According to a Formstack report, contact forms should include no more than four fields per form. Adding additional fields reduces the likelihood a lead will fill out your form and give you their information. With such a limited number of fields, it becomes rather challenging to be able to capture enough quality data from your leads that can be fed into your marketing automation. What if there’s a way to get more data out of your leads without scaring them away with a long web form? Enter progressive profiling.

What is progressive profiling?

Progressive profiling is a method of gathering user data over time using an interactive smart form that presents a lead with a subset of form fields from a larger set at any one time. Fields are queued in advance in this larger set so that if a lead has already answered one of the earlier fields, the next unanswered field can be displayed in its place. In this way, a fuller picture of the lead’s profile can be built up over time without discouraging visitor engagement by requesting too much information upfront.

The greatest benefit of progressive profiling is boosting lead generation through a series of less demanding touch-points that advance the lead through the sales funnel. Another benefit is also autocompleting forms, which gives leads the freedom to update information as their situation changes, while also relieving them of the burden of filling out forms.

How does it work?

SharpSpring has recently added progressive fields to its form tool that makes it possible to achieve progressive profiling. Here’s a quick video that walks through how easy it is to start adding progressive fields to forms in SharpSpring.

What I can use it for?

To use progressive profiling effectively, you should start assessing your contact fields and determine a priority order among the fields. What are considered as important and required fields in your organisation may not be the same as other organisations, so it is critical to consider that and decide what works best for your company. Secondary fields would be less important fields that may be good-to-haves but are not necessary when they are filling out your forms for the first time. These may include fields such as phone number, industry, country, topics of interest, etc.

Parting notes

Keep your forms short and sweet if you want to increase engagement with your forms. Asking only a few questions and keeping them relevant is a sure way of building up more robust user data over time.

What Counts as Engagement?

SharpSpring’s engagement tools use all aspects of the platform to signify that a contact still wants to hear from you, including:

• When a contact opens an email
• When a contact clicks a link in an email
• When a contact visits a tracked site
• When a contact clicks a Media Center link

As you can see, SharpSpring provides comprehensive measures to ensure any contact that is engaging with you, your emails, your media center assets, or your sites will still be able to receive email from you.

At a Glance – An Infographic Summary

We have summarised how the contact engagement score changes with different activities tracked inside SharpSpring in an infographic below. The subsequent sections describe the information conveyed in this infographic in more details.

Contact Engagement Score

Each contact is given a contact engagement score upon creation. This score has a maximum value of 16 and a minimum value of 0. Contacts created manually, from a form submission, or through the API will be given an initial contact engagement score of 16.

Contacts created through the import tool will be scored based on overall list quality and individual email address quality. This is described in the later section.

Contact Engagement Score Categories

Contact engagement score is divided into three categorizations: Engaged, At Risk and Unengaged. The criteria of these categorizations are defined below.

Engaged

Contact Engagement scores of 5 or greater (with a maximum value of 16). Users can send email to these contacts as normal.

At Risk

Contact engagement scores of 4 or less (not including 0), or after 20 months of not opening an email. Contacts with scores in this range are added to the dynamic list, “At Risk Contacts”.

Users can send email to these contacts as normal, but should consider sending highly engaging content in an attempt to drive clicks/opens.

The At Risk status will be included in the automation engine as well as for list segmentation. You can easily add this attribute as a filter to any of your existing lists or automations to exclude / include all contacts with this status.

When scheduling an email send to a list, there is a checkbox option to “Suppress recipients at risk of unengagement”. When clicked, the at risk contacts will not be included in the send for the email job.

Unengaged

Contact engagement score equal to 0. Contacts with this score are added to a dynamic list, “Unengaged Contacts”. These contacts cannot receive email.

The Unengaged status will be included in the automation engine as well as for list segmentation. You can easily add this attribute as a filter to any of your existing lists or automations to exclude / include all contacts with this status.

What Affects the Contact Engagement Score?

Contact engagement score changes based on the following activity:

1. For every email the contact is sent and does not open the score will decrease by 1 point.
2. If the contact opens any email, the score will reset to 16.
3. If the contact fills out a form, the score will reset to 16.
4. If a contact with tracking established is unengaged (score of 0) and visits a tracked site, the score will increase by 6 points.
5. If a contact with tracking established is unengaged (score of 0) and clicks a media center link, the score will increase by 6 points.

In addition to the above, if a contact has not opened or clicked any email in 24 months the contact engagement score will immediately set to 0.

What About List Imports?

Contacts created through the import tool will be scored based on the overall list quality and the presence of individual contact’s email address on a third party verification service. These contact engagement scores will vary per contact, scored with a maximum value of 9 and a minimum value of 0.

If equal to or greater than 45% of your list contacts are present on a third party verification service, your list will not import. We have determined these lists would fall into the lowest 2.5% of list quality, and have a high risk of damaging your sender reputation should an email send be attempted.

Parting Notes

By preventing sends to unengaged recipients, SharpSpring is helping to protect your domain reputation and ensure engaged recipients continue receiving your content. Sending to unengaged recipients puts your sender domain at risk of hitting a spam trap, or having ISPs classify your sender domain as a spammer.

If you are encountering any issues or need clarifications to your doubts about this update, please reach out to your assigned account manager or project manager.

We have worked with marketers to gain clarity within their organisations on what their ideal content strategy should be. The key factors that determine whether a content strategy is sound are none other than knowing exactly who you are talking to, and knowing what content is relevant to them. And this is the approach that is tried and tested by many content marketers that are seeing success in their inbound marketing strategy. This week, we are seeing two content marketing experts talking more about this, in the form of “customer-content fit” and “topic clusters.”

Customer-Content Fit

Content marketing agency Grow and Convert recently coined the term “customer-content fit” that exemplifies the importance of understanding your buyer personas and buyer’s journey so that you are writing the correct, relevant content to attract the right people at the right time. Here’s what Grow and Convert says of the problem that many marketers are familiar with:

If you’re the marketing executive or founder, this misalignment problem is mentally and emotionally exhausting. You’re working your tail off producing content month after month. From ideating, to writing, to graphics, to promotion- it’s all a lot of work. So when the management team asks you “How many customers are we generating from our content marketing efforts?”, it can feel like you want to throw something at a wall.

— Customer-Content Fit: A Framework for Producing Content That Attracts Customers
Grow and Convert

For marketers just coming onboard inbound and content marketing, getting the right mindset on how to write relevant content is a big hurdle to overcome. I’d say there are two camps of marketers that I’ve worked with: marketers who want to jump right in to start churning out content, and marketers who don’t know where to start. For both camps, the solution is surprisingly the same:

1. Build your buyer personas
2. Identify your buyer’s journey and map your content strategy to your sales funnel
3. Write content to target these personas in their various buying stages.

Topic Clusters

Incidentally, HubSpot recently released its new Content Strategy tool which is built on the concept of topic clusters. HubSpot explains why topic clusters is the new approach to SEO:

Influential search engines like Google have changed their algorithm to favor topic-based content. As a result, SEOs are exploring a new way of linking related content under a “topic clusters” model. This report serves as a tactical primer for marketers responsible for SEO strategies.

— Topic Clusters: The Next Evolution of SEO
HubSpot

Essentially, the key difference in content approach with topic clusters is that topics are more valued over keywords, as search engines enhance their algorithms and become more intelligent in deciphering search queries and guessing intent.

Credit: HubSpot

The Content Strategy tool is very new and we are on our way to understanding it more, but it’s not difficult to see this as a move in the right direction. Interestingly as well, focusing on topics can open up new opportunities to fill in content gaps that cannot be easily surfaced when simply focusing on keywords. This is good news for marketers who are finding it harder to think of new content to write given the saturation of similar content already out there.

With that in mind, I want to talk about five marketing ideas that are highly adaptable and have shown that they are a good fit for almost everyone. I’m not going to deep dive into how to execute these ideas. Instead, I want to help you take a step back and look at the big picture. Not getting caught up with the execution details allows you clarity to see how to fit each idea into your own marketing strategy. After you have truly understood and appreciated the ideas would you be able to focus on the methods and tools that can help you achieve them.

1. Personalisation

This is a huge topic, and rightly so because relevant marketing is not going away anytime soon. If all you are doing now for personalisation is starting your bulk emails with “Dear {FirstName}”, then you are missing out.

Personalisation is all about how to speak directly to the needs and wants of your audience. Since not everyone is the same, it makes sense that how you speak to them needs to be different. A blanket marketing message that targets everyone, targets no one.

Personalisation is not just in the content that you write–you have to think of it more than just marketing copy. It can be how you reach them: what social media networks do your different target segments frequent and what kind of tone to use on these platforms? Or what kind of content types (blogs, photos, videos, chats, podcasts, etc.) do they engage with the most? Or think about the when: what’s the best time to reach out to them in the day or week?

2. Content and Storytelling

You’ve heard this all the time: content is king. Yet, many marketers are not devoting enough attention to content. Don’t get too caught up with SEO and design, until you have worked out a solid editorial calendar. We have witnessed it far too often: good content will draw in the crowd, even if UI and design is not optimal, but a good design with poor content is almost certainly going to fail.

Are you already constantly putting out content? Good! Then, you might want to consider using storytelling in your content to tell your marketing story. Everyone loves a good story, and through storytelling, you reveal a side of your organisation that appeals to your targeted segments.

I attended a brand storytelling workshop recently, and within the small group of business owners, one word kept popping up — authenticity. It’s amazing everyone craves for authenticity, not just those on the receiving end. While it may be tempting to shape yourself to sound like one of the big brands, you run the risk of sounding hollow and putting yourself in a disadvantage of having to stand out with the same message as everyone else. People want authenticity, and it’s brands that invest the time and effort to find their true story and walk their own talk that truly capture the imaginations of those that they want to reach.

3. Personas

The topic of buyer personas is so important that, even though it’s one tactic under the broad topic of personalisation, it warrants a discussion point all on its own.

Buyer personas are one of the key factors to successful personalisation that I talked about earlier. Building personas can be fun and rewarding, once you get past the beginning stage of understanding what buyer personas are. I know this, because all the marketers that we have worked with find the entire process necessary and not too intimidating once they got into it. While it’s important to ultimately come up with good personas, what I find even more valuable is the process that goes into building out these personas. Through the process, marketers begin to look deeper into understanding their target audience at a more human level, rather than only seeing them as statistics and bundles of attributes. And this is important, why? Because it’s only when you start to think of your target audience this way that you will begin to feel more natural in personalising content and weaving in storytelling that will evoke emotions in them.

For me, if there’s only one thing you take away from this post, make it buyer personas. Very often, the process of developing personas causes a sea change in how marketers look at the potential of the different ways to reach out to their customers, and this change propagates through all the other points that I touch on in this post. It changes how they craft their marketing messages and how they measure reach and engagement.

4. Buyer’s Journey

If personalisation is about reaching the right people at the right time, and buyer personas are about targeting the right people, then buyer’s journey is about getting them at the right time.

Our engagement process with our targeted audience can be modelled as what we call the “engagement continuum”. Whether you are targeting consumers, business customers, partners or employees, as long as you need to engage them, that process can be described by this continuum.

Understanding what kind of content and deals your buyers need at each stage of their buying journeys is key to being relevant and useful to them in their decision making process. This exercise, like buyer personas, forces you to step into the shoes of your target audience and think through the what and how to present content to them at the time that makes the most sense.

5. Attribution

Data is a marketer’s best weapon. Go beyond sessions and pageviews in your Google Analytics, and start looking at tracking how different campaigns, sources and media are contributing to the success of your marketing. As you start engaging customers on a myriad of platforms, it becomes crucial to be able to report on the true effectiveness of each campaign and channel through calculating their respective ROIs.

The topic of attribution is gaining a lot of traction as more marketers move away from the less-nuanced last-click attribution model in favour of attribution models that take into account of the proliferation of omni-channel marketing, such as time-decay and position-based attribution models. Google’s data-driven attribution is also a huge thing to pay attention to, and it’s a safe bet that this area will continue to grow and more tools will be available to marketers of all sizes.

Parting notes

I hope this post can guide you towards a mindset change on what these marketing concepts are really about and help you understand how each of these concepts could fit into your own marketing story. With this clarity, it can help you be more focused on what you must do, how you should do it, and do it in a way that’s most relevant to you.

Have you tried these yourself, or do you have your own ideas to share? Let us know in the comments.

In this blog post, I want to share four tactics that you should start working on, if you are not already doing so, to make your marketing more relevant to your customers.

1. Personas

Buyer personas, or simply personas, are fictional representations of your ideal customers. With personas, you move away from thinking of your contacts as a set of demographics and attributes, but as persons with desires and frustrations that your products and services can reach them to fulfil their dreams and wants, and remove their pain points. What really sets personas apart from segments by attributes is the persona story. When building your buyer personas, you weave back stories to humanise your target audience, which will in turn inform you on how to talk to them, what’s most important to talk to them about, and when to talk to them. And that’s what we mean by being relevant to your customers.

Additionally, when you bring a human face to your segments through personas, your marketing messages take on a humanised voice as well. And that’s always good, because most customers prefer to deal with businesses that listen to them and are able to respond to them with awareness.

As soon as you are able to be more relevant and more responsive to your customers, you will start seeing engagement rise because now you are talking to people who are interested to listen to what you have to say.

So, what does a typical persona look like? As an example, here are three personas for a fictional travel agency:

Each persona describes a particular segment of travelers that abctravel.com wishes to target. Oftentimes, your product categories can clearly correspond to your personas, but this may not always be the case. In this example, it makes sense for the travel agency to target each persona for each travel category.

One very important point about personas is that they are not your actual customers. Personas should be broad enough, and should not describe any particular customer specifically, as doing so may unnecessarily narrow down your personas. Your customers may resemble one key persona, and that will be the lead persona that you go with for that customer. As you can see above, your customers Amy, Martin and Parker may describe themselves as one of your set personas.

So, after personas are built and customers are assigned to personas, what’s next? That’s when personalisation can truly begin. Depending on your marketing strategy, you may start to personalise your emails, landing pages and websites according to personas. Here’s an example of how a landing page might be customised to these customers based on their personas:

2. Buyer’s Journey

Buyer personas are for telling you who you want to reach out to, while buyers’ journeys are for telling you when and how you should reach out to them. The journey that a customer takes from understanding and becoming aware, to researching and considering, and finally to converting, is described as a continuum as depicted in the diagram below:

This diagram clearly illustrates that at different stages of a customer’s journey, their most immediate concern changes and the means to reach them morphs accordingly as well. For example, at the awareness stage, your customers are likely to have only just become aware of a challenge (or opportunity) they face, and may not yet be ready to look for a solution to address that issue. This is a good time for marketers to educate about the issue and be helpful in their paths to research and find out more about the problem. It will only be at the decision stage that it’d be appropriate to provide these prospective customers with information to help them make a decision to go with your products and services to answer their problems and challenges.

As important as buyer personas, a buyer’s journey should be mapped out clearly so that you can decide early on what kind of content should be created for each persona at their different stages in the journey. Identify the content types to invest time on, and whether there are existing content that can be repurposed and leveraged on.

3. Calls-to-Action

Before you embark on writing a piece of content or offer, stop and think about the call-to-action first. More often than not, doing that will give you a greater sense of clarity of how to structure the content and keep a keen eye on the goal that you want to achieve. With that focus, you will be less likely to deviate from your intended message, and the result will be a concise and clearly articulated piece of content that will engage your customers.

Defining a good call-to-action takes experience. For a start, refrain from the temptation to offer multiple calls-to-action. Very often, having many calls-to-action indicates a lack of confidence in what you are offering. By focusing on one strong call-to-action, you minimise the distractions to your intended audience and increase the likelihood of them converting. In other words, do not treat calls-to-action like safety nets to “catch them all.” Instead, be very focused and relevant in your messaging, and target the right segment, and you will create a much more effective call-to-action.

A good call-to-action must not be wishy-washy in its message as well. Be clear and bold–if the call-to-action is for a content download offer, for example, use the verb “Download” very distinctly (like, “Download Your Free Marketing Checklist Now”), so that there’s no mistaking what you want the audience to achieve. Remember that you are fighting against very limited attention spans, so it pays to be bold and to the point about the action to take.

4. Marketing Automation

To tie all these concepts together, you need to have in place a good marketing automation process. What marketing automation does is automating workflows that helps you achieve the mass personalisation that would otherwise be impossible to manage simply by manual process. For example, automated welcome emails or responder emails that are automatically sent out upon some website visitor’s actions are some classic use cases for automation.

Above is an example of a visual workflow set up in SharpSpring. Visual workflows are flowcharts that specify to SharpSpring which user trigger actions to look out for, and what email or system actions to carry out in response to those triggers.

Each flow may be as simple or as complex as one wants it to be, but taken together, all the workflows can come together to form an intricate system of automated triggers and actions that will make your marketing very responsive, targeted and relevant.

Parting Notes

It cannot be stressed enough just how important personalisation is to marketers today. Start small, but start today, to work towards bringing some form of personalisation into your marketing tactics. Stop driving the same old message to everyone on your list. Start thinking of how to slice and dice your segments and re-imagine the content and tone of voice that you use to reach out to these segments. Before long, you will start to see better engagement with your target audience.

This is where the editorial calendar comes in. The editorial calendar is essential to any content marketing strategy. It gives you a clear overview on the upcoming deliverables on the content side. Without it, your content efforts will become haphazard, unfocused and draining on your time and energy. With a good plan, you will have a sharp focus on the content gaps that you need to fill in, and you will have a much easier time planning on what to write and be sure that you have covered all the areas that you want to cover.

What Does A Good Editorial Calendar Look Like?

A good editorial calendar should give you easy access to information about your content plan for each month. Through our experience working with marketers, the most basic information you need to have in your calendar are:

1. Targeted publish date of the content
2. Title of the content
3. Content type (is it a blog post, a Facebook video, a tweet, or a sponsored ad?)
4. Buyer personas (or segments)
5. Publishing/Promotion platforms (blog, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)

The expected publish date and title of the content allow you to plan ahead the content that you want to release in a month. It gives you a clear look at how the content pipeline looks like so you can decide if you should ramp up or ease up on the content schedule. Content types and buyer personas (or segments) help you keep tab on whether you are covering enough ground for all the target audiences you want to reach out to, and also whether you are putting out a variety of content formats, so that your audience remains engaged and interested. Lastly, choose the publishing and promotion platforms wisely to help you with amplifying your carefully crafted content.

How Do We Do It?

To give you a good idea about how an editorial calendar can help you in your content strategy, let me give you an example of how we do it here at thepixelage. Our monthly editorial calendar is important to us for several reasons:

1. As an agency, we help our clients plan out their marketing strategy as well as execute them, so oftentimes, we need to strike a balance between working on our own content and working on our clients’. The calendar helps us find that balance by giving us the ability to lookahead and also flexibility to make changes to our plan.
2. The clear view on the plan helps us keep a finger on the different personas, funnel stages and topic areas that we want to cover each month. This helps us build up a broad content coverage, as well as put out specific topics that are relevant to the various buyer personas we have identified.

While we have used a variety of tools, for ourselves and for our clients, we find that you don’t need a system with bells and whistles to get you started. In fact, one of our most trusted method is to use a spreadsheet to help us get organised. Part of this template can be seen in the screen capture below.

This editorial calendar template is the same one that we use for some of our own clients as well, so it has been put through the works to get to its current distilled and tested-to-work format. Over the years, we have tweaked and re-tweaked this calendar to its current form that we find has been very adaptable to most of our clients’ needs as well as ours.

And we are very excited to share this with you. If you still don’t have an editorial calendar, you may be interested to download our free editorial calendar template that you can use for your own content planning.

More Alternatives

You get the idea–an editorial calendar simply helps you get organised and gives you a good roadmap to divide and conquer the huge task of generating content for your company. While here at thepixelage we generally use our internal project management system and our Microsoft Excel workbook to help us in this, we know fellow marketers have been using various tools to achieve the same. So, if you are used to these alternative tools, they may be worth considering to use as your editorial calendar tool.

• Trello
• WordPress Editorial Calendar (WordPress plugin)
• Google Docs

Do you already have an editorial calendar in place? What’s your favourite editorial calendar tool or process? Share with us in the comments. And if you are still looking for an editorial calendar to help you get started, don’t forget to download our free editorial calendar template.

Bookmark this list, as we will keep expanding this list when we discover new tools. Let us know in the comments if you are using any of these, or if you have your own suggestions.

Content Marketing

• Our very own editorial calendar template
  This editorial calendar keeps your content marketing plan on track. Now, you get to download it for free.

Analytics

• Google Analytics
  Powerful and free analytics service that should serve your needs
• Google Tag Manager
  Tag management service to simplify the maintenance of tracking codes on your websites.
• Google Data Studio
  We use this to help us quickly get at the raw analytics data that we will then process and consolidate for our clients’ monthly analytics reports

Marketing Automation

Marketing automation platforms are essentially suites of tools that help you automate your marketing efforts and make such tactics as automated emails, drip campaigns and lead nurturing possible. We are partners of both platforms in this list, and can help you with setting up your own inbound and content marketing strategy. Get in touch.

• SharpSpring
• HubSpot