Digital Marketing News & Insights

Curated news and information on various aspects of digital marketing.

[jamescurtismba]

The 3 Critical B2B Sales Pipeline Metrics

How healthy is your sales pipeline right now? And what steps are you taking to progressively improve its fitness? Just as your own doctor might measure your body temperature, heart rate and blood pressure before putting you on a personal fitness regime, a pipeline doctor would want to understand your qualified pipeline value, average sales velocity and average sales win rate – and how these factors had changed over time – before coming up with their diagnosis. Here’s why these three measures are so important…

There are three fundamental things you can do to improve your sales figures: you can generate more qualified sales opportunities, you can shorten your average sales cycles, and you can increase your average sales win rates. Steadily improving all three factors will have a powerful multiplier effect on your sales – and dramatically improve your revenue predictability.

Bottlenecks and Best Practice

But if you’re not regularly measuring and reviewing all three factors at every level in your sales organisation – from each individual sales person through to the whole sales team – you’ll struggle to identify either where your most pressing performance bottlenecks lie or (and this is equally important) to identify pockets of best practice which if adopted more widely would enable you to systematically increase your overall sales performance.

Value, Velocity and Win Rate

Proactive pipeline management involves paying particularly close attention to all three factors – value, velocity and win rate. Together they represent what we have come to regard as the essential pipeline success formula.

 And just in case you wonder whether the effort is worthwhile, a series of studies have shown that organisations that take a data-driven approach to proactive pipeline management show significantly accelerated revenue growth compared to their peers.

Qualified Pipeline Value

The key word here is qualified. Measuring pipeline value without imposing a company-wide universally agreed definition of what a qualified sales opportunity ought to look like will simply generate misleading, unhelpful and ultimately useless data. And “leads” or “enquiries” don’t count. As I’ve pointed out before, tracking the number of leads generated in the absence of a consistent quality standard tells you nothing and may even lead you to do more of the wrong thing.

You’ll need to craft qualification criteria that address the specifics of your offering and your markets, but at minimum, a qualified sales opportunity must satisfy all of the following:

Have they identified a clear need?

Are they likely to buy something?

Do we have a reasonable chance of winning?

Would they make a good customer?

Sales Cycle Velocity

Most sales managers would acknowledge that the longer a deal hangs around in the pipeline, stuck at its current stage, the less likely they are to buy. Sales cycle velocity – the amount of time it takes for an opportunity to move from start to finish, and from stage to stage – is, therefore, an incredibly important predictor of sales success. And if you can shorten your average sales cycles, you have the capacity – without increasing your resources – to sell more.

Given all of this, it always surprises me to see CRM systems that are not set up to report on how long each deal has spent at each stage, or to throw up an exception report when opportunities have been stuck for long than the typical time taken for winning deals to progress. If you’re not measuring or reporting on this, take an initiative today to deal with it. In fact, if your current CRM system can’t provide it, I would seriously think of changing it. It’s that important.

Sales Win Rate

This is an obvious metric, but even here not all organisations track it with enough granularity to learn the significant lessons this metric can provide. You need to be tracking all possible outcomes. In most complex B2B sales environments, there are at least four:

You win the deal

A competitor wins the deal

The prospect decides to implement an internally developed solution

The prospect decides to do nothing

You’ll miss the opportunity for incredibly valuable learning if you categorise the last three outcomes simply as “lost”. If you’re not evaluating the outcome of every opportunity into at least these four categories, I strongly suggest you start doing so today – and that you retrospectively analyse recent sales outcomes.

Measure at Every Level

My final recommendation is that you measure these three metrics at every level within your organisation, as well as analysing outcomes by source of opportunity – including comparing different marketing campaigns. You’ll inevitably find outliers in both directions: poor performance that clearly needs to be corrected, and exceptional success that needs to be replicated.

In fact, the latter may provide some of the most valuable learning opportunities: where are you currently being most successful today, what can you learn from this, and how can you enable the rest of the organisation to embrace the winning habits you have identified?

The Power of Sales Analytics

Your ability to analyse patterns of performance – to identify both winning and losing habits – will be dramatically amplified if you implement one of the growing number of sales analytics packages – we’ve seen clients have particular success with InsightSquared. If you’re serious about metrics, you’ve got be serious about your data, and your ability to analyse it.

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[jamescurtismba]

Are Your Analytics Telling the Right Story?

Posted by Bill.Sebald

A process can easily become a habit. A habit may not change without awareness or intervention.

Before it becomes a habit, a process should be adjusted to change along with new goals, constant learning, experimentation, and so on.

Considering your time in analytics, are you engaging in a process, or in an outdated habit?

That’s a real question that digital marketing practitioners should ask themselves. Inherently, marketers tend to be buried with work, reusing templates to speed up results. But many agencies lean on those templates a little too much, in my opinion.

Templates should never be written in stone.

If your company is pumping out canned reports, you’re not alone. I do the business development for our company and regularly ask prospects to explain or share the reports they’ve received in the past. Sometimes it’s truly discouraging, outdated, wasteful, and the reason businesses search for new SEO vendors.

Look—I’m all for scalability. It’s a huge help. But some things can’t be scaled and still be successful, especially in today’s SEO climate—or, frankly, marketing in general. Much of what was scalable in SEO prior to 2011 is now penalty-bait. Today’s analytics tools and platforms can slice and dice data faster than anything Ron Popeil ever sold, but the human element will always be necessary if you want your marketing to dominate.

Find the stories to tell

I like to tell stories. I’m real fun in the pub. What I’ve always loved about marketing is the challenge to not only find a story, but have that story change something for the better. I like adding my layer based on real data and experimenting.

Analytics work is all about finding the story. It’s detective work. It's equal parts Sherlock Holmes, Batman, and Indiana Jones. If you’re lucky, the story jumps out with very little digging. However, it’s more likely you’ll be going on some expeditions. It’s common to start with a hunch or random click through reports, but you need to always be looking for the story.

A great place to start is through client conversations. We schedule at least one monthly call with our clients, where it’s truly a discussion session. We get conversations going to pull intel out of the key stakeholders. Case in point: Recently, we discovered through an open discussion that one of our clients had great success with an earlier email campaign targeted to business owners. There was specific information customers positively responded to, which was helpful in recent content development on their website. It's amazing what you can learn by asking questions and simply listening to responses.

We should be true consultants, not report monkeys. Dive into the discussions started and enjoy the ride. I guarantee you’ll take note of a few ripe areas to review next time you log into your Google Analytics account.

An impromptu survey says it’s a time issue

Most SEO engagements are designed around a block of purchased hours. Hopefully the client understands they’re not only buying your time to complete SEO tasks, but also your expertise and analysis. If someone on your team were to say, “I don’t have time to do analysis because all my tasks used up their budget this month,” then you really need to question the value of the chosen tasks. Were they picked based on front-loaded analysis, or were they simply tasks pulled out of guesswork?

A few weeks ago I pushed a quick Survey Monkey survey out on Twitter and Linkedin. Thanks to a few retweets, 94 people responded (please consider the following results more directional than scientific—I’m well aware it’s a shallow survey pool). I asked two questions:

If you work in-house or have clients, how often do you log into your clients’ analytics? (Multiple choices ranged from several times a day to a few times a month).

Do you, or do you not, get enough time in Analytics to interpret the data?

The responses:

While some do make a habit of logging into analytics once or more times a day, more do not. Is it required to check under the hood every day? Personally, I believe it is—but your answer may vary on that one. If something went south overnight, I want to be aware before my client tells me. After all, that’s one of the things I’m paid for. I like the idea of being active—not reactive.

More notable is that most respondents didn’t feel they get enough time in analytics. That should absolutely change.

There was also a field for respondents to elaborate on their selections. There were several comments that jumped out at me:

“In house, day to day tasks and random projects prevent me from taking the deep dives in analytics that I feel are valuable.” “It’s challenging to keep up with the changes and enhancements made in Google Analytics in particular, amongst other responsibilities and initiatives.” “Too many things are on my plate for me to spend the time I know I should be spending in Google Analytics.” “Finding the actionable info in Analytics always takes more time that expected—never enough time to crunch the numbers!” “I log in to 'spot check' things but rarely do I get to delve into the data for long enough to suss out the issues and opportunities presented by the data.”

These results suggest that many marketers are not spending enough time with analytics. And possibly not because they don’t see the value, but simply because they don’t have time. “Either you run the day, or the day runs you (Jim Rohn)” is apropos here—you must make time. You need to get on top of all the people filling your plate. It’s not easy, but it needs to be done.

Get on top of those filling your plate. Kind of like professional crowd surfing.

Helpful resources

Dashboards are fantastic, but I rarely see them set up in analytics platforms. One of the best ways to get a quick glimpse of your key metrics are with dashboards. All good analytics platforms provide the ability to make custom dashboards. Get into work, grab a coffee, fire up the computer, click your dashboard bookmark. (I recommend that order!) Google Analytics, which most of us probably use, provides some decent options with their dashboards, though limited compared to enterprise analytics platforms.

However, this basic dashboard is the minimum you should review in analytics. We’ll get deeper soon.

Building these widgets are quite easy (I recently created a tutorial on my site). There are also websites that provide dashboards you can import into Google Analytics. Dashboard Junkie is a fun one. Here are some others from Econsultancy and Google themselves.

It’s not just analytics platforms that offer dashboards. There are several other vendors in the SEO space that port in analytics data and mesh with their own data—from Moz Analytics to SearchMetrics to Conductor to many, many others.

SEMrush has a unique data set that marketers should routinely review. While your traffic data in analytics will be truer, if you’re targeting pages you may be interested in monitoring keyword rank counts:

Are backlinks a target? Maybe you’d find Cognitive SEO’s dashboard valuable:

RankRanger is another SaaS we use. It’s become way more than just our daily rank tracking software. The data you can port in creates excellent snapshots and graphs, and strong dashboards:

It also offers other graphing functionality to make pretty useful views:

While some of the bigger platforms, like SearchMetrics and Conductor, make it easier to get a lot of information within one login, I’m still finding myself logging into several programs to get the most useful data possible. C’est la vie.

Analytics is your vehicle to identifying problems and opportunity

Remember, dashboards are simply the “quick and dirty” window into your site. They help spotlight drastic changes, and make your website’s general traction more visible. Certainly valuable for when your CMO corners you by the Keurig machine. It’s a state of the union, but doesn’t focus on subsections that may need attention.

Agencies and consultants tend to create SEO reports for their clients as a standard practice, though sometimes these reports become extremely boilerplate. Boilerplate reports essentially force you to look under the same rocks month after month. How can you get a bigger view of the world if you never leave your comfortable neighborhood? A new routine needs to be created by generating new reports and correlations, finding trends that were hidden, and using all the tools at your disposal (from Analytics to link tools to competitive tools).

Your analytics app is not a toy—it’s the lifeblood of your website.

Deeper dives with Google Analytics

Grouped pages lookup

A quick way to look at chunks of the site is by identifying a footprint in the URL and searching with that. For example, go to Behavior > Site Content > All Pages or Landing Pages. Then, in the search bar right below the graph, search for the footprint. For example, take http://ift.tt/1S7JyaK as a real URL. if you want to see everything in the blog, enter */blog/ into the search bar. This is especially useful in getting the temperature of an eCommerce category.

Segment sessions with conversions/transactions

So often in SEO we spend our time analyzing what’s not working or posing as a barrier. This report helps us take a look at what is performing (by leads or sales generated) and the customer behavior, channels, and demographic information that goes along with that. Then we can identify opportunities to make use of our success and improve our overall inbound strategy.

Below is a deeper dive into the conversions “Lead Generation” segment, although these same reports can just as aptly be applied to transactions. Ultimately, there are a lot of ways to slice and dice the analysis, so you’ll have to know what makes sense for your client, but here are three different reports from this segment that provided useful insights that will enhance our strategy.

Conversions One of the easy and most valuable ones! Directions: Under any report, go to Add a Segment > Sessions with Conversions > Apply.

Demographics – age, gender, location For example, our client is based in Pennsylvania, but is receiving almost as many request form submissions from Texas and New York, and has a high ratio of request form submissions to visitors for both of these other states. Given our client’s industry, this gives us ideas on how to market to these individuals and additional information the Texans may need given the long distance.

Mobile – overview, device type, landing pages For this client, we see more confirmation of what has been called the “micro-moment” in that our mobile users spend less time on the site, view less pages per visit, have a higher bounce rate, and are more likely to be new users (less brand affinity). This would indicate that the site is mobile optimized and performing as expected. From here, I would next go into mobile traffic segments to find pages that aren’t receiving a lot of mobile traffic, but are similar to those that are, and find ways to drive traffic to those pages as well.

Acquisition Here we’re looking at how the inbound channels stack up for driving conversions. Organic and Paid channels are neck and neck, although referral and social are unexpected wins (and social, glad we’ve proven your viability to make money!). We’ll now dig deeper into the referring sites and social channels to see where the opportunities are here.

Assisted conversions

There’s more to the story than last click. In Analytics, go to Conversions > Multi-Channel Funnels > Assisted conversions. Many clients have difficulty understanding the concept of attribution. This report seems to provide the best introduction to the world of attribution. Last click isn’t going to be replaced anytime soon, but we can start to educate and optimize for other parts of the funnel.

True stories from analytics detective work

Granted, this is not a post about favorite reports. But this is a post about why digging through analytics can open up huge opportunities. So, it’s real-life example time from Greenlane’s own experience!

Story 1: The Forgotten Links

The client is a big fashion brand. They’ve been a popular brick-and-mortar retail destination since the early 80s, but only went online in 1996. This is the type of company that builds links based on their brand ambassadors and trendy styles. SEO wasn’t the mainstream channel it is today, so it’s likely they had some serious architecture changes since the 90s, right?

For this company, analytics data can only be traced back about seven years. We thought, “Let’s take a look at what drove traffic in their early years. Let’s see if there were any trends that drove volume and sales where they may be slipping today. If they had authority then, and are slipping now, it might be easier to recoup that authority versus building from scratch.”

The good news—this brand had been able to essentially maintain the authority they launched with, as there were not any real noticeable gaps between search data then and search data today. But, in the digging, we uncovered a gem. We found a lot of URLs that used to draw traffic that are not on their tree today. After digging furthur, we found a redesign occurred in the late 90s. SEO wasn’t factored in, creating a ton of 404s. These 404s were not even being charted in Google Webmaster Tools, yet they are still being linked to today from external sites (remember, GWT is still quite directional in terms of the data they provide). Better yet, we pulled links from OSE and Majestic, and saw that thousands of forgotten links existed.

This is an easy campaign—create a 301 redirect matrix for those dead pages and bring those old backlinks to life.

But we kept wondering what pages were out there before the days where analytics was implemented. Using the Wayback Machine, we found that even more redesigns had occurred in the first few years of the site’s life. We didn’t have data for these pages, so we had to get creative. Using Screaming Frog, we crawled the Wayback Machine to pull out URLs we didn’t know existed. We fed them into the link tools, and sure enough, there were links there, too.

Story 2: To “View All” or Not To “View All”

Most eCommerce sites have pagination issues. It’s a given. A seasoned SEO knows immediately to look for these issues. SEOs use rel=”next” and “prev” to help Google understand the relationships. But does Google always behave the way we think they should? Golly, no!

Example 2 is a company that sells barware online. They have a lot of products, and tend to show only “page 1” of a given category. Yet, the analytics showed instances where Google preferred to show the view all page. These were long "view all" pages, which, after comparing to the “page 1” pages, showed a much lower bounce rate and higher conversions. Google seemed to prefer them in several cases anyway, so a quick change to default to “view all” started showing very positive returns in three months.

Story 3: Selling What Analytics Says to Sell

I have to change some details of this story because of NDAs, but once upon a time there was a jewelry company that sold artisan products. They were fond of creating certain kinds of keepsakes based on what sold well in their retail stores. Online, though, they weren't performing very well selling these same products. The website was fairly new and hadn't quite earned the footing they thought their brand should have, but that wasn't the terminal answer we wanted to give them. Instead, we wanted to focus on areas they could compete with, while building up the entire site and turning their offline brand into an online brand.

Conversion rates, search metrics, and even PPC data showed a small but consistent win on a niche product that didn't perform nearly as well in the brick-and-mortar stores. It wasn't a target for us or the CEO. Yet online, there was obvious interest. Not only that, with low effort, this series of products was poised to score big in natural search due to low competition. The estimated search volume (per Google Keyword Planner) wasn't extraordinary by any stretch, but it led to traffic that spent considerable dollars on these products. So much so, in fact, that this product became a focus point of the website. Sometimes, mining through rocks can uncover gold (jewelry pun intended).

Conclusion

My biggest hope is that your takeaway after reading this piece is a candid look at your role as an SEO or digital marketer. You’re a person with a “unique set of skills,” being called upon to perform works of brilliance. Being busy does create pressure; that pressure can sometimes force you to look for shortcuts or “phone it in.” If you really want to find the purest joy in what you’ve chosen as a career, I believe it’s from the stories embedded within the data. Go get ’em, Sherlock!

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Moz Blog viahttps://moz.com/blog/are-your-analytics-telling-the-right-story

[jamescurtismba]

Use iOS 9’s New Spotlight Search to Grow Your App

With iOS 9, Apple made Spotlight search more important than ever before – not just for users, but also for developers. Now, with Spotlight search, Apple provides a brand new tool for them to acquire more users.

Here’s what you need to know…

How the new Spotlight works in iOS 9

Now, Spotlight surfaces:

content within apps already on your phone

apps in the app store, not already on your phone

content on the web

Imagine a user searches for an Airbnb apartment in Hamburg, Germany. Instead of tapping on Safari, waiting for it to open, then typing a search query (tedious!), the user simply swipes on her device’s home screen and instantly lands in Spotlight.

As she types “airbnb hamburg” into Spotlight’s search, Spotlight presents her with a list of suggested websites. These include links to properties in the city on Airbnb’s website.

That makes Spotlight the perfect opportunity to let users directly discover your app, or lead them to your app from online content. But what do you need to do to ensure this happens as successfully as possible?

How to take advantage of Spotlight for growing your app

As a developer, you decide what content Spotlight indexes and shows in its search results. And as Apple states in the relevant developer documentation (scroll down to the section about search), it’s easy to get started.

Once Spotlight leads a user to your web content, use deep links and deferred deep links to make sure she has a great experience and easily finds the relevant content in the app on her iOS device. If the user already has the app installed, a deep link will lead her directly to the relevant content within the app.

Apple already integrated deep linking into iOS 9, as one major feature of the operating system’s new universal links (read our previous article to see if you need to worry about these). However, universal links don’t work as deferred deep links. So universal links fail when the user does not already have an app installed – unlike Yozio’s SuperLink.

How to delight new users with deferred deep links

If the user does not have the app installed, use a deferred deep link to ensure she still has a great first time experience. While universal links don’t work as deferred deep links, Yozio’s SuperLinks do.

With deferred deep links, the user taps a link on your website to download and use your app instead. The link takes her to the app’s page in the iOS App Store. After she installs and opens the app, she still lands on the relevant content. Now she can instantly continue to book her vacation to Germany, buy a product, or carry out any other transaction.

Universal links don’t allow deferred deep linking because they cannot pass information around the app store. However, Yozio’s SuperLink uses unique fingerprinting technology to identify the user and pass information about her around the app store. Then, when the user installs the app, she reaches the exact content that matches the search phrase entered into the Spotlight search.

Without SuperLinks, universal links drop users from Spotlight Search into the app …. as if the search never occurred.

Beyond iOS 9

Developing for Android, too? SuperLinks work across all Android and Apple devices, as well as older versions of both operating systems. So you can save yourself time and effort to customize deep links for different purposes by using just one simple tool. Plus, Yozio combines analytics from both Android and iOS from all your campaigns, installs and engagements into one simple dashboard.

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[jamescurtismba]

Clean Up Your Conversion Tracking Mess with the New Streamlined Facebook Pixel

I was recently rummaging through my pile of conversion tracking pixels in Facebook’s Business Manager when I noticed an alert that explicitly stated the ending of individual pixels.

As someone who is managing multiple lead gen promotions on Facebook, each requiring a unique tracking code, I was pretty excited. The fact is, this is a pretty big deal for anyone using the Facebook Ads platform, ESPECIALLY those using it for remarketing. I’ll explain…

What’s the Big Deal?

So in the latter half of 2016, Facebook claims, they will be eliminating the option for advertisers to generate individual unique tracking pixels for conversion tracking and custom audience tracking. The intended purpose of having your tracking pixels unique and individual was to differentiate between conversion types. For example, you could have one to signify an e-commerce goal so that you could tie back to a specific Facebook ad.

I personally used these unique pixels to allow me to align my campaign strategies (i.e. website conversions) with my desired outcome from the subsequent ad (i.e. eBook download). I promoted a bunch of different whitepapers and had separate conversion pixels for each one. There are also separate tracking pixels to be placed on your website for remarketing purposes.

The reason this wasn’t so great was that every new promotion required a new pixel. Every new pixel had to be implemented on the destination landing page, and the end result was way too many pixels and a whole lot of javascript clutter. Not to mention a SEPARATE pixel that had to be placed on your website to track web traffic and allow you to remarket.

On a small scale it was workable, but the more complex your strategy becomes, the messier it gets. Thankfully, Facebook realized all this pixel nonsense was unnecessary and they took their pre-existing website pixel and made it better.

Introducing the New Facebook Pixel

Behold: The Facebook Pixel. A little anti-climactic, but that’s what it’s called. I was let down too and was certainly rooting for something a little more transparent like “The Creep” but you know what, that’s life. So what’s the big fuss about this fancy new piece of tracking code? Take the three main reasons you created pixels before and now take the headache away from having to create and manage several of them.

The Facebook Pixel allows you to:

Build Custom Audiences from your website for remarketing

Optimize ads for conversions

Track conversions and attribute them back to your ads

This is phenomenal because it simplifies a process in a marketing world where time is your greatest opponent. This super pixel will allow you to attain in-depth insights into website traffic and individual conversions. If you already have the old pixel set up for either custom audiences or conversions it will still work (for the time being). If you have the pre-existing Custom Audience pixel on your website you can continue to use it and just add custom events for conversion tracking and optimization.

For an in-depth walkthrough on how to upgrade your pixel go here.

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[jamescurtismba]

AdWords Goes Dynamic: 4 Things You Don’t Have To Do Manually Anymore

When I head home to visit my parents, my mom never fails to comment that I’m getting lazier. Sadly, she’s right! Thanks to good old technology, I haven’t been to a real bank in years, I’ve cut out mall visits in favor of online shopping in the comfort of my sweats and shamefully, I Uber far more than I walk (it’s far too cold to be outdoors in New England, I swear!). Admittedly, technology has made super mundane tasks even easier and, while I definitely appreciate the convenience factor, I do recognize that we’ve gone a little too far at times. Case in point—these inventions actually DO exist:

An “Automatic Pet Petter” with possibly the best tagline I’ve ever read: “Never touch your pets again!”.

Zippy’s Battery Operated Scissors for when your hands are too weak to… cut paper?

And finally, the Fork Extender. Because sometimes you’re too tired to actually lift the fork up to your mouth (ok, I can sympathize with that).

Even Google has jumped on the laziness bandwagon and is providing more automated services for PPC advertisers. Here’s a recap of the top 4 tasks you no longer have to do manually in AdWords:

#1: Callout Extensions

Last year, Google added Callouts to the growing list of ad extensions available to paid search advertisers. These extensions give advertisers the opportunity to include an additional line of text in their ads to highlight benefits such as free shipping, price matching, discounts and more.

Although their initial setup process was fairly simple, Google recently announced that it was rolling out a fully automated version. With the new dynamic callout extensions, AdWords will pull information about your business and products directly from your site to be displayed in text ads. You get all the benefit of callouts without having to do any of the work. Total win for the lazy among us.

Not confident that a machine can do your business justice? Don’t worry, you can still create Callouts manually, which will trump the dynamic version.

#2: Countdowns in Ads

Anyone who has suffered through a semester of Psych 101 can school you on the Principle of Scarcity, which states that people are highly motivated when they fear that they may lose out on something. For decades, smart advertisers have taken advantage of our innate sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) by running limited-time-only sales promotions, seasonal products (Pumpkin Spiced Lattes anyone?) and warning of dwindling product supply.

There’s no doubt that this strategy is incredibly effective but it’s traditionally been a headache for PPC account managers to integrate into their ads, as it required regular updates as the sale period closed/product supply diminished.

Within the last year, Google released Ad Customizers, which have been a true game-changer for paid search advertisers. This feature allows you to set parameters within your ads that are replaced with dynamic text when an ad is triggered by a search, producing real-time updates automatically. Customizers can include a wide range of data—from location specific information, product details and pricing—but we’re most excited about the countdown feature that gives advertisers the opportunity to highlight days remaining in a sale or decreasing product availability. Your ad text will count down the days automatically so you don’t have to keep manually changing it!

#3: Extensions for Shopping Ads

Earlier this year, AdWords made the transition to fully automated extensions for Shopping Ads, causing many e-commerce advertisers around the globe to rejoice. While this was not a complicated task, far too many advertisers were neglecting to actually make it to that section of their to-do list.

So, AdWords took matters into their own hands and began automating extension creation, based on retailers’ feed information. The goal is to include information that potential shoppers may find useful, like free shipping or significant price drops. Take note: While this was certainly a positive change for retailers who offer regular deals, it’s likely to have a negative impact on those who do not, so make sure you have other ways to stand out on the SERP.

#4: Dynamic Search Ads (DSAs)

This is one of the most heavily automated features that AdWords offers. Unlike typical search ads, which are triggered by keyword matches, DSAs are triggered based off your site content. To do this, Google leverages its organic web-crawling technology to analyze your website. When a user searches a query that AdWords deems relevant to the site content, it will enter a dynamically produced ad in the auction.

DSA is incredibly easy for advertisers to implement and manage because Google automates the majority of the work. While this may feel like an overly hands-off approach to some PPCers, it’s certainly nothing like the widely disdained AdWords Express product. DSAs come with various levels of control. From a targeting perspective, you can choose to show ads based on your entire website or specific categories or pages. Plus, you can protect your overall spend by setting specific bids, budget restrictions and negative keywords.

Seems too good to be true, right? Well, it’s important to note that DSAs aren’t necessarily a great fit for all PPC advertisers. As always, the manual route affords advertisers more control and usually yields better results. However, these are a godsend for businesses who have an enormous inventory with consistently changing products (like seasonal lines), which can be a nightmare for advertisers to maintain manually!

Why Is Google Shifting to a More Automated Model?

Most marketing platforms subscribe to the old “if it ain’t broke down fix it” model. There was certainly nothing wrong with the original versions of these four features, so why did Google invest time and resources in automating them?

I suspect that the reasoning was two-fold. Firstly, Google strives to be a customer-centric company and, as such, aims to give searchers a great experience with both their organic AND paid listings. Features like extensions provide valuable information to these searchers, enhancing their experience. In addition, Google wants to ensure advertisers are successful on its network, so they continue to use it (and support its main revenue stream). When features Google deems valuable have low adoption rates, it takes matters into its own hands by reducing barriers or eliminating them altogether through automation.

Is Automation Leveling the Playing Field TOO Much?

Years ago, only the most advanced, well-informed advertisers were taking advantage of AdWords’ “bells and whistles” to strengthen their performance. As Google makes the setup processes for these “extras” easier and easier, they’re becoming the norm. This may be frustrating for those of us who go the extra mile to nail advanced features but, rest assured, there’s always something bigger, better and more sophisticated to give a whirl.

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[jamescurtismba]

Solving The Customer’s Problem

Yesterday, I had one of those “Aha” moments. I realized that much of what I’ve been talking about for years has been wrong.

Well not completely wrong but off target enough to be significant. I’ve written and advocated about helping customers buy, facilitating their buying process, or even leading them through buying when they don’t know how to buy.

Now all of that is great stuff. Far better than what normal sales people do in “showing up and throwing up,” or pitching products.

But, it’s based on the assumption that “buying” is critical to the customer.

In reality, the customer doesn’t care about buying, at least buying is just a component of solving the customer’s problem! What the customer really cares about is solving their problem or addressing an opportunity.

At this point it probably pays for me to step back a moment. I’m at the CEB’s Sales and Marketing Summit. It’s a collection of some of the smartest sales and marketing practitioners that I’ve ever met. I was watching a presentation by Brent Adamson as he talked about Prescription, which is an enormously important concept. He described Prescription as:

A credible and influential set of “do this”/”don’t do that” recommendations provided to customers throughout their purchase process, deliberately intended to ease the customer’s movement toward purchase.

My knee jerk reaction was “Amen Brent!” We create enormous value leading the customer through their buying process. It’s part of what I’ve been advocating in this blog for years.

All of a sudden I became uncomfortable about it. The last two words “toward purchase” leapt out at me.

Our focus on the customer buying process and moving them toward purchase is still all about us, not about the customer. Granted it’s a more elegant and possibly more helpful version of being about us, but it’s not about the customer.

The real issue here, is that buying is always just a component of solving the customer problem or helping them address an opportunity. But really what the customer cares about is solving their problem.

Let’s look at the case of a CRM system. Customer buy CRM systems to help drive sales productivity, effectiveness, and better data/knowledge about customers. The CRM system itself may be a major component of the problem the customer is trying to solve, but there’s all the Business Process Design and other stuff that’s critical the customer to achieve the goals they are trying to achieve. Over the years, we’ve been regaled with story after story of failures in CRM systems. It’s probably never because they chose the wrong system, but rather because they couldn’t solve their problem.

Everything we sell is always just a component of what the customer is trying to achieve–but helping the customer buy doesn’t help the customer solve their problem.

Magic happens, when we change Brent’s last two words in his sentence on prescription:

A credible and influential set of “do this”/”don’t do that” recommendations provided to customers throughout their purchase process, deliberately intended to ease the customer’s movement toward solving their problem/addressing their opportunity.

This shifts both our perspective and the customer’s on the thing that’s most important to them–and to us. Solving their problem enables us to focus totally on the customer. It maximizes the value we create with* them–not just in this instance, but how we help them over the life cycle of our relationship.

Customers want people to help solve their problem, not just a part of their problem.

Now here’s where it may get a little confusing. Going back to the CRM example, this doesn’t mean that all of a sudden we have to help the customer do the business process design, implementation, change management, training, and so forth. What we have to do is guide them through all the issues they have to address in solving their problem. So we have to help them understand the business process design issues they face and make sure they have a plan in place to implement it.

The really cool thing is by helping the customer solve their problem, we are automatically engaged in easing their movement toward a purchase. But the opposite is seldom true-moving them toward purchase doesn’t solve their problem.

Some readers may think I’m parsing words, but I don’t think so. We always have to test what we do by putting ourselves in the customer’s shoes, thinking, “What is it they care most about.” Buying is just one element in solving their problem–and that’s what they care about.

*This was originally “for,” but as my friend Martin Schmalenbach pointed out we really are engaging our customers collaboratively in this problem solving process. The value we create together is far greater than the value we create “for” them. Thanks so much Martin!

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[jamescurtismba]

Why It’s Essential to Adapt Your Analytics Strategy to Justify Your Mobile Ad Budget

Marketers love mobile and have been increasing their mobile advertising budgets steadily in recent years. Mobile ad spend is predicted to top $100 billion worldwide in 2016, but in order for this to happen marketers will need to be able to prove why mobile deserves such a large portion of their budgets.

Unfortunately, mobile ROI isn’t always the easiest thing to measure. While the metrics largely remain the same (conversions, leads, pipeline, revenue, etc.), the way the data is captured is very different. Smartphones are used differently than desktop computers, and in order to track your ad campaign success you need to adapt how you capture mobile analytics.

Optimize Your Campaigns With Complete Mobile Attribution

Optimization of any advertising campaign requires rock-solid attribution. Knowing what specific keywords, ads, and campaigns are driving people to take actions allows you to focus your ad spend on those things that are truly driving revenue to your business. Performance data for your ads and your campaigns are available inside of any advertising platform, but you are not able to connect these metrics back to actual prospects or revenue. Typically, this data is captured by the forms that you have on your website, but this is not sufficient for mobile for one key reason.

There is something fundamentally different about how customers interact with business on mobile devices compared to desktop. Customers do not want to connect with your business by filling out a form on their smartphone and instead opt for a simpler contact method – a phone call. Data from our research arm, DialogTech Insights, shows that calls from mobile sources are up 34% in the past 6 months alone. For many marketers this poses a huge problem. When somebody is served one of your display ads on their mobile device or hits that call button from their Google search results, what you thought was rock solid attribution vanishes into thin air. To fill this black hole in your attribution, you need to be able to attribute these calls the same way you would a form. With call attribution you can pinpoint which ads, search keywords, and campaigns are driving calls to your business. Only then can you truly optimize your mobile ad campaigns for what is driving conversions.

Prove Results by Capturing Every Mobile Conversion

Digital advertising is designed to drive results for your business. Only when ads drive customers to connect with your company can they be deemed successful. Online conversions are relatively easy to capture and this data can be found in digital ad platforms and web analytics platforms alike. Through the use of marketing automation and forms, online conversions can even be connected to prospects and tracked all the way through to revenue. But, if you are only able to connect revenue driven by online mobile conversions, you are missing a huge portion of revenue and your budget will take a hit.

With so many mobile users choosing to convert over the phone, it is crucial that you have the ability to capture these conversions and attribute them back to your advertising. And these are often the most valuable type of conversions because they turn into revenue 10 to 15 times more than web forms. Connecting these conversions to their opportunities and revenue allow you to prove how your mobile advertising efforts are paying off. You can justify a much larger mobile budget when you have the ability to prove how your mobile advertising is generating conversions both online and offline.

Marketers are pouring advertising dollars into mobile, and for good reason. But in order to continue increasing their mobile budgets they have to prove mobile’s value. When you only have the ability to capture online data and conversions you are not giving your mobile advertising a fair chance. To continue advocating for the growth of your mobile budget, you need to be able to capture conversions that occur both online and over the phone. Only then can you prove the full value of your mobile ads. If you are interested in learning more about how to optimize and prove the value of your mobile advertising, check out our recent webinar, Advanced Conversion Strategies for Mobile Search: Secrets to More Clicks, Calls, and Sales.

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[jamescurtismba]

3 Fearsome Digital Marketing Tips for Halloween

The trick-or-treating, mask-wearing, pumpkin-carving celebrations of 31st October are within touching distance.

Here are some simple digital marketing tips for getting into the spirit and winning over your online followers this weekend. No trick, all treat.

Dig out your broomsticks. Fetch the fake fangs. Halloween is just around the corner. Among the the jack-o’-lanterns, fancy dress and excitable kids trick or treating lies the opportunity to capture the imagination of your audience with your online activities. Here are some ideas:

Spookify your social media branding

Google doodles are so popular because they capture a moment in a playful, imaginative and evocative way. Think about what you can do to the visual appearance of your social media channels and emails to get into the spirit of Halloween. That could be as simple as changing the colour theme on your Twitter, finding a suitably spooky image for your background or adding some Halloween puns to your next newsletter.

Run a Halloween-themed competition

Halloween is nothing without pumpkins and fancy dress. Invite your followers to unleash their creative dark side with a competition to find the best jack-o’-lantern or the best costume theme. Your theme can be as poetic or prosaic as you like – go create! You can promote the competition across email and social media, with a well-chosen hashtag to enhance your reach. Boost engagement by whittling down the ten best entries and asking your followers to vote for their favourites.

Don’t forget about the power of visual content

Once you’ve gathered all of that visual content from your competition, put it to good use and create some images and collages to share on each of your channels. Visual content is a big deal on social media. Last year Socialbakers studied 30,000 brand pages on Facebook. Combing through the top 10 percent of each brand’s best performing posts, they found that 87% were photos. Posting a photo on Twitter, meanwhile, can bump retweets by 35 percent.

Over to you…

Exploring a topical theme is a great way to engage your visitors and can give you lots of opportunities to create fresh content.

The trick is to maximise the opportunity and play with Halloween in a way that intersects with your brand, products, services or brand values and that will help you stand out amongst your competitors this weekend!

Happy Halloween!

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[jamescurtismba]

4 Ways to Use Social Media to Increase Your Email List

By building an email list that’s full of quality prospects and customers, you have the chance to augment your sales and boost your brand. Your email list is valuable which is why you should continually add contacts to it. Keep the collection process rolling by using social media to enhance your strategy.

Here are four ways to go about building your email list via social media.

1. Use the Facebook call to action button

In December 2014, Facebook introduced the call to action button, which resides on a page’s cover photo. There are seven call to action buttons that pages choose from including, “Sign Up,” “Shop Now,” “Contact Us,” and “Watch Video.” This one, from the Dollar Shave Club page, says “Sign Up.”

When fans click it, they are taken to the company’s website, which has an enticing reason to sign up for the service: “A great shave for a few bucks a month. No commitment. No fees. No BS. Do it.” Here’s their page:

When fans click your email sign up button, take them to a page that includes a short list of reasons why they should give you their email address. For example, you could say, “Receive 10 percent off for signing up now,” or “Get daily deals in your inbox.”

2. Utilize Twitter’s lead generation cards

Within Twitter Ads, the social media site offers lead generation cards that allow you to promote your content and collect information on customers at the same time. Here’s an example of a card from Meridian & Co.:

First, write out what you’re offering your follower, and then add an interesting image to go along with the description. After clicking the call to action button, your follower will see all of his or her contact information. This will then be sent to your company.

These lead generation cards can promote anything you choose, from your email newsletter to a new, secret portion of your website – available only for select customers. As always, the reason for signing up must be enticing because people won’t give away their email address if they aren’t given a good reason for doing so.

3. Generate a Pinterest offer

Pinterest is a great place to target a niche audience. Sixty-eight percent of the users are women, 50 percent have children and 28.1 percent of users make $100,000+ per year.

The site allows you to visually stimulate your prospects and give them a pinnable, clickable offer. For example, you can post a photo and a snippet of a blog post like Nordstrom did here, allow users to pin it and give them the link to follow the blog post to its native site.

Once users click the link, you can ask them to sign up for your email list to access the content. On Pinterest, you have the option to promote any offering like coupons, blog posts and videos, simply by posting a picture that will entice users to click, as well as an accompanying link.

4. Post compelling photos on Instagram

In terms of email marketing, Instagram can be leveraged in a number of ways. You could:

Post a photo of an item that is discounted exclusively for your email newsletter subscribers.

Upload a video highlighting the benefits of signing up for your email newsletter.

Post a picture or video that details your exclusive email content.

There are two options on Instagram regarding link posting: You can either copy and paste your link onto your actual photo, or include it in your bio. Diamond Candles placed a link to its website within its bio, as seen here:

If you choose to paste the link onto your photo, make sure you include clear directions. Tell your followers that the email sign up link is in your bio or your profile, just like Diamond Candles did with a link to its Mother’s Day giveaway:

Integrating email with social media

Email and social media marketing are effective on their own, but when you combine the two, you have the opportunity to grow your email list exponentially and become even more engaged with your followers. By placing email sign up links within your social media channels, you’re given the chance to turn interested prospects into valuable customers.

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[jamescurtismba]

Don’t Just Solve Your Team’s Problems. Teach Them How!

If you care about developing the people on your team to be junior execs and eventually senior leaders, make sure they can manage the organizational, interpersonal, and market problems that will inevitably come their way even when you’re not around to solve them.

A Helping Hand on the Way Up the Ladder

Up-and-coming employees used to learn leadership through apprenticeship: They observed experienced executives as they thought their way through tough situations, made clear judgments, and communicated cogently the reasons behind their decisions. They were also guided around pitfalls, often getting crucial repetitive practice with a senior manager looking over their shoulder and commenting at every step.

But today’s norm is for even high-potential employees to receive no more than some standard instructional material on problem-solving. Even worse, the colleagues they observe often have no more experience than they do.

Three Leadership Lessons

How can you teach your team to analyze a problem before trying to solve it?

Present the facts. Don’t jump in to answer staffers’ questions with explanations and stories of what you would do in their place. You’ll only cut off their thinking, along with their participation, practice, and testing. And on complex topics — or if they’re feeling anxious — they may not have anything to suggest, and therefore might rely too much on your prompting. Even then, don’t give them an easy answer, tied with a bow. People implement plans with greater dedication and sense of context if they’ve helped build those plans themselves. So instead, array the facts for them and talk through the issues together — sort of like playing cards open-hand.

Probe with leading questions to help the team learn to anticipate the logical ramifications of their judgments, and to incorporate the likelihood of various potential outcomes into their thought process. Your questions might include: What do you think the result of that action would be? How would it affect that colleague/customer/executive/friend? How do you think they’d respond to that?

Ask about their evidence. What if the team’s assumptions are inaccurate? How would those errors affect their analysis and conclusions, as well as the potential outcomes? What if the truth is actually the opposite of what they believe? Try to provide hypotheticals that require new and expanded use of data, and encourage more robust solutions.

Yes, you may have to facilitate all of the discussions in the beginning, but over time your staff will learn how to define, analyze, and judge. Watch them develop the intellectual and pragmatic muscles to add their own thoughtful opinions and push at the issue themselves.

Taking Off the Training Wheels

Once they’ve had a little practice, sometimes the best teaching method is to let your team struggle with a problem for a while. That way, you can see how far they can take things on their own before you intervene. Keep in mind that not every problem needs to be fixed — at least not right away.

And although it may feel more efficient to direct staffers explicitly, you’re not really helping if you leave them incapable of handling their own problems later in their careers. So definitely let the team experiment. Just be sure they don’t hurt themselves, each other, or the organization while they do it.

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[jamescurtismba]

How the Internet of Things Is Transforming Your World

What happens when everyday items—everything from your thermostat to your home’s front door—are connected to the internet? That’s increasingly becoming a reality that now has a name all its own: The Internet of Things. But what does this mean for both large and small businesses, and what can they do to take advantage of it?

These are just a few of the questions that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation is exploring with its initiative, “The Internet of Everything.” Drawing on some of the industry’s leading voices, the project includes more than 30 essays on a variety of topics related to the subject.

Unsure about how the Internet of Things will affect you personally? Well, if you one day envision yourself cruising around in a self-driving car, you’ll be benefiting from the Internet of Things. Indeed, the technology underpinning driverless cars has the ability to transform R&D as we know it. The Foundation explains in an essay, “Driving Into a Connected Future—How Data Is Changing the Auto Industry,” from the Internet of Everything project:

“As cars gain access to more data about their environments from information fed to them via vehicles’ sensors and cameras, the Internet, global positioning satellite systems, and other systems, they will be able to become more autonomous—including the capability to take partial or complete control of the driving task. Automated cars have numerous safety and environmental benefits. The U.S. National Highway Safety Traffic Administration (NHTSA) estimates that around 94% of crashes are caused by driver error. The more autonomous capability hits the road, the more that crash rate is expected to go down.

Automated vehicles have other advantages as well. As NHTSA outlined in its Preliminary Statement of Policy Concerning Automated Vehicles in 2013, “Vehicle control systems that automatically accelerate and brake with the flow of traffic can conserve fuel more efficiently than the average driver. By eliminating a large number of vehicle crashes, highly effective crash avoidance technologies can reduce fuel consumption by also eliminating the traffic congestion that crashes cause every day on our roads. Reductions in fuel consumption, of course, yield corresponding reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.”

Intrigued? Then check out The Internet of Everything, where you can learn even more about how this emergent industry is transforming everything from healthcare and business, to government and transportation.

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[jamescurtismba]

5 Marketing Challenges For 2016 That B2B Marketers Need To Start Thinking About

It’s that time of year again, when everyone starts thinking about what next year will bring. It’s a time to both reflect on the gains of this past year and think about what we can do to prepare ourselves for the future.

Marketing technology changes faster than anyone can keep up, but at the same time, many of the challenges of the past few years remain challenges today. Here are five B2B marketing challenges that marketers will face in 2016:

1. Continued Maturation of Account-Based Marketing

Account-based marketing (ABM) became a huge focus for B2B marketers this year. It’s been a sales term for a while now, but marketers are finally catching up…and more importantly, they are now starting to have the technology to catch up.

Right now, account-based marketing entails things like setting up specific LinkedIn ad campaigns targeted at big accounts, and making sure that the messaging of those ads match the type of work the sales team is doing on those same accounts.

But what’s the next step?  How do marketers leverage the advances in digital marketing and the vast amount of data that is being collected to do even more effective ABM? What does ABM look like in 2016? We’re not sure…and that will be the challenge marketers face this upcoming year.

2. Marketing-Sales Alignment

SiriusDecisions research shows that “highly aligned B2B organizations achieve 19 percent faster revenue growth and 15 percent higher profitability.” According to the State of Pipeline Marketing survey, only one-third of organizations consider their marketing and sales teams tightly aligned. Organizational alignment, according to SiriusDecisions, is when an organization has a collection of technologies that are selected and architected to effectively execute core sales, marketing and product processes, measure the results and achieve those functions’ collective goals.

State of Pipeline Marketing Survey: Only ⅓ of organizations consider their marketing and sales teams tightly aligned

In 2016, marketers will need to think outside of their marketing silo when considering new technology and processes. It will take a shift in mindset to begin thinking about how their marketing decisions affect the sales team and the product team, in order to ensure that there is strategic organizational alignment.

3. Focusing on Quality Content, not Quantity

Content marketing is thriving in the B2B marketing world. It seems like just about every company has adopted it as a major marketing priority, and that of course leads to one thing: major clutter. In 2016, B2B marketing teams will need to figure out how to break through the clutter and that will be through quality — creating content that both resonates and has compounding value.

[Source: Tomasz Tunguz]

How do you know what content will live on and keep producing value? How do you recycle and optimize content for different formats?

4. Mapping the Customer Decision Journey

Knowing your customer has always been a pillar of marketing. It’s the fundamentals. That’s why it is so shocking that even in 2015, only 13 percent of companies firmly believe they understand the decision journeys of their customers, according to the Marketing Disruption Study (ANA and McKinsey & Co). And nearly half can’t measure the critical stages of that journey. With the amount of data that is now available and with all of the advances in marketing technology, that isn’t acceptable.

B2B companies, if they want to gain a competitive advantage, will need to research and invest in the marketing tools necessary to better understand the customer journey. Once marketers can better map the customer decision journey, they will be able to provide more value by matching their content and offer strategies to the correct stages in the funnel.

5. Connecting Marketing Spend to Revenue

According to the Walker Sands State of Marketing Technology 2015, 51% of marketers say their companies don’t invest enough on marketing technology.

And if you talk to their executives, that’s because marketers are currently unable to prove the value of their investments. If marketers want their bosses to invest, they have to be able to connect their activities to revenue — show that the money going out is doing something to bring money back in.

51% of marketers say their companies don’t invest enough on marketing technology (Walker Sands State of Marketing Technology 2015)

The 2015 State of Pipeline Marketing Report found that marketers who use marketing automation tools, CRMs, and attribution solutions enjoy a greater ROI…and are able to prove it through attribution.

[2015 State of Pipeline Marketing Report]

Marketing attribution connects marketing activities to their downstream revenue, allowing marketing to accurately receive revenue credit. It gives credit where it’s due. For example, with attribution, marketers will be able to say that the $30,000 spent on the PPC campaign drove $100,000 in revenue. If marketers can report like this, rather than saying it drove X amount impressions or Y amount of clicks, companies will be more open to investing in new marketing technology.

It all comes back to revenue.

Are you ready to take these challenges on?

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[jamescurtismba]

The Advantages of Adopting a Sales Playbook

What Is A Sales Playbook?

A Sales Playbook is the engineering and development of better sales processes. This is a team driven approach where the Sales Playbook is designed to make business development efforts more productive. The Playbook is often highly detailed with specific instructions to follow.

The Sales Playbook are also a living document that defines the strategy and goals to achieve a success. They can and do evolve over time. In it includes detailed description of the products and services your organization offers, group exercises, and relevant content like links to websites, client lists, etc.

There are also instructions for improvements, tools and resources to essentially be handed to a new hire to review on their first day on the job. Think of the Playbook as new staff orientations for those in business development.

Also included are written out coaching and techniques unique to your environment so you can Turn No Into Yes! When a playbook is well written, has clear instructions, etc. and if the sales representative has the aptitude for the job, they should be successful very quickly.

Why The Need For A Sales Playbook?

If you surveyed CEO’s and VP of Business Development chances are that training, and development are keys to reaching their sales quotas. Training a new hire is time-consuming. Playbooks are a coaching tool intended to get workers up to speed quickly, and defines the company culture. Sales Playbooks save everyone time and cuts down on confusion. Everyone knows their roles and if you stick to the plan, the sales program runs itself.

Even the best sales representative needs guidance and development from time to time. Then are those in sales with less experience who find it difficult to learn the ropes when there is no instructional manual. They are sent out into the world woefully unprepared expecting to close deals right out of the gate. Some of us are successful right out of the gate but most need help. That’s where the Sales Playbook is most effective.

They are repeatable and actionable steps that have been proven to close deals. If you stick with the script and have the aptitude to sell, then it works. If what you are doing is not working, then you make adjustments. You memorize the steps involved and know from experience what does not work. That’s essentially why a Playbook is necessary. A good sales representative has mental playbooks already. The key though is sharing that information or institutional knowledge so that the organization nets more sales.

Creation of the Playbook can help to change the company culture by following a uniform strategy. By stepping back and defining goals and providing a roadmap, an organization change their business processes, systems (CRM, etc.) and internal staffing structure in one swoop.

I Know From Personal Experience

First off, I have written several Playbooks. I know they work and I have seen the results. When I have written Playbooks for the companies I worked for, in some instances I would come in and would be the first hire for business development. I eventually wrote a Playbook because I easily forget things. I have gotten so comfortable abiding by Playbooks that I won’t go into an organization with at least some concept or plan for battle.

But let me back up a minute. I feel that the need for the Sales Playbook, is to help newbies be professional and treat everyone with respect. Sometimes I hear such horror stories about how the prospect was treated or misled by a competitor when evaluating their product or services. This makes my job even harder because when I met with the same prospect, after my competitors met with them, I am treated with caution.

The prospect may assume that meeting with me might be an uncomfortable “buy now!” experience. After the meeting, the feedback I receive was positive. I need to have all members of our sales team have a positive experience and by following the Playbook, this ensure uniformity in our approach.

I close a lot of business simply because I observe the Golden Rule: Treat others and you would want to be treated. I am respectful and honest with my prospects. I learned this through years of experience. Whenever I am bringing on additional members to the sales team the first thing they will read and understand is the Golden Rule. I want to start them off right. I wished all our competitors in our industry would follow a Playbook.

Advice For Creating a Successful Playbook

Do not make it too overly instructional. I always hate it when a boss, who has had some early success selling the product or service, tells you do only do it their way. Everyone in business development has their own style and their approach to developing deals. The Playbook needs to be a flexible document, or more of staying in between the lines.

Avoid industry speak in the Playbook. Keep in mind the Playbook is relevant mostly for new hires. They may not yet know the jargon just yet. Further, one of the sections of the Playbook should include a FAQ section and also common industry acronyms. In a couple of the playbooks I have written I even included buyer personas and explained the job function of ideal target prospects.

The Playbook is the law of the land. There are no if’s, and’s or but’s! The Playbook should also include the job description for every member of the business development team (appendix is fine) and their corresponding goals and objectives. The Playbook should be considered the judge, jury and executioner. Keep in mind that since the business development team creates and periodically reviews the Playbook together, it’s not like anyone won’t have input.

Playbooks require significant collaboration/alignment/change of culture and drive major productivity of the sales team. Playbooks require sales representatives to actively contribute and offer their own experiences to enhance the foundation of the playbook. Sales playbooks are highly specific documentation that tells the salesperson what to do when and how to do it and why it is being done.

Review it periodically. You should get in the habit of scheduling a review ever quarter or at the very least twice a year. This is an opportunity to review of your sales team’s processes, strategies, and what is working. This is a group driven effort where the sales and marketing team has a chance to bond and develop ways to be highly successful as a team. The review is also an opportunity to improve team communications and work out any issues.

Experience Counts

Consider outsourcing the management of the Playbook as a new project. If your organization is concerned about employee buy-in, fairness, or has doubts about launching the Playbook, then bring in someone to manage the project. You could hire me, I have written several playbooks and have the steps memorized. I know what works and what doesn’t. If not me, than do your research, but make sure that your solution is not necessarily “coaching” or “training” in a one-day seminar. There are firms that can do this as well as the coaching and or training as part of the process.

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[jamescurtismba]

How A Content Marketing Strategy Impacts Your Bottom Line

Content marketing is having a moment. More than 75 percent of companies plan to increase their content marketing budget this year, with the increase set to comprise a substantial portion of the budget: On average, companies are planning to allocate nearly a third of their total marketing budget to content marketing.

Why the push for an inbound approach? Content marketing is about attracting attention through a more genuine connection. Instead of something overly promotional, your audience expects something that has high value with very little branding. The goal is to encourage engagement through this content that eventually fosters a relationship and will lead to a conversion.

Attention, relationships, and conversions all make up various levels of the sales funnel, and part of content marketing’s appeal is it can reach your target audience at each stage. Fractl recently outlined how an effective content marketing strategy – specifically one that combines an alignment of on- and off-site content – can help brands throughout every step of the sales funnel.

Here’s how content marketing impacts three stages of the funnel: generating awareness, building trust and converting leads.

Increase awareness through an off-site promotion strategy that targets authoritative sites.

Content marketing success relies heavily on authoritative publishers, and luckily for marketers, these publishers are always looking for a steady stream of great content. Another benefit to working with publishers? It is the most effective way for your content to impact consumers at the awareness level. More specifically, additional gains from earned media include:

Search engines indexing your site higher through a strong inbound link portfolio

Growth in traffic to your site from new and returning visitors

A higher return on the content you created because you’re actively promoting it versus simply relying on natural syndication

A great example of an effective outreach strategy is Groove’s highly targeted guest blogging efforts, which helped the software startup reach more than 1 million people. One guest post alone, for instance, earned the company more than 10,000 social shares along with more than 20,000 unique visitors. Although the overall influence of the content can be impacted by multiple factors – including the date and time of when the post is published – one thing is clear: Guest blogging is a cost-effective way to impact the top of the sales funnel.

Establish yourself as a thought leader and build trust with your target audience through valuable on-site content.

An effective blogging strategy doesn’t have to rely solely on earning guest posts, though. An on-site blog is a great way to establish authority – a crucial step in the sales funnel that will continue to drive your leads down to possible conversions.

The growth of KISSmetrics’ blog is a perfect example of one brand using on-site posts to position itself as a leader in its industry. Last January, more than 60 percent of the site’s leads for that month were generated through the blog.

Other on-site content that can increase your authority? White papers, case studies and eBooks—especially when grouped together. For instance, Cox Media created a “Success Kit” for small businesses that included an eBook and video. The bundle led to more than 500 downloads and generated more than 2,000 leads.

Drive conversion events through gated on-site content to optimize bottom line results.

It’s clear that a mix of on- and off-site content can generate awareness and drive traffic – a successful content marketing strategy has the potential to increase traffic by 850 percent – but how do you ensure conversions? Make sure your content includes a call to action.

Remember that although the goal of any content should be to drive conversions, it has a greater chance of driving conversion events. A common one is asking your audience to provide an email address in exchange for your content. This initiates a conversation with a potential consumer and offers the opportunity to provide them with additional content that can drive them further down the funnel.

However, this content can also be optimized for lower-funnel conversions. For instance, BuzzStream launched a combination of large-scale, research-based campaigns that earned placements on high-authority sites. These campaigns were hyper-targeted to consumers who were already close to conversions, and because all off-site content led to a gated on-site asset, the company managed to break its record for new subscriber sign-ups.

Another way to optimize bottom line results is to shorten your sales cycle. For example, PR Newswire launched a content marketing strategy in an effort to accelerate its sales funnel of more than 25,000 potential consumers. Through highly targeted, automated emails and expanding its client interaction to multiple channels, the company shortened its sales cycle by 30 percent in only a year.

The biggest takeaway from our research?

Carefully align content with your business goals while maintaining high value for your consumers.

Although there is no go-to content marketing strategy that will ensure every potential lead ends up at the bottom of your sales funnel, offering highly targeted, off-site content that leads back to conversion-optimized, on-site content will help initiate a conversation with your target audience.

Check out this deck highlighting five additional case studies that reveal how content marketing can drive your bottom line. Understanding how your content can benefit each stage of the funnel will help stimulate ideas that will have a profound impact on awareness, traffic, search rankings, and lead generation.

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[jamescurtismba]

10 Clever Halloween Costumes for Content Marketers

As a costumer, former Drama Club kid, and lifelong geek, Halloween is one of my favorite holidays. I mean, hello: You get to dress up in costumes, eat candy, and commune with the dead! Best. Holiday. Ever.

I already know what my costume is going to be this year (I started thinking about it weeks ago), but I know not everyone is as organized/obsessive as I am. For all of you who are still debating a good party outfit, here are 10 content marketing-tastic ideas to consider. (All crappy Photoshopping courtesty of yours truly.)

Idea 1: Instagram Photo

Source: LindaHoang.com

This is a super easy option if you didn’t inherit the sewing / crafty gene and you don’t want to buy an expensive outfit. As an added bonus, you don’t have to worry about cumbersome prosthetics, wigs, or body paint getting in the way of your midnight revels.

Idea 2: Chicago Manual of Style Gang Member

Source: Digital Spy

You may remember this amazing article from The Onion awhile back about the gang war between Chicago Manual and AP Style adherents. Just buy an orange jumpsuit and carry your CMS copy with you, and you’re all set. (You could also paint on a fake Oxford comma tattoos if you really wanted to be authentic.)

Idea 3: Brainstorm

Source: Radiolab

This is an adorable costume idea that wouldn’t take much to put together. Just glue a plastic brain to a hat, get some lightning bolt earrings, and wear grey, and you’re done.

Idea 4: Wysiwg Editor

Step 1: Get a custom print t-shirt with Wysiwg menu icons on it, like this:

Step 2: Grab your glasses, pica ruler, and red pencil.

Step 3: Correct everyone’s style and formatting all night.

Idea 5: Content Distribution Monster

Source: Everything Octopus

Start with your standard octopus or cthulhu costume, and add icons for your favorite content distribution channels to the ends of each tentacle. Ta-da!

Idea 6: SEO Wizard

Source: Amazon

Lord of the Rings fans, rejoice: You can still get another use out of that Gandolf costume sitting in your closet! Dust off those grey robes, cut out some SEO-related terms in felt, and hot glue those suckers on. Presto: You’re now an SEO wizard.

Idea 7: Mad Data Scientist

Source: iO9

My favorite mad scientist of recent times is, of course, Dr. Horrible. For this costume, start with a standard white lab coat and gloves. Goggles are optional, but nice. Then pin on a few charts from your analytics program of choice—or draw them with fabric pens, if you want a permanent look—and you’ll be ready to impress people with your insane data science skills (and personality).

Idea 8: Meerkat

Source: Amazon

The hardest part about this costume will be figuring out how to keep your paws up while holding your smartphone and live streaming at the same time.

Idea 9: Rand Fishkin as the Wizard of M(OZ)

Source: HalloweenCostumes.com

Rand calls himself the “Wizard of Moz.” Combine a Wizard of Oz costume, handlebar moustache, and some serious SEO knowledge, and you too can aspire to Rand’s greatness—if only for an evening.

Idea 10: Walking Infographic

Source: Getty

Pick your favorite infographic (or better yet, create one that’s all about you!), get a signboard, and glue an enlarged version of the data to the board. The chicken suit is totally optional, but a nice touch.

Before you go: Tell me what you’re dressing up as this Halloween in the comments!

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[jamescurtismba]

Wal-Mart Is Testing Drones For Home Delivery

Wal-Mart Stores is the newest company to test drone-based delivery. The company on Monday filed with U.S. regulators for permission to test home delivery with the devices. Users would be able to receive products at home and experience the ease of curbside delivery.

Wal-Mart also plans to use the drones to check warehouse investories. The company’s test is in direct response to Amazon’s own recent drone delivery tests.

The world’s largest retailer by revenue has for several months been conducting indoor tests of small unmanned aircraft systems – the term regulators use for drones. The company’s filing requests the ability to test the drone delivery system outdoors.

Wal-Mart is asking the Federal Aviation Administration for permission to research drone use in “deliveries to customers at Walmart facilities, as well as to consumer homes.”

FAA Deputy Administrator Michael Whitaker said in June that the agency expected to finalize regulations for drone flights within the next 12 months.

Amazon has already said that it would go live with its drone delivery service the moment federal regulations are approved.

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[jamescurtismba]

Uber Is Raising Another $1 Billion For A $70 Billion Valuation

In June 2015, Uber was valued at $18.2 billion. Soon, it could be worth $70 billion.

According to CNNMoney the ride-sharing service is looking to secure another $1 billion in funding. The raise would value the company between $60 billion and $70 billion.

Uber already claims the title as the most valuable privately-held company in the world, valued at more than Chinese smartphone company Xiaomi, which is already profitable.

$70 billion is a huge number, but it’s important to remember that investors only think the company is worth that much money. As of now it is all billions of dollars on paper.

When the $1 billion funding round closes it will be the eight round of capital for the ride-sharing service since it launched five years ago.

To put the company’s valuation in perspective, it would be worth more than Ford and GM.

The company now runs its service in more than 300 cities and 63 countries.

CEO Travis Kalanick said last week that the company won’t be going public anytime soon.

Uber plans to use the $1 billion it raises to expand service in the United States and fight off competing apps in other parts of the world.

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