This article has moved to the new Steveology Group website. Great content marketing

This article has moved to the new Steveology Group website. Great marketing

In Part 1 I shared what I saw coming in 2015 for digital marketers. For this post I look  at few key trends that I think are worth knowing about.

Click To Tweet >>> Social, Mobile, Content Marketing Predictions for 2015 Part 2

Taking The Notion Of “Brands Are Publishers” And Pushing The Boundaries

How that plays out: We’ll focus on enormous empathy and customer experience (and not just more blog posts). (That doesn’t mean blog posts aren’t important, for the right company and the right customer. But it means we consider if that’s the best approach, rather than making a post the default.)

We’ll focus on more relevance and new inspirations (rather than just the tried and true).

And we’ll focus on being generously useful.

 — Ann Handley (Read More 21 Digital Marketing Trends & Predictions for 2015)

Steve’s Comment: Tom Foremski for predicted this about 10 years ago, and he was right. The idea of becoming a publisher is very difficult for businesses…especially for large ones. They traditionally think about ensuring every word they publish is saccharine sweet and glowing in its obsequious praise. However, publishers want to attract readers and are forced to write for them. Not at them. With the growing cost of creating content, the painful truth that self-serving drek just doesn’t get shared rings loudly. Content marketers who strike the balance of being a great editor who knows a good story, but has the keen eye of a publisher who knows it must drive revenue will be the biggest winners.

Starting with sharing your blog posts or larger digital assets on your best performing social networks, like Twitter or Facebook, helps get early exposure, going back and promoting them with $20 bucks gives you a better chance to see how they will perform, and stronger signals to determine if they are worth supporting with heavier ad dollars.

Twitter’s New Business Advertising Model Will Skyrocket In Popularity

With Twitter’s move to offering businesses more choice and flexibility in how and what they pay for in terms of advertising, more small and medium sized businesses will jump on the Twitter ad bandwagon.  The new fee structure allows businesses to pay for certain performance-based actions rather than just retweets or clicks.

These objective-based campaigns, which are still currently in beta, will offer more flexibility including tweet engagements (retweets, replies, etc.), website clicks or conversions, app installs, new followers and leads. These campaigns will be particularly appealing to small business owners who want to pay for results, not just for brand visibility.

—  Jayson DeMers ( Read More The Top 7 Social Media Marketing Trends That Will Dominate 2015)

Steve’s Comment: Paying to amplify content marketing is the new reality. Ad spending will continue to grow as social networks gate meaningful access to businesses trying to reach the active users. Both Facebook and Twitter are evolving their advertising models to bring in more companies. There is an advantage for midsized business because they can create more micro-campaigns to take advantage of multiple niches their product serve that large companies are likely to overlook or undervalue. Learning how to create and test multiple ad campaigns can be learned over a weekend. Marketers not willing to get their hands dirty are at a disadvantage for career growth.

Advanced, Pervasive and Invisible Analytics

Analytics will take center stage as the volume of data generated by embedded systems increases and vast pools of structured and unstructured data inside and outside the enterprise are analyzed. “Every app now needs to be an analytic app,” said Mr. Cearley.

“Organizations need to manage how best to filter the huge amounts of data coming from the IoT, social media and wearable devices, and then deliver exactly the right information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics will become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere.” Big data remains an important enabler for this trend but the focus needs to shift to thinking about big questions and big answers first and big data second — the value is in the answers, not the data.

— David Cearley (Read More Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2015)

Steve’s Comment: Knowing what content is accelerating sales, and which channels work for different types of content is mandatory.  While marketing analytics is growing, to date much of it is to generate graphs and reports that we show the bosses we did something and make everyone feel good. However, we now need to grasp, analyze, and make data actionable. We need to get ahead of the curve and know specifically which kinds of content drives business goals, and pay to promote it, now requires marketers to become marketing technologists. And that’s a good thing.

About The Author
Steve Farnsworth is a Demand Generation Strategist for The @Steveology Group: A Content Marketing agency that drive sales and dominate markets for high tech B2B. You can contact Steve or connect with him on Twitter as @Steveology.

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And a special thank you for the very cool team at Racepoint Global for their outstanding work and continued support.

This article has moved to the new Steveology Group website. Great content marketing

These are the trends that stand out from working with midsized clients, and that influences what I advise to them.

In part 2, I will look at what other digital marketers I respect are saying and what trend data is worth keeping in mind as you up your digital marketing game for 2015.

Social Media Becomes Layered In All Content Touchpoints

For most marketers sharing your new content on Twitter and your company Facebook page is a given.

Click To Tweet >>> Social, Mobile, Content Marketing Predictions for 2015 Part 1

However, until recently few marketers have integrated layered social sharing strategies across all content touchpoints. With the increasing cost of creating great content it’s now mandatory for midsized businesses on a tight budget, which is pretty much everyone, to maximize sharability.

Several tactics are emerging:

• Making headlines more telegraphic (Allowing the reader to instantly grasp the topic/value)
• Showing only the highest performing social network icons on page.
• Using tools like Click-To-Tweet to share quotable tidbits throughout the content.
• Social sharing optimized for mobile devices.
• Creating word-smithed prepopulated Tweets/posts so readers can just click and share.
• Embed social sharing in newsletters and emails.
• Granting access to exclusive content when a readers shares.

Content Is Created For Mobile First

The year of being mobile is cliché. However, 2015 is when marketers start to grasp Flex-Media (Content in audio, video, and text) and its necessity to take advantage of “content in your pocket.” That is, content that goes everywhere the user goes.

As content consumption via mobile device swells, envisioning your content marketing assets from a mobile user’s perspective first is mandatory to win big with your target customers. Content that is slow to load, doesn’t resize for the viewer’s mobile device form factor, or is not easily scanble costs you views, shares, and ultimately key engagement that closes sales.

The advantage here for midsized marketers is most enterprise companies are still creating content for the desktop in one primary media format. Then repurposing it by chunking it up the best they can in a few formats. This fails to create content that has been designed specifically for each media platform. However, if you conceptualize your content creation with each user experience at the beginning, each component stands fully on its own.

Pay To Promote Becomes Standard Content Marketing Procedure

Content marketers will finally embrace paid as an integral part of their owned and earned strategy. While most marketers have resisted paying to promote free content, leaders like Todd Defren, CEO of SHIFT, have demonstrated huge success using pay-per-click and social ads promoting new and well performing content to amplify results.

A great technique to leverage tight budgets is to do 50/50. That is, use half of your budget to promote new content, and the other half to promote well-performing content.

You can spend $15 on each new blog post and digital asset when you publish using audience targeted Facebook ads. (You can have an ad promoting your blog post, that links back to your website, shown to people who work at specific companies, have a special interest, or follow a company page; like your competitors Facebook page for example.)

Then you can use the other 50% of your budget to promote ads that drive your KPIs: email signups, engagement, time on site, pages per visit, or requests for demos, etc.

About The Author
Steve Farnsworth is a Demand Generation Strategist for The @Steveology Group: A Content Marketing agency that drive sales and dominate markets for high tech B2B. You can contact Steve or connect with him on Twitter as @Steveology.

Awesome Sponsor

And a special thank you for the very cool team at Racepoint Global for their outstanding work and continued support.

This article has moved to the new Steveology Group website. Social media and content marketing

In Creating A Powerful Content Marketing Framework Part 1 I talked with Erin Robbins O’Brien, the COO of GinzaMetrics, about some of the key components for that framework. But what are the steps you want to take for putting it all together? What should you include in making your content marketing framework?

Click To Tweet >>> Creating A Powerful Content Marketing Framework Part 2

It depends on where you are. If you’re an individual contributor at a midsized organization, and not necessarily at the management or executive level, then start by having a conversation with the big bosses. Explain why this is important, the benefits, and how implementation is NOT going to be a burden on them. Rather it’s going to make their lives easier and make them look like rockstars.

Avoid Roadblocks

If you want to successfully sell this idea to management you must emphasize what you are specifically asking in terms of their time and mind share. “I can tell you that one of the things that’s really hard for me as I’ve moved along in my career is having these great ideas,” said Erin. “I want to implement these programs immediately but I run into roadblocks. As you grow and become the manager you have a lot on your plate.

Most people I know who are working managers are responsible for some tactics and execution in addition to general management and oversight of an entire department. When somebody wants to come in and try this new thing out, a lot of times it just means adding something else on to their plate.” If they are left with that impression it will kill your project before it leaves the starting gate.

Starting off with bite-size chunks is really important. Usually it’s a bad idea going and talking to other departments before you have first spoken with your own people. If you already have regular meetings and conversations with other staff, or if there’s a way to get base level insight from other people to start evaluating tactics, insights and information, then gather that together.

Create One or Two Page Action Plan

This allows you to create a recommendation briefing sheet, or a small report with some recommendations, that fundamentally says, “Hey, here are three things I learned from talking with colleagues. Here are the current outcomes. Here’s a suggestion I have for something that we could do differently, and how that will benefit us. And I’ve taken a first stab at it and here are the initial results.”

If you are able to accomplish some version of this, then you’ve actually taken it 80% of the way by yourself. This means your manager is not stuck with 100% of figuring out how to handle this new thing you want to do.

Pilot Project

If you are in management or executive stuff, suggest to give this process a try. As a midsized company you have greater agility to test smart projects out. It’s great for the team because it systemizes a lot of process that currently exists. It actually takes a lot of the pressure off of you having to be hands-on and manage day-to-day granular tasks. People like to have a very specific set of activities mapped out. And it allows you and your team to be more strategic, because it streamlines the little tactically stuff, and moves it away from being constantly top of mind because it’s now a process.

Choosing The Right Metrics To Measure Success

How do you know that your content marketing framework is working well? Not surprisingly it’s all about increased revenue or achieving the company’s business goals. You should see your arrows going up and to the right when your metrics improve. Setting those metrics appropriately at the beginning is how you know you’re on track. This is why you need to choose metrics beyond vanity metrics like more tweets, more followers, or more email opens. Those are unlikely to actually end up leading to conversions and revenue that you can really take and say, “Look at what we’ve done.”

That’s why setting it up at the very beginning with those KPIs is so important. And because it’s always different for every organization, that’s why there’s not a standard one size fits all “The 5 Exact Metrics You Should Measure.”

This is from an interview I had with Erin Robbins O’Brien, COO of GinzaMetrics. You can watch the complete interview here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E37vlsKrqaY

About The Author
Steve Farnsworth is a Demand Generation Strategist for The @Steveology Group: A Content Marketing agency that drive sales and dominate markets for high tech B2B. You can contact Steve or connect with him on Twitter as @Steveology.

Awesome Sponsor

And a special thank you for the very cool team at Racepoint Global for their outstanding work and continued support.

Social media has been the answer that marketers have been looking for to elevate their efforts. Since the advent of the internet, they consider it as a quick marketing ground to be influential—with a single click, their content can reach a wider scope around the world, their message can be repeatedly executed and delivered in a creative manner.

Click To Tweet >>> 11 Keys Of Persuasion For Social Media Marketing

Marketers use social media actively for their various marketing efforts. According to the Social Media Examiner’s 2014 Social Media Marketing Industry Report, 92% of marketers indicated that social media is highly relevant for their businesses; and this finding is relatively higher than 86% from last year’s results. With various social media platforms available, most marketers jump into the bandwagon by posting instantly, but all they get are paid likes, with no engagement at all. Is this what we want to achieve?

In order to win the marketing influence game, incorporating the science and art of persuasion is a must. But how do you do it?

Here are 11 keys of persuasion for your social media marketing efforts

1. Give And Receive

Robert Cialdini’s book, “Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion”, says that we can influence other people’s decision by sharpening our communication skills and incorporating persuasiveness to it. Use persuasion techniques to express the real and genuine similarities between you and your audience in order to connect with them.

Persuade your audience through the principle of reciprocity: respond to a favor given to you by returning it in the same extent or even greater. Start by clearly identifying your target audience, your reason for influencing them, and what they really want. Then, reciprocate by providing your users with free valuable content such as an e-book, free download of apps or programs for a certain period of time, or invitation to your events and trainings that users might find valuable. This will make users visit your site regularly, and share your content in their social media handles as their gratitude to what you have given them.

2. Get In Touch With People’s Emotions—Through A Story

People love stories. They like stories that matter to them, especially if they can easily relate to it. Once you get to the core of their emotions, you have the perfect opportunity of persuading them to check out your website, which will eventually lead to their purchase. You have the role to convey a good story that will touch directly into people’s hearts and minds, and evoke right emotions without hard-selling your product.

Coca-Cola launched its “What is Happiness” campaign, banking on the idea that you can find happiness when you least expect it. It focuses on different heartwarming stories that made people happy because of a bottle of Coke shared. Campaigns like this, when injected with proper social media marketing efforts, are a sure-fire hit that will increase conversions for your business. Consider the top emotions to tap when creating a content in order to produce the right type of content for the right emotions of your users.

3. Consistency Counts, All The Time

They say that it is easier to keep an existing customer, rather than attract a new one. Be consistent in what you say to your customers so that they stay on your side. Consistency also counts for higher conversion rates, and leads you to your loyal customers.

Start by offering a free trial for your product for a certain time to gauge their consistency. Try to direct your customers to your mailing list subscription, webinars, or articles in a consistent way. After they have experienced these from your website, they will feel more committed in purchasing. Each site visit or click, no matter how small, can be their small steps of consistency.

4. Show People That You Are Their Option

Each day, people are faced with choices. Sometimes we feel strong with our preferences, but oftentimes we are stuck between two equally strong options. In this situation, we tend to investigate how others are choosing in order to have a social proof that one is working and one isn’t.

Since people follow trends, persuade your customers by including sentences such as “9 out of 10 people prefer this…” to apply this principle in your next marketing activity. One good example for this is Amazon: they use star ratings, recommendations, and comments to help people in their decision making on a certain product. This is another perfect way to persuade your customers to visit you regularly.

5. Increase Your (Like)ability

Research says that we are more likely to follow someone whom we like. There are lots of factors to be considered, such as how a person looks or talks, and how he carries himself. And we tend to buy something from someone we knew—friends, family, and people whom we look up to, rather than from a stranger. This is true, even for social media marketing.

Influence your customers better by being more likeable online. Be more empathic with your content production by incorporating images or videos that your users can easily relate to. This will increase the probability that people will like you, and your conversion rates will go higher. Do take into consideration the proper use of SEO and content marketing strategies to better reach your audience. Be more creative with your “about” page and show your similarities between you and your clients. Once done properly, people will feel that you represent them, and they will feel a strong connection to your company’s brand.

6. Shout Out The Authority

Authority in social media means that you have established a good relationship with a well-known brand, especially if they left positive comments. Proudly shout it out to the rest of the world through social media. This will show users that your business is trustworthy. Build greater influence by showcasing your achievements locally and globally, and share your content that has been published in credible online and offline publications.

Also, include a highly influential person for your testimonials. This can help when people are doubtful of a certain brand. Adidas, over the years, has always used prominent figures in their campaigns, such as Lionel Messi, in order to push for a certain brand message. People are more likely to follow these authority figures, even in social media, so you need to highlight them in your marketing strategies.

7. Be Limited To Gain Their Unlimited Attention

Being scarce or limited in your product or services is not a bad thing, especially if your offering is of high value to your clients. This persuasion principle lets people know that they’re going to miss out on something valuable if they don’t decide or act quickly.

Weave this with your strategies by telling people that you have limited time with an influential guest. For example, if you have Tim Cook in your webinar, tell everyone via social media that he only has 1 hour for the said event. People will be flocking towards your website because of this. Also, give deadlines for the availability of a certain product or service. Ticketmaster offers lots of event ticket deals for a limited time. Being limited increases the chances that people will regularly check on you as long as you provide people with that they want, in good quality.

8. Share The Power Of Influence

Word of mouth combined with social media is a powerful combination for your business. The Digital Marketer: Benchmark and Trend Report for 2011 conducted by Experian reveals that 54 percent of adults in America stated that word of mouth still influences them heavily when it comes to their purchase decisions.

Share the power of influence by giving your customers simple platforms to give feedback and connect it with their social media handles. Since people are most likely to consider recommendations from people they know, they will be interested to click on your website to gain more information about your company when they see a positive comment or post from their friend discussing your brand.

9. Engage More To Persuade More

Quick engagement with people is one of the qualities that social media boasts. Seeing this advantage, you need to use effective social media marketing techniques for better engagement. A social media brand engagement can’t run on a one-way communication. If people connect with you, they expect a simple interaction or a “like” from their post mentioning you and your services.

If you ignore both positive and negative messages, it can give a signal that you don’t care or you don’t value them who supports your brand. Check the most popular social media platforms that your customers are utilizing and set a regular time for engagement, in order to keep them to continuously avail of your products and services.

10. Utilize Power Words

Words are powerful. The Ultimate Terms theory states that words have “special meaning within each culture and carry power where they are used.” If you use words properly in your tactics in a subtle and light way, you can persuade people more effectively.

The theory divides words into three categories. God terms convey blessings, sacrifice, or obedience (e.g. value), Devil terms evoke disgust (e.g. fascist), and Charismatic terms are directly associated with intangible things (e.g. contribution). Terms can change, especially when used improperly, so you need to check on the reason why you are using it. Power words can also be directed to a specific idea or concept, such as safety, health, control, and understanding.

11. Check On Your Progress Regularly

Effective persuasion also involves the right evaluation of your personal progress when it comes to your social media marketing efforts. It is recommended that you conduct quarterly review to see if you are effective and to gauge whether it is producing user conversions.

Pam Sahota suggests that to make adjustments, one should regularly analyze the traffic and leads being generated from each social media platform that you are using. If it is ineffective, then adjustments on your persuasion should be done.

These keys of persuasion for your social media marketing efforts can help you win the marketing game by engaging more and influencing more your audience. Be more persuasive without sounding desperate to meet your customers’ needs in order to build a lasting relationship with them as your loyal customers.

About The Author

Kimberly Grimms is a futurist who spends most of her time monitoring social behavior in search for new consumer and trends. She uses the information to create viral and useful content. She mostly address young professionals, educating them easy to digest content about investing, technology, and home improvement. Also, she share the latest and upcoming trends in the global market. Want to read more from Kim? See her blog. Connect with Kim on Twitter too!

This article has moved to the new Steveology Group website. Social media and content marketing

A content marketing framework (a standardized process) is basically something that will allow you to create as close to a close-loop system as your business will let you get. It’s the thing that allows you to develop a process that can be duplicated, not a like mechanism that just stamps out cookie-cutter content but are repeatable framework for any type of content to be better utilized.

Click To Tweet >>> Creating A Powerful Content Marketing Framework Part 1

Findability expert Erin Robbins O’Brien, the COO of GinzaMetrics in an interview explained, “It needs to incorporate goal setting at the beginning, and then an understanding from goal setting to how you’re going to put that into a strategy or a plan to roll out. Once you publish the content, you then must get feedback and optimize the content while it’s in market. Then, one has to take that “understanding” to create new content that would be even more effective for that market. Most enterprise companies move at a glacial pace. As a startup or midsized company you can iterate faster than a larger competitor and outmaneuver them.

Feedback From Internal Stakeholders

A good framework allows internal stakeholders from across a midsized organization’s different departments to give you feedback as well. An example is, if you’re in the marketing department, and you’ve created a case study or a white paper, you send that out.

Then your sales team gets on the phone with people that downloaded that digital asset, and gathers specific questions are coming up. You want to be able to have that valuable information shared back with you. Now when you create new content, you’re creating it based on real conversations that people are having and real issues that they’re bringing up.

Capture And Loop-In Insights Gleaned From The Customer-Facing Roles

Same thing for your community managers and customer service agents. A lot of times marketing forgets them when they create all this new content; however, they both are on the front lines of getting comments and feedback from your new content.

If you have included them, that helps close the loop. Now you’ve got market feedback and measurement combined. You’ve got internal feedback and measurement combined. Together, you take those learnings and this close-loop system, and apply those insights to future marketing efforts for content marketing domination, or at least your best version of that.

Components Of A Good Content Marketing Framework

It starts with goal setting. You’re going to need to make sure that you have the ability to clearly understand what your organization’s business goals are, and that you understand what your department’s goals are and how they dovetail. Once you’ve understand those, you can talk about what real/actual content you need to create to achieve those.

That means you have to understand marketing strategy and company goals as they evolve. There should be a place for a shared document like a Google Doc, or use an internal sharing service, where you can really discuss and update goals regularly.

Map Your KPIs To Your Business Objective Numbers

If your goals include target numbers, which a lot of times there are, make sure that you understand how you will connect your actions to those targets. What are the expectations of your marketing content campaigns and how are they going to to help meet those goals. From there, you can develop KPIs.

If your company’s goal is $1 billion in revenue, that’s too meta for you to say, “From my content marketing campaign, I’m just going to draw a direct line to this $1 billion.” What you need to do is set some measurements like,” I’ll create this content and it should get X amount of engagement here, and based on our historically numbers, that drives this much of conversions there, et cetera, et cetera.”

Whatever analytics, platforms, and systems you have, you need access to those. You need to be able to tie them together.If there are ways to set goals within the analytic system that most closely match your organization’s goals and your department’s KPIs, you need to set those up at the end section of the campaign from the start. It’s a pain to add them later and it means you also missed valuable data.

Who’s On First?

Also, somebody needs to be responsible for actually looking at these datapoints constantly during the campaigns. Erin goes on to say, “It sounds super basic but I can’t tell you how many people I know that have analytics platforms and they don’t really ever look at them. Maybe they look at them when a boss says, ‘I need to know this.’ Then they just go in, they get that one number and then they regurgitate it back out. But it’s like, well, all this data is here to help make your life better, to help you make smarter choices. Let’s do a little something with it!”

In terms of getting other departments involved, it’s about fostering people skills. That may be hard for a lot of people, but you got to go sometimes and shake hands with your colleagues in other departments. Meet with them. Pick up the phone and talk to them and explain what they’re going to get out of it.

Think Small Connections To Win Big

Midsized companies can often fall prey to silofication like their larger competitors. However, you can quickly break these walls down for a strategic advantage, whereas large companies are too entrenched to respond with agility.

You need a value proposition for the fact that your interdepartmental colleagues are going to take a few minutes every week, or month or whatever, to share their experiences with you. Whether it’s through their own analytic system or through just a quick 20-minute phone call one Friday a month where somebody can just tell you, “Here’s what I’m hearing.”

By doing this you should be able to promise them to deliver better content. From that you should be able to deliver more qualified leads, and a better experience on your end. Not only is your own job better, but your entire department will look better because you’re on target to achieve a better starting point with for your customer’s journey.
This is from an interview I had with Erin Robbins O’Brien, COO of GinzaMetrics. You can watch the complete interview here

About The Author
Steve Farnsworth is a Demand Generation Strategist for The @Steveology Group: A Content Marketing agency that drive sales and dominate markets for high tech B2B. You can contact Steve or connect with him on Twitter as @Steveology.

Awesome Sponsor

And a special thank you for the very cool team at Racepoint Global for their outstanding work and continued support.

The dashboard. It’s something we’re used to seeing, whether as a casual blogger or a marketer at a midsized organization. For the latter, to have an advantage over larger competitors it’s essential to have a dashboard interface that is well-organized, intuitive and contains relevant resources.

Click To Tweet >>> Creating The Perfect Content Marketing Dashboard

After all, the dashboard is suppose to help you analyze data and execute different actions like publishing, inventory editing, and marketing strategies. Having said that, how do you identify what to track so that you will capture data that is actionable?

All Seeing Marketing Metrics

Erin Robbins O’Brien, COO of GinzaMetrics, believes in taking an omniscient approach and prefers to track everything her dashboard can offer her. At a granular level, she looks at a lot of different data. She suggests that if your company has the resources, you should have business intelligence (BI) tools that will allow you to approach the workflow in both macro and micro vantage points.

A good dashboard will allow you to create BI spreadsheets that include metrics for everything that you send out. For instance, if you’re doing content marketing, at a meta level, the metrics would detail the title of the piece. — what campaign it was tied to, and what channel was used and was it  via email, Facebook, Twitter, and/or AdWords ad?

Channels Vs. Campaign

You need the ability to slice and dice the data different ways to get the whole picture, noted Erin. That means that the one thing you can do is look at and segment your data and say: Okay, I can segment activity by campaign because everything has campaign tags. I can track activities by channel, or ask how are channels performing against other channels? I could segment these by audience: Was it to existing customers? Was it to early stage prospects? Was it to qualified leads?

What are a few common meaningful metrics that are good for tracking content marketing effectiveness? One of the easiest to track is traffic. It doesn’t take complex analytical processes to gain insight as to how decrease or increase in website traffic correlates with changes in revenue. To put it simply, if you get 1,000 viewers and it amounts to one sale, and then 2,000 views equals two sales, then you’ll know that optimizing your website for more views could lead to increased revenue.

Uncommon Marketing Metrics

Of course, each company and their respective operations is different, and so the particular metrics to focus on should correspond with those specifics. There are also uncommon metrics that marketers should track to gain insight into their content marketing efficiency. For example, analyzing share of voice (how often your brand is mentioned in context to a product issue vs. a competing brand), or keyword phrases used to find your website. Those offer valuable insight. You can spot trends in traffic and views on your website and how that relates to revenues.

In the end, there is no such thing as a perfect dashboard, because it’s not a static thing—it constantly evolves. However, Erin, suggests that your dashboard should have “the ability to view all of your marketing channels in one place.” This will allow you see the big picture and the fine details all in one platform.

Pro Tip: Super-Charge Your Dashboard

Often large companies have too much data and fail to connect it to metrics that the C-level track. Here is when a midsized company can pull a full-on Ninja move. Being more agile you can make your dashboard a smart-bomb by asking a few questions. Ask your CEO and CFO what are import metrics for them. Then integrate those into your dashboard. Now, reports have the data that’s important to them, and you look like a rockstar.

This is from an interview I had with Erin Robbins O’Brien, COO of GinzaMetrics. You can watch the complete interview here

About The Author
Steve Farnsworth is a Demand Generation Strategist for The @Steveology Group: A Content Marketing agency that drive sales and dominate markets for high tech B2B. You can contact Steve or connect with him on Twitter as @Steveology.

Awesome Sponsor

And a special thank you for the very cool team at Racepoint Global for their outstanding work and continued support.

I

This article has moved to the new Steveology Group website. B2B content marketing blog

We all know that the internet is constantly exploding with new content and new marketing strategies. However, the population, literacy rate, and the amount of time that people have to pour over new content is not increasing at even close to the same rate. Thus, marketers need to face the fact that the number of eyeballs available to read their content is now vastly outmatched by the sheer amount of content.

Click To Tweet >>> Too Much Content; Not Enough Eyeballs

In short, this means that each piece of content or individual social media outreach may become less and less potent as the post or article becomes lost in the ever increasing flood of information. The scarce resource is attention. This presents unique challenges to marketers trying to capture that attention. Because of this, it may be ever more important for your sales and marketing efforts to focus on having actual face-to-face conversations with real human beings.

Staying Connected

This may not seem like the current conventional wisdom. Nowadays, everyone is talking about the power of the internet, social media, and the latest ever-new forum for connecting. However, it is this very ability to connect in so many different ways that is going to make it crucial for your salespeople to have the ability to have an actual conversation with another human. The classic “in the box” principles of human connection will be ever more needed in a world that is trying to always live “outside the box” with the newest and latest technology.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not anti-technology. Nor do I discount the value of good metrics, data, and good content. I readily acknowledge the immense power in connecting electronically. I also believe that the internet and social media are still in their infancy. I am simply stating that the sales and marketing teams that are able to get in front of real people will have an immense advantage over those that only focus on digital communications.

Humans Communicating

The reason? For all of our technological advances, the need for people to actually connect and look someone in the eye, to perceive things that crawling robots, big-data crunching software, and search algorithms cannot discern, will only happen when humans communicate the way they have communicated for thousands of years: face-to-face, or at the very least, voice-to-voice.

Let me give you an example: As a salesperson, I sat face-to-face with a high-level director of a sizeable organization. He told me that I was the only salesperson that he had let into his office regarding the product that I was selling. I was surprised. I knew competition was fierce in this particular market.

Just Being A Real Human

He then told me that the only reason that he had let me present to him was because I was nice to his secretary. Think about that – he didn’t say it was because I had a brilliant marketing approach. He didn’t say it was because I had a great logo, or a solid marketing brochure. He didn’t say it was because the company I was with had a great website or that our online media or social media presence was outstanding. He said that it was because I was “nice” to his secretary.

In my experience as a seasoned sales rep and trainer, I encounter a surprising number of booming businesses that are flourishing with little help from internet marketing. These businesses are often operating on a referral basis based on trust and relationships. Though perhaps I should be surprised, I am not.

Marketing and sales managers and directors who neglect the human side of the business do so to their peril. You can have great online marketing, be technologically savvy, and ride the latest trends in technology and online marketing, but if you don’t invest in training your salespeople how to connect with other people, you are leaving a lot of business to the companies that do. In short, use the best technology, but be old fashioned when it comes to people.

About The Author

EksAyn is an author, sales consultant, and public speaker. Recently featured on Forbes, EksAyn’s new book, The Key to the Gate: Principles and Techniques to Get Past Gatekeepers to the Decision Maker, has sold internationally. EksAyn’s sales and negotiation strategies come how-to’s and real-world applications about how to close sales, get past gatekeepers, negotiate like a pro and use the principles of psychology to explode your sales and negotiation results. YOu can connect with him on Twitter at @eksayn.