Making Money On-line

Wednesday, 5 July 2017

Do You Fascinate?

Do You Fascinate? written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Sally Hogshead Why are you captivated by some people, but not others? Why do you recall some brands, yet forget the rest? In a distracted and overcrowded world, how do certain leaders, friends, and family members convince you to change your behavior? The answer, according to brand innovation consultant Sally Hogshead, fascination.

Hogshead is the author Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers of Persuasion and Captivation. The book represents three years of research, and explores the 7 universal triggers of fascination: power, lust, mystique, prestige, alarm, vice, and trust.

The primary idea behind Fascinate is that we all have some amount of the seven potential fascination triggers. Each trigger leads to a different style of communication and a different type of relationship. The more accurately you identify your personality triggers, and the more intelligently you hone them, the more influential your message becomes.

This notion certainly applies to individuals, but it also applies to how fascinating your company or brand is as well. It’s not enough to simply know the triggers, you’ve got to find ways to communicate and use them as well.

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The TopRank Marketing Team Explores the Meaning of Great Work

When you hear the names Tesla, Einstein, Da Vinci or Earhart, what comes to mind?

For me, these are people who pushed boundaries, didn’t settle and changed the world. In the end, what they really have in common is that they all produced “great work”.

Today more than ever, marketers are challenged to constantly push themselves to be more innovative and agile to create great work quickly. Competition is becoming increasingly fierce and brands and agencies alike are trying to stand out to attract customers and clients.

But what does great work really mean?

At the core, in order to actually produce great work you must always be learning, growing and practicing your craft.

Recently, our friends at Workfront released a series of interviews with some of today’s top marketing minds that focused on what it really takes to create meaningful work. Inspired by that series, we’ve included some of our favorite insights from these marketing masterminds, and asked some of our own team members what great work means to them (including my own definition of great work).

Here is what they had to say…

What Does Great Work Mean to You?

Lee Odden

“I think great work is a combination of things. Great work should serve a purpose and have an impact to advance the organization in some way. Quality, effectiveness, and efficiency all contribute to work that’s great.

But, there’s another dimension that I think is critical for defining great work and that is based on the assessment we do of ourselves.

Those who set high standards and are driven to excellence set the bar higher than any manager, client, or customer would. Great work in this context is the accomplishment of quality, consistency, and effectiveness that satisfy personal goals for excellence.

Ultimately, great work stands out as thoughtful and purposeful, creative, data informed, effective, efficient, measurable, and satisfying for those who do it.”
– Lee Odden, CEO, TopRank Marketing – Read Lee’s full interview on the Workfront blog

“At a bare minimum, great work produces the results or desired outcome you’re looking for. Really great work is innovative in that it addresses the needs of your audience in a new and creative way.”
– Alexis Hall, Director of Client Accounts, TopRank Marketing

“There is producing work, and then there is producing ‘great work’. To me, producing great work means that the work needs to achieve two pivotal qualifiers. It must be something that you are proud to stand behind, and it must serve a clear and desirable outcome.”
– Dan Rasmussen, Account Manager, TopRank Marketing

“I think ‘great work’ is that which exceeds your original objective and/or opens up new opportunities.”
– Evan Prokop, Digital Marketing Manager, TopRank Marketing

“Great work means what it’s always meant: It’s work that an audience values. It’s work that resonates with the people you want to reach.”
– Ann Handley, Chief Content Officer, MarketingProfs – Read Ann’s full interview on the Workfront blog

“The definition of great work is ridiculously simple; great work has transformative power to change behavior, thoughts, habits, or opinions of everyone it touches. But actually cultivating that sort of work every single day? Now that is a ridiculously complex challenge that few can meet, but is nonetheless worth striving for.”
– Knute Sands, Content Marketing Manager, TopRank Marketing

“The definition of great work can be found in the results. Great work goes above and beyond objectives for the product – whether that’s a blog post, an eBook or a pair of fluffy cat pajamas.”
– Tiffani Allen, Account Manager, TopRank Marketing

“To me, producing great work comes down to focusing on doing the little things right. At times, marketers are too fixated on the bigger goal instead of what it will take to get there. Producing great work is a collection of the little things to make something that drives actions/results.”
– Kevin Cotch, SEO Analyst, TopRank Marketing

“Through your work you get ROI for your customers and you strive for better ROI than anyone else in the industry. But you also want to have work that creates opportunities for people. That could mean your employees, your family of people who you want to help.”
– Ian Cleary, Founder, RazorSocial – Read Ian’s full interview on the Workfront blog

“Producing great work is all about having fun as well as learning something new along the way. I love it when that child-like curiosity comes out that say, ‘oh, what if we do this?’. The experimentation takes place comes from both the willingness to push boundaries and the knowledge to understand when you are on the right path.”
– Amy Higgins, Account Manager, TopRank Marketing

“Producing great work is all about two things:

Knowing that it could be better. Even if you put everything you could into a project you know that it could have been better. You learned something from your mistakes or success that you can use the next time. When you know that it could be better you’re not afraid to change and iterate. Doing great work is knowing that it’s never perfect.
Getting it done. Sometimes, when you know things can be better, it’s hard to finish a project. You strive for perfection and pay the cost in missed opportunity. Getting things done even though you know they can be better is the key. You have to finish something to learn from it.”

– Steve Slater, Digital Advertising Manager, TopRank Marketing

“For me, producing great work comes down to three core things: Vision, attention to detail and passion. Your vision is what drives your creative process. Your attention to detail is what ensures your vision is realized. And your passion is what adds authenticity, credibility and true quality to your finished product.”
– Caitlin Burgess, Content Marketing Manager, TopRank Marketing

“To me, this is actually a ‘body of work’—attributable to a thought leader, writer, artist, creative. It’s a physical or virtual ‘thing’ you can point to with great pride and humility at the same time, and know that you put this creation together.”
– Mari Smith, Social Media Expert & Consultant – Read Mari’s full interview on the Workfront blog

“Great Work is a massive, motivational goal for me and team members I spend my time with daily. We all believe as Steve Jobs did that ‘Work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work.’

The thing is; great work doesn’t always get the recognition it deserves. And so being open to the multitude of lenses, we all view our work through, is extremely important to fostering even more great work in the future.

Remember Lester Bangs who said ‘Every great work of art has two faces, one toward its own time and one toward the future, toward eternity.’

The only way to truly produce great work is to commit to learning, absorbing, experiencing and trying, trying and yes, trying again.

Thornton Wilder motivates us all to be great workers with his thoughts ‘Seek the lofty by reading, hearing and seeing great work at some moment every day.’

No matter what lens you view great work through or how much time and energy you put into generating great work, I think it wise to live by the words of Mark Zuckerberg ‘Celebrate people doing great work and create more cultural momentum and awareness that this is an important thing in the world.’

Great work! A guiding principle in my life and those around me.”
– Susan Misukanis, President & Co-Founder, TopRank Marketing

“Once you deliver great work, it’s expected of you. Truly great work continuously satisfies. It sticks to the higher standard.”
– Jesse Pickrain, Content Marketing Manager, TopRank Marketing

“Great work is something you can look back on with a sense of pride and accomplishment. If you pushed yourself, utilized the tools and resources available to you, and delivered something you’re proud to put your name on, chances are you’ve produced great work.”
– Will Peterson, Account Manager, TopRank Marketing

“Results achieved and nothing less. With the real-time, noisy nature of social media today, you’re only as good as your last win. Meaning, what worked for you a year or two ago is no longer relevant due to the speed at which marketing is evolving.”
– Carlos Gil, Head of Global Media, BMC Software – Read Carlos’ full interview on the Workfront blog

“I think the one deciding factor for ‘great work’ is that it is meaningful. That doesn’t necessarily mean curing cancer or getting stray dogs adopted or the like, though a societal benefit definitely helps. By ‘meaningful’ I mean that you understand the purpose of the work in the context of the company, the client, the intended audience. For a content writer like me, that meaning is the difference between filling buckets with words and guiding a reader to take action. If my content helps a reader make a decision that benefits them, brings revenue to our client, and inspires that client to continue investing in our agency—to me, that’s great work.”
– Josh Nite, Content Marketing Manager, TopRank Marketing

“Great work must be founded on solid strategy aligned with specific business (or personal) objectives, integrated in all definitions of the word (across channels, across business units, etc.), be measurable and have goals. If you don’t reach your goals, you haven’t necessarily failed. Great work means failing fast. Learning quickly. And trying again.”
– Elizabeth Williams, Account Manager, TopRank Marketing

“For me, great work is all about producing something that you’re proud of, especially if it is something new or different. Also, great work should absolutely have a big impact on business goals, otherwise, what’s the point?

By not settling for the status quo, being open to learning new things and pushing boundaries, you open yourself up to finding new and innovative ways of creating great work that stands out against your competitors.”
– Ashley Zeckman, Director of Agency Marketing, TopRank Marketing

“I don’t really think about it. For me, if I’m proud of it, and my team is proud of it, and our clients are proud of it, I’m okay with that. Of course, we look at metrics. But when you have a real impact, you don’t need metrics to tell you.”
– Jay Baer, President, Convince & Convert – Read Jay’s full interview on the Workfront blog

Guiding Themes of Great Work

In order to create great work, you must:

Always be learning growing and evolving your approach.
Do work that you find meaningful and fulfilling.
Set the bar high and measure results against business objectives.

If you’d like to join a team of digital marketers committed to doing great work, let’s talk! Feel free to stop over at our careers page to browse our open positions or contact us at hr@toprankmarketing.com and let us know what great work means to you!

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Tuesday, 4 July 2017

Declare Independence from B2B Influencer Marketing Blunders: 5 Tips for Success

Today marks the birth of American independence. While it took collaboration, respect and strategic thinking to persuade Continental Congress to formally adopt the Declaration of Independence 241 years ago, the impact and importance will forever be remembered throughout history. This is a lot like influencer marketing (although, Congress will not be involved).

Starting over 200 years ago influencer marketing was primarily B2C with celebrities endorsing products like home goods and cigarettes. It has taken a long time and a lot of work on the part of marketers and journalists to get influencer marketing where it is today. In a recent report conducted by Traackr, Altimeter Group and TopRank Marketing, data shows that only 15% of B2B brands are running ongoing influencer programs, which opens up huge opportunities for the future of B2B brands and influencer marketing.

With primary objectives like increased brand awareness and reach and driving lead generation, influencer marketing is a highly strategic marketing tactic that is rising in the ranks for B2B many brands.

It’s a known fact that influencer marketing should be implemented, but how can you successfully execute ongoing influencer relationships?

Identify the right influencers and nurture long-term relationships that are mutually beneficial for your brand and your influencers to captivate your audience and bring them value. To help you achieve this, below you’ll find 5 common influencer marketing missteps, tips to get it right and advice from top influencer marketing experts to declare independence and implement successful influencer marketing campaigns to achieve your brand goals:

#1 – Don’t Just Look for Influencers with Large Social Followings

The first misstep is very common and proves to be misleading for many brands because often times, influence is equated with the number of followers, fans, and likes an influencer has. It’s tempting to look to celebrities and other popular figures to increase reach and awareness, but this isn’t always the most effective option.

TIP: Identify influencers whose brand goals and objectives align with yours. Micro-influencers, those who have a smaller following, but are more focused on a specific topic, can be very powerful collaborators who can make strong connections with your audience.

Reaching out with poor design using a Gmail address doesn't motivate engagement @leeodden
Click To Tweet

#2 – Guest Blogging isn’t the Only Option

One way to implement an influencer marketing campaign is to ask for a contribution via a guest blog post. While technically this is seen as influencer marketing, you probably won’t get the results you desire. A guest post alone won’t help educate and inspire your audience, you must do more.

TIP: Use an integrated approach to the content campaign with your influencer. Give them guidelines and ask them questions. Use their answers, in their own words, and employ social media to amplify the co-created content.

Influencers are likely to add commentary if there's an existing relationship @JoePulizzi
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#3 – Money Shouldn’t Drive Your Influencer Relationships

This touches on a much larger topic that influencer marketing is transactional. I hate to break it to you, but the money driven, pay-to-play approach isn’t a scalable model. Often times, influencers are turned off by this type of interaction.

TIP: Instead of putting a price on the influencer engagement, think of it as a long-term relationship. With each interaction, social mention, personalized email and in-person contact, you are strengthening that relationship and helping it grow. It could be as simple sharing content to your network that the influencer has created previous to your partnership.

Reach out directly and make it personal. Do NOT delegate this critical step @heidicohen
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#4 – Your Brand Must Give Up Some Control

For many of your marketing efforts, your brand will have complete control. However, having the ultimate cosmic power will likely get you trapped in a little genie bottle where you’ll be stuck on a lonely island with no influencer contributions.

TIP: Let loose the reins a little bit and set guidelines and clear expectations for the influencer, but give them some control over the messaging and design. The influencer has a committed following who is familiar with their brand, don’t confuse the audience by imposing.

Don't tell me your story, let me tell my story. LESS fabrication, MORE facilitation @TedRubin
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#5 – Don’t Stop Communication After the Campaign is Over

Stopping the communication after the close of a campaign will make more future work. It’s common for B2B brands to end communication with the influencer after the campaign. The time and energy you spent nurturing the influencer will be wasted if this happens. It’s the “one and done” mentality, and no one likes the feeling of being used, and neither does your influencer network.

TIP: Keep the communication channel open and use an ongoing approach to your influencer marketing program. Share the co-created content and send pre-written messages to your influencer so they can share it with their networks on various platforms including social media. Thank your influencer for their contribution and continue to nurture the relationship, even after the campaign is over.

Influencers are indeed interested in seeing the fruits of their labors @lieblink
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You May Have Won the Battle…

Influencer marketing is an essential component of any successful B2B marketing strategy. To stand out amongst the competition, it’s important to approach influencers with tact and respect. Heeding the advice of these 5 marketing experts and influencers, and focusing on the relationship, rather than the result will help your brand thrive in the B2B marketplace.

Need Help Incorporating Influencer Marketing?

We’re here for you. Contact TopRank Marketing for help declaring your independence from bad influencer marketing.

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TopRank® Online Marketing Newsletter.

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Monday, 3 July 2017

Why Is It So Complex?

Corporate complexity operates in stealth mode. It is born as simplicity, something initiated with the purest of intent. Its goal is to solve a small, straightforward, departmental problem through the implementation of a solution with just a few basic steps. It achieves that modest goal and is deemed by its developers and internal customers to be a success. Its success triggers ideas for how it might evolve and grow from that base. It gains confidence as people make requests for it to add more steps to accomplish more tasks. More people take notice of its developing scope and it is granted the right to expand and consume even more adjacent problems and challenges. It meets with more success but with some mediocre results too. The latter are dismissed by decision-makers as likely meaning the plan was slightly off-target, the requirements poorly assembled. Nothing to worry about. No need to throw unnecessary shade. So, most people hear only of the successes and begin to think of it as being the right way to do things. Various leaders meet to plan strategy and being eager to solve problems they attach their ideas to it and adopt the ways of it too. Its tentacles now reach across teams and its effects are felt across organizations. Like a centrifuge, people’s careers revolve now around how well they can work with it. They need it and it needs them. Before long it becomes arrogant. It looks around, sees no serious challengers, and declares itself the modus operandi for the entire company. There is very little disagreement. Sometime later, quite a way down the road of time, after the company has struggled through 19 consecutive quarters of disappointing results, when buyers and customers no longer react to the efforts of marketing, when the sales cycle takes exceedingly long to get to a point of no decision or worse, loss, when product teams strangle themselves to create features and functionality for only the highest revenue customers, and when post-sales teams spend all their time focused only on fixing problems and zero time on enablement and driving product adoption… in that environment no one in the company knows the answer when a newly-hired and eager employee asks a very simple question, “Why is it so complex?"

Setting aside the dangerous implications buried within the mind of the questioner (How does it even work? Is there any empirical proof that it does? No wonder their Glassdoor reviews are spotty. I can’t believe I accepted this job offer), the question of why something is so complex is actually a good one.

It’s also one that has no answer because the truth is, companies grow, problems arise, problems get resolved, more problems arise, leaders come and go, employees get hired, they move around the organization, they leave, shareholders grow impatient, and Boards of Directors become more demanding. Processes pile up and rarely ever get stripped back to a state of simplicity. Why? The Boston Consulting Group discussed this topic in this article titled, The Twelve Forces that will Radically Change how Organizations Work. Their research shows that 75% of executives believe complexity is making it harder for them to reach their business goals. Worse, only 17% of them believe that their company’s efforts to reduce complexity will resolve the issue. Ouch.

We see it that way too. One of the inhibitors to success we discuss with our marketing clients, who are seeking guidance around digital transformation, is unnecessary, or obsolete, complexity in the way their processes operate. Sclerotic processes gum up the machinery of modern corporations and make them vulnerable to more nimble competitors who suffer less from a history of process enlargement. McKinsey has touched on this subject a number of times and in this article there is one sentence that sums up the perfect prescription:

Successful digitization efforts start by designing the future state for each process without regard for current constraints...

I inserted those italics to emphasize the criticality of shedding a historical context when designing a process. It’s the end that’s important and if a corporation is to be truly and authentically customer-centric, then the process, all processes, will be designed to achieve an improvement for the customer with the results.

Back to our clients, it helps when we begin by asking a few questions to surface some critical information. Our intention is that the information will improve our understanding of the client’s maturity with respect to process, customers, organizational agility, and creativity.

Are you optimally sharing data across the marketing eco-system?
How well are you tracking the customer across their journey with your company?
Where does their journey start and end, from your POV?
Who owns the customer?
What does innovation mean to you?

Steering clear of discussions of Lean Principles and Six Sigma, what we’re hoping to achieve through our conversations is self-realization by the client that a) their environment is needlessly complex, b) it’s mostly due to organizational barriers that inhibit communication, collaboration, and the development of coherent and consistent customer engagement strategies, c) the environment, despite the purest of original intent, is not actually focused on creating customer value, and finally, d) hope grows from despair but only when it is first seeded by honesty.

Do you know which questions to ask in order to yield relevant customer data? Once you have that data, you need to know what to do with it. Download this guide to Maximize Your Marketing to learn how to get what you need and how to make it work for you.

Image credit: StockSnap

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What’s Your Open Rate? How to Write Compelling Intros for Mobile Email Marketing

How many of your current marketing tactics are over five years old? Marketing is a fast-paced profession; even if you’re still using the same channels, odds are your strategy has changed. How about ten years old? Twenty? Thirty?

It’s surprising, then, that a marketing channel nearly forty years old is still one of the most relevant for digital marketing. Email marketing has been a steadily effective channel for decades, and advances in technology only make it easier to track, personalize, and optimize your campaigns.

Ever-increasing mobile device use has helped keep email marketing relevant, too. One study suggests 20-75% of your email opens will be on mobile. The younger your target audience, the more likely they are to use their phone as a primary email-reading device. Combine a self-selected audience with new ways to deliver the content they opted into, and it’s easy to see why email remains popular. How popular? A recent study from Salesforce found that email marketing has grown 83% in the last two years, across B2B and B2C.

However, the more valuable a marketing channel is, the more crowded it will become. More brands sending emails means more competition for your audience’s limited attention span.

Your email has to do more than provide value—it has to compel a click within a very limited character count. Here’s how to write subject lines and preview text that make your email more likely to get read.

Subject Lines – Every Character Counts

Counting up characters for email subject lines wouldn’t have made sense in a desktop-only world. There’s a virtual acre of screen real estate for your beautiful subject line to sprawl across. On mobile, though, there’s precious little space to make your case.

The exact character count varies by device, and whether it’s held in portrait or landscape mode. You could have as little as 33 characters – or about a quarter of a tweet.

You don’t have to completely limit your subject line to that short, of course. Just put your most persuasive language at the beginning. Which of the following truncated subject lines is more enticing?

Happy 4^th of July! Enjoy the weath…
We miss you! Are you ready to get…
Free shipping today only + disco…

Personally, I’m only clicking on the last one. Even if only to find out if it’s “discounts” or an actual disco.

Basically, skip the pleasantries, the cutesiness, and the bizarre assertion that your brand “misses” someone. You can include all that in your preview text (more on that later). Instead, get down to:

The Offer: “50% off sock puppets this Friday!”
The Mystery: “Why do CEOs hate sock puppets?”
The Thought Provoker: “How do you feel about sock puppets?”
The Joke: “Every sock can be a sock puppet.”

Keep it all about the reader, and you’re far more likely to get an open.

Preview Text – Undervalued Real Estate

A great deal of marketing emails start with “housekeeping” stuff – a standard header that doesn’t have much to do with the subject at hand. That means the preview text displayed on a mobile device won’t give the reader more reasons to read it.

For example:

“How do you feel about sock puppets? Download this message as a pdf. Check out our sock puppet YouTube Channel.”

Versus:

“How do you feel about sock puppets? Senator Kelly wants to outlaw sock puppets.”

If your email starts with “click here to view on the website,” “view plain text version,” or a set of hyperlinks to navigate your site, you’re missing an opportunity for engagement.

Generally, you have about 90 characters for your preview text. So make your first couple of sentence irresistible. If you’re personalizing your emails (and you should be), make sure the preview text will demonstrate that personalization.

A Personal Email Marketing Success Story

I have an email subscription that sends daily emails. It’s pretty much the only one left that I still allow that frequency of access. And I open every single one and click through.

The email comes from online store meh.com. They have a different deal every day, and the email is just to let me know what’s on sale. But they don’t just say “Hi Josh, we have sock puppets today. Click to buy one.”

Here’s a screenshot of the email in my Gmail app:

I didn’t censor the subject line—meh are masters at introducing mystery in their subject line. They don’t tell me what’s for sale. They invite me to guess. The email body includes a few similarly redacted comments, inviting me to play along before clicking the link to see if I guessed right.

Mysterious subject line, compelling preview text, and an interactive element, delivered to my inbox daily. For me, that earns a 100% open rate (and several purchases).

Keep Them in the Know on the Go

It’s possible (though unlikely) that you have been sending marketing emails for forty years now. But you likely have a few years of experience. While email is more relevant than ever, it’s time for us to refresh our approach to grab the attention of mobile users. Keep your subject lines short and hyper-relevant, make your case in the preview text, and you can earn a tap on your message.

Just make sure that email leads to a mobile-optimized website, too.

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Saturday, 1 July 2017

Weekend Favs July 1

Weekend Favs July 1 written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

My weekend blog post routine includes posting links to a handful of tools or great content I ran across during the week.

I don’t go into depth about the finds, but encourage you to check them out if they sound interesting. The photo in the post is a favorite for the week from an online source or one that I took out there on the road.

MBO Partners – Maximize your billable time and earnings potential with expert guidance and back-office support.
Landbot – Turn a landing page into a chatbot.
Anchor – Broadcast your voice, music, and conversations, all for free. Share it anywhere you want, or turn it into a podcast with one tap.

These are my weekend favs, I would love to hear about some of yours – Tweet me @ducttape

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