 2019
• 100,000 members over the next 5 years

But those are not the biggest and boldest of the organization’s goals.

Cynthia wants to see the NAWSP be so effective that it becomes obsolete. She wants its emphasis of leveling the playing field for women to become so well received and embraced, and its sales training for women to be so effective, that women no longer need an advocacy organization like the NAWSP.

Cynthia’s inspiring approach of turning adversity into opportunity is opening doors for women in sales across the country. Listen to this episode to be inspired, to find out more about the National Association of Women Sales Professionals, and to learn how you can connect with this amazing organization and its founder, Cynthia Barnes.

Featured on This Episode

• Connect with Cynthia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cynthiabarnes/
• Follow Cynthia on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cynthiambarnes
• Cynthia’s organization: https://nawsp.org/

Outline of This Episode

• [2:22] From meetup groups to an official organization
• [7:10] Why it’s time to transform sales training (for men and women)
• [11:34] Strategies in NAWSP’s training to strengthen women in sales
• [14:50] Trends Cynthia sees happening for women both young and more experienced
• [18:50] The future of the NAWSP: 100,000 members, 15 cities, and becoming obsolete
• [21:43] Bernie’s summary and Cynthia’s final comments

Resources & People Mentioned

• Saleshacker’s list of Top Women in Sales
• Eastman Kodak

• The Selling With Social Podcast with Vengreso CEO, Mario Martinez, Jr

• David Neagle is a success coach who has helped thousands of leaders and entrepreneurs.
• He's found that the only way to get past being "stuck" is to change your mindset.
• Below, he highlights the mental shifts he's found make the difference, starting with the idea that working harder isn't the answer.

All leaders have felt stuck at some point in their career or in their current position.

Self-doubt creeps into their routines and environments, often toxic in nature, making them feel like failing is just not an option. They become paralyzed, frozen by fear, and avoid making decisions. Yet, as I am sure you know, this is not a long-term solution: Leaders must learn the mindsets to overcome obstacles to achieve success for themselves, their companies and employees.

Read More: I spent years agonizing about wasting money until I realized successful people have a completely different mindset

As someone who has coached thousands of leaders on mindset and having worked alongside Bob Proctor and Tony Robbins, a lot of the struggles faced in business can be turned into opportunities by changing the viewpoint.  While some problems require drastic measures — e.g. pivoting a business model — others just require a leader to change his or her mindset to view the situation differently.

What I like to call the quantum leap — or accelerating your path to success — can be achieved by bypassing what most people think is required in order to get the outcome they desire.  

To accelerate this path, consider making these mental shifts.

Quit trying harder

Working harder is not working smarter, yet we have been taught that this sort of approach is something we should be proud of. It's a value. It's become part of our ethics. It's become also part of the way that we view the world — that everything is actually difficult. But success can actually be easy, if you break down the barriers in your mind that everything has to be hard.

A bonus just for you: Click here to claim 30 days of access to Business Insider PRIME

Begin by working backwards. Think of your outcome and ask if anything was possible, what would be the simplest solution to it?  Then begin working on that solution. For instance, some executives believe they should charge less and sell more, when an easier approach may be to charge more and sell less. Or someone may try to convince the wrong person to buy their product or service rather than taking the time to identify your ideal client and approaching them directly.

There are also the leaders that just put too much on their plate and don’t delegate to people who are better than they are. Just because you have the idea doesn’t mean you have to be the one to do the work.  

Remember to start with the end in mind and then create a plan according to that idea.

Ignore conventional approaches

You have heard the famous quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results.”

This couldn’t be truer for those looking to find success in their lifetime. Often, people develop work habits — jump on a sales call, create social media campaigns, push out tweets — that don’t move the needle. But rather than change these strategies, they double down, hoping that if they work harder on this task, they will see better results. If everyone else is doing it, it must work, they think.

This often isn’t how things work. As a leader, you need to look outside the box. Ignore what others are doing and focus on experimentation to find what is right for you. You have to get ruthless about trying new approaches. Faith in the familiar is a trap.

Read More: After coaching managers and execs from companies like Google, Facebook, and HP, I've seen that the most successful people use 3 psychological strategies on a daily basis

Suspend disbelief

As a leader, it’s okay to not know all the answers, but it is important to try and seek them out. This means that you can start off saying, "I'm going to take a chance on it. I'm going to test this."

You don't have to be convinced that you always will find success with each choice you make, but you can’t carry the belief about how you can't, or won't, do it. Every attempt that doesn’t work leads you closer to the one that will. Remember, we failed many times trying to put a man on the moon before figured it out. Edison failed 10,000 times before creating the light bulb. Now these things are easy. You have to keep trying and never stop.

To test and go full force, do what you would do if you truly believed that you could succeed. If we let doubt creep into our thinking, then we can't think about what it is that we would choose to believe that would actually make this work. So, if you're going to doubt anything, doubt your limits, not what it is that's possible for you to do.

Focus on the end, rather than the means

It's crucial to have a crystal-clear picture of what you want to create. If you worry about the how, then you're bound to be bogged down. You must be willing to tolerate ambiguity, confusion and chaos for some time in your life. This is after all, the life of a leader: you sometimes need to create your own road map.

So rather than obsessing about the how, you should be laser-focused about where it is that you want to go and say yes to the opportunities that can help propel you forward.

Seek failure

We often live a life that is about learning how to avoid mistakes, which means we're not willing to take risks. When we won't take chances, we don't learn anything new — all we're doing is repeating back all the knowledge that we currently have, which isn't all that much, based on how much is actually out there.

To accelerate success, you must be willing to make mistakes. Failure is a resource; it helps you find the edge of your capabilities, and your capacities.

Everything that you do has come through failing, realizing that wasn't the way to do it, doing it differently, learning a skill set and then eventually mastering whatever it is.

David Neagle is known as one of the architects of the coaching and personal growth industry, having worked alongside other well-known mentors like Bob Proctor, Tony Robbins and the like for decades. Through David’s coaching and mentorship, he has helped thousands of leaders and entrepreneurs gain the confidence and find the right mindset to increase their revenue and find success, turning their strategies and business models into seven- and eight-figure ventures. He is also the best selling author of "The Millions Within." Follow him on Twitter @DavidNeagle.

SEE ALSO: I've helped thousands of people start their own businesses, and I've found that everyone who makes money has the same thing in common

Join the conversation about this story »

NOW WATCH: The CMO of $30 billion financial giant State Street says to be successful, you have to be the CEO of your own brand