People Buy Stories Before They Buy Stuff

People Buy Stories Before They Buy Stuff written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

I’ve been writing about the use of story in marketing for years. I remember when I first started telling people over a decade ago to make their clients the hero of their stories and to use their personal stories as foundational marketing elements they were dubious at best.

Today, every marketer understands the value of story as a way to sell just about anything. But, still, few understand the right way to use story and narrative as a way to guide people on the perfect journey.

This is due in large part to the fact that it takes some skill, a bit of hard work and perhaps, more importantly, patience. A great story has many significant elements and to have the greatest impact each element must be built in a certain order – much like the foundation of a house must be laid before the walls and roof have a place to stand.

The good news is that I believe there’s a framework that any business can adopt and that framework is evident in just about every great story told throughout time.

Any screenwriter making a living today uses this same framework to draw us in and take us along with them on a journey.

After you read this post, you’ll also have the tools to build this same framework for your business and use it as the basis for just about every marketing decision you make.

Your core story and the narrative technique described below will work to help cement your brand in the mind of your ideal client, but it is equally effective as a framework for a product launch or email autoresponder campaign.

The framework relies on the three key elements: The ideal client persona, the core story and the journey goal map (based on the Marketing Hourglass.)

The ideal client persona

The term persona is borrowed from the theater. An actor may receive a script, and the persona is the description of the character played by the part. If an actor is to understand the character they must know a little about what drives them, what they believe, what they fear, and what they desire.

Audience Audit, Inc did research on small business personas for Infusionsoft and created some great examples of how you might describe a segment of your marketing.

They give the segment a name and then describe them with a handful of core words as well as some background on what they believe.

“Passionate creators – Creativity, optimism, service

This segment believes that passion is one of the most important qualities of a small business owner. They are proud of the job-creation engine that small businesses represent, and value having the ability to serve a customer well.

Passionate Creators are interested in creating something unique, making a difference in the world, and driving economic growth. They are dramatically more optimistic than other segments, and the most likely to report that small business ownership has contributed to improvements in their overall attitude, time availability and financial security (versus if they had a corporate job).”

You can read the entire small business market survey here

Another resource I often point to when discussing the topic of personas is Adele Revella’s Buyer Persona Institute. http://ift.tt/P4G7zF Revella is a past guest on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast – you can listen to that episode here. http://ift.tt/1n2SaWh

How to craft the right story

As stated above, there are elements that make a story both a good story and the right story. For most businesses this isn’t about telling some riveting tale that makes for good entertainment, it’s about demonstrating you are the right person to help the reader achieve what they want to achieve.

Make them the hero

First and foremost, if you intend to create a story that your prospects care about you must position them as the hero of the story. Most businesses go on and on about how great their business, product or service is, and frankly, that’s the last thing a customer cares about.

Think about every great story you’ve read, you love the story because you connect with the story’s main character. For your story, the main character must be your ideal customer persona and not your business.

Your customer or prospect has problems, and it’s your job to guide them on a journey to solve that problem and achieve their ultimate destiny.

I know that may sound a bit dramatic, but doesn’t that sound a lot nobler than just selling them stuff?

I work with small business owners, and I can tell you that no one wants the world’s greatest marketing consulting – the hero of our story wants freedom, control, growth, and creativity and it’s our job to guide them down the path to leads to just that.

Help them understand their problem

One of the first tasks is to help the hero understand the real problem they face as it’s often not what they think it is.

Now, sometimes this can pose a real challenge as selling a solution to a problem people don’t even know they have is a tough path to trod.

The real key lies in the persona. So often what people want in life can be achieved once they let go of many of the symptoms of what’s holding them back.

Often we have to show prospects what letting go and refocusing on what matters looks like before they start to see that as the answer.

Our story must both reveal the real enemy and prove that we know who and what it is. You build a great deal of trust through empathy.

In our case, the real enemy is time, focus and fear. When we address these elements, we can start to reveal what a solution could look like in the context of the real problem.

Reveal the authority to guide them

Of course, once your story connects with their real problem you must be able to reveal you and your business as the one who can guide them to where they want to go.

Every great hero meets a mentor or guide along the journey that gives them the knowledge, tools and confidence to take up the journey.

Think

• Obi-Wan Kenobi and Luke Skywalker’s lightsaber
• Gandalf and Mithril armor
• Dumbledore and Harry Potter’s wand

Admit it, the idea of playing the role of Obi-Wan for your prospects has to be a lot more fun that just being the head of marketing.

Paint a better picture

One of the keys to moving your prospects down the path is to inspire them by painting a picture of what it could look like if they had the real problem handled.

A vivid picture of what a small business owner’s day could look like if they installed a marketing system – right down to how they would feel on that day is a great way to lead your prospects to make a change.

Challenge them to succeed

Finally, you must be able to challenge them to take action. This part of the story might be referred to by marketers as the call to action, but for it to be powerful, you must also help them understand the cost of not taking action.

Generally, people are more motivated by what they might lose than what they might gain and when you can help them see the true cost of not acting as well as the value of succeeding when they do act, you can start to position what you do as an investment rather than a cost.

Marketing is almost always seen as a cost – when it’s seen as an investment the dynamic of the sales conversation changes dramatically.

How to craft the right journey

Once you understand the hero of your story and the challenge you can help them solve you have to move to understanding the journey itself.

As a prospect searches for solutions to questions, problems and challenges known and yet unidentified you have to use your marketing to address the questions and goals they are bound to have during each stage of the journey.

You must get involved in their journey as early as possible, and you can only do this by addressing them where they are. If you simply jump to promoting what you sell before they’ve even concluded that you address their challenges, you’ll be forced to hard sell.

But, if you wait until they’ve concluded on their own that your category of solution is that answer to their prayers, you’ll be forced to compete against everyone else who says they do what you do.

When you understand the goals and questions your prospects are facing during each phase of their buying journey you can create content and campaigns aimed at these specific desires.

For example, here’s what the journey goals for a small business looking to grow more profit by working with a tax advisor might look like.

• Know – To learn the best, most profitable ways to run and grow their business
• Like – To better understand what other people are doing to lower expenses
• Trust – To understand what’s possible and legal
• Try – To see if any of the proposed savings apply to their situation
• Buy – To experience a process that feels very professional and give hope of substantial savings
• Repeat – Understand other ways they can gain wealth and possibly set up business to sell
• Refer – To feel proud telling another business owner about a very smart decision they made

As you can plainly see the idea of cutting taxes doesn’t even appear until about midway through this journey. The consultant selling tax consulting, however, must look to become the guide first by building trust teaching ways to run and grow a business.

Understand your customers, make your prospects the hero of your marketing story and then guide them to success. That’s how you build a business that both succeeds and matters.

If you’re an overachiever I also suggest that you read the following:

• Save the Cat – Blake Snyder (Storytelling from a screenwriting perspective)
• The Hero with a Thousand Faces – Joseph Campbell (The classic academic tomb that reveals why we like Star Wars so much)
• The Writer’s Journey – Christopher Vogler (A very practical text for understanding the role of mythology in story)
• resonate – Nancy Duarte (A presentation framework based on the hero’s journey)
• Storytelling with Data – Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic (Sometimes you must use numbers to tell a story! – Edward Tufte for the Internet age)

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Landing Page Flaws That Kill Your Conversions

What is the purpose of a landing page?

To acquire valuable information from prospects that will allow you to market to them effectively, right?

It’s a simple transaction. You, the marketer, lay your offer on the table. If the prospect finds your offer valuable enough, they’ll give up some of their information to receive what you’re offering. Nothing else in marketing could be so simple. It’s a great “take it or leave it” scenario.

So how do you know if your landing pages are doing well?

The average landing page conversion rates are all over the board. Some people claim the average is 2%, while other say you should be at around 20%.

Wishpond looked at data from a number of different companies and found the average conversion rate for a B2B landing page is 13.28%, while the average for B2C is 9.87%.

If you’re struggling for conversions, the best thing you can do is repeatedly test variants against the originals. But if you’re always producing low-quality variants, it’s unlikely you’ll see a budge in conversions.

That’s what today’s infographic is for. It will show you what a lot of landing pages get wrong – and how you can rectify those flaws. From here you’ll be able to create better variants that’ll kick your originals in the rear.

Courtesy of: Quick Sprout

Additional Resources

We’ve created a lot of free content to help you take your landing pages to the next level. Here are some of my favorite webinars (blog posts are included under Related Posts):

• The 7 Principles of Conversion Centered Design
• How to Design High-Converting Lead Gen Landing Pages
• 3 Secrets to Perfecting Your Landing Pages and A/B Tests

Signup for these webinars. They’re presented by top-notch folks who have been around the block and done their fair share of optimizing. Now they share that knowledge with you, for free.

They’ve already been recorded, so as soon you watch the webinar you’ll get to watch it right away. You’ll have some great takeaways for each.

What techniques have you used to increase landing page conversions?

About the Author: Zach Bulygo (Twitter) is the Blog Manager for Kissmetrics.

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Why Switch To Solar-Powered LED Lighting?

Designers considering LEDs as the future of lighting technology. In fact, LED is already gaining popularity, although it is still in the development process. Due to the strong campaign towards green living, consumers are turning to the lighting power more reliable and efficient type. Today more and more homes are beginning to frequent the LED lights for your home design and lighting needs. These are the reasons why solar lighting LED begins to exceed the product of conventional lighting, such as incandescent and fluorescent bulbs.

How Efficient Solar LED Lighting?

Compared with traditional solar lights LED lighting products are more energy efficient. First, LED bulbs require very little energy to operate than incandescent bulbs and fluorescent lamps. Second, an incredible light per watt than conventional bulbs such is created. With the increasing cost of energy today and increased environmental awareness among consumers, greater efficiency is often equated with lower energy costs and reduced environmental damage.

Coloration

Currently, manufacturers can create different colored LEDs of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple and without the use of color filters that many conventional lighting methods require. In addition, the use of multiple shades in different concentrations, LED producers sunlight can be effectively millions of bright colors that can be used in the visual effects, such as color washing, bleaching, change, etc. In addition, the manufacture of LED color is also more efficient than other colored lights and reduces the initial cost of the product.

Size

LED is available in various sizes. And they can still be functional, even if they are small. That’s why commonly used for electronic devices such as mobile phones, laptops and remote controls.

Mitigation

Though gradation may not be an essential property of a light bulb or for general lighting, but that makes the LED solar light to be more versatile. LED This feature makes it an ideal choice for solar garden lighting option. Therefore, many designers prefer to use LEDs as light as incandescent bulbs CFL ad.

Life expectancy

The LED lasts so long sunlight combined with traditional bulbs. Bulbs average life to survive 1500 hours lighting. An ordinary light bulb 700 hours standing half the time. Although LEDs last between estimated 50,000-100,000 hours.

Durability

LED does not break easily or acquire damage to external shocks than fluorescent and incandescent bulbs As is covered with a solid state material. Thus, the Solar LED lights tend to wear better over time than traditional devices. However, LEDs are more sensitive to high temperatures than traditional lights however.

Not toxic

Another advantage of switching LED solar lighting is that LEDs do not contain harmful substances such as mercury. This makes it less lethal and less dangerous to human health and the environment the LED.

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7 Quotes From 7 CMOs About Building a Modern Marketing Organization

Not sure if I buy into the whole 7 is the luckiest of all numbers thing. According to the Daily Mail, however, 7 is the most significant number across religions and cultures, it also appears in some of the world's favorite fictional works and a poll of 30,000 people revealed 7 is overwhelmingly our favorite number.

Regardless of where you fall on the Lucky 7 scale, it is by complete happenstance that I present to you today 7 Quotes From 7 CMOs About Building a Modern Marketing Organization. These all are culled directly from The CMO Solution Guide For Building A Modern Marketing Organization  — our recently-released eBook which was developed in partnership with The CMO Club. 

In bold is the topic for which each quote is referring to specifically. 

1. Consumer Insights

"I think in an ideal state there is a dedicated consumer insights team, but a team that doesn’t work in its own little silo. A team that is interactive not only with the marketing team but also the product team, as well as with others who touch the customer technology. They have to understand the full circle of customers’ curiosities so they can put together a real, robust view for those who need it." — Patrick Adams, CMO, PayPal

2. Integrated Engagement Planning

"Ultimately [integrated planning] is a function that’s run through the marketing team. We establish the brand voice and try to create and implement consistency across all of our efforts, all of our communications channels and all of our internal divisions/business units." — Evan Greene, CMO, The Recording Academy (The GRAMMYs)

3. Content Development

"We have a dedicated team that’s focused on content strategy and on creating what I call the content supply chain, mapping out where all the sources of content come from. Do we have the content already? How do we create new content? Who creates the content? It may be internal, it may be external. What format does that content take? Then, how do we work with the appropriate teams to get that content in market? — Rishi Dave, CMO, Dun & Bradstreet

4. Evaluative Analytics

"We set up this analytics center of excellence. At the same time we did the same thing in sales and the same thing in finance so that we could create more integrated capabilities in order to drive much more consistency and connections of our data. Not too long ago we launched a marketing analytic workbench. Now we can take all this information from various platforms and put it in one place and analyze it and make real-time decisions about how our multichannel customer engagements are performing and make adjustments. — Karen Quintos, CMO, Dell

5. Customer Data Management

"We’re building a centralized marketing profile that is at the customer level and becomes the common definition used by marketing teams across the organization to drive their campaigns. Getting the data house in order, making it real time and managing it at the attribute level is what’s important. As is making sure that the experts who are really close to the products have the ability to control what’s most important to them in that profile. This allows
us to federate it out and take a much more efficient view across the organization, rather than be a big centralized behemoth that is too slow and ultimately doesn’t work. — Steve Ireland, SVP/MD, JPMorgan Chase

6. Alignment

"Alignment happens at multiple levels. First, you’ve got to align on what your model is and then be true to it. Pick one and do it properly and continue to talk about how to improve that model versus pretending you’re picking one yet trying to do another. Align the top 25 people in your organization with that and have them talk consistently about it. The second level of alignment is the foundation tools. Let’s get aligned on what the brand stands for and how to express it at a high level. The third level of alignment is strategic alignment. Let’s agree on what the strategic plan is, and as a consequence of P&L, what the KPIs are for the brands and the business units globally. The fourth level of alignment is what the brand plan looks like and what the programs are going to be in each market for each brand. The last level of alignment is how our teams are going to work together as one team to execute on that plan. You can imagine if you are off at any one of these levels the further you are into the organization, the greater the gap is. So we try to talk as an organization about the impact of what we are doing, even as to how that impacts you four levels into the organization. — Clive Sirkin, CMO, Kimberly-Clark

7. Accountability

"n order to be effective, marketers need to have credibility. Because they have to do a lot of leading by influence, they have to do a lot of aligning and engaging and evangelizing, and that only works when people trust you. They only trust you if you deliver the goods and are accountable; you do what you say and you say what you mean.
— Peter Horst, CMO, The Hershey Company

To get more incredible insights and thoughts like these, download The CMO Solution Guide For Building A Modern Marketing Organization.

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7 Ways to Optimize Your Web Content for Humans & Search Engines

In case you haven’t heard, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not dead. In fact, SEO is an absolute must for successful content marketing, but gone are the days where the first two words dictate how you execute the third.

Ever since Google dropped its Penguin update in 2012, user experience has become the primary focus of good SEO. Yes. Today’s SEO is about finding the perfect balance between user-centric content and convincing search engine crawlers that your content is supreme.

Now, I’m pretty confident that everything I just said isn’t news to you. However, actually accomplishing that perfect balance may be something you’re still working on. And that’s where I aim to help.

Below are some best practices and tips for optimizing your on-page content for human users and search engines:

#1 – Put Yourself in the Mind of the User

Researching and understanding your audience’s needs and intentions will help guide your keyword strategy and content creation so you can provide the best information for your prospective customers—and search engines.

If you were searching for your product or services, what information would you be looking for? What would you search queries contain? What are your pain points? How can this product or service help address those pain points?

#2 – Let Go of Keyword Stuffing

While keyword stuffing used to be a common and acceptable practice, that’s no longer the case. Keyword stuffing adds nothing to user experience, and as robots become more advanced, your risk of being penalized for following such practices increases.

#3 – Cover the SEO Basics

All of the items below are essential parts of on-page SEO basics. The content for each should be unique and incorporate the keywords appropriately.

• SEO Title: Your page title should be no longer than 70 characters and should have your target keyword as close to the beginning as possible.
• Meta Description: Meta descriptions should be no longer than 160 characters, and your keyword should be included there, too. The text should be a nice teaser that informs users and entices them to click through to the page. (Tip: Start with a strong action verb such as “Learn” or “Read.”)

• H1: The H1 (headline) tag tells search engines this is the most important headline on the page, and it’s also a visual cue to readers. Just one H1 should be used on each page.
• Image alt tag: Describing the image is incredibly important. Search engines can’t see the image like humans. It’s certainly ideal to get your keyword in here, but don’t force it.
• URLs: Shorter is better here, and make sure to include your focus keyword, too. URLs are visible in search results and could impact whether users click through.
• Body copy: Include the target keyword at the top of the page and at least two or three times throughout the rest of the copy—including variations of the keyword.

#4 – Be Honest & Accurate

If you drive users to your content with one promise, and then don’t deliver when they reach the content, you’re creating a very bad user experience. Any text—keywords or otherwise—included in the title, meta, H1, image alt tag or URL should accurately describe what a user will find when they land on your page.

#5 – Crosslink. Crosslink. Crosslink.

Crosslinking your content to other pages on your site is an absolute must. Not only does it add relevance to pages, it also keeps people moving through your website and can send traffic to your priority pages. (Tip: Make sure your crosslinking strategy matches where you are in the sales cycle. This will ensure you’re moving people along the sales funnel in the right way.)

#6 – Make Content Easy to Read & Scannable

There is no denying that we are in an age of information overload. To combat content fatigue for your users, it’s essential to give them content that is easy to digest. A few ways to create ease of use for your audience include:

• Avoid large blocks of content.
• Utilize bullets and numbering for lists.
• Use H2 or H3 tags as subheads to further break up content.
• Bold or italicize words or phrases to make key points stand out.

#7 – Let Content Flow Naturally

If you’re sticking with all the other guidelines above, this shouldn’t be a problem. Keywords and keyword variations will naturally occur throughout the body text, the content will be visually appealing and easy to read, links will help guide users to other areas of your site and search bots will be able to easily crawl the page.

What it all comes down to—as TopRank Marketing CEO Lee Odden would say—is ”Being the best answer.” Your content should provide the best possible information to your audience. And having that content optimized to today’s SEO standards will allow search engines to deliver those pages to your audience.

What are your biggest challenges for creating content that’s full of SEO, but also great for users? Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Did you like this article? Then you may also enjoy “5 SEO Considerations to Win with Both Customers and Search Engines.”

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5 Marketing Processes You Should Seriously Consider Automating

Marketing technology is moving at a rapid pace that is enabling businesses to reach more potential customers and better engage existing ones. So, if you are still stuck with excel sheets and manual outreach processes, it’s time to reexamine how you can bring in the much required marketing efficiency to your business.

Automation doesn’t necessarily have to be an advanced AI capable of solving complex riddles, predicting and magically running your show. Nor does it mean that you should be able to automate the complete chain of activities in a process. Using marketing technology to reduce manual effort and intervention itself can save a ton of time and improve conversions.

WSJ published a great article recently on how companies are using automation (paywall) to boost their marketing efforts and reach their customers better. The author describes marketing automation as an ever-expanding area with a big focus currently on automating activities such as website and content management, email marketing, customer segmentation, lead filtering, digital advertising and social media marketing.

While digital has opened up a ton of opportunities for marketers, the increasing amount of noise and activity online makes it really tough to be heard and seen. For a business, this means two things:

• Every lead is precious and worth fighting for
• The marketing effort required today is several times higher than it was 10 years ago

Deploying marketing automation is just as important for SMBs as it is for large companies to have a competitive edge. You can identify activities for automation by looking for repetitive tasks that are backed by some data or specific logic. Often such activities involve simple decision-making or are rules-based.

Below are five examples of marketing processes where automation can bring immense benefits. You can automate parts of these processes by using off-the-shelf solutions or building some small tech in-house. The decision of choosing one over another should be based on cost-effort-time analysis.

1. Lead tracking and nurturing

Like I said before, the battle today is open for every lead. However, it is impossible and probably stupid to nurture leads through manual processes. Whether you are working with 50-100 leads a month or several thousands, a CRM is must in your marketing technology arsenal.

Most CRMs offer automatic lead capturing from contact forms. There are several cloud based CRM SaaS providers, and some even offer access for single user for free. And if you are a SaaS company, most likely your CRM would be heavily integrated within your product.

Salesforce is the big daddy of the CRM software world, and while a bit pricey, it offers valuable integrations with key software products you are likely to use now or in future like Pardot, Hubspot, ExactTarget and Marketo. Salesforce also allows for a lot of flexibility to configure, but its user interface is not one of the friendliest to work with.

Other popular CRM solutions include Close.io, Pipedrive, AgileCRM and Zoho – all of these are modern and easy to get started with.

Close.io has a clean interface, and is great for logging email and call interactions, bulk emailing, calendar integrations and reporting.

Zoho does most of this and is cheaper, maybe not as elegant.

Pipedrive is a good low cost basic CRM.

AgileCRM is interesting and goes beyond regular lead tracking and management. It has a bunch of marketing automation features, which SaaS companies will find useful. These include user onboarding with rule-based emailing, in-app messages and guided tours, social media monitoring, and web engagement tools.

Getting the data in order is just the beginning. Using this data to drive conversions is the big battle. This starts with mapping your sales cycle, identifying the various touch-points and opportunities for follow–ups, and then automating the follow-ups themselves or the reminders for the personal ones (depending on the kind of business you run).

In a typical SaaS scenario, you generally have 30 days or less to get a user engaged and convert. A series of well-planned emails, sent on an automated schedule during the period, based on the user activity pattern can improve conversions significantly. It also allows you to create the much needed touch points for user interaction, early problem resolutions and feedback.

While setting up the email follow up plan, be sure to customize it to the existing engagement of the user with the product, using the activity data of the account. For example, if the user account has not registered any trigger activity, following up with a demo suggestion is a great idea. But if the user is already primed and active, sending in a congratulatory note praising the activity might be more in order.

While it is always possible to set up such rule based email campaigns on your own, considering the option of using one of the many email marketing automation solutions is always worthy of exploration.

Some popular email marketing automation software:

1. Customer.io – It is a smart app for sending your customers email messages at just the ‘right’ times. You can set up simple day based email schedules or activity-based emails. Also supports A/B testing and conversion tracking.
2. Drip – It’s a simple tool for creating drip campaigns. Drip offers blueprints or pre-set drip campaigns, which can be customized to your case. The app can pull emails from your website and other sources.
3. Sendloop – This app gets closely integrated with your website, monitoring user activity, allowing you to create personalized drip email campaigns.
4. Pardot – This is the best choice if you’re using Salesforce as your CRM. They integrate together seamlessly (Salesforce owns Pardot). Set up marketing emails and drip campaigns easily. All the data is shared with your Salesforce account.

Marketing automation tools and email marketing apps:

1. Marketing automation tools – AgileCRM, Hubspot and Infusionsoft – These are more multi-purpose software, which gives them a unique edge, as they are powered with more data about your users or customers. AgileCRM lets you create visual flows of the rules to send your messages. Infusionsoft also allows you to create rules-based visual maps of interactions including emails. Hubspot is powered with a lot of web analytics, which is great assistance creating targeted email campaigns.
2. Newsletter and email marketing apps – MailChimp and Campaign Monitor – These are more traditional email marketing tools, popular for sending newsletters. Mailchimp gives you some powerful email marketing automation options by giving you access to data such as who opened emails and clicked links. Campaign monitor can be armed with personal customer data such as birthdays, anniversary to personalize email content to engage better.

2. Social media marketing

Social is a busy business – engaging thousands of fans and followers is no easy task. There are 3 critical components of social media engagement and marketing:

1. Posting content on social accounts
2. Conversations on social
3. Community building

Of these, no. 2 should never be automated. However, the other two do have a reasonable scope of automation, and between them, content more than the community.

Posting on social every couple of hours is a good idea, as the content is so fast moving that if you are not there every few hours, your account will have very poor visibility. To create this amount of content real time and posting can be extremely time and effort intensive. This is why you’ll need something like Buffer, which makes it easy to schedule posts and send them out on customized times. All social media platforms are included, as well as some analytics to tell you the engagement each post/tweet receives.

I think the real big win comes from partially automating your content generation process. As it’s expensive and very difficult to generate this volume of new content, curating thought leadership stories for your social accounts is a great alternative. Most businesses rely heavily on sharing content from sources other than their own web properties.

Community building is largely difficult to automate, and should ideally be driven by effort from real people. I’m personally strongly against automated direct messages, likes and retweets – these go against all principles of social media and are also against the policies of social platforms. However, if you use a tool to find people who’d be interested in your social accounts and follow them – that’s a perfectly okay partial-automation boost.

Social media automation has been a topic of much debate, but as long as the basic principles of social media are respected, technology can bring in the much-needed efficiency to reach out in the crowded space.

3. Content marketing

For the most part, content marketing is a tough one to automate. But time consuming activities like content research and idea generation can be technology enabled. Similar to the use of content curation tools for social media, the same apps can be used to monitor the trending content thematically, getting a personalized content feed for idea generation, research or curation.

Having been in the content industry for over 6 years now, I have seen content creators spend close to 30% of their time in these activities. Even partial content research automation can save hours of energy spent Googling for relevant stories or material. The trick to partially automating content research is to use tools to track your industry news and trends – basically let some cool technology do the content discovery and filtering for you. Below are some handy apps you can use:

1. Feedly – Feedly took off with the shuttering down of Google Reader, as a popular alternative to reading RSS feeds. Today Feedly boasts of an impressive collection of blog and publications feeds, which can be subscribed to create your own custom news and trends feed. It’s a handy app to stay abreast of the latest in industry, research by broad keywords and generate ideas for your content pieces.
2. Buzzsumo– Buzzsumo is a great tool for finding the most socially trending content in your space. It’s great for content idea generation, research and finding influencers to involve in your content marketing efforts.
3. Google Alerts – Google Alerts is a simple, basic tool to get email alerts on recent content published with some keywords mentioned. It’s different and cleaner in output from the Google search, which makes it high utility. Great for tracking content trends and idea generation.
4. Storify – Storify is a great tool to curate content for your blog posts. You can search content by keywords and use the app’s editor to draft your post. For your occasional curated posts, it is plenty useful.

You can also use some free tools to help discover what your target audience wants to read.

Similarly, a lot of energy is spent in planning and coordinating content generation and publishing. As content marketing involves multiple process stakeholders (freelance and in-house content creators, content managers, graphic designers and sometimes more), a project management platform is in order. There are project management platforms solely dedicated to managing content marketing efforts, but the popular multi-purpose project management platforms do the job as well. Not using any workflow automation can easily create a lot of process and communication redundancy, and even lead your content marketing efforts astray.

Good multi-purpose project management platforms include Asana, Trello, Basecamp and Teamwork. I particularly like Asana – it has a neat interface that makes tracking tasks and team conversations a breeze.

4. User onboarding, engagement, cross- and up-sell

Converting a user is half the battle won. Retaining the user, ensuring that she stays engaged and finding opportunities for expanding the relationship are the next big and important challenges. The good news is much of this can be managed by smart automation backed by data.

Onboarding a user is a critical part of SaaS sales. It starts when a user creates an account.

A well-crafted automated email campaign for the defined conversion cycle is required. It should start with a welcome note and then lead into emails/in-product messages about usage-prompts (based on the user activity), offering of support and resources, and a few reminders about paid plans and trial periods nearing end (if the case be). Once the user converts to a paid plan, continuing to lend a helping hand with resources, tips and gentle notification nudges to encourage activity, can go a long way in ensuring user retention. Khuram Hussain of Fileboard has written a step-by-step on how to follow up with leads.

Intercom.io also has a great blog post on several good examples of converting emails.

Smart use of data is the building block of awesome marketing. Segmenting users by activity data and classifying them in buckets will allow you to create personalized automated marketing campaigns for cross and up-sell. For example, your most engaged SaaS users can get prompts for discounted upgrades or add-ons, while relatively low activity users can get emails about tips to better use the software or cross-sell of the add-ons that can bring more value.

For e-commerce, previous e-commerce purchase history can be used for selective product cross-sell (complementary products) or up-sell (better/newer versions of what customer previously purchased).

Below is an illustrative example (simplified) of an email campaign based on customer segmentation:

5. Website/App operation and optimization

Your web and mobile interfaces are your most important marketing assets, and offer many opportunities of improving conversions and capturing users. Well-placed and timely prompts to engage users can be very valuable on these assets. Several off-the shelf solutions are available to A/B test and implement changes. Similarly, several marketing tech solutions are also offered to measure performance and recommend changes for search engine optimization or on-site or app user engagement.

Automation solutions that track visitor or user activity real-time and present timely prompts to take desired actions can significantly improve conversions. When configuring such tech for your app or site, it is important to make sure you don’t over-do the prompts and that they are thoughtful to bring about desired results. Too many disruptions in a user’s experience with your product will irk the user to moving away from it. Tools like Kissmetrics, Intercom.io, SumoMe and Hubspot can be very handy in achieving such high quality user interactions.

Kissmetrics Engage

E-commerce businesses can especially benefit a lot from marketing tech that allows them to assess real-time user behavior and allows them to give smart recommendations to convert a sale. Cart abandonments also should trigger timely reminders or feedback requests, both of which can be very valuable.

Conclusion

Marketing technology offers a lot of opportunities for bringing in new customers and doing more business with existing ones. Large companies are using it on a big scale to drive more efficiency in their marketing processes, and better engage with their customers. But marketing automation is not just the dominion of large businesses, smaller businesses need it just as much to drive down marketing costs and convert more to have a competitive edge.

Automation doesn’t necessarily mean complex systems running large processes on big data. Even smaller hits with partial process automations can bring in significant wins. What’s most important is structured thinking about marketing processes to identify areas of opportunities and implementing automated systems to run the show for you.

About the Author: Sophia Solanki is a co-founder of DrumUp, a social media and content marketing automation app and Godot Media, a content services firm. She has over a decade of experience in content and social media marketing, entrepreneurship and business consulting. Sophia is an ardent supporter of technology to improve efficiency in all aspects of life and business. You can also follower her on Twitter @sophiasolanki.

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5 Ways to Gain Brand Ambassadors (And Keep Them)

5 Ways to Gain Brand Ambassadors (And Keep Them) written by Guest Post read more at Duct Tape Marketing

“Brand ambassadors” seems like a relatively new term; however, they’ve been around as long as advertising and marketing itself (and even long before that). Knowingly or not, you’ve probably acted as a brand ambassador yourself when you recommended a product to a friend or was writing a glowing review for a local business.

More often than not, social media celebrities and bloggers come to mind when the term is used. However, the foremost important way to build brand ambassadorship is through brand loyalty of regular users. While they might not have a huge following, their words are probably more valuable to their closest circles.

Research shows that people tend to believe other people and review websites more than advertising copy on a company’s website. According to Nielsen (http://ift.tt/1usdwd3), 92 percent of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family, above all other forms of advertising. Online consumer reviews are the second most trusted source of brand information and messaging with 70 percent trust level. It follows that brand ambassadors add one more channel to your marketing strategy as well as a new dimension to it: personality.

Brand ambassadors often encompass the target market, their aspirations and needs. So, spend some time identifying your brand ambassadors and nurture relationships with them.

Listen to conversations

If you haven’t started already, start listening to conversations happening around your brand online. One of the most obvious ways to do it is to read the comments below your social posts. Yet, with modern online listening technology, the possibilities are endless.

There are quite a few free and paid services you could use to tune in into conversations regarding your company. Viralheat is a great social media listening tool that provides in-depth analytics for mentions of your brand name, products, location, and competition. Mention offers a website app, Chrome app, as well as iOS and Android apps, so you can constantly monitor conversation happening about your brand online. Social Mention might be the most user-friendly option for beginners because it doesn’t require registration and presents information in a single information stream. Using Hootsuite, you can set up a stream that will aggregate all of the conversations about your brand even if they don’t tag you in it. For example, they may use a hashtag instead of @ symbol or not use your full brand name. They also might not use any hashtags whatsoever and just say “Mike’s Subs in downtown rocks!” If you set up a stream with search query “Mike’s Subs” and specify the location to match your city, you will get all of these tweets.

Now, if you get consistently negative sentiment regarding the same areas of your business (say customer service, long wait time, overall quality, etc.), that means you have to take care of these issues before you can start earning brand ambassadors.

However, if these reviews or comments are occasional and scattered, take them with a grain of salt; treat these as an individual case, not as a sign that your whole business model needs to be changed.

Look for the most engaged followers

It’s more difficult to achieve with business pages that have a large following, yet try to outline a few people who you notice on your social channels the most. I’m not talking about just likes here, your super fans are more engaged – they comment and share your posts frequently. Those are your raving fans because they show dedication and a true following of your brand. They might be already acting as brand ambassadors for you in their circles. If you reach out to them to act as your online brand ambassadors officially, they will be super happy to help you out because they will feel even more appreciated.

Watch out for bloggers

Blogger outreach is another great strategy to gain more “experienced” or “heavyweight” brand ambassadors. Do your research and find most influential and interesting bloggers in your niche; see if it makes sense to work with these bloggers. Try to go as targeted as you can. Sometimes it is better to work with bloggers who have a smaller following, but are considered a true guru in their respective niche. If you sell wine and they blog about all kinds of alcoholic drinks, your turn to shine might not happen often. Instead, focus on wine bloggers who might shine a true spotlight on your products. Besides, wine bloggers’ audience is specifically interested in wine, whereas more broad bloggers have a much more varied audience that might not necessarily be interested in your type of product.

Quality over quantity approach is very important with this strategy. Sure you can buy ads on pretty much any website, or you could find great affiliate networks that will promote your products day and night. However, if these affiliates, bloggers or other publishers didn’t build the trust with their respective audiences, your efforts will go to waste. Another thing you should examine is how many products they promote and whether they promote industry competitors. Try to find authentic publishers who have built their credibility and trust; this will warm up their audiences to your pitch as well.

Another thing to take into consideration is what type of reimbursement these bloggers work for. Some might accept product reimbursements; other bloggers only accept monetary reimbursements (and some of those are pretty hefty and specific). If a blogger already mentioned your product on their blog because they liked it (I often share links to online tools I use and like), then approaching them might be very easy and reimbursements for their mentions might be minimal.

Sometimes you just need to hire a few brand ambassadors to get the ball rolling. It’s ok. This way, you will have a full control of what gets said, where it is shared and when some information should come down. Besides, you will have professional relations with these people, so you can edit their writing before it gets published. There will be no hurt feelings either once you decide to part ways.

Look internally

Sometimes your best brand ambassadors are your own employees. A lot of times, employees use company’s products already. All you need to do here is to identify employees who a) truly love the company and/or the product and b) write well. These employees can write occasional interviews and blog posts clearly disclosing that they are employed with a company; otherwise, you might run into trouble later.

When you identify and work with brand ambassadors, make sure to show your appreciation of their efforts. Especially if these people are regular people loving your products and telling your friends about it, be personable and human. Whatever approach you choose, make sure that selected brand ambassadors:

1. Make sense for you industry-wise;
2. Have built up credibility and following;
3. Provide value to their audiences by promoting your products (otherwise no one will care for your offering even if it’s amazing).

What do you think? Do you think brand ambassadors play an important role in your marketing strategy? What approaches and tactics do you use to manage relationships with existing brand ambassadors and nurture new ones? Share in the comments section below.

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