The Research & Development team announced today that SharedVue has consolidated its client’s code into one codebase bringing the organization one step closer to a continuous integration (CI) strategy.

“The reduction in hours needed to put code into production has made additional developer resources available that can be dedicated to updating and creating SharedVue platform features,” Stuart Eaves, SharedVue Sr. Application Developer, said.

Before the consolidation process was completed,  a build, or the entire process of turning code into software, took the SharedVue Research and Development team 30 minutes to complete. With the update, a build can now be completed in less than five minutes. Once the build process is achieved, it can take an additional two hours to complete the deploy process which brings the software into production.

“Our next steps towards completing our CI strategy is to work to improve the code quality by having automated code and front-end tests,” Eaves said. “Once we can achieve this goal, we will be able to turn on the CI server making builds and deploys a thing of the past.”

In the middle of the morning or afternoon, people are generally in meetings or executing on tasks. They check their email, but if it isn’t important to their immediate needs, they simply ignore or delete it. If you’re tied up in early or after-lunch meetings, it is impossible to hit sales prospects’ inboxes while they’re looking at them. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could compose 20-30 prospecting emails at the same time and schedule them to be sent at the right time?

Well… with Outlook’s built in Delivery Options, you can easily “hold” an email from sending until a specified date and time.

To start using the Miscrosoft Outlook Delayed Send feature, simply follow the steps below.

1. Open Outlook and compose your email, including a creative subject line and proper recipient(s).
2. Click the “Options” tab.
3. In the Message Options dialogue box (below), select  the “Do Not Deliver Before” check box.
4. Choose the desired send date and time in the drop-down menus.
5. Click “Close” and then hit the “Send” button.

Your message will go to the Outbox folder until the assigned date and time. Ideally, you have scheduled it to hit your prospects inboxes while they are sorting through their emails in either the morning or just after lunch. They will be more likely to give it some attention and you may end up closing a deal because of it!

The email subject line is your first chance to grab the attention of your target audience.  It’s an opportunity you won’t want to miss.  In fact, if your subject line fails to sufficiently motivate your audience to click on it, all the other effort you’ve put into designing your great campaign won’t matter.

Here are five ideas to improve your subject lines:

• Create a sense of urgency with phrases like “Today only!” or “Get a Trial for this week only!”
• Address a specific pain point: “Marketing on a Tight Budget – Part 1 “.  This also alludes to there being more help on the way.
• Get people excited: “Countdown to the Cloud Seminar:  Reason #5 to Attend”
• Ask a question:  “Frustrated by the amount of passwords you need to remember?”  Tailor this to the specific problem the product or service alleviates.
• Try something intriguing like an “Unwrap me…” subject during the holidays.

Also, some email clients display the preheader text (the title line of the email) so it’s a good idea to further your message there, as well.  This way you won’t lose out on the opportunity to further target and refine your message.

For example, the email below would have been better if the preheader text was different than the email subject line.

With any practice, and a bit of luck, you can dramatically increase the number of people opening your emails with creative subject lines.

Raleigh-based channel marketing firm SharedVue: A Part of UBM Tech (www.sharedvue.com), announces today it has received the 2013 Above and Beyond Award from the North Carolina chapter of the Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve for their role as a patriotic employer in the small business category.

On hand to accept the award on behalf of SharedVue were John Brown, SharedVue Vice President and Managing Director and Christopher Kimball, SharedVue Partner Relationship Representative and former U.S. Army Reserves public affairs specialist with the 28th Military History Detachment located at Fort Bragg, N.C.

“The SharedVue team would like to express their gratitude for the men and women who dedicate their lives to protecting America’s freedom,” Brown said. “Through our experience of working together with Chris, we have affirmed our belief that servicemembers have highly valuable skills instilled in them that translate well into a corporate setting.”

The Above and Beyond Award celebration is of ESGR’s biggest annual events. More than 250 veterans, active Guard and Reserves servicemembers, employer representatives and family members were in attendance as SharedVue and 30 other loacal businesses were honored on March 9 at the Hilton North Raleigh/Midtown.

The ESGR created the Above and Beyond Award to publicly recognize American employers providing extraordinary support and cooperation to their employees. The award is given in limited numbers by state committees to employers who have had a least one of their supervisors/managers previously recognized with a Patriot Award, and who have signed or agreed to sign a statement of support.

About ESGR                                                      
The Committee for Employer Support of the Guard and Reserve (ESGR) is an agency within the office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Reserve Affairs. The committee was established by Presidential Executive Order in 1972 to promote cooperation and understanding between Reserve Component Members and their civilian employers and to assist in resolution of conflicts arising from an employee’s military commitment. Today, ESGR operates through a network of more than 4,500 volunteers in 55 communities located in each state, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico, the Virgin Islands and Europe. The North Carolina ESGR Committee is tasked to promote understanding of the National Guard and Reserve with both public and private sector employers.

About SharedVue: A Part of UBM Tech
UBM Tech’s content syndication and marketing automation platform—Sharedvue—ensures channel partners are promoting the most relevant, up-to-date marketing, product and promotional content available through their existing websites, all while capturing sales leads and nurturing them into sales.

Channel vendors are available to use SharedVue to make global content updates on all partners websites, improving metrics and tracking, quickly set up for new promotions and more easily integrate other marketing enablement programs. For channel partners, this eliminates the need to constantly update their websites. For channel vendors, it means seamless updating and control over product and solution offerings with measurable ROI on a global channel scale.

Let’s face it. No one wants to be sold to. Buyers want relevant information that leads them to a decision they think they reach on their own. Social media is great for that (as well as improving your SEO)! By creating as many engagements as possible, and being where the buyer is looking for information, you come across as a subject-matter expert. Below are three easy ways you can increase your B2B social media success and easily measure the ROI.

Time Your Connection Requests

Recently, I was exploring options for a new CRM for my company. Logically, I started looking at QuickBase. I eventually filled out a contact request form to see a demo and talk to a sales representative. Not long after I filled out the form, I receive a phone call from a rep. We talked for a few minutes and agreed on a time to have the demo. I received the calendar invite right after we hung up the phone. About 10 seconds after I accepted the invite, I received an invitation to connect on LinkedIn. Since I was already in answer-email mode and actively processing my inbox, I immediately clicked accept.

To me, this is one of the best ways to gain customer loyalty. The sales rep knew I would be able to easily recall his name and that I was more likely to accept the LinkedIn request because I had literally just talked to him. He also know I was currently looking at my email. He’s so smart (or maybe just lucky)! Now he has an easy way to see my posts, questions, etc. and respond to them in an acceptable way.

Don’t Pitch Your Products; Answer Questions

One of the best ways to win over a lead is by simply answering their questions without giving them a sales pitch. Social media sites like Twitter and LinkedIn are perfect for this kind of interaction. From a B2B point of view, people use social media to connect with others that have already gone through the same info-gathering process they are currently in and ask for advice. If you can be there as an expert and answer their questions, you will then be top-of-mind when it comes time to buy.

The best part is that you don’t even have to had a qualified lead to do this. Simply set up Twitter searches or find LinkedIn Groups that are related to the products and services you offer. Looking for things like point of sale solutions, inventory management, or secure credit card transaction software will turn up tons of questions from potential buyers. If you answer their questions quickly, concisely, and accurately, you’re going to come out ahead when it comes time for them to buy.

Renew More Customers with Minimal Social Effort

Everyone knows that 80% of your business will come from 20% of your existing clients. What lots of B2B markers don’t realize, though, is that you can increase that business retention rate simply by being active with current customers on social media sites. As soon as you land a deal, you should have your sales staff find your new customer on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+. They should then regularly reach out to the customer, answering their questions about actual usage of the product. It isn’t a bad idea to post great content, too, that shows customers new ways of using your products to meet their business needs. Even simple things like congratulating a contact on a promotion (LinkedIn) can go a long way when you start that renewal conversation. And it is easy to attribute any increase in customer retention directly to these efforts, showing immediate ROI.

What are some ways you have used social media to either increase sales, improve retentions, or save money?

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Many marketers struggle to justify their social media activities for one main reason – they can’t show ROI (return on investment). While there are some obvious benefits to using social media, such as SEO, audience engagement, and product promotion, there are no dollars assigned to those metrics. ROI deals with financial impact, not benefits. From an economists’ standpoint, it is the opportunity cost (comparison of what you could be doing vs what you are doing) divided by the cost of your investment.

At the end of the day, things like website visitors, community engagement, or number of people submitting employment applications means absolutely nothing unless you can assign a monetary value to the data. However, connecting the dots can sometimes be convoluted.

Ask yourself, “So what does all this non-financial data mean?”

For any business, cost reduction and revenue growth are the focus for all short-run and long-run activities. Thus, if you can show that your social media activities directly affect one or both of those two performance indicators, you can justify using social media for your business.

How to Justify Social Media for Your Business

To justify using social media, you must establish a baseline for comparison. What are your current monthly sales? How many hours per week does your customer service department or representative spend on issues? Taking the time to gather these metrics will make showing ROI easier. Moreover, they actually give you something to show a correlation to your social media marketing activities.

For example, instead of just showing an increase in the number of hits to your website since you began your social media efforts, show the correlation between an increase in sales and the number of people visiting the website. Have you had more sales inquiries? What is the total for net new customers? Assign a dollar amount to those potential sales and then you’ve got something.

The Bottom Line: Use trend analysis to make correlations with your social media activities. You must assign dollars to the data you collect.

Have you used or seen good examples of trend analysis to justify ROI for social media activities? Tell others in the comments.

Your business elevator speech is the most important detail in selling face to face; your meta-data description IS your elevator speech to thousand of web searchers. Are you utilizing that ‘elevator speech’ on your website to optimize your search engine results page (SERP) listing? More importantly, are you broadcasting that speech to potentially millions of people?

Meta Descriptions are the smalls snippets of text you see on a search engine results page under the link. Usually, there are a few key phrases in bold that match what you searched for. Be sure to write unique meta descriptions for each page of your website. This will help guarantee both search engines and searchers fully understand what your page is about. Ideally, your description should be no longer than 155 characters (including spaces). However, you should always check your SERP listings confirm your optimum content layout. Some are longer and some are shorter. This is only a rule of thumb, not a definite “best practice” anymore.

3 Ways Meta Descriptions Improve Your SEO

Tell the search engines about your site: For the search engine to understand what your page is about, you need to write a good description. When Google’s algorithm decides a description is badly written or inaccurate, it will replace that description with its own version of what is on the page. Wouldn’t you prefer to describe your site to potential customers or visitors using your own words rather than leaving it in Google’s artificial hands? For your home page, your elevator pitch is a good way to start looking for this type of content.

Improve Click-Through Rates: Writing a good description not only helps keep Google from rewriting it, but also helps you get more clicks. A well-written description advertises what is on your page and seduces searchers to visit. You should optimize your meta descriptions for driving people from SERPs to particular pages of your site. After all, your homepage isn’t your homepage — Google is! Sites with poor descriptions will see poorer click-through rates to pages deep in your page hierarchy and the search engines will demote your site in favor of other sites.

Slightly Better Your Site Rankings: The common belief is that the meta description will not help you get rankings. However, there is evidence to the contrary. It is not heavily weighted but it will provide some value on a secondary keyword (say an –ing –ed or –s).

In all, rewriting your meta descriptions is one of the best ways to guarantee you’re presenting the most accurate, clear vision of what a user will see when they click on your link from a search engine results page. Spend some time developing a unique description for each page. After all, you never know what someone might be searching for that could turn them into a sale for you.

 This post is part of the Intuit iMarketer101 series. To learn more about iMarketer, visit the program home page. 

To do well in search engine rankings, it is first important to understand what SEO is and isn’t. Often, marketers confuse SEO with SEM (search engine marketing). The difference is simple but rarely explained.

SEO is everything you can do on your website to improve the way search engines index your content and increase your chances of ranking higher for organic key search phrases. Building your website with good SEO practices is like cleaning your house before company comes over. If it is messy, people are less likely to hang around.

SEM is everything you do outside your website to improve your search rankings. For example, you can list your company in directories like ZOOMinfo or Google Places for Business and social media sites like LinkedIn and Twitter. SEM is all about being where the people are and telling them how to find you. To use the previous analogy, if your website is your house, you have to get out there and find people before you can invite them over. Be where your audience is!

But be aware! According to MarketingProfs, social media accounts for less than 5% of all leads coming from B2B websites. Organic search, on the other hand, is the number one driver accounting for 41% of the total traffic to B2B sites in 2012.

The takeaway is don’t spend too much time on social media to improve your SEO if you are already strapped for resources. Work on your website first. Do plenty of keyword research using tools like SEO Book to make sure your content includes search terms your prospects are actually looking for. Get it in order from an SEO-perspective and then focus on SEM tactics to really drive leads.

This post is part of the Intuit iMarketer101 series. To learn more about iMarketer, visit the program home page. 

PR Newswire CEO Ninan Chacko talks about the importance of content in building relationships with customers and stakeholders:

[From PRN] Marketing, today, is about driving closer, authentic, deep and meaningful relationships, on an individual level, between an enterprise and its constituents – customers, prospects, investors, business partners, key influencers, and more.

These constituents are far more informed; and as such, much smarter than ever before. To that end, if an enterprise is unable to articulate its purpose, its ideals and values and how these impact the products & services it brings to market; if it is unable to offer something more than just its wares; and if it is only interested in being heard but not listening, the enterprise will never establish a true relationship with its constituents. Read More »

Recent downturns in the economy have affected many businesses’ bottom lines, making buyers increasingly cognizant of ways to decrease spending when it comes to researching products and services online. According to a Google and OTX study, more than 75 percent of all product and service inquiries start online, compared to other traditional methods like using catalogs or visiting brick-and-mortar establishments.

“This is why it is critical for Solution Providers to have an inbound lead generation platform that engages B2B purchasers at the beginning of the buying cycle”, says Eric Bedard, of SharedVue.

On August 8, 2012, Bedard, along with product development specialist Scott Johnson, presented a ChannelCast introducing Acceler8, a solution that helps vendors generate leads for their channel partners using automated paid search campaigns.

Key topics include:

• Targeting more inbound traffic to your local resellers to find your products and services online.
• Reducing advertising costs per inquiry with targeted ads and relative landing pages
• Improving results by monitoring reseller networks online in real time.

View the On-Demand ChannelCast »