Saturday, 31 January 2015
6 Productivity Hacks For Content Marketers #socialtoolkit
Friday, 30 January 2015
How to Pick the Right Domain Name (+ 11 Domain Name Tools, FS090)
Snapchat Outgrows The Friend Zone
Discover is Snapchat’s big new play in the world of media. It’s a special tab in the app powered by content publishers like ESPN, Yahoo, etc., offering daily long-form content with videos, articles and, of course, advertisements.
Brands can buy advertisements against these Discover “Editions,” which play every three or four swipes. It’s really not all that bad. Read MoreThursday, 29 January 2015
Swipe Raises $6.5M To Combine Tinder And Photo Sharing Clichés Into Something Cool
What if you swiped through Instagram rather than scrolling? What if posts were anonymous until you commented and the author replied? What if you’re already too old to know what kids like? Swipe raises these questions, and it’s that last one that may have prompted top early-stage firms Sherpa Ventures, First Round Capital, Lowercase Capital and Binary Capital to invest $6.5 million… Read MoreA Marketing Process That Built Two 7-Figure Companies in Three Years
Imgur Releases A Fast Video-To-GIF Converter
Here’s an embarrassing secret: Before today, I’d never made a GIF.
I mean, obviously I’ve seen them, laughed when they’ve been passed along, and made a note so that I could share them myself later. I’ve even searched for them once or twice on Giphy. Read MoreFacebook boasts nearly 1.4 billion monthly users in newly released data
Love it or loathe it, Facebook is as integral to our day-to-day lives as checking email or texting that special someone. And in case there was any doubt, the social network unleashed new data on Wednesday to prove it.
Nearly 1.4 billion people around the world use Facebook every month. Some 890 million people visit it daily and now view more than 3 billion videos a day. Unsurprisingly, much of the growth is happening on the mobile side. Almost half of Facebook's 1.89 billion mobile users now check the social network exclusively on their phones and tablets. In other words? While most people continue to use their desktop computers to share, like and comment, mobile-only use is quickly catching up Read more...
More about Facebook, Earnings, Social Media, Apps Software, and MobileBecome Intelligent: Use Google Analytics Intelligence Alerts to your Advantage
Posted by Martijn_Scheijbeler
Everybody remembers being in college, writing down activities in a logbook, hoping the hours they worked on a project were enough for a sufficient grade. After two years as an online marketer/SEO, I realized what makes writing down activities so important.
The intent of this post is to save you from making the same mistakes I made. If you're working for a brand, you probably want to make sure you're on top of all your KPIs, but few of us are able to carefully track our valued metrics 24 hours a day.
So in addition to providing you with some useful insights into why it’s so important to write down everything you do, I’ll also give you some useful tips on how to get this started with the tools you likely already use. Most importantly, I'll show you how to keep track of drastic changes in web traffic and user engagement.
How Meta Robots & XML Issues Impacted My Perception of Web Analytics
To give you an example of why it’s useful to keep track of what you and your team are working on, let me take you back to an incident I experienced roughly two years ago. My team tested an upgrade for functionally, but forgot to check the involved technical SEO elements. After a massive drop in keyword positions for all of our top (landing) pages, we did our best to retrace our steps. In the process, we discovered we had implemented the META robots noindex tag on all pages. I’d love to say I’m joking, but our drop in search traffic says otherwise.
I think you get the point—and that it’s probably best if I don't tell you about the time that we returned XML to Google instead of proper HTML—record everything. To this end, I’m going to share my insights into what I like to track on a daily and weekly basis via Google Intelligence Events, and share occurred events with our team, using the annotations of Google Analytics for our sites. I’m also hoping to hear your ideas on anything I'm missing so that we can learn from each other.
Rebecca Lehman made a great start back in 2011 with this, but in the past years a lot of new metrics and dimensions have been added to Google Analytics, making it easier to keep track of even more changes.
What are Google Intelligence Alerts?
Analytics monitors your website's traffic to detect significant statistical variations, and then automatically generates alerts, or Intelligence Events, when those variations occur. - Google Analytics Help Guides
Google Analytics provides you with predefined alerts that guide you through certain changes in engagement, traffic or visitor data, but they are hard to notice if you're not looking at your web analytics on an hourly basis. However, you are able to add custom intelligence alerts that update you of any changes that are important to you (e.g., when your traffic increases by 10% day over a single day). The tool makes it possible for you to respond faster to changing data, and you can also use it to keep your colleagues up to date.
Google Intelligence Alerts enable you to monitor your web analytics in many different ways, but they’re not without their disadvantages. Let’s look at both sides of the argument:
| Advantages | Disadvantages |
| You'll be notified within 24 hours. | You're not able to share intelligence alerts with your colleagues. |
| If you live in the US, you can get texts message alerts of important changes. | If you don't live in the US, you can't receive text messages. |
| You can keep track of almost every metric and dimension in Google Analytics. | Setting up a large number of alerts is a time-consuming process. |
| You can use your intelligence alerts in multiple properties as they belong to your personal Google Analytics account and data. |
|
Note: The email reports from Intelligence Alerts have a certain delay. Hopfully Google Analytics will improve this delay in the future, but for now it's the best we have to work with.
Why is This Useful for You?
I've provided you with just one example of how Intelligence Alerts can be useful. Now let me give you more insight into why it's easier for you to keep track of changes with Google Alerts. The average e-commerce store has thousands of products, each of which is likely to be impacted by seasonal preferences such as who's buying umbrellas in mid-summer. But what if it suddenly starts raining and your warehouse is running out of umbrellas? What if you could set up alerts to see if sudden product categories change in performance based on your data in Google Analytics?
Overview
Image: personal screenshots
On the left side of your Google Analytics Reporting dashboard you have the ability to view the daily, weekly and monthly automatic alerts that Google has already triggered for you. This overview provides the most important metrics and dimensions for your site. For example, the screenshot below shows you the change in views throughout April 2014 for one of my accounts. Naturally, by clicking on details you are provided with more details on the period.
Image: personal screenshots
As you can see, the detailed view shows you the metrics again so that you can determine how importance each change is to you business. In this case, the graph tells you what the per-session goal value is, so you can see the weekly progress this metric made and why it triggered an automatic alert.
Daily, Weekly & Monthly Events
Image: personal screenshots
Image: personal screenshots
Overview: In the Admin of your Google Analytics View you're able to see an overview of current intelligence alerts. Click the New Alert button at the top.
Image: personal screenshots
Now you have the opportunity to add a name to the alert and select the profiles you would like this intelligence event to apply to. By selecting the time period, you will be able to compare the current day, week or month to its previous variant. By setting the alert conditions, you have the opportunity to select the metrics and dimensions that must change in order to trigger a notification.
To save you some time, I've created a couple dozen intelligence alerts. The only things you need to do are log into your Google Analytics account and make sure you're ready to get overwhelmed with weekly or daily alerts. Seriously, though, don't feel compelled to add all of the alerts. Select only those that have the most value for you and your business.
Error/Panic
A couple of alerts could help you monitor the status of your site and the Google Analytics integration into the site itself. You'll likely want to know when certain tracking codes are removed and pages trigger errors:
- No traffic
- No goal completions
- No e-commerce conversions
- 404 Tracking (based on this great blog post)
- Revenue drop of XX% or no revenue
- Referrals from your own domain (this alert tells you that a tracking code is missing on certain pages)
Engagement
These alerts are ideal for publishers with lots of traffic:
Traffic Sources
If you suddenly have more traffic, but don't know where the traffic is coming from, the alerts for traffic sources could come in very handy:
- Increase / Decrease in direct traffic
- Increase / Decrease in organic traffic
- Increase / Decrease in paid traffic
- Increase / Decrease in referral traffic from a specific source
E-commerce
Monitoring the conversion rate for different browsers will make you aware of any problems your site has playing nice with certain browsers:
Google Adwords
If you're running Google Adwords, you undoubtedly have alerts set up. But it would be handy to know the performance onsite and to see the corresponding spend associated with it.if your spend goes up or down.
My favorite annotations are reports of bugs, new website features, and UX/ CRO improvements to popular pages.
Image: personal screenshots
P.S. Dear Google Analytics product managers, if one of you is reading this, please make adding annotations available via the Google Analytics Management API. It would make it so much cooler if, for example, we could add a new annotation to our data for every new post in WordPress.
TLDR; Intelligence Alerts automatically keep you up to date on pre-configured changes in your data. With a daily email updates, you'll never miss important changes associated with your website's data, traffic or engagement.
Please let me know in the comments what your favorite intelligence alerts are and how you use them to your advantage. If you have any other tools that you use to keep yourself informed, don't hesitate to share them.
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4 Promotion Strategies Used by the Best Business Bloggers
Editor's Note: Today's post comes courtesy of Michael Gerard, CMO of Curata. He is responsible for Curata's marketing strategy and all related activities. Michael has more than 25 years of marketing and sales experience, having successfully launched and sustained three start-up ventures, as well as driving innovative customer creation strategies for large technology organizations (IDC, Kenan Systems, Prospero (mZinga) and Millipore).
Curata's Business Blogging Survey of 428 marketers revealed what it takes to develop and sustain a highly successful blog. Key findings of the study demonstrate that blogs have most certainly not disappeared. Instead, business blogs have morphed into a mature part of enterprises’ content marketing and publishing ecosystem. For example:
●80% of marketers use blogs as part of their content marketing strategies.
●70% of business bloggers have had their blogs for more than two years.
●44% of business bloggers have more than two blogs.
There is an exclusive group of business bloggers, which we’ll call “The 10K Club”, who receive more than 10,000 page views per month. This groups represents 21.8% of all business bloggers in the study. These bloggers certainly create great content, but they are also experts at thinking “out of the box” when it comes to developing innovative promotion strategies.
Here are 4 promotion secretes of the "10K Business Bloggers Club:"
1. Reuse- Repurposing content is a fantastic way to better promote your blog content, and create new resources at a lower cost versus creating new content. The Content Marketing PyramidTM provides a useful framework for creating and repurposing content.
The top of the pyramid contains heavy content, typically gated. (e.g., eBook) As you move down the pyramid, content is lighter and more easily absorbed and “digestible” for your audience. The base of the Content Marketing Pyramid is curated content, which is relatively low effort and lends itself to high frequencies.
Although this framework is commonly used to create smaller pieces of content from large surveys or thought leadership pieces; the best content marketers have learned that content can also flow upwards in the pyramid from items such as blog posts. Several of our 10K Club members have already discovered this; for example, one survey respondent said:
“We are preparing to package our best blogs into subject matter-specific eZines, which we will post on our website and promote”
2. Sales Enablement. Sales enablement, as defined by IDC, is:“The delivery of the right information to the right person at the right time in the right format and in the right place to assist in moving a specific sales opportunity forward.“
Why should content marketers and bloggers care about sales enablement? Because it is a fantastic opportunity to increase content marketing’s impact on the sales pipeline. Bloggers, in general, are under-utilizing the potential impact of their own content on sales enablement; however, not 10K Club members. The 10K Club are taking full advantage of this opportunity; for example, 10K bloggers:
•Are equipping sales reps with content they can forward to their prospects. The best sales folks understand the importance of maintaining frequent communication with their prospects; and these sales reps would like nothing more than a link to a valuable blog post published by their own organization that they can send to a prospect. The best bloggers understand this, and frequently email content to their reps to share with prospects.
•Repurposing the best posts as sales enablement assets. Great content marketers and bloggers are always thinking up new and innovative ways to deliver valuable content to their audience. 10K Club bloggers often repackage their own blog posts into content/assets that can be used by their sales team. For example, the Curata blogging team developed an in-depth post on Content Marketing Analytics & Metrics. This post was transformed into a tool for use by the Curata sales team. Posting these types of content assets into sales enablement tools such as SAVO also represent a best practice.
3. Influencer Marketing. Wikipedia defines Influencer marketing as a form of marketing in which focus is placed on specific key individuals (or types of individuals) rather than the target market as a whole. The following examples provide insight into how bloggers can use influencer marketing to promote their content and company:
- Buzzsumo: How to Assess Content Marketing Performance
- Not only did Buzzsumo use curation in this post, but they also cited a number of key content marketing influencers throughout the post. (i.e., Rebecca Lieb of Altimeter and Lee Odden of TopRank Marketing)
- Curata: Content Marketing Predictions: 6 Big Themes for 2015.
- By creating an infographic made of all expert predictions for 2015, we were able to target this specific group of influencers. This also helped promote the piece because these influencers, who have very large followings, are likely to share the post.
4. Advocate Enablement. Top bloggers know how to turn their most passionate customers into a community of advocates who will amplify their messaging. This is achieved through:
●Providing exceptionally valuable content.
●Ensuring that customers grasp an idea within 30 seconds.
●Using the customer's own information where possible to further engage them in the content, thereby providing more motivation for them to promote the blog.
●Providing customers the opportunity to easily share content with their own social community.
Some examples include:
- Enabling sharing directly from a blog site.
- Using advocacy tools such as GaggleAmp or influitive to identify and mobilize your audience.
- For additional examples, check out Neal Schaffer’s post on “11 Effective Ways to Use Social Media to Promote your Content” for additional insight on advocate enablement.
To learn more about the strategies and tactics of the best business bloggers, check out the survey results in Business Blogging Secrets Revealed.
Tuesday, 27 January 2015
Marissa Mayer Pretends “MaVeNS” Isn’t A Silly Acronym, Says It Represents Yahoo’s Future
Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has been talking for a while now about how mobile, video, native advertising, and social are the company’s key growth areas. Now she’s come up with an interesting way to refer to them — MaVeNS.
I don’t know how you feel, but personally, I’m not convinced that it’s, um, the best acronym ever. I mean, the unusual capitalization is… Read MoreIs Snapchat about to become a publishing powerhouse?
For Snapchat, it isn't enough to have 100 million users sharing ephemeral photos every month. With Snapchat Discover, a long-awaited feature unveiled on Tuesday, the Los Angeles-based startup wants to be a hub for media content, too.
Snapchat Discover allows media companies to publish content to a new section of Snapchat. Staying true to the app's ephemeral nature, that media content disappears after 24 hours
What remains to be seen is whether reader interest will vanish that fast, too.
See also: Snapchat breaks into media with Discover
At launch, there are 10 partners: CNN, Cosmopolitan, the Daily Mail, ESPN, Food Network, National Geographic, People, Vice, Yahoo! News and Warner Music. Each partner currently publishes a batch of content called a "daily edition," averaging between 5 and 10 stories. Read more...
More about Media, Startups, Social Media, Apps Software, and MobileThe best of the blizzard in photos and Vines
An all-out blizzard has slammed the northeastern U.S. with a thick blanket of snow, and it just keeps getting worse.
More than 5,500 flights have already been canceled. Several states have put in place travel bans for the sake of safety. Even major transit systems like the MTA, MBTA and Amtrak have suspended their service for Tuesday. This storm is no joke.
But even so, there were souls brave enough to make the trek to parks, bridges and rooftops just to get that one solid capture. From slushy streets, to snowmen, to portraits under falling snowflakes, we curated our favorite photos and videos shared using the hashtag #MashaBlizzard. Read more...
More about Weather, Vine, Instagram, Snow, and Social Media6 Marketing Strategies to Speed Up a Longer Sales Cycle
Have you ever purchased a car? Or a home? Personally, I rent and over-utilize Uber, but I can imagine that the typical consumer of these valuable items does not simply hop on Google, type in “new car,” and hit “buy now.”
Along with real estate and automotive, there are a plethora of other industries known for their longer sales cycles, such as most industries within the B2B space, software, consulting services, insurance, finance, and the list goes on. Basically, anything that costs a heavy penny and/or has a contract tied to it typically falls into the longer sales cycle category.
Marketers are continuously trying to create engaging content, generate buzz, and nurture leads, in an effort to shorten the sales cycle and push more people through it, but with the longer decision-making process the challenges are much higher. Yes, products and services with longer sales cycles typically cost more and lead to more revenue, but marketers need to make sure that they’re not spending more of their budget to gain the sale then the sale itself is actually worth (cough, cough, ROI is critical).
Hold up, what is a sales cycle?
“A sales cycle is the series of predictable phases required to sell a product or a service. Sales cycles can vary greatly among organizations, products and services, and no one sale will be exactly the same.” - piperdrive
Most definitions speak of the sales cycle being the time between making the first touch point and closing the deal. The sales cycle encompasses marketing efforts to generate and maintain interest, along with the selling process to engage and convert into customers. For this article we’ll be diving into the marketing side of the cycle. So what period of time signifies a sales cycle as long as opposed to short? There’s no official time period to mark this, but I would argue that any sale that typically takes several touch points (for example, paid search, display, email marketing, organic, white paper download etc.), and spans over several weeks to months is typically considered a longer sales cycle.
If you’re a marketer then you are likely familiar with the concept of the marketing or purchase funnel, a model that dates back to 1898 that maps out the customer journey starting at the wide opening of the funnel and spiraling down until engrossed into the customer phase. The stages vary per business, but typically include awareness, interest, desire, and action. Several marketing scientists have come up with various theories suggesting the funnel should be revamped into a pyramid or circle. “Consumers are now more informed, connected, and empowered than ever. Does the funnel still work in a digital, social, mobile age?” pondered a study published in the Harvard Business Review. Asking companies such as Google, Sephora, Twitter, and Visa, researchers found that: “the primary problem with the funnel is the buying process is no longer linear. Prospects don’t just enter at the top of the funnel; instead, they come in at any stage, jump stages, stay in a stage indefinitely, or move back and forth between them.” The study goes on to explain McKinsey’s Customer Decision Journey model, which is circular rather than linear.
Whether your funnel is linear, circular, or fluorescently rainbow patterned, the bottom line is that a significant quantity of qualified leads need to be moving through your sales cycle to earn you money and grow your business. So what can be done to battle against a longer sales cycle and keep your leads engaged and moving? After extensive research and in-depth conversations with experienced marketing professionals across B2B industries, I’ve discovered these 6 marketing tactics that will help not only cut down the length of your sales cycle, but also push a larger audience through the cycle.
#1: Implement a “Top of the Funnel” Paid Search Strategy
Take a moment to reflect on the last time you made an expensive purchase. One of the first things you likely did is conducted some research on Google to see what your options were, did some comparison shopping, and just got a general sense of what companies and offerings were in the space. I do this all the time even with smaller purchases, like a massage appointment or new piece of clothing, but with larger purchases that are more of a financial commitment, the chances of that being the first and last action you take are slim to none. This needs to be kept in mind when implementing your paid search strategy (which is absolutely necessary!).
If you’re doubting why you need to pay for ads on Google, then banish these thoughts from your mind and start using the more logical side of your brain. Longer sales cycles go hand in hand with extensive research, and guess where your leads likely start? Google! If you’re not appearing in the SERPs then you are losing the huge audience that is conducting research to eventually make a purchase; if you are showing up in the top positions then you’re presented with the opportunity to gain site visitors that you can then nurture and eventually convert into loyal, paying customers.
So how do you distinguish your offers as “top of the funnel?” Well, you need to conduct thorough keyword research and avoid terms like “buy now,” “apply now,” or “signup today” – you get the gist. If your call-to-actions are too aggressive and low-down in the funnel, then the searchers are going to feel like you’re proposing on the first date. Take a step back and get into the mind-set of the searcher. Instead cater your paid search experience to…
- Target keywords for people conducting research. For instance if you are selling marketing software, target “marketing automation help” or “marketing management solution.”
- Present an ad that highlights why you’re better than your competitors. You’re most likely going to be appearing right alongside them (hopefully in front) so your ad copy needs to highlight some compelling offers. Do you have free shipping or a money back guarantee policy that your top competitor doesn’t offer? Then create ad extensions, such as sitelinks and callout extensions, to highlight these benefits. Check out the example below from Marketo. This ad is great because it highlights several benefits of their software, and gives it validation with social proof from their followers on Google+. It’s also not overly aggressive with language that hints at making a purchase; rather the links all direct to educational offers, which brings me to my next point…
- Create landing pages that cater to educational content such as a white paper download or e-book rather than presenting your product or offering off the bat. Remember, these people are top of the funnel. If they already knew about your service they probably wouldn’t be searching. Direct them to a page that provides educational content, continue to nurture them, and push them closer to commitment.
#2: Align Content and Offerings with Progressions within the Sales Cycle
Have you ever received an offering prompting you to opt into a newsletter or sign up for a demo when you weren’t even familiar with the company’s brand? You look cross-eyed at the email and hit your trash icon while simultaneously rolling your eyes. Pushing too hard before the lead is ready will blow up in your face. But how do you ensure potential leads don’t slip through the cracks?
- Provide on-going thought-leadership. Do not serve up your offerings right away, but rather establish brand awareness and credibility with quality content. “We like to stay top of mind from a marketing perspective by providing ongoing thought leadership,” says Laura Taylor, WordStream’s Vice President of Acquisition and Experience Design. “Part of a robust marketing strategy is to make sure you have educational content all along the funnel.”
- When the time is right, integrate your thought-leadership content with promotional offerings. There needs to be a strategized balance between education content and offers that showcase your product. “If all you have is thought leadership, but nothing to evaluate your product and position it as a solution to solve a problem then leads become stuck,” says Laura. “Another pitfall would be offering all product promotional materials like buying guides and demos. There needs to be a balance and flow, where your content is being offered along the cycle and leads don’t consistently feel like you’re trying to back them into a corner.”
- Look at the first action taken and prescribe from there. WordStream’s Lead Nurturing Manager, Callahan McGuinness, explained to me how important the first action taken is because it shows where the lead is within the funnel. For example if they sign up for a trial then the assumption can be made that they’re a bit more knowledgeable because they took the action to sign up and actually explore the software. “That first action helps you know what to put in front of them and how often,” says Callahan.
- Scale back on marketing emails once a lead becomes an SQL (sales qualified lead): If a lead is getting closer and closer to converting and now assigned to a sales representative to guide them through the final stages, then marketing messages need to tone it down a notch. “Not only is an SQL getting marketing emails, but also emails from sales so once the lead turns into an SQL we scale back significantly so they can build that personal relationship with the rep,” says Callahan. The SQL is then also taken out of new content downloads and webinar invites which are for those in the earlier stages in the funnel.
#3: Drive Action by Making the Experience Personalized & Relating with Each Prospect
I’d assume your inbox is often swamped with marketing emails that you have to scroll to the bottom to find that tiny “unsubscribe” option. Have you ever called a business in hopes of speaking to (gasp) a real-live, breathing human-being, but instead are directed from one automated operator to another? We’re all constantly swamped with marketing messages the second we wake up and scroll through our social feeds. People are becoming pretty excellent at dismissing them so how do you make your touch-points during the sales cycle more effective?
Well, how about personalizing the experience? When a company is outrageously promotional, slapping their brand in front of your face, it’s an instant turn-off. In contrast, when the company connects on a more personalized level and gains an actual understanding of your interests, then your engagement level increases. But first you need to gain the trust from your leads so that they’re willing to reveal more information about themselves. As Laura explains, “Within a system like Pandora or Spotify you can say ‘I’m interested in country or rock music’ and you can do a level of granularity, but when someone distinguishes that they like Taylor Swift’s ‘Blank Spaces’ song, but not Carrie Underwood’s ‘Something in the Water,’ at that point you’re able to nurture much more granularly.”
How can this be done? Start off with these strategies:
- Put a face to your brand: You need employees that act as brand promoters and represent the face of your company, whether that be your founder or a respected higher-up. “Having a person or group of people that are the voice of the brand helps people connect more with the company; it’s not just I’m working with WordStream, but rather I’m working with Larry or Elisa, making the experience much more personal,” says
EverTrue uses a similar strategy. I recently spoke with Jesse Weiss, Manager of Demand Generation, at the Boston-based SaaS startup, EverTrue, which offers donor software solutions to help higher education and non-profits expand their donor network and work towards their fundraising goals. He explained how their CEO & Founder, Brent Grinna, is constantly used to promote and add value to their brand. “He’s all over the place. He recently went to Brown and Harvard Business School to volunteer for fundraising,” Weiss explained. Even browsing around EverTrue’s site you can see that Brent is used to tell the “EverTrue story” and his picture as well as other members of the leadership team are highlighted on their “About Us” page.
- Personalize touch points: Every marketing message should relate to that lead and be personalized at some level. For example an email blast should direct each customer by name. It also helps to have emails sent from an actual person or the “face of your brand” rather than a company email alias, but Callahan advises using the strategy sparingly. “Emails sent from Larry (WordStream’s founder and CTO) prove to be much more powerful, but we try not to overuse this strategy because then it won’t be as effective when needed. For example the first touch point once a lead signs up for a trial is a good opportunity to leverage this strategy and get the lead excited about our software.”
Weiss spoke candidly with me about tactics used to engage targeted prospects during their longer sales cycle, which typically spans across six months. He is a huge advocate of personalizing touch points to engage leads, for instance, he often uses strategies such as tagging universities in posts via Twitter or Facebook. “People love seeing photos they’re tagged in,” stated Weiss. “I’m constantly collaborating internally to create content that caters exclusively to our target prospects.” Another strategy Weiss and his team have implemented is publishing blog posts that cover a list of universities they’re targeting to convert. “We’ll force rank universities at certain stages in the funnel and promote the posts through email, LinkedIn sponsored posts, or even having the BDR (business development rep) use that as a way to engage with them.” See the content below that EverTrue promoted on their blog to engage with the listed Universities.
- Use relatable language in all of your messaging: I was reading a blog post the other day and legitimately fell asleep with my MacBook on my lap. It was likely because the writing sucked. We know quality content is critical, but what makes content engaging during a sales cycle? At WordStream we’ve found that writing with personality and catering our messaging to relate to our audience is the way to go. “We always try to sound more conversational so we can seem more relatable as a brand,” says Callahan. “Having a message that’s thought-provoking and avoiding the urge to sound sales-y, but more solution based. We use softer sales tactics, subtle calls-to-action, and relate to them by saying things like ‘we feel your pain, we can help you.’”
EverTrue uses a similar strategy when it comes to their language usage. “We try to make our marketing messaging as candid as possible. We’ve always been very open when it comes to product innovation, and we try to spur conversations by tagging schools in our social posts,” says Weiss. “Our main goal is to stimulate a warm conversation between a lead and a BDR, and if we’ve done that then we’ve done our jobs.”
- Create a strategic remarketing strategy: There are so many ways to remarket to those who have already visited you site, and the amount of granularity you can use to target a specific audience is incredible. Dig into your options and implement a strategy to cater to specific behaviors, for example you would want to remarket to an audience that that visited a trial or demo page in a different manner then those who simply read a blog post or visited your homepage.
#4: Study Common Behaviors and Make Changes Accordingly
A/B test, A/B test, A/B test!!! This is something that all marketers are constantly preaching, but if you’re always testing then when will you actually arrive on an outcome? The lesson to learn is to test one element at a time, and not over test. If something is working then let it work! Don’t throw a road block in front of it because it could result in a fatal accident. Instead start by gaining insight into common behaviors. To constantly be improving the pace and effectiveness of the sales cycle you need to:
- Prioritize data analysis: “Data should affect all of your decision making,” Callahan says. “We look at targets each month, break it out by channel and program, and ask what is and what isn’t working? How many SQL’s did we gain? Which pieces of content resonated?”
Data analysis can also be extremely time consuming and challenging, which is why Laura advises to not become paralyzed by the data, but rather make a hypothesis and test. “In our space it’s not as if visitors come to our website and make an e-commerce conversion. There are so many in-between’s that it’s difficult to know how conversions occur,” says Laura. “They might finally convert on a phone call, but every webinar, tweet, and blog that’s layered along the path might be tied to them.”
- Make adjustments based on your analysis: One of our main free offerings at WordStream are the WordStream Graders. These tools enable you to connect your AdWords or Bing accounts to have our algorithms scrape through your account performance and give you a grade. After doing some data analysis our marketing team found that a chunk of people who start the grader abandon mid-process. To combat this abandonment a survey was set up to pop up and email the lead who abandoned their Grader to find out why. It was found that security is a huge concern and the prime reason for abandonment. Therefore the Grader landing pages were adjusted in design to use language like “secure” with an image of a lock, and emails were sent out with impressive statistics showing how many advertisers and agencies have graded their accounts. This is just one example of how spending time to conduct studies and analyze data can make a huge impact on the effectiveness of your sales cycle.
#5: Invest in a Marketing Automation Platform or Team to Nurture Leads
Utilizing marketing automation software to score leads and trigger communications is an absolute must if you want to scale and grow your leads as well as speed up your sales cycle. “Pay attention to activities your leads take. If they downloaded information about quality score, then we’ll target them for a quality score webinar,” says Laura, who is a huge proponent of marketing automation. “Use marketing automation to set up triggers and program responses. Utilize lead scoring and treat it as a living, breathing model that you tweak over time and learn from because you’ll learn that maybe you've handed leads off too soon. Even if they’re showing signs of being qualified behaviorally, they might not be at that stage yet. It would be great if they could magically design triggers to signify a lead is ready to move from one stage to another, but they don’t always raise their hand. It requires data mining.”
This is why having a person or team dedicated to nurturing and analysis is critical. Laura describes how data integrity is a huge challenge: “Businesses start and close, people move from one business to another, people try things with one email address and then use another later on. Since nurturing is data based, it’s much more science then creativity. As much as every marketing software will claim to be able to visualize the flow of the database of leads, it’s still flawed in hygiene.” This is why you need people behind the automation to be able to take a huge mass of data, learn from it, and act on it.
At WordStream, Callahan owns nurturing, and is constantly working on the automated and point-in-time campaigns and using the database to help inform her on how to build the triggers.
As a startup employee, Weiss has found this to be a challenge at EverTrue. On a team of only three other marketers, his bandwidth is stretched very thin. While they do use the marketing software from HubSpot, his focus on customization and experimentation with the software has been limited, but is on his list of future endeavors. “Over the last few months we’ve created a huge volume of content, but now we need to figure out how to fit that into a more automated lead nurturing program,” he says. “If people get into our system they’ll receive a slew of emails, but they’re older, poorly branded, with little insight into how they’re progressing into any nurture queue.”
#6: Maintain a Close and Transparent Relationship with Your Sales Team
Laura, Callahan, and Weiss all agreed that maintaining a positive, open, and transparent relationship with sales is absolutely critical to improve the flow of the sales cycle. Why? The answer is obvious: sales and marketing are like cheese and crackers, one is not complete without the other. To create a fluid, clear, and efficient sales cycle the lines of communication need to be wide open.
“Being aligned with sales is absolutely crucial in order for there to actually be sales,” Callahan says. “Communication, working together, listening to pain points, and not making rash decisions…It can be challenging because they have one goal and we have another, but it’s important to find the balance, and it’s rewarding when both teams can.”
So how can you ensure a positive and open relationship is maintained? Conduct regular meeting with sales managers, send emails seeking feedback, collaborate on content that goes to leads later in the sales process, fill sales in on content that’s being released, and be patient, open, and listen, learn, and adjust as needed.
What marketing strategies have you found to speed up the sales cycle?
About the Author:
Margot is a Content Marketing Specialist at WordStream with a background in PPC, SEM, content and digital marketing. She enjoys running and eating ice cream during her free time (not simultaneous although that would be impressive). Follow her on:
Twitter: @ChappyMargot
Google+: +Margot da Cunha
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/pub/margot-da-cunha/30/3a7/14b
Facebook, Tinder, Instagram suffer widespread issues
UPDATED: Tuesday, Jan. 27 / 2:14 a.m. EST — Facebook, Tinder and Twitter appear to be back to normal after a 40 minute outage and mass freak out.
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Hold your duck faces, sexy messages and food photos. The world is in the middle of an extreme outage.
Facebook, Tinder and Instagram users worldwide are experiencing issues on Tuesday.
Mobile apps and website versions of the sites have gone down for some users, while others have been experiencing intermittent issues since 12:10 a.m. EST, according to downdetector.com, which monitors disruptions to Facebook's services
It is unclear at this time the reason for the issue. Facebook, which also owns Instagram, said in a statement emailed to Mashable: “We’re aware that many people are currently having trouble accessing Facebook and Instagram. We’re working to get things back to normal as quickly as possible.” Read more...
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Solar panels can be a great help to sailors, keeping vital lights and appliances functioning, even when batteries run low or a generator malfunctions. They are also a much quieter way of recharging batteries! Learning how to install marine solar panels will be vital for the sailor who wants their advantages, but first he or ...
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More Than 200,000 Photographers Have Participated In EyeEm’s “Missions” For Brands
Whenever a new social network or online community springs up, it seems pretty inevitable that brands will eventually try to build a presence there. Naturally, this can cause lots of handwringing and eye-rolling — that’s why emphatically ad-free social networks like Ello attract a lot of interest, but also seem rather quixotic. So I was glad to get an update on what EyeEm is doing… Read More