However, if you only send emails sporadically, and if you don’t tailor them to recipients’ preferences, you could be losing out on conversions. You need a framework for sending regular, personalized messages which is where email drip marketing comes in.

What is an email drip campaign?

An email drip campaign is an automated sequence of emails, sent to existing and potential subscribers over a period of time. It gradually “drips” information, such as product details, special offers, or relevant content.

The frequency and content of the emails are based on specific timelines or behavioral triggers. You can send different messages depending on the recipient’s actions: a welcome email for a new subscriber or a series of reminders after someone abandons their shopping cart.

The idea is to provide ongoing value that eventually persuades the recipient to convert. It’s a form of behavioral email marketing that factors in user preferences for segmentation and targeting.

Benefits of email drip campaigns

Multiple messages are typically more effective than single emails when it comes to generating results and revenue. It’s a good way to remind people about your brand and encourage them to convert. For example, marketers who send three cart abandonment emails generate 69% more sales than those who don’t.

This slow-burn approach helps to build trust, especially when emails are relevant and personalized. By getting to know the recipients, you can address their pain points and keep them engaged throughout the relationship funnel.

Drip emails also ensure consistency, with all subscribers receiving the same sequence regardless of when they joined your mailing list. Automation saves time and boosts productivity and while the proactive approach shortens the sales cycle.

Types of email drip campaign

Email drip campaigns may be categorized as “cold” or “warm.” Cold emails are sent to new leads, perhaps triggered by someone clicking your CTA. Warm emails are for people already on your lists, such as subscribers and registered users.

Cold leads

This type of campaign enables you to nurture leads by starting a conversation and feeding them information about your product. Emails should be highly targeted and make the recipient feel valued. It’s important to send follow-ups swiftly and ask questions to engage the reader.

Warm leads

These might be subscribers whom you’ll nurture into active users or existing customers whom you want to retain. Either way, you’ll have plenty of information to use for personalized emails, which can be triggered by a wider range of actions. You might send a subscriber-only offer, show them how to use your product or service, ask them for a positive review, or upsell additional products.

Types of email in a drip campaign

There are a ton of email types to choose from, so here’s a rundown of popular options.

Welcome email

This is your chance to make a great first impression. Welcome emails have an impressive average open rate of more than 86%, and an average click-through rate of 25%.

Take the opportunity to introduce yourself and your company, set expectations, and link to your social media channels. As well as welcoming new prospects and onboarding subscribers, you can also send these emails to thank customers for making a purchase.

Content email

These can be used in all campaigns, whether you’re talking to cold leads or registered users. Send out something useful to the recipient, such as exclusive content or a video.

Birthday email

These emails arrive on or shortly before the recipient’s birthday, with a cute e-card and a special discount for a limited period. You then send a reminder that the offer expires shortly, which taps into FOMO (fear of missing out) but still gives them time to act.

To make this work, you’ll obviously need the person’s date of birth. If they’re already a subscriber, you’ll have this information. Otherwise, you’ll have to collect it from your opt-in form, but you may put people off if it’s a required field.

Special offer email

Everyone loves an offer. Maybe it’s purely about saving money, or maybe they were thinking of buying anyway and this reminder seems like fate.

In the first email, concentrate on showcasing the offer and making them want the product. Then send a follow-up with more information, perhaps FAQs that will help them see the logic behind making the purchase. Finally, tell them the offer is time-sensitive to create a sense of urgency.

Invitation email

These emails make the recipient feel special as if they’re part of an exclusive club. Invite them to an online or offline event that’s relevant to them (for instance, subscribers from the customer service industry could be invited to a webinar on “What is a contact center”).

When people sign up for the event, you’ll get more information about them—and when you meet them online or in person, it’s a great chance to build your relationship.

Upselling email

Once someone has made a purchase, it’s the perfect time to sell them something else. If they bought a new phone, they might want a protective case and headphones, especially if they’re on offer.

Timing is important here – strike while the iron’s hot, and start the upsell email sequence no later than two weeks after the initial purchase. Mention that special deals are available, and follow up by putting a time limit on the offer. Just be careful not to give it the hard sell.

Cart abandonment email

With an average cart abandonment rate of 69.82%, companies are losing out big-time if they don’t bring these indecisive shoppers back into the fold. As we said earlier, cart abandonment emails have a high success rate.

Send a friendly reminder of the item they left in their cart (“Did you forget something?”) and confirm it’s still available but mention that stocks are limited. With the next email, you might throw in free shipping then follow up with a last-chance offer that’s too good to resist.

Re-engagement or renewal email

Re-engagement emails are a good way to inspire people who haven’t interacted for a while. Send them a reminder about items they browsed, mention that there are special deals on your site, or direct them to new social media posts.

You also need to encourage users to renew their subscriptions. Send a series of reminders to let them know the expiry date and renewal fee, and direct them to a renewal page where they can confirm the subscription.

Unsubscribe email

If someone wants to unsubscribe, there’s still an opportunity to make them reconsider. Send an “Are you sure?” message, reminding them of the benefits of subscribing.

If they’re still not swayed, send a goodbye email saying you’ll miss them, and include options to follow your other channels. Ask for feedback on why they’re leaving, which you can use to improve your services.

Best practices for email drip campaigns

Perfect timing

First, decide how often you want to send emails, and at what intervals. This will depend on the type of campaign. You need to follow up quickly with new leads, whereas subscriber newsletters might be sent weekly or monthly.

The key is not to bombard your list with emails. Usually, it’s best to leave gaps of a few days between each send. You also have to consider the optimum times and days for sending, which may be based on your recipients’ schedules and time zones.

Engaging copy

The content of your emails must be relevant, engaging, and concise. Focus on one topic per email and don’t go too crazy with links, attachments, and CTAs. Make the emails colorful and interesting with a few well-chosen visuals.

We’ve already mentioned the importance of tailored content, but it’s worth covering once more. For example, if someone shows an interest in buying software, send a link to your landing page.

You can also connect the email campaign to your other channels by adding clickable social media icons. Finally, you must always include the option to unsubscribe.

Analyze and optimize

By analyzing recipients’ behavior and encouraging feedback, you’ll learn the best times to send out emails and the most successful ways to keep people engaged.

Is an email drip campaign right for me?

It depends on what you want to achieve, but it’s a great way to nurture new leads and retain subscribers.

Email drip marketing helps you build trust and make the recipients feel special with personalized content and offers, which makes them more likely to become paying customers.

Thank you to the author of this guest post:

The post Email Drip Campaigns: Best Practices to Nurture, Convert and Retain Customers appeared first on Feldman Creative.

Until relatively recently, many marketers were content to live and die by the sales funnel.

To review, the basic outline for said funnel looks something like this:

•  At the top of the funnel (TOFU), a prospect becomes aware of your brand.

•  In the middle (MOFU), they actively engage by expressing interest in what you sell.

• At the bottom (BOFU), the prospect makes their ultimate decision and (hopefully) converts from lead to customer.

But, as with most behavioral templates, things don’t always work according to plan. Strategies can change. Prospects can disappear. Funnels can leak.

One possible culprit? BOFU content.

Sadly, today’s marketers tend to sideline their BOFU strategy. This isn’t too surprising, as it’s no secret many marketers spend the bulk of their time on “awareness” (or TOFU) materials, designed solely to draw prospects in.

In fact, this imbalance is so prevalent, experts are starting to take notice…and issue warnings.

Content strategist/influencer Kathryn Aragon, for example, cautions many marketers are “guilty” of letting TOFU content consume their schedules. And Forbes.com similarly suggests marketers often skew their efforts toward creating TOFU leads, which can put added pressure on sales.

All of this can be highly problematic because a) today’s buyer is fully in charge, and BOFU content plays a crucial role in inspiring them to pull the trigger, and b) without a final sale, the TOFU content your team creates is rendered useless, meaning BOFU content essentially sets the stage for TOFU to have its desired effect.

How, then, do marketers right this top-heavy ship?

They do it by revamping their sales collateral processes, aligning their end-of-tunnel strategy with BOFU best practices and taking cues from excellent BOFU campaigns in action.

Let’s clarify.

Truly effective BOFU content:

• Convinces “precipice” buyers into making a purchase.

• Assures prospects their purchase won’t be in vain.

• Features a call to action (CTA) that moves buyers even closer to the finish line.

Below, I’ve compiled a few top tricks of the trade to bear in mind when creating your BOFU content, along with some examples of impactful BOFU assets to help your campaigns land more sales.

1: Consider the audience source

Creating BOFU content that converts requires you to know exactly who your prospects are. It also requires a working acquaintance with the BOFU consumer mindset.

Meet your BOFU buyer:

Typically, a prospect at the BOFU stage has done her homework. She knows quite a lot about your industry and product––and she’s very close to purchase. But, for whatever reason, something is standing in her way. And to complicate matters, she’s very likely looking into your competitors as well.

But there’s good news. You can bypass these roadblocks by asking yourself a detailed set of questions about who this buyer actually is, such as:

• “How has she already engaged?” – Did she arrive via landing page? Respond to an email from your sales team? Attend a webinar? 

• “Who is she?” – What industry, verticals, and business challenges does she represent? How can your solution appeal to her in particular? 

• “What does she already know about the product?” – How far along is this prospect in the funnel, really? Has she completed a product trial? Watched a sales video? Downloaded a comparative report? 

•  “What’s the buying dynamic?” – Will your approach be a classic B2B or eCommerce play? Who’s likely to make the final decision? (A single buyer? A buying committee?)

• “What do her web searches look like?” – Consider: Most BOFU buyers actively search for keywords such as:

o   “Compare”

o   “Consumer reviews”

o   “Company A vs. Company B”

o   “Discount”

o   “Customer testimonials”

The answers to the above will help you fine-tune your BOFU content stockpile so you can speak directly to the needs/concerns of each late-stage target. As you proceed, though, remember: The BOFU audience is a lot smaller than the TOFU—or even MOFU—audience. Your BOFU content should therefore always be narrower in scope and address specific problems in greater detail. 

2: Practice persuasion

Once your marketing efforts and your buyer’s journey converge at the BOFU stage, your content should take on the role of advocate. By this point, the time for modesty has passed, and a neutral, purely educational tone (common practice for TOFU assets) is no longer necessary.

Instead, your task is now to persuade your prospect into the end zone using as many of the following as possible:

• A voice that establishes your sales team as a friendly consultant, rather than a stuffy professor.

• Informative content that assures buyers your solution will help them reach their goals and overcome their challenges.

• Comparative content that places your solution in context with your competitors, highlighting your strengths and emphasizing any sources of additional value.  

• “Show-don’t-tell” content that lets your prospects envision themselves as bona fide customers. 

• Educational content that delves deeper, providing a glimpse into how your product has proven successful for niche businesses in the past.

The greater your powers of persuasion (and your facility with the techniques/genres listed), the greater your chance of transforming your prospect into a purchaser. 

3: Measure and modify

As is always the case with digital marketing, you’ll need to keep track of how well your BOFU content is working, and to what degree.

Unfortunately, however, standard metrics can’t really track in-depth levels of performance or engagement, so you’ll have to pursue several specialized KPIs when it comes to your BOFU analytics.

Sound like a lot? Don’t worry. Just keep telling yourself the most important factor is conversion. Try tracing things like:

• Total conversions

• ROI

• Earnings per lead

• Average order value

• Webinar, trial, or demo enrollment

• Cart abandonment rate

For a slightly broader picture of how your BOFU campaigns are resonating with your audience, you may also want to investigate:

• Content downloads 

• Web engagement (such as landing page visits or price comparison tool usage)

• Direct BOFU asset revenue influence

Once gathered, these findings can inform necessary content modifications, enabling you to attract buyers more readily using an evidence-based strategy.

Successful BOFU content in action

The list of possible BOFU assets is potentially limitless, but here are a few favorites, with a brief rundown of why they work so well (along with some real-world examples).

Case studies & customer reviews

93% of consumers report a tendency to check in with buyer reviews before making any concrete decisions. These third-party-driven BOFU assets carry a lot of “social cred” because they provide concrete proof of the success of your solution, verified by an outsider.

Examples:

• Customer stories from Slack’s collaboration platform, each focusing on how a single product feature helped a customer achieve a certain goal.

• Sprinklr’s video overview of how its CXM solution was utilized to collect and manage information for the US 2020 Census.

• See also: AllSaints’s visual review page, where social media influencers simply upload pictures of themselves sporting the brand’s clothing as digital endorsement. 

Demos/trials & webinar Q&As

These offer prospects a chance to immerse themselves in your product and raise questions in real time (while also generating a sense of urgency by keeping the experience confined to a limited timeframe).

Examples:

• Kajabi’s 14-day trial, allowing novice entrepreneurs to test the marketing/community-building platform before making a full commitment.

• Mailchimp’s free version offering, which is entirely upfront about complimentary vs. premium paid features.

Vendor/price comparisons & cost/ROI calculators

All great ways to graciously acknowledge your competition while emphasizing your strengths and playing to your product value.

Examples:

• ClickUp productivity software’s extensive lineup of comparisons, covering no fewer than 11 competitor platforms.

• SensrTrx’s detailed ROI calculator for its manufacturing analytics solution (with a breakdown of how to interpret results).

Consultations/free courses/walkthrough videos

These capitalize on the “assurance” factor, allowing reps or company personalities to build buyer trust through interactive discussion and/or educational materials that mimic the UX.

Examples:

• CoSchedule Actionable Marketing Institute’s in-depth courses (some of which are free), providing real-world advice and product training.

• Asics’s 3D rendering of its MetaRun shoe with a near-microscopic look at materials and construction.

All these examples reflect a deep awareness of their respective audiences, along with an exceptionally persuasive voice. Look to them for guidance when crafting your next BOFU asset, but be sure to incorporate intel from your analytics and company-specific KPIs as well.

A reminder before you begin:

Today’s buyer may call the shots, but you have the power to shift the entire game by placing thoughtful, creative BOFU content on your prospects’ screens. As you proceed, keep in mind BOFU is far from the end of the line––rather, it’s a place to display advocacy and to champion your brand in a truthful and meaningful way.

TOFU assets should always remain a critical part of your process, but it pays to think about your marketing strategy from the bottom up.

The post BOFU Content Could Be Your Secret Marketing Weapon appeared first on Feldman Creative.

“Salespeople can’t go it alone anymore in the digital era. Sales enablement is essential if the purchase cycle is long and the products and services require education and explanation. They need to be properly trained and equipped with relevant knowledge, tools, and processes from customer outreach through deal closing. This is especially true in B2B, technology or complex sales.”

 ~ Pam Didner, author of Effective Sales Enablement

Who needs sales enablement?

Over the last five years, the percentage of salespeople making quota dropped by 10 points. The percentage of companies achieving revenue dropped by nearly 4 points. (Source)

Sales organizations are not keeping up with the pace of change. The pains are clearly evident in complex B2B sales. In software and technology industries:

• More buyers are involved
• The sales cycle is longer
• Buyers have greater access to information and increased demands

Sales can no longer sell advanced, complex technology products by themselves. Done effectively, sales enablement provides all sales people with the best practices, knowledge, skills, tools, and resources needed to succeed.

However, there tends to be a lack of agreement about what sales enablement actually is, what can be accomplished with it and how to make it an effective discipline. In fact, questions about sales enablement abound. You’ll find these questions—along with answers from the experts—on this FAQ page.

What is sales enablement?

It’s a safe bet your company’s org chart includes departments including sales, marketing and HR, to name a few. While it’s unlikely it has a dedicated sales enablement department, research by CSO Insights, the research division of Miller Heiman Group, indicates there’s a 61% chance your company has a dedicated sales enablement person, program or function.

Good for you if you’re among the 61%. According to the research cited above, having an effective sales enablement function leads to two-digit improvements for quota attainment and win rates for forecast deals compared to those without.

But wait…

How do you define sales enablement?

Sales enablement is an ongoing process of equipping sales people—and all client-facing employees—with the content, training, coaching and tools they need to produce effective outcomes.

You need not continue reading if your company has perfected sales enablement. All of your company’s sales processes perfectly align with the journeys of all your customers? You’re set.

However, if you recognize empowering the sales team to succeed is a formidable and ongoing task your company has yet to master, I have a good deal of helpful ideas for you here.

Does your company need sales enablement?

We’ll answer this question with questions you should ask yourself. The more the questions produce “no” answers, the more you need to begin or improve your sales enablement practice.

• Are new hires ramped-up at sufficient speed and able to achieve quota as fast as you’d like?
• Does your company’s sales and marketing teams communicate and collaborate effectively?
• Does your company effectively collect and share best practices across sales and service departments?
• Do your salespeople know how to search for and find the content they need quickly and effectively?
• Does every salesperson perfectly nail product positioning and value messages?
• Do your salespeople consistently articulate a solution aligned to the customer’s need?
• Are you able to determine exactly what makes your top performers successful?
• Does your company culture support the continuous development of salespeople and sales leaders?
• Do you consistently develop and implement personalized performance improvement plans?
• Are you able to avoid discounting products and services?
• Do your customers enjoy positive interactions across every interaction channel?

Whose job is sales enablement?

“There are many opinions about where sales enablement should live inside an organization, but there is no right answer. It can live in sales, marketing, or human resources. It can report to sales operations, or directly to the CEO, CMO or CRO.”

~ Elay Cohen, author of Enablement Mastery

The ideal answer is sales enablement is its own department or independent unit, which may be part of the sales team and serve as a peer to sales operations.

The growth in sales enablement as a function in organizations is clear. However, the answer to this question tends not to solicit universal agreement. “It depends” is the common answer. What does it depend on?

• Budget
• Timelines
• Resources
• Tools
• Company roles
• Management
• Maturity of the sales organization

Undoubtedly, companies approach sales enablement differently and evolve their approach over time. After all, the function is evolving and unlike well-established departments, the team structure of sales enablement varies across organizations. In truth, for early entrants, the sales enablement function is most often performed collectively by multiple business units including sales, marketing, customer service, and HR.

Research and advisory firm TOPO claims:

• Sales enablement is owned jointly by sales and marketing and must collaborate on needed resources.
• Marketing is usually responsible for creating the vast majority of the resources.
• Marketing should bear most of the responsibility for training the sales organization.
• Sales operations play a crucial role in “operationalizing” the information sales receive as part of the sales enablement program.
• Sales management needs to make sure the sales enablement program is put into practice.

TOPO’s Scott Albro concludes, “When it comes to sales enablement, the best organizational rule is that marketing is a better creator and sales is a better enforcer.”

How do sales and marketing achieve alignment?

If sales and marketing are to work together, they have some silo-busting to do.

First, they should focus on common priorities. Inevitably, sales and marketing will have some different priorities, however the two factions should agree to focus on a small set of priorities they can work together on.

Second, they should put a service level agreement (SLA) in place. An appropriately aligned team creates an SLA, a contract, to identify roles, responsibilities, clear deliverables and schedules. The two factions should also agree on metrics to be used to measure progress and success.

Third, marketers should work to better understand the salesperson’s challenges. An effective practice is to shadow members of sales team—both junior sales persons and highly skilled veterans—to learn how they manage leads, communicate with customers and address objections. Additionally, marketers can conduct focus groups with sales people or have them fill out surveys to gain insights into the tactics and strategies they use.

Finally, sales and marketing need to communicate and solicit feedback from each other. A regular cadence of communications builds rapport, helps to validate insights, and provides an opportunity to change course when needed.

A feedback loop and group sessions between sales and marketing will help surface issues and improve lead quality. Sales should also involve including marketing in forecast calls to uncover insights that can help the team determine where to shift and prioritize investments to boost sales efforts.

What does sales enablement deliver?

Sales enablement may be tasked with different functions and deliverables. Most common among them are:

• Content
• Training
• Coaching
• Processes and technology

We’ll tackle questions about each now.

Why is content so critical?

Content plays a critical role in technology sales serving to educate prospects and give sales professionals relevant talking points.

While it often functions as your marketing department’s calling card to create marketing qualified leads (MQLs), content marketing is a vital part of the selling cycle beyond the awareness stage. Equipped with the right content, salespeople can add value every time an interaction occurs—online and off—for prospects and customers.

Learn more about content marketing here

Reference The Content Marketing Roadmap here.

What content serves customers?

Client-facing content for technology companies should align with the stages of customer’s journey including awareness, consideration/decision and implementation. Note: many organizations separate “middle of the funnel” stages—most commonly, consideration and decision—however, here, for the sake of simplicity, we’ll combine the two.

Awareness

Examples of customer-facing content for generating awareness include:

• Blog post and articles
• Social media content
• Customer case studies
• White papers and eBooks
• Industry research
• Infographics
• Interactive tools (such as assessments, quizzes, calculators, etc.)
• Video

Consideration and decision

None of the above content types are necessarily out of bounds for this stage, however, additional assets that can serve to help prospects make informed buying decisions might include:

• Email
• Webinars
• Product demonstrations
• Competitor comparisons
• Client references/testimonials
• Collateral
• Proposal templates
• Contract templates

Implementation 

Again, the content types listed above may be useful to help customers implement your technology. You may also want to develop assets such as:

• Industry-specific or application-specific implementation guidelines
• How-to videos or courses
• Best practice tip sheets
• Help documentation

What is internal enablement content?

Content created for internal enablement helps build the salesperson’s skills and knowledge to prepare for interacting with prospects. Although content created expressly for internal use may focus on a singular stage of the buyer journey, following is an all-purpose list:

• Customer profiles and personas
• Brand and/or product cheat sheets
• Competitor research
• Sales playbooks
• Sales scripts
• Training assets
• Opportunity planning tools
• Implementation checklists
• Account management tools
• Relationship mapping templates

What are the keys to the content planning process?

The following is a five-step process based on advice sourced from the book Sales Enablement—A Master Framework to Engage, Equip, and Empower a World-Class Sales Force.

1. Take stock of what you have. Conduct an inventory of everything available including informal content (such as presentations created by sales).
2. Gather feedback and data. Feedback may come from customers, sales and internal teams. Gather any data you have on the effectiveness or use of content.
3. Assess your assets. Identify assets that need to be improved. Trash obsolete content and what appears to be redundant.
4. Identify the gaps. Try to find gaps in the phases of the customer’s path, or by role or industry. Plan to create content to fill the gaps.
5. Identify the projects that best support your strategies and organization’s goals.

Where does training fit in?

Training is another critical component of sales enablement. Some would say training is its main function. Training should focus on increasing knowledge, helping sales people master methodology, and skills training to apply the knowledge and execute methodology.

Training applies to both onboarding and continuous training:

• Onboarding—The effective onboarding of new hires can have a great impact on your success—and the retention of salespeople. Decreasing the time it takes to ramp-up a new salesperson to productivity is an important goal.
• Continuous training—Successful sales organizations commit to continuing training after onboarding. The objective is to help salespeople keep current on new techniques, market trends and products. In addition to learning new things, the training should review previous lessons and help trainees sharpen their skills. Additionally, continuous training should come from marketing and focus on branding, messaging, and marketing campaign strategies and tactics.

Should you offer social selling training?

Yes, best-in-class companies prioritize social selling and improve win rates as a result. Why? Most sales people aren’t effective at social selling or even knowledgeable about how to use social media to engage potential buyers. Those that do use social media effectively are able to provide information that helps speed-up the buyer’s decision-making process.

LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index shows the strong correlation between achieving sales goals and sales reps that score high in its index. 78% of social sellers outsell peers who don’t use social media and high scorers:

• Get 45%more sales opportunities
• Are 51%more likely to hit quota

The report claims social selling technique eliminates the need for cold calling and enables sales reps to:

• Create a professional brand
• Focus on the right prospects
• Engage with insights
• Build trusted relationships

Sales enablement professionals need to take a proactive stance. They should encourage the use of social selling and help salespeople understand the potential of each network and how to use it, master the tools needed to stay on top of social media and add value at each stage of the customer journey by sharing content effectively.

Where does coaching fit in?

Coaching’s critical for reinforcing content and training services and improving ROI. Though coaching has long been a focus in sales organizations, it remains one of the biggest challenges.

The authors of Sales Enablement identify multiple types of coaching, including: 

• Lead and opportunity coaching
• Funnel or pipeline coaching
• Skills and behaviors coaching
• Account coaching
• Territory coaching

Where do processes and technology fit in?

The management of sales technology tends to fall under the purview of sales operations. However, sales enablement continues taking a more active role and a new category of software, sales enablement content management (SECM), has made its mark. Additionally, sales enablement technology often includes learning management, coaching technologies, and other solutions.

Let’s look take a closer look at SECM. An SECM allows the salesperson to search for content assets based on specific criteria. Many integrate with established CRM systems to proactively suggest content based on the specific sales scenario and, in some cases, automatically generate sales playbooks.

Additionally, SECM platforms provide important analytics, which enables users to:

• Assess feedback from salespeople regarding the effectiveness of content and tools
• Track which content’s used by salespeople
• Track which content buyers are consuming
• Track which content contributes to higher win rates

How do you build your sales enablement technology stack?

As with most topics we’ve covered, especially the “how to’s,” your company will have unique requirements, however, a bare-bones set of steps should include:

• Identify what needs to be done. What will help sales be more productive? What will help make sales enablement a stronger function?
• Audit what you have. What tech platforms do you already have? Which among them play a role in achieving objectives? Which are used (or neglected)?
• Establish priorities. Determine what’s nice to have vs. what’s essential.
• Evaluate your options. Look at your vendor options. Invite key stakeholders to get involved in the process. You’ll need them to get where you want to go. 

In the book Effective Sales Enablement, author Pam Didner offers helpful hints for selecting the right tools. She writes, the questions to ask should include:

• What problems are we trying to solve?
• How will we measure success?
• How does the tool help customers?
• Where does the tool fit in our overall sales and marketing tech stack?

Should you create a brand guide?

Yes, a brand guide serves as a central element for the content marketing and training processes that drive your sales enablement efforts. Recognize that customers vacillate between materials and sources from both sales and marketing and it serves your interests to present a consistent brand in terms of look, feel, tone and messaging.

Your company’s marketing team should create branded templates for:

• Email
• Presentations
• Case studies
• Solution briefs
• And other frequently used content types

Generally, the brand guide is created by the marketing department, however, in the interest of alignment and consistency, you’ll want the sales team—or sales enablement team—to buy in and subscribe to its ideas.

Should you have a messaging framework?

Yes, you need this too. In the B2B realm, what you sell is bound to have a variety of features and benefits and in addressing various audiences, the messages to stress won’t always be the same.

This is where a messaging framework comes into play. With a solid, agreed-upon messaging framework, both the sales and marketing teams can consistently present simple and meaningful features and benefit statements. A carefully crafted messaging framework can guide sales scripts, pitches and much more.

What’s the value of a sales playbook?

Sales playbooks can be invaluable as they provide valuable details to be applied to:

• Sales pitches
• Competitive landscapes
• Product differentiation
• Target customer profiles
• Product offerings
• Customer success stories

Again, according to Pam Didner, elements of the sales playbook may include:

• Product/solution descriptions
• Competitive analysis
• Customer challenges
• Value proposition
• Elevator pitch
• Proof points
• Conversation starters
• Buyers’ roles
• And more

How do you measure your progress?

Sales enablement professionals need to gain clarity regarding the effectiveness of the efforts and methods they employ. Armed with performance data, enablement professionals can better justify the work, better align with senior level decision-makers, and refine processes and priorities to achieve more successful outcomes.

The following list of sales enablement metrics are offered by Elay Cohen in his book, Enablement Mastery.

• Quota attainment—Cohen recommends reviewing the degree sales targets are reached monthly, quarterly, and annually by seller, manager, segment and tenure.
• Win/loss rates—Know deal-win rates to better predict resources, leads and deal opportunities needed to hit quota.
• Sales cycle time—Knowing the number of days in a sales cycle helps the company predict revenue and forecast. Also, for better allocate resources, it’s helpful to know where in the sales process teams are getting stuck.
• Deal size—Look at deal size and average selling price to gauge sales skills.
• Time-to-ramp—It’s important to know time-to-ramp, the amount of time it takes to hit quota, to improve the effectiveness of onboarding efforts.
• Content effectiveness—As mentioned prior in the section about SECM software, it’s important to know content consumption metrics such as views, download, user ratings and more. Cohen claims, “Tying knowledge and content consumption back to closed or lost deals is the holy grail of content enablement metrics.”
• Employee attrition/retention—You need to know how many employees leave each year and understand the related costs. Obviously, retention should be a high priority.
• Employee engagement—Measure employee engagement with employee satisfaction or net promoter score. Correlating employee engagement to results is a great way to profile top performers.

The Sales Enablement Handbook includes many of the metrics above, but also:

• Number of new customers
• Number of new multi-product customers
• Productivity per rep
• Qualification/demo-to-close rate

How do you get your sales enablement plan started?

Though far too few companies take a formal approach to setting up sales enablement, doing so has proven to greatly affect sales performance as measured by quota attainment, win rates for forecast deals and revenue plan attainment.

Our research uncovered a variety of approaches to creating a sales enablement strategy. Here, I’ll offer a simple set of fundamental steps recommended in The Sales Enablement Handbook by Ben Cotton.

• Document a mission. With a focus on long-term goals, document what the team will aspire to accomplish.
• Document a strategy. Create a simple strategy document to summarize what the team does. Identify the key stakeholders you’ll serve.
• List the key plays. Determine the big initiatives the sales enablement function will focus on.
• Set targets. Determine your plan’s most important goals and select the metrics you’ll use to evaluate your progress.
• Define responsibilities.What will the sales enablement team be responsible for? Your list may include:
  • Onboarding
  • Sales process and methodology
  • Sales playbooks
  • CRM
  • Sales tools and technologies
  • Sales content
  • Ongoing training and development
  • Competitive intelligence
  • Sales projects and campaigns
  • Deal support
  • Sales coaching
  • Recruiting
  • Incentives and compensation
  • Channel partner support

What skills does your team need?

Given the authority to hire employees or contractors, you’ll want to look for:

• Communications skills—Sales enablement is a cross-functional role and so your best performers must possess the ability to navigate multiple departments, listen well, and communicate effectively.
• Training skills—The best enablement professionals can energize, motivate, command the attention of an audience and educate and inspire.
• Analytic skills—As the sales enablement function matures, strategic leaders should be able to analyze metrics and plan tactics tied to practical business strategies. 
• Sales sensibilities—Your team will require people who grasp the achievement mentality of top salespeople and the challenges all salespeople face.
• Market experience—Relevant market experience in sales, product marketing and your specific industry will give you team members greater credibility.
• Content skills—Content skills are paramount. Team members, or the team at large should be adept at:
  • Understanding how content will be used
  • Writing and producing content in different formats
  • Sourcing appropriate tools salespeople can use to find and use content
• Attention to detail—Team members should be able to focus on continuous improvement by identifying gaps and proposing solutions.
• Comfort with new tools, processes and technology—At least one team member must have the skills to:
  • Evaluate, test and deploy new tools
  • Help make the tools easy to learn and use 

How can you evolve your sales enablement practice?

Each of the experts whose books I’ve referenced agree the process of assessing your sales enablement maturity will help you determine how to shore-up your gaps and make effective progress.  Essentially, having a clear view of where you now stand is a critical first step to defining your journey forward.

In Enablement Mastery, the authors present a four-stage maturity model:

1. Random
2. Organized
3. Scalable
4. Adaptive

For each, it is recommended to evaluate the following:

• The degree to which the customer is a defined design point
• The degree to which the strategy is formally documented and sponsored by company leaders
• The audience served, as in salespeople, managers and/or all customer-facing roles
• The services delivered and the degree to which they are aligned to unified value messaging
• The degree to which cross-function collaboration has been formalized
• The degree to which useful technologies are integrated to serve sales enablement objectives
• The degree to which operations are formalized, metrics are recorded and production processes are clear and effective

The post B2B Sales Enablement Best Practices appeared first on Feldman Creative.

You might think buying a book (or reading articles like this) about personal branding is the first step in your personal branding journey. Think again. You already have a personal brand. Let’s not pretend you’re about to create it. The best you can do is develop it, ideally, with purpose and passion.

If personal branding is a road to recognition, your challenge is to steer.

If personal branding is a road to recognition, your challenge is to steer.
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“Brand” is a tricky thing to describe. In the classic marketing world, most companies try hard to define their brand when, in reality, the market, or more specifically the audience, defines it.

We can dive deep into defining a brand but we’ll start with the basics. A brand is:

• The impression formed when the brand’s name is read or said
• The sum of the experiences a person has had with the brand
• Reputation
• How people describe the brand (not how the company, or person, describes him or herself)

All of the above applies to your personal brand. You don’t “spin” your personal brand. You live it. It’s what’s true about you.

When you achieve success with your personal brand, people recognize you as a specialist. For example:

AJ specializes in helping entrepreneurs use marketing automation to sell information products online.

BJ is a life coach who works one-on-one with CEOs to help them avoid burnout and depression from workaholism.

CJ is a consultant who works with members of family businesses to advance generational success by working with them on legacy family planning.

Bring who you are to what you do

Who are you? The core of your personal brand is the person you are, the things you believe in, and the gifts you aim to share. Though many of the platforms you’ll use to develop your personal brand will be digital, in personal branding there’s no virtual reality.

Authenticity is your key to:

• Build a trusted identity
• Elevate and substantiate your brand in a competitive market
• Set expectations
• Be easier to understand and relate to
• Encourage engagement with like-minded individuals
• Turn audiences into advocates.

At its core, being authentic means staying true to who you are, what you do, and those you serve. I’m not talking about sharing every thought you’ve ever had but, rather, connecting with people on a human level, as you would with someone you care about.

Let’s face it: trust is a valuable but rare commodity. Marketing—the action or business of promoting and selling products or services—generally poses a threat to authenticity and thus, trust. Marketing encourages us to be cynical.

Be true. Be able to say with confidence you are being real, consistent, accountable, thoughtful, and honest. It’ll feel right.

Nurture your authenticity

You are unique. However, you don’t need to be unique to be authentic. The definition of authentic is, in a word, “genuine.”

Authenticity isn’t quite like many of the skills I plan to share with you on your branding journey, which can be taught. However, it’s something you need to examine and nurture. The process begins by identifying your skills, strengths, talents, values, and passions.

Here are some practical ideas:

Identify authentic people in your niche

Look at role models in your niche. Dig into the content they publish. Why does it resonate with you? What do they do to earn your trust?

Tune into what people say about you

Your friends, family, and mentors can help get you in touch with your authentic self. Get input from them. How do they perceive you? How do they describe you? What strengths of yours do they acknowledge?

Scope your skills

Attempt to identify and document your essential skills. Which do you most enjoy using? Which apply best to your career goals? Make a list of five or more.

Buck conformity

Public enemy number one in personal branding is fear. A fear of being different compels people to conform. Buck it. Let your opinion be known. Set your personality free.

Re-examine your content

As you read more from me on personal branding, you’re going to begin learning how the things you write and the content you create are expressions of your brand. Don’t edit yourself out of it. Infuse your personality into all your communications.

Be clear about your mission

Share it with gusto but take care to make only promises you know you can keep. Practice what you preach.

Be consistent

Each and every conversation—online and off— is an opportunity to demonstrate your values. Align everything around them and send a consistent message.

Let authenticity be your compass

On your personal branding journey, you will discover many tips, tactics, and strategies to strengthen your personal brand. Let authenticity help you navigate and develop a brand you believe in.

Are you feeling good about what the real you has to offer? Going forward, we’ll explore how you’re going to share it.

LEARN HOW FELDMAN CREATIVE CAN HELP YOU DEVELOP YOUR PERSONAL BRAND

The post Authenticity: The Heartbeat of Your Personal Branding Journey appeared first on Feldman Creative.

• You can measure nearly every tactic you try in one way or another. Essentially, you know what is and isn’t working. 
• There’s a DIY approach for nearly every tactic, too. 
• Budget need not be an issue. It’s easy to start small and control your spend. 
• You can adjust on the fly.

A logical conclusion is: digital marketing is only expensive when it’s not working. So, it’s always a good time to scrutinize your goals, and performance metrics, and adopt new strategies. Let’s take a dive into a variety of ways your company can make smart moves while keeping a handle on the budget. You’re bound to find an idea here that you can quickly put into play. 

Smart ideas for your website

1. Improve your homepage

Let’s begin by scrutinizing your homepage headline, the most important line on the most important page of your website, which is your most important digital marketing asset.

It must make a powerful first impression by quickly assuring visitors they have come to the right place for the challenge they face. Your homepage headline, subheadline, and the hero shot or header design in which they’re presented, should promise a transformation from having a problem to having the power to overcome it.

I’m hungry. I gather UberEats can solve my problem.
It’s also quite clear what this hungry fella’ is supposed to do next.
Does your homepage immediately get to the point like this?

Take a hard look at your homepage headline. Test a new idea. Here are some additional fixes you might consider for your homepage:

• User navigation—Is it obvious how to find stuff or where to get started? Is the menu clear and concise?
• Brevity—The objective of your homepage is to steer prospects to another page. Consider the very real possibility that your homepage presents too much information. If so, prune it. Less sections. Shorter copy. More suspense.
• Calls-to-action—Do your offers come through loud and clear?

This checklist will give you more ideas about composing a smart homepage.

2. Update your website’s design

If it’s been several years since you last updated your website, it may be lagging in one or more ways. It could be serving too slowly, limiting your creative options, looking a bit dated, or backdating your branding.

If your site’s based on WordPress a theme change may be all that’s required to apply an attractive new coat of paint. Consider the various design elements of your website such as its fonts, color scheme, and layout to determine what does and doesn’t need revision.   

3. Introduce a new feature or section

You might make a simple upgrade to your site by adding a new feature or section. I can’t tell you what it should be, but if you click around your competitors’ sites or sites you like, you’re bound to uncover something useful and cool. Here are 10 ideas that jump to mind:

• Customers—Testimonials and case studies go here. Done that?
• Gallery or portfolio—Are you showing off what you produce or how customers use your products and services?
• Glossary—This is a cool feature I see often see on B2B sites.
• Social feed—Showcasing social feeds make sense for a variety of businesses in a variety of ways.
• Tools—If you’ve developed any kind of content that can be considered tools, it may be time to showcase them in its own section.
• Team—This is a common website section, of course, but not every business offers it and those that do often publish dreadfully boring content that reads like a bunch of consolidated resumes. Have fun with it.
• Careers—Are you growing? Even if you’re not, maybe you’d like to have a pool of candidates ready to go when the need strikes.
• Press/media—Perhaps you’ve made some strides getting noteworthy media coverage and haven’t created a showcase for it.
• Blog—This is the age of content marketing. As they say, if you didn’t start blogging 10 years ago, today is the second-best time to start.
• Resources/hub—Your content ideas may expand beyond the blog or consist of stuff that’s not only articles. A resources page or content hub is a smart place to offer videos, webinars, eBooks, or any digital asset.

Granted, it probably wasn’t inexpensive for Hootsuite to offer “hundreds of free resources” (like it says above),
but the resources section of their website probably began with just a few of them.

4. Develop a new (or your first) website

Skip forward if you have a website and it’s producing the results you need.

If you don’t have a website, the time has come. Though you may be convinced website creation is a big time and money-consuming endeavor, it doesn’t have to be. Most clients I work with on websites opt to develop their site on WordPress, which can deliver a plethora of shortcuts, but there are easier ways to go.

In recent months, I developed websites quickly and inexpensively for a non-profit (shown above) and a musical artist (my daughter) with Wix. Platforms such as Wix, Weebly, Squarespace, and others make it insanely efficient to quickly put together a great-looking site—and they’re more feature-rich than years past.

Smart ideas for your content marketing

5. Clean house

If you’ve been blogging or populating your site with content for several years, it may be time to audit your website’s content and trim the fat. Old content might actually be a drag on your site’s authority. With a little help from their friend (that’d be me), my friends at ToThe Web created a helpful guide to conducting a content audit.

6. Update old content

Your content audit is likely to reveal content that once made a mark, but its effect has fizzled. Perhaps some of it’s outdated. But if it used to draw eyeballs, it’s likely to have earned some links, and it could even rank high on search.

Don’t trash content such as this. Update and republish it. Check your facts, lists, links, images, and every possible “dated” detail. Maybe add or subtract sections and ideas. And, of course, when it’s shiny and new, promote it all over again.  

(Note to self: take your own advice on tip #6 this year.)

Research findings from The State of Content Marketing 2020 Global Report, by SEMRush, reveals updating and repurposing existing content are the number two and three most efficient tactics. 

7. Repurpose existing content

You’re only creating content that makes a ding in your universe if you’re pouring time into it. So, it’s wise to ask yourself, “Have you extracted all the value you can from it?” Do so by repurposing content that’s proven effective.

I’m talking about a serious time-saver here. Consider, for example, how easy it could be to repurpose a list post as an infographic, a webinar as an email series, a series of interviews as an ebook, etc. But in addition to pumping up the volume of your content with less effort, you’re also testing new waters with various content formats and media outlets, which will ultimately expand your reach.  

Content in the form of lists are supremely primed for repurposing.
Above is a snapshot from an example of repurposable content I’ve used as a blog post,
infographic, presentation, webinar and the focal point of guest posts.  

8. Develop useful tools

While nearly every content marketer focuses on the bare bones with a blog, few apply their efforts to offer simple tools such as templates, checklists, and assessments. Think about it this way: prospects are forever searching for these things. They do searches such as “How do I….” and “What’s the best way to…” and “(Blank) template” (or tool).

Here’s a thing of beauty from Backlinko (and I’ve only shown one-fifth of it).
The SEO templates offered are the first of five collections of templates.
I did a search for “keyword research template” and Backlinko ranked first.
It may have taken a good bit of work to create these resources, but the ROI gained will surely
qualify this tactic as “inexpensive and smart.”

9. Host a webinar

Webinars can deliver wide reach cost-effectively and remain an asset afterwards. Once again, they ranked in the top three tactics for both securing and converting leads for B2B brands, according to Content Marketing Institute.

10. Create a podcast

The age of multitasking has arrived. Though we’ve witnessed a decline in commuting to work, for obvious reasons, droves of content consumers are taking in content via their ears as they jog and walk. And so, consumption for audio books, courses, and podcasts keeps climbing.

Podcasts are relatively easy and inexpensive to create. Business.com claims that podcasts:

• Capture your audience’s attention
• Create a personalized experience
• Help build and maintain network connections
• Open up new financial possibilities
• Position yourself as a leader in your industry

Smart ideas for your email marketing

11. Deliver a welcome series

A surprising percentage of brands don’t greet new email subscribers with a welcome email or series. That strikes me as (1) an opportunity lost and (2) kind of rude. Not sending welcome email is to ignore a new prospect when their interest level is potentially at its highest, a missed chance to teach them more about your solutions, and to simply connect.

Get this: welcome emails multiply transactions and revenue per email by 3X.

If you haven’t yet put this strategy in play, read this post I wrote for Orbit Media to learn more about why a welcome email series is smart marketing, how to get started, and what to feature in your emails.

12. Begin segmenting your email list

Many businesses offer all email subscribers the same content. This lazy approach backfires in the form of low engagement and losing subscribers.  

Segmenting your email list divides your subscribers into smaller segments based on criteria you dictate. Then, you have the opportunity to deliver more relevant email based on location, interests, gender, purchase history, and more. MailChimp research indicates segmented campaigns produce a 100% increase in clicks.

13. Offer an email course

Let’s assume you have established some good cred in your “know zone.” Now, if you use the word “course,” some percentage of your subscribers may consider whipping out their credit cards to get it.

But what if you offered a free course? It’s likely to pull in a big way. And it need not be fancy. You can simply drip emails forth over a week, or month, or more. Essentially, the idea is to take a valuable lesson you’re qualified to deliver—or already have delivered—and serve it up as bite-size pieces.  

An email course is easy and inexpensive to setup and deliver and a great way to attract new subscribers or stay connected to the ones you already have.

Smart ideas to expand your digital footprint

14. Contribute guest posts

Neil Patel claims guest blogging is the best inbound marketing strategy. Though it may seem counterintuitive to publish your best work on other blogs, the benefits of contributing guest posts to relevant publishers can be enormous.  

First and foremost, when you land a guest gig on a popular site, you expand your reach and increase the chance of driving quality traffic to your site (read: potential new subscribers). You position yourself as an expert in your niche and build meaningful relationships with other prominent people and brands.

My blog is targeted by wanna-be guest bloggers multiple times every day—but terribly. If you’d like to drastically lower your rejection rate, read my post How to Land Meaningful Guest Blogging Opportunities.  

15. Run ads on social media channels

Look at some of the numbers from 2020 research by Hootsuite and We Are Social…

Two simple conclusions: a majority of the world’s population are now active on social media and nearly all of them access it via mobile.

Now, look at this data from a report by GlobalWebIndex…

Peruse the numbers above and you’ll find some telling insights about why social media advertising is exploding. Social media advertising enables you to laser-target your ads and attract new customers. You can get started with a small budget, closely track ROAS (return on ad spend), and scale your campaigns when you identify the campaigns and media that deliver the best results. 

It’s a big topic, so I’ll steer you to the most recent and thorough guide to social media advertising I’ve found here (from Hootsuite).

Smart ideas for social media marketing

16. Dive deeper into one social channel

If you’re not realizing the results you seek via social media there’s a good chance you’re spreading your efforts thinly across numerous channels. Consider setting a few of them aside, at least in the near-term, and focusing solely on the one where you’re most likely to produce results.

If the question then becomes, “Which one?” your challenge is to develop buyer personas and identify the social channel that best aligns with your most promising persona.

Additionally, you can examine how your competitors use social media, conduct a customer survey, and examine your analytics. The process is likely to be easier than you think and the outcome is unlikely to be surprising. Sprout Social offers many tips for this process here.

17. Try live streaming

Livestreaming on social media appeared to take-off in a big way when Periscope caught on in 2015, but then, stalled a bit in subsequent years. The lockdown era that began in early 2020 appears to have given the tactic new life.

“Live streaming is dynamic, authentic and engaging,” writes Stacey McLachlan in her Ultimate Guide on Hootsuite. “The best part is that you don’t need any special equipment or tools to tap into the world of self-broadcasting, she adds. “Streaming is for everyone, especially businesses looking to connect with their customers in real time.”

18. Improve your visual content

You battle for attention in the war zone that is social media and like most, you’ve come to find engagement is increasingly elusive. Recent data from RivalIQ puts average Facebook engagement at .09%.

Text-based posts won’t cut it, so the vast majority of marketers rely on visuals to draw attention to their posts. However, most lack the skills to consistently create engaging visuals, so they offer-up easy-to-get, easy-to-ignore stock photography.

However, there are now a mesmerizing array of low-cost (and fun) tools for creating more intriguing visual marketing, which don’t require the skills of a professional designer.

 

 

 

 

 

View this post on Instagram

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A post shared by Motionleap (Formerly Pixaloop) (@enlightpixaloop)

• Look to an app provider such as the award-winning Lightricks to make crazy cool images, cinemagraphs (like the example above), and short videos.
• Unfold will make it remarkably easy to add a pro shine on your social media stories.
• Free accounts with services like Canva and Crello, which supply thousands of templates, will advance your visuals in a big way with a just a few clicks.
• If you want to include infographics and presentations in your mix I recommend Visme or Venngage.
• Also, consider adding subtitles to your videos and trying alternative approaches such as creating carousels.

Boosted is a web and mobile app that makes it insanely simple to quickly create one-shot video ads for social media.
It’s ideal for promoting a product, sale, event, and more.

Smart ideas to improve your productivity

19. Adapt some time-saving tools

We’re all guilty of doing our work the way we know how instead of embracing efficient shortcuts. Maybe you waste a time with…

• Monitoring social media and posting
• Gathering analytics
• Tracking links and rankings
• Proofreading copy
• Researching keywords
• Managing projects and scheduling
• Sharing content and ideas and archiving them

These are just a few examples. Whatever it may be, a shortcut is out there. There’s an app for that, as they say. Examine how your time is spent tackling the tasks you’re responsible for and make a vow to yourself to research, try and adapt a new time-saving tool or two this year.

Oh, how I love Keywords Everywhere, an inexpensive tool that saves me a ton of time when I do keyword research.

20. Cut something out

What should we call the digital marketer’s obsession with trying to do everything, every day, everywhere possible? Unhealthy? Unreasonable? Unfair?

I think we should call it unproductive. You’re doing too much. I hereby declare your New Year’s resolution is to cut something out.

21. Learn a new skill

Though I’ve hit on the theme a few times now that “thin doesn’t win” and suggested some “get leaner and meaner” strategies, I want to conclude by recommending this is the year you learn to master a new skill.

Make it something that matters. Add together the many ingredients of digital marketing in the 20s and you have a fairly complex recipe. But it’s important to recognize that recipe is different than the previous decade (or even year). So try to step outside of your daily to-do list for a moment, revisit your objectives, prioritize them as well as you can, and see if you can identify a skill you can use to improve your productivity.

The post 21 Inexpensive and Smart Digital Marketing Ideas for 2021 appeared first on Feldman Creative.

That sucks. As much as 91% are burning time and money or putting a dangerous amount of faith in a marketing approach for which they lack the necessary skills.

It’s time to put more thought into your content and inject some excellence in your strategy. I have a boatload of ideas about what makes for good content, what makes for bad content, and tactics that can go either way. Let’s get into ‘em.

Good content can be…

Relevant

Yeah, I suppose I’m kicking this list off with what seems like a no-duh idea, but I continue to see brands that aren’t in touch with what pains their prospects and fall short of understanding their educational, entertainment and inspirational needs.

You fix this by (1) creating solid buyer personas, (2) asking customers and customer-facing employees what they need, and (3) analyzing where your competitors are kicking your butt.

Entertaining

Anyone, on occasion, can stumble their way into producing a decent how-to. The best content marketers hire talented creators to make the story entertaining. Your goal shouldn’t be only to get people to visit your website (or content channel), it should be to compel them to keep coming back for more.

Your goal shouldn’t be only to get people to visit your website (or content channel), it should be to compel them to keep coming back for more.
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Helpful

Helpful rules. Helpful is why content marketing rules. And helpful doesn’t mean helping yourself; it means helping your audience have a more rewarding experience.

Authentic

Authentic is a bit hard to describe, but inauthentic is easy to snuff-out and it’s an audience repellant. Create content only if you genuinely want to help and ixnay the BS. Also, your content should be by a person, not a company.

Data-based

Much of the best content presents original research or applies data that’s useful and real. Of course, there’s a glut of second, third, fourth and fifth-hand data flying around because fact-checking tends to fly out the window in online marketing. Cite real, recent, and relevant data and link to its original source.

Data-driven

This gets back to relevance. As I wrote above, there are some proven ways to identify what’s relevant to your prospects and customers. Add to this list the data your analytics reveals. Nearly every measure that is important to your brand is a number or set of numbers that live in the reports provided by Google, email providers, marketing automation systems and social media channels. 

Save-worthy

Oh, how I love hearing from a customer, reader, fan, follower, or peer that my content was so helpful they saved it, bookmarked it, pinned it, or the like. Make an effort to make stuff worth saving.

Useful

I didn’t necessarily put “useful” on this list to reiterate “relevant” or “helpful,” but to stress how good, sometimes great, content can be a tool or template or even app. The point is it gets used and therefore saves your audience time and/or money.

Revealing

I chose the word “revealing” but I also mean surprising, shocking, provocative and so forth. My point is, while of course your content can aim to teach, you can gain credibility points if you’re able to shoot down myths and misconceptions or boot some nonsense out of someone’s brain.

Emotional

You may not be able to elate, enrage, or deject someone every time you write or record content, but your content will be more engaging and effective when you understand there’s a human on the receiving end. He or she has feelings. Fondle them.

Exciting

I’ll grant you, content that qualifies as helpful and relevant often won’t bring people to the edge of their seat or play out like an adventure film. However, there are multiple ways you can enliven your content (courtesy of a post by Larry Alton on HuffPost):

• Tell a story
• Write in a personal, conversational style
• Create urgency with your headline
• Write a great lead to build anticipation
• Inject cultural references
• Toss in surprising elements

Visual

It takes more time and effort to make your content more visual, but…

• Your pillar, evergreen content that you invest so much time in writing will deliver a far greater user experience when you include images and video.
• Your content is likely to earn more shares, backlinks, engagement and SEO juice.
• It’s worth it.

In addition to photos, consider visual elements such as:

• Illustrations
• GIFs
• Infographics
• Charts
• Screenshots
• Lists
• Quotes
• Slides
• Short videos

Easy on the eyes

Easy on the eyes = more likely to be consumed (and vice-versa). How many times have you seen ugly blog designs and articles that present a wall of text only?

The fix: break it up with subheads, lists, pull quotes, graphics, photos, embedded visual content, or anything that makes written content less work to read. Use whitespace and simple, sizable fonts.

Original

Obviously, digital media makes it easy to copy the work of others and claim it as your own. Obviously, it happens relentlessly. And obviously, it’s a crime and I’m sure you won’t do it.

However, you need not be a bad guy to borrow good ideas. It’s perfectly okay to cover territory and topics that have been trodden upon. In fact, you probably do want to put your fingerprints on popular topics in your field. When you do, bring an original voice and point of view.

Take this post, for example. Am I the first to make a list of what makes for good content? Of course not. Have I made it all mine? I sure tried.

Collaborative

Collaborative content—as well as crowd-sourced—can be great. Consider publishing interviews and roundups and playing host with experts in your webinars, podcasts, chats, etc. Feature insights from authors, partners and relevant professions in your blog posts and infographics too. Doing so will help you establish authority and you’ll make important connections along the way.

Thorough

The research continues to indicate longer content earns more pageviews, shares and backlinks.

Okay, I’ll buy it. However, I have pages that have done great in each of these metrics, and more, that don’t contain thousands of words, or even close.

Don’t be long-winded. Be thorough. Great content wrestles a challenge to the ground and may naturally include the elements viewers, sharers, outside publishers, and yes, even search engines love.

Repurposed

You’ve heard the virtues of repurposing content extolled before. Yes indeed, repurposing is a good thing. This article, for instance, could easily become a presentation, webinar, download, infographic, video, email, and a heap of social media posts.

Repurposing content in different ways via multiple outlets can increase your audience reach and appeal to differing media tastes.

Optimized

Organic search is bound to be your prevailing source of traffic. Learn how to optimize for search and give it a chance to win eyeballs on the channel that matters most. 

Demonstrative

“Giving proof” is one definition of “demonstrative” and the one I mean here. When you deliver a lesson, tell a story, or both, your content gets all the more solid and believable by showing your audience precisely what you mean.

Demonstrate with:

• Screenshots
• Customer stories
• Data
• Video
• Photos

Directive

Calling all content marketers: content can, and should, generate leads.

Generating leads is the content marketer’s leading challenge and many of the others that made this list support it. A simple little tip (that’s often not taken) is to include a prominent call to action designed to generate leads. It’s not pushy or out of bounds; it’s smart.

Bad content is often…

Boring

You like to read, watch or listen to boring stuff? I didn’t think so. Boring’s bad. And please, don’t play the “I’m covering a boring topic” card. There are no excuses for subjecting the world to boring content. If you’re not able to get your material to sing and dance a bit, find someone who can.

If you’re not able to get your content to sing and dance a bit, find someone who can.
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Sloppy

I’m no longer amazed—but still appalled—by how many companies publish slop. Bad grammar, spelling, syntax, structure, formatting, bad links, etc…

C’mon. Don’t rush. Don’t write it off as unimportant. And don’t excuse your slop for any reason. If you want your audience to take your content seriously, get serious about maintaining high quality standards in every regard. 

Dated

Sure, when you deliver content into the word for a prolonged length of time, it’s bound to get dated. I believe you should date it. If you refuse to, then you should keep it up-to-date. In my book, out-of-date content is big turnoff. I’m especially sensitive to it when it pertains to a relentlessly changing topic, like marketing or technology, and cites crusty old data.

Dense

I told you thorough is good. Go deep when you can. Dense is different. What I mean by “dense” is:

• Articles with overly long paragraphs or no paragraphs
• Pages with no white space
• Webinars that drone on relentlessly with no pace-breakers
• Videos and podcasts that are longer than they need to be

You get the idea, I hope. Whatever format you’re expressing yourself in, if you don’t give it some breathing room, you run the risk of suffocating your audience.   

Off-brand

Your brand’s voice extends to your blog, vlog, social media and so forth. Sure, you may want to expand its perspective to include new contributors, from inside or out, but I suggest you take care to maintain some continuity. Consider your brand’s voice, tone, and style and edit accordingly. Deliver a cohesive, on-brand narrative across your media spectrum and over time.

Predictable

Try not to be painfully predictable. To review, you do want to be on-brand, but I personally abhor the blogs and content hubs that scream, “We have a formula.” Same templates. Same length. Same headline style. Same sameness.

Blech. Of course, your content is going to cover some common ground, but if reads like a broken record, you risk losing your audience.

Okay, okay, if your site specializes in lists, or how-to’s, or customer videos, or industry news, or some such formula, you’ll need to work harder to be unpredictable. I submit, however, even a recipe site stands to benefit from mixing up its recipes—or the way they’re presented. 

Me-too

One of the worst kinds of content is content you can find anywhere. Revisit my blurb above about originality. You have a voice; use it.

100% promotional

Ever been to a blog or YouTube page or any content hub that’s one continuous brochure? We all have. Ever subscribed, bookmarked it, or come back? If your content is all or mostly about your brand, it’s time to grab a few books about content marketing and learn how it’s done in this century.

Content for the sake of content

At various content hubs, mostly blogs I suppose, and on social media channels too, it often feels to me like brands are publishing content in some sort of obligatory mode. Most of the factors I’ve listed as good are absent.

If you’re “checking a box” with content, it’s the wrong approach for your company. Sure, advertising, PR, direct marketing, telemarketing, and other age-old tactics continue getting more challenging, but reconsider them if you can’t get into the idea of educating, entertaining and inspiring your prospects.

You decide if it’s good or bad…

Supported by multimedia

I was tempted to proclaim the inclusion of multimedia elements as good—and it can be—but it’s only good when the media’s good. I’m all for seeing posts that include video, infographics, and possibly GIFs, but often feel I’m being hammered with irrelevant nonsense. Develop and use media that strongly supports your story.

Quick

Many content marketers attest to the power of deep and long content as the research often indicates it performs better via search.

Others talk about our short attention spans and the appeal of making it quick.

Feel free to make content that’s short and sweet. Feel free to go deep. Experiment, get feedback, and learn what works for you audience in various venues.

Free or paid

Most of your content should be free because few will be willing to pay for it. That said, when you offer free content it may entice your fans to purchase books, reports, courses, and possibly even memberships.

Interactive

Interactive content works for many reasons. Atop the list, interactive content can:

• Increase engagement
• Help potential buyers collect valuable insights
• Deliver customer insight you might not otherwise be able to gather
• Increase social media shares

Thanks to a plethora of SaaS platforms, it’s become easy to produce contests, quizzes, assessments, and other types of interactive content. Consequently, in many instances, much of it’s purely bubble gum.

User-generated

Many brands seek to inspire their audience to give them user-generated content such as reviews, photos, stories, and more. The brands that do well with it generally create a positive customer experience, forge relationships with customers, and skillfully curate and present the content.  

Curated

I’m not a big fan of blogs or content hubs where the majority (or all) of the content is collected from other sources and republished. However, content curation—done thoughtfully—can help the cause. Additionally, there are numerous ways to curate beyond simply republishing, including interviews, crowd-sourced content, and creative collaborations (as I dug into above).  

Controversial

A wise advertising mentor of mine once said, “When you turn some people off, you turn some people on.” I love that. I love reading and hearing bold, controversial, and opinionated points of view. And I love dishing it out, too. But it not’s for every author or audience.

I propose you should say what you think and express how you feel but think about how.

Time-consuming

It took me quite some time to create this post. Good or bad?

It was a bad use of my time if it didn’t inform, entertain and inspire you. I hope it did all three.

DISCOVER AN AMAZING LIBRARY OF CONTENT MARKETING TIPS HERE.

OR CONTACT FELDMAN CREATIVE TO DISCUSS YOUR NEEDS.

The post Good Content, Bad Content and Content that Can Go Both Ways appeared first on Feldman Creative.

An insane amount of content is published on the web each day. Few companies achieve the reach they seek with the standard one-two punch of organic search and social media.

In social, it’s hard and getting harder to create the perception of “signal” in a sea of “noise.” With search, your odds get even longer. Golden though they may be, the ten slots on the first page of a search result are evasive. 

The good news is there are many channels you can pursue—and even control—via content distribution with paid media. However, it’s not as though I just revealed some priceless secret. Paid content channels are crowded and competitive as well. Ever-increasing demand for prime screen space is driving digital advertising costs higher.

I’ve written this (beefy) post to help you navigate the paid media content distribution and promotion waters. Whether you’re new to paid content distribution or frustrated by your past efforts to cash-in on it, you’re about to take-in and take-away practical strategies bound to help you achieve more of your traffic, leads and sales objectives.

Want to improve your reach with #paidmedia? This post @feldmancreative offers insights on the most effective options. #contentmarketing
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Native advertising: A relatively new frontier in digital marketing

Banner blindness is real. Though banner-style ads still populate web pages, viewers largely ignore them. Recent research considered various placements and sizes for display ads and reported an average clickthrough rate (CTR) across all ad formats as 0.05%. (Source)

Ad blocking’s equally real—and has been on a steady rise the past six years.

But advertising is alive and well in a new form called “native.” It even has its own institute, who we’ll turn to for a definition of native advertising:

Native advertising is paid advertising where the ad matches the form, feel and function of the content of the media on which it appears

Native Advertising Institute

Essentially, native ads look less like ads

They’re not blocked. They don’t disrupt the reading experience. They appear on blogs and news sites and while they compel the notice of viewers, they don’t scream “advertising.” So they work.

• Native ads earn a 9% lift for brand affinity and 18% lift for purchase intent as compared to display banners.
• Consumers looked at native ads 53% more frequently than display ads.
• 25% more consumers were measured to look at in-feed native ad placements (the most common editorial native ad format) than display ad units. (Source)

“Which part of the website gets the most engagement? It’s the editorial stream—the core content areas. So the best place to deliver your ads is where you can natively embed them in your website’s content.”

Neil Patel, Neil Patel Digital

Native advertising increases credibility

Creating a highly credible online news source is no easy task. Even if your content is consistently great, it can take years to achieve the magic combination of traffic and loyalty. Most businesses never get there.

With native advertising, you pay for exposure on someone else’s platform and therefore piggyback on their reputation.

In fact, it works both ways. In a study by IAB and Edelman, its authors write, “Well done sponsored content can enhance the credibility of the site and the site’s credibly can enhance the perceived credibility of the in-feed sponsored content.”

They go on to say, “Users are highly receptive to in-feed sponsored content if it is relevant, authoritative and trustworthy.” (I wish I could tell you it usually is.)

Content discovery platforms: A proven solution for driving traffic

It should be noted that with the exception of banner/display ads, each of the paid media formats presented in this article qualify as native advertising. Again, an ad qualifies as native if it reflects the form of the organic content (e.g. a Facebook ad).

We’ll begin our review of various native ad formats with its fastest rising star: content discovery. 

Content discovery platforms are the recommendation widgets consumers find on publisher websites, most often at the conclusion of an article. Usually ads are displayed, in native fashion, with simply an image and headline.

Ad blockers are not an issue. Viewers using ad blocking software will see ads presented by a content discovery platform.

What makes content discovery platforms unique is the massive scale they achieve. See, the term “walled gardens” is used to describe Google and social media networks because they’re closed ecosystems controlled by the operator. Not so for content discovery networks, which might include tens of thousands of publishers.

Make your content meaningful

You can promote any content you choose via content discovery networks. Consequently, far too many brands put their money behind “click bait” content offering sometimes fun, but usually lightweight features.

Genuinely helpful content works best.

“Ads are for stuff. Discovery platforms are for content. They’re particularly effective when it comes to getting new eyes on B2C content or expanding a niche B2B blog to reach new leads and prospects.” Source

• Most people would rather learn about a company through articles than ads
• Recommended articles should not be paid ads disguised as editorial content

Performance-based content promotion

Content discovery ad buys are programmatic, so they’re rapidly moving toward giving ad buyers on the open web greater targeting and personalization capabilities.

As such, the most effective content discovery networks are performance-based. Advertisers pay only when people actually click and can take advantage of powerful data resources to continuously optimize cost per acquisition (CPA).

Your paid media campaigns are therefore:

• Transparent—You have easy access to detailed audience data.
• Accessible—It’s simple to create campaigns targeting focused segments.
• Performance-based—You can see how audiences engage with their content and gather all relevant metrics, including CTR, CVR, and CPA.
  

Content sponsorships: Where brands and publishers become partners

Sponsored content is another form of native advertising. Generally, a brand and publisher establish a direct relationship, create content, and present it in-line with the publisher’s content feed.

While it most often takes the form of editorial articles, multimedia tactics can also be within the realm of this form of advertising. Sponsored content types might include:

• eBooks and white papers
• Infographics
• Interactive content
• Video
• Podcasts

Note, publishing partnerships can go even further than any one individual media type listed above and deliver co-branded microsites. For instance, here’s an example of a robust microsite from GE and the New York Times.

Because sponsored content appears on publications people go to for news, education, and entertainment, it can increase the trust factor for your brand. Sponsored content also tends to achieve high click rates because it blends in so well with the page on which it’s presented.

Where can you place sponsored content?

You name it. Prominent publishers include Forbes, New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal. Actually, the vast majority of publishers have embraced sponsored content in recent years.

What’s sponsored content cost?

The fees for sponsored articles are difficult to generalize. There are no industry standards. Nearly every publisher maintains their own criteria for validating the costs of sponsored articles.

In 2014, Relevance’s Chad Pollitt created the Media Buyer’s Guide to Sponsored Editorial Content and in the eBook he presented the many factors publishers may use to set prices.

Two factors likely to create extra costs—are:

• Content promotion—Content promoted via the publishers’ channels might include social media, e-newsletters and additional ad units.
  
• Content creation—The time and effort required from the publisher’s editorial staff is a wild card. The question is, who’ll create the content?

“Most major media publishers now offer a content development team that is separate from their editorial team. They all have slightly different names—the custom studios team, branded content team, custom content solutions team—but they all do essentially the same thing: offer a full spectrum of customized content solutions, including videos, infographics, whitepapers, research and more.”

 (Source: AdAge)

Yes, production costs are likely to represent a higher percentage of the overall budget than advertising. Of course, the effectiveness of the sponsored content campaign is tied to its quality.

Finally, understand recurring sponsorships perform best. If you’ve selected your outlet wisely and delivered great content, you’ll benefit from having a steady platform to tell your story.

Since 2012, Purina has collaborated with Buzzfeed to produce and distribute the now famous “Dear Kitten” sponsored video series. With over 50-million views, audiences around the world love “Dear Kitten.”

Pay-per-click: The search engine option

Pay-per-click (PPC)? Search engine marketing (SEM)? Confused? I feel you.

PPC could (and often is) used to describe a variety of content promotion strategies across digital channels, including social. Technically, the term describes the billing structure. You pay per click.

And then there’s SEM, which can describe both paid and organic strategies for appearing on search engine results pages.

This section is specifically about paid search.

Since 2000, Google AdWords has by far been the dominant service in paid search. More than 2.3-million searches are conducted on Google every minute.

Just in case you’re not confused enough, in 2018, Google chose to retire the brand AdWords. It’s now Google Ads.

And, yes, Bing—and the sites powered by it (Yahoo, MSN, AOL)—operates a similar advertising service.

Now let’s look at how to cash-in on paid search for content promotion.   

A quick primer on Google Ads

Google Ads appear in search results on Google and other websites that participate in the program. They are presented at the top of the page, bottom, or both. Unpaid, or organic search results, appear between.

The text-based PPC ads are as native as can be and reveal themselves as paid placements with small box that reads “Ad.”

However, though they look virtually the same as organic results, they rode in on much different trains:

• Brands paid to present their ads. You can achieve top billing in minutes.
• Brands did not pay for organic rankings. They earned them. Earning high search rankings organically is not easy, nor is it usually fast. For billions of searches, Internet titans rule organic search.

Suffice to say, SEO is slow; PPC is not.

Google claims businesses make $2 in income for every $1 they spend.

Experts often claim PPC caters more to buyers than browsers:

• For high commercial intent searches (someone looking to buy a product) paid ads get 65% of all clicks. (Source)
  
• PPC visitors are 50% more likely to purchase something than organic visitors. (Source)

Results, of course, will vary.

Google Ads (Bing too) works on an auction system, which takes place every time a user performs a keyword search. The auction is focused around the keywords you choose to target relevant searches and the bids you place on them. 

What content should you promote on PPC?

You might use a portion of your PPC budget to test new content, however the majority should be allocated to promoting your most educational and compelling stuff.

Look to promote content that includes actionable offers likely to turn first-time visitors into leads or subscribers. An educational offering, or lead magnet, such as a guide, e-course, webinar, assessment or checklist might be ideal. The idea, of course, is to help visitors solve the problem that inspired them to use a search engine.

Examine your website’s data to learn which offers garner the most engagement and highest conversion rates.

Ask yourself: Is this a good piece of content to nurture and push leads through the buying journey?

PPC ROI is about perpetual refinement

Ultimately, your PPC marketing campaign will serve you increasingly well as you take actions to improve your click-through rate (CTR), grow your list of targeted keywords, and reduce your cost per conversion. Getting there requires clearly defining your goals.

PPC is inherently rich in metrics. Your goal is to perpetually increase efficiency as measured by the cost metrics. As you optimize your keywords, ads, and account structure, you’ll measure campaign performance and work toward reaching your goals.

It’s easy to get started with PPC. However it can be hard to keep up with it. Plus, running multiple campaigns is bound to get tricky and technical. If you’re battling for highly competitive keywords and aiming to perpetually improve ROI, you’ll benefit from enlisting the help of PPC pros.

Facebook advertising: Social media’s largest audience

No thorough discussion of content promotion options can exclude the fast growing behemoth that is Facebook advertising. Thanks to its reach of 2-billion-plus members, Facebook is the most advertised-on social media platform.

It’s widely understood changes in recent years to the Facebook algorithms have significantly decreased organic distribution for brands and publishers. As a result, many turn to paid content distribution.

Running promoted posts on Facebook guarantees your content gets more eyeballs and allows you to target your ideal audience.

Facebook offers a variety of ad formats

The choices you make when promoting content via Facebook ads begins with selecting from a myriad of ad formats:

• Video
• Image
• Collection (catalogue style)
• Carousel
• Slideshow
• Canvas (fullscreen experience)
• Lead generation
• Offers
• Post engagement
• Event responses
• Page likes

Note also that Facebook is the parent company of Instagram so some of the formats and advertising options apply to Instagram.

Getting started with Facebook ads

The list of ad formats above may appear a bit intimidating, however Facebook presents a friendly face to advertisers. Once in the Facebook Ad Manager platform, you’re prompted to select a primary campaign objective.

Once you choose an objective, the ad system shows you the best options. It also provides Facebook’s algorithms with useful information to better target your audience and improve results.

The targeting process

Facebook’s ad programs are well reputed for their audience targeting capabilities. Your choices will include:

• Custom audiences—Targets specific users from your email list, users who have taken certain actions on your site, your Facebook page, or Instagram’s business profile
  
• Lookalike audiences—Replicates qualities from your custom audience
• Demographic targeting
• Location targeting
• Interest/behavior targeting
  
• Connection targeting—Determines if you want your ads to be shown to users who are or are not connected with your brand

Subsequently, you’ll choose where you want your ad to be displayed. Choices include placement options on Facebook, Instagram, the audience network (an in-app advertising network for mobile apps), and Facebook Messenger. Additionally, you’ll select the devices with options to choose mobile, desktop or both.

The budgeting process

Facebook advertising can cost much less than paid search. In fact, you can start with as little as $1 per day.

In the budget and schedule section of the Ad Manager, you’ll choose your budget, schedule the ads, and fine-tune the campaign with options to optimize ad delivery and bidding.

Facebook offers multiple payment structures including:

• Cost per click (CPC)
• Cost per like
• Impressions (CPM)
• Cost per action (CPA)

Spending smart on Facebook

Facebook advertising cost is determined by:

1. Audience
2. Relevance
3. Estimated action rate
   

Costs will vary per a wide variety of factors including seasonality, competition, placement and the target audience selections you make. An ad targeted to a specific audience is likely to be more relevant, which causes the audience to interact, and ultimately increase your ROI.

Monitor your campaigns with the Facebook Ad Manager looking for crucial metrics such as CPC, frequency, relevance scores, and number of actions taken.

You’ll also want to keep your ads fresh. Change them up frequently with different images and copy and continue testing.

“As your audience gets to know you better, you want to serve your message in engaging and different ways. So run campaigns using a particular trend for a month or two and then choose a new trend to use.”

AdEspresso Facebook Advertising Playbook 2018

Finally, you’ll optimize your ROI more effectively by focusing on one objective per campaign. Avoid asking the viewer to take multiple actions. Confusion results.  Instead, to achieve higher conversion rates, create more ads—each with a single focus.

Instagram advertising: The king of mobile

Instagram is the king of mobile and an astounding study of explosive growth as a social media advertising channel. From 2016 to 2017, ad volume and sales doubled.

Why has the app enjoyed such success from ad sales? Engagement rates are off the charts.

• Forrester research reports consumers are 58x more likely to engage with branded content on Instagram compared to Facebook
• 80% of users follow a business on Instagram
• Engagement with brands is 10X higher than Facebook
• Visitors from Instagram stay on a site for an average of 192 seconds, longer than visitors from every other channel
• 90% of Interbrand’s Top 100 Global Brands use Instagram

Instagram’s unique

Instagram’s primarily a mobile app. Its ad experience is entirely unobtrusive, however it’s a visual-first channel. Success depends on recognizing you’ll only call attention to your content if you think visually.

Here are some additional tips for improving your success with Instagram:

• Test different ad formats and conduct split tests.
• Include closed captions for videos because ads start without any sound and may be watched without it.
• Utilize segmented lists to create laser-sharp messaging that will resonate with each.
• Remember the focus is on the visual.

LinkedIn advertising: The B2B play

According to the 2017 version of the LinkedIn marketing guide, 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn as a content distribution channel and more than half of all social traffic to B2B sites comes from LinkedIn. They also report content gets 15 times the interaction of job postings.

Like Facebook and Instagram, LinkedIn has a powerful ads program. Unlike the highly popular general-purpose social platforms, LinkedIn is highly useful for promoting business-to-business content to decision-makers.

A HubSpot study revealed traffic from LinkedIn generated the highest visitor-to-lead conversion rate at 2.74%, almost 3 times higher (277%) than both Twitter (.69%) and Facebook (.77%).

LinkedIn offers two basic pricing models: CPC and CPM. For sponsored content, LinkedIn recommends a minimum audience of about 300,000.

LinkedIn’s paid advertising programs include:

• Sponsored content—A normal post you boost with your ad budget
• Sponsored InMail—You send customized private messages to users
• Text ads—Ads include brief copy and a small image and are presented atop feeds and in the sidebar
  
• Video ads—Appear in users’ feeds and auto-play silently by default

Higher prices, higher returns

LinkedIn’s ad costs are generally higher than other platforms, but conversion rates are too. Following are tips for achieving better results:

• Pay close attention to your analytics. Use the LinkedIn ads Campaign Manager to track impressions, clicks, costs, and other metrics.
  
• Test different versions of each LinkedIn ad to see which one generates the best results.
  
• Test and optimize CPC bidding against CPM bidding to determine which option drives the best cost per lead/conversion.

Twitter advertising: A potential dark horse

Twitter doesn’t rank in the top 10 websites for daily visits. It’s rare you’ll find ad experts raving about Twitter advertising and most don’t think of it as a paid content promotion platform.

But don’t go away. We’ll cover Twitter because it can indeed be a viable channel for paid content distribution for many brands, possibly yours. After all, the majority of companies use Twitter and the majority of Twitter users follow brands.

So Twitter is probably not where you want to start your advertising efforts, but you may want to experiment with the platform. The more touchpoints you make with your content distribution, the better. Sprout Social endorses Twitter ads pointing out they are subtle, highly customizable and cost-effective.

And there is this: more than 67% of those users are likely to purchase from a brand they follow on Twitter.

Your Twitter ads options

On Twitter you pay for specific user actions. You can choose from actions including clicks, acquire new followers, engagement, app installs, leads or video views.

Following are some tips to increase the ROI of your Twitter ad budget:

• Fees—Set a daily maximum payment or a total campaign budget to control your costs. You can compare your campaign to costs paid by similar businesses. Twitter also recommends budgets for different types of campaigns.
  
• CTA—Be clear exactly about what you are trying to achieve. Don’t overdo the hashtags and links.
  
• Cards—Create a card with the Twitter ads manager. You can add a preview of your website, app download option or take advantage of other options. Twitter stats suggest promoted Tweets that include a card get more than 40% more engagement.
  
  

P

Pinterest advertising: Where the shoppers are

Pinterest is hardly the giant Facebook and Instagram are. However 61% of its users (that are 80% female) have discovered new brands or products from Promoted Pins. Half of the pinning population has made a purchase after seeing a Promoted Pin.

According to the social media experts at Hootsuite, Pinterest is more popular than Instagram among U.S. baby boomers and moms, which makes the channel worthy of a percentage of your budget if you’re targeting these demographics.

Pinterest offers the following types of ads:

• Promoted pins—Regular pins are promoted to reach a larger audience. The “Promoted” label goes away when a user repins the post.
  
• Promoted video pins—Promoted video pins appear in the news feed, search results, and the “More like this” section, and play automatically.
• One-tap pins—These ads take users straight to a website (as opposed to a close-up of the pin).
  
• Promoted app pins—These are specifically for app providers and make app installation easy and instant.

Tips to make your Pinterest posts pay

Pinterest uses a simple CPC bidding system. Costs are bound to be less expensive than the other platforms reviewed in this eBook. To get more from your investment, consider the following:

• Before you pay to promote pins, it’s wise to test them organically and promote the pins that appear to be getting some traction.
• For ideas, look to www.pinterest.com/topics/ and conduct keyword research. You’ll discover how many people follow the topic. Take advantage of the “related terns” suggestions provided.
  
• Make sure, of course, your images are attractive. Blocks or tiles of multiple images perform well.
  
• Use Pinterest analytics to discover how many people are clicking on your pins, doing close-ups, and how many repins or saves your pins generate. You can also learn more about your audience here.            
• Five variations of rich pins enable you to pin more than just an image. “Article pins” are especially useful for content promotion and allow you to information such as author, link and headline.

“Video Pins enable our customers to discover new DIY ideas in an entertaining format,” said Savannah Samuelson, Social Media Manager at Lowe’s. “Beyond the video, Pinners are also given step-by-step guidance and insight into products used in home improvement projects.”

Banner ads: The web’s billboards

You’d have to look hard to find data that makes a case for banner ads generating clicks. The average click-through rate on a 468 x 60 banner ad is 0.04%.

How terrible is that? It’s up to you. To put in it context, TV spots have a 0.05 percent response rate and billboards have a 0.03 percent response rate.

So… 996 times out of 1,000 times banner ads don’t clicked. Are they a waste of money?

Perhaps not. Banners may be thought of as weak conversion drivers, however they have the potential to boost awareness and brand equity. You might think of banners as brand-building billboards.

“Clickthrough rates miss a lot of attribution of people buying products.”
~ Julian Cole, head of communications planning at BBDO

Make the most of banners

BBDO recommends the following for executing effective banner ads:

• Communicate fast—Viewers don’t “watch” banners. Make sure your banner helps viewers instantly recognize your brand.
  
• Simplify—Stick to one benefit. Make your banner visually simple. Keep your copy to 5–10 words and avoid complexity.
  
• Stay on brand—Maintain consistent colors and typography. Tone is also key. Reinforce your brand’s personality.
  
• Trigger the campaign—Create recognition using clear cues jive with the campaign’s overarching creative strategy.

Conclusion: Your content distribution options are many

As I said atop this post, most content can be likened to trees falling in the forest and not making a sound. It doesn’t have to be that way.

Putting some money down on your content distribution and promotion with paid media gives you control over its exposure and drives traffic to your landing pages.

But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Your brand—and the many companies you compete with—have access to same media outlets. The secret to success lies in experimenting with various distribution options, tuning it to how they perform, and making refinements to increase ROI.

The post How to Improve Your Reach with Paid Media appeared first on Feldman Creative.

It’s a fun convo writers new and old are bound to learn something from—or have opinions about.

Highlights from the episode include:

• The number one way to develop your voice as a writer
• How to overcome perfection paralysis and free yourself
• Writing to an audience to an audience of one
• Why—and how—to copy your favorite writers
• Examples of writers in content marketing who are rocking a unique voice
• Exploring styles
• How Andy learns from his own blog

In the cheese & mousetrap segment:

• Barry talks about the value of injecting your opinion into your content
• Andy introduces how voice affects your website’s call to actions

They talked about how you’ll want to read stuff at:

• Enchanting Marketing
• Ann Handley
• Spin Sucks

Coming in the show’s next episode:
What are lead magnets? Do you need them?

The post How Do You Develop Your Voice as a Writer? [Content Jam Episode 38] appeared first on Feldman Creative.

“Customers expect brands to know what they’re interested in, what they need now, and even what they might need in the future.”

Why pursue personalization?

In his 1991 book, Relationship Marketing, Regis McKenna spoke of the age of customer-centered and knowledge-based marketing.

The One to One Future, by Don Peppers and Martha Rogers, published two years later, foretold a future where marketing and technology would marry and give birth to a new age of personalization.

Do people want personalized marketing?

They do indeed. Customers want to be understood. Though enjoying a personalized experience calls for accepting that brands will gather and use personal information, few people object. In fact, recent research from Epsilon (The Power of Me) reports:

• 90% of people find personalization appealing, and
• 80% of consumers are more likely to do business with a company that offers personalized experiences

How does your brand benefit from personalization?

When brands understand their customers and respond accordingly they can:

• Improve the customer experience
• Create consistency across channels
• Drive increased revenues
• Increase brand loyalty

The many benefits of personalized marketing—from the fifth edition of
Salesforce’s State of Marketing report.

Let’s examine the essential questions about personalized marketing and uncover the answers you’ll need to tap its power.

Where do you begin with personalized marketing?

As you know, nearly all marketing strategies begin with goals. Questions to ponder as you pursue them include:

• What do you want to achieve? Increased conversions… reduced bounce rate… average order value… etc. You may want to improve the ROI of a specific marketing tactic or many.
  
• How will you measure success? Which metrics will determine whether you have reached your goals?
  
• Who are you targeting? This question begets more questions… Do you want to deliver different experiences to new versus returning visitors? What channels will you focus on?
  
• What data sources do you need? Start thinking about the data you need to reach your goals.
  
• What content do we need? You’ll need to identify any major gaps and make a plan to address them.
  
• What skills do we need? Start thinking about the tasks required to accomplish your goals and how they’ll get done.

Marketing automation leaders, Marketo, encourage marketers to approach personalization planning by answering the following three questions:

• Who—Who will you personalize for?
  
• What—What will you personalize?
  
• Where—Where will you present personalized content?
  

How do you apply personalization in B2C marketing?

Personalization in consumer marketing could be applied based on:

• Location—Where is your customer and how can your product be more relevant based on the answer?
  
• Demographics—What information about your buyer’s age, gender, and more can inform your messages and offers?
• Behavior—How has your prospect or customer reacted to various offers or content?
  
• History—What have you learned about the customer that would help you nurture new or ongoing sales?

How do you apply personalization in B2B marketing?

Personalization in business-to-business marketing is more complex but could be applied based on:

• Account-Based Marketing (ABM)—How can you target and personalize for specific companies or existing customers?
  
• Persona-based—How might you target specific buyer personas by title, job functions, needs and pain points?
  
• Location—Can you target businesses based on location? 
  
• Behavior—The holy grail of personalization targets buyers based on behavior and data drawn from analytics across their interactions.

How does personalization meet customer expectations?

In an effort to simplify the complex topic of personalization, Accenture developed a tidy “4R Personalization Framework.”

1. Recognize
   Customers expect to be recognized by name.
2. Remember
   They expect to have their preferences remembered without having to be reminded.
3. Recommend
   They expect the business to pay close attention to their unique preferences and make recommendations.
4. Relevance
   They expect personalization that is relevant within the context of the situation, such as where and when.

I’ll summarize it all with one short phrase: right-timing. Examples might be:

• Suggesting refilling a supply when the time is right
• Recommending what to do, watch, listen to, read, try, or buy next
• Suggesting a complementary product or service based on purchase behavior
• Facilitating the purchase by automatically accepting payment, delivering the product or service as needed, and delivering receipts or reports as needed 
• Inquiring about the buyer’s satisfaction at the appropriate time

Use your imagination. Think of the 4Rs or right-timing in the context of your business and your customers’ needs. No doubt, the list above could get long. And I think it’s clear to see, whether the personalization revolves around content, products, services, or options, delivering it in a helpful way is bound to foster greater satisfaction and loyalty.

Where should you put personalization in play?

Brands can deliver personalization across the customer journey, across devices, and offline. You can personalize your communications across channels such as:

• Your website and landing pages
• Site search
• Email marketing
• Mobile
• Advertising
• Offline

You can personalize across content types too, with

• Blog posts
• Ebooks and white papers
• Infographics
• Images
• Video
• Case studies
• Offers
• Calls-to-action
  

In a 2017 State of Personalization Report, Segment asked its customers which were the most important channels to get a personalized experience, where brands are succeeding, and where they need improvement. The results:

What does it take to do personalized marketing?

Given the obvious benefits of personalized marketing you would think every brand would be in rapid pursuit of making it happen. But that’s simply not the case.

Most assume personalization is the domain of the megabrands such as Amazon and Netflix and consider it too resource-intensive and therefore out of reach.

What are the main things brands struggle with?

The answers include:

• Technology
• Strategy
• Budgets
• Staff skills

Technical challenges loom largest and include:

• Integrating data sources
• Automating decisions at scale
• Gaining a real-time view of customers with context
• Understanding buying behavior
• And more

How do you overcome the technical hurdles?

As you would expect, software is the key. The challenge is to achieve new levels of insight from multiple customer touchpoints and respond. A tightly integrated martech stack must inform decisions and:

• Enhance collaboration between the marketing and all departments integral to the customer experience to ensure fast and satisfying fulfillment.
• Mine huge data volumes to create effective campaign strategies.

For many brands, offline systems must factor in as well. Consider, for example, the important data generated at the point of sale.   

Essentially, every action at every touchpoint in the connected customer journey is a source of data. Three questions become crucial:

• Is the data collected?
  
• Is the data integrated?
  
• Does the data inform action across the marketing, service, and customer experience your brand delivers?

The continued maturation of AI and machine learning are helping addresses the challenge with technology. Platforms including CRM and marketing automation enter the equation as well. However, marketing automation platforms usually automate engagement for a single channel.

A new breed of software, the customer data platform (CDP) is emerging as the connective tissue that delivers the ability for marketers to tap into a system that reveals needs-based data regarding the individual buyer.

What is a CDP?

A CDP is not a CRM or a marketing automation platform (MAP). It provides marketers a central location for customer data. A CDP opens the door for marketers to employ personalized marketing using omnichannel data in real-time to tailor digital experiences to the customer.

According to Gartner, CDPs are gaining widespread attention from marketers because they provide “a holistic view of the customer to help execute and optimize personalized journeys.”

Element Solutions simplifies the essential role of the CDP

What is customer journey analytics?

The customer journey tends to be cross-functional in nature. McKinsey found:

• 56% of all customer interactions occur during a multi-event, multi-channel journey
  
• 38% of all customer journeys involve more than one channel of interaction

As we’ve established, personalized marketing demands an actionable single customer view. The essential ideas:

• The goal is to identify points where you can influence and enhance the journey, journey analytics are indispensable.
  
• Customer journey analytics allow you understand what customers are thinking, feeling, and doing across touchpoints.
  
• An effective journey analytics tool aggregates and presents actionable data you use to engage with customers via the right channel when it matters most.

Customer journey analytics overcomes the gaps between analytics and action.

Forrester claims customer journey analytics combines quantitative and qualitative data to analyze customer behaviors and motivations across touchpoints and over time to optimize customer interactions and predict future behavior.

How do you get customer journey analytics?

The simple answer is you get customer journey analytics from an AI-powered CDP.

One provider claims: AI-powered CDP gives organizations access to thousands of metrics for each customer from the earliest prospect stage of the journey through long-term, loyal customers. It also builds individual customer profiles in real-time to take the guesswork out of customer journey analytics.

What does personalized marketing look like?

Here are snapshots of six brands putting personalized marketing to work.

STARBUCKS

Starbucks engages its customers with its mobile app My Starbucks Rewards Program, which makes use purchase history, location, and more. According to GlobalWebIndex, the introduction of the rewards system saw Starbucks’ revenue soaring to $2.56 billion, while the app has generated around 6 million sales per month (around 22% of all U.S. sales).

SPOTIFY

Spotify has mastered the fine art of content recommendations. I’m sent personalized playlists based on my listening history and concert notices about bands “Because I listen to them.”

NETFLIX

Netflix combines behavioral attributes with predictive learning to present subscribers content recommendations. More than 75 percent of its website activity is driven by their personalization engine.

NAKED WINES

Naked Wines has adopted personalized marketing strategies similar to Amazon.

The online seller allows you to buy wines and rate them and delivers personalized recommendations based on your tastes.

EASYJET

easyJet celebrated its 20^th anniversary with emails that made personal travel recommendations. The company created a model that profiled all the destinations the customer had been to and suggested other, relevant ones.

Open rates were over 100% more than its average newsletter—with 25% higher click-through rates. 7.5% of easyJet customers who received the personalized email went on to make a booking within the next 30 days.

EVERGAGE

Rather than generically promote content across its site, Evergage uses one-to-one content recommendations to show website visitors specific content assets based on who the visitor is, what they’ve shown affinities for, and what they’ve already downloaded.

Are you ready to personalize your marketing?

Dynamic Yield’s 2019 Personalization Maturity Assessment indicates 97% of marketers believe personalization is valuable yet the majority still can’t say they’re prioritizing it as a strategic initiative.

Additional data from the study claims only 5% have attained a single view of the customer to orchestrate personalization across channels.

Where are you now?

Like most things that promise large rewards, achieving effective personalized marketing requires taking methodical and persistent steps up a steep path. Try to gauge where you stand today.

This diagram from WebEngage depicts a maturity model that might help you determine where you are and understand subsequent steps.

Will you need help?

Getting going with personalized marketing isn’t strictly the domain of software.

“Building a personalization program starts with getting the relevant stakeholders in your organization on the same page about the value and benefits of the initiative, developing a comprehensive strategy, ensuring you have the right skills on the team, defining a process to execute a personalization program, and confirming you have the appropriate level of governance in place to keep your personalization efforts on track.”

(Excerpt from One-to-One Personalization In the Age of Machine Learning, by Karl Wirth and Katie Sweet, Evergage, Inc. 2017)

You may want to tap a digital marketing agency that knows the ropes and is capable of helping you accurately assess your systems, processes, and capabilities to determine next steps.

I’ve done a lot of reading on the topic and found that common theme is to “start small.”

You may not be able to leap from the basic (and boring) personalized email subject line to the immensely personalized experience a brand like Spotify delivers, but in short measure—with the guidance of professionals—you should take smart, strategic steps leading you up and to the right in your pursuit of personalized marketing.

Keep in mind, your customers expect a personalized experience. Will they get it from your brand or from a competitor?

The post Personalization in Digital Marketing: The Essential FAQ appeared first on Feldman Creative.

Sure, we feasted on the various flavors of eye candy media-makers spun forth then, but today we’re even more magnetized by pixelicious content.

So… the benefits of infographics are no longer a mystery to content marketers. Infographics can be the device-friendly and social media-friendly content format that rallies both deep data divers and the skim-as-fast-as-you-can clan.

But do you know how to increase the effectiveness of infographics to their full potential?

Unless you’re large and in charge of a phantasmagorical audience of friends, followers, and subscribers, your infographics can turn out to be search engine-defying duds.

Your content needs legs to be effective.

With my brain pointed squarely on marketing with infographics, I challenged myself to create a list of ways you can increase your ROI in infographics. I came up with 13 ideas I’ve used effectively. Here they are.

Want to discover effective ideas for your next infographic? Click here, or the image below for The Great Big List of Infographic Ideas.

Thanks again to the talented team at Infobrandz that works with me to develop infographics.

The post Multiplying the Effectiveness of Your Infographics [Infographic] appeared first on Feldman Creative.