6 demand generation tips for your business

By David Ronald

Successful demand generation requires a strategy. Not just any strategy, of course, but one based on a metrics and processes.

In this blog post I offer some ideas on how to develop a data-centric demand generation strategy that works.

1. Buyer-centricity—strive to understand buyer prospects both in terms of their role as individuals and also in terms of their part in the collective buying process. A useful exercise is to develop personas that represent each buyer and include the influence vectors that inform the relationships between personas within the context of the buying cycle. It is then possible to structure the conversation threads that will inform the content strategy.

2. Content—“content is king” is only useful within the context and planning that make content relevant to the audience. Within the context of a demand generation strategy, this translates first into understanding the content consumption patterns of the target audience. Where do prospects consume information and at what stages of the buying cycle: search, social, peers, analysts? This understanding leads to content strategies with specific assets and media vehicles that are relevant and timely.

3. Research—reach out to current customers, including detractors and advocates, and interview them. Ask them about their influencers, buying processes, decision-making processes and so on. And you can also ask your salespeople the same about their customers to get additional insights.

4. Lead nurturing—with an understanding of the audience, relevant dialogue threads and business processes, and a content strategy in place, lead nurturing then comes into play. The process of building programs that successfully marry insights and operations is both an art and a science. The key success factors include the length, depth, and breadth of the content being offered; the logic that determines how a prospect moves through the buying cycle; the cadence of offerings; and, perhaps most important, whether the program is perpetual.

5. Analytics and optimization—analysis of the data gleaned from marketing efforts can provide real value to validate, refine, or change a demand generation strategy completely. Segmentation and testing are two examples. Consistent, results-oriented optimization of demand generation programs is a key factor in extracting the greatest possible value from them.

6. Sales readiness—work with your sales reps to develop frameworks that help them have relevant, highly targeted conversations with qualified prospects. The insights gleaned from the proceeding items on this list should also be made available to your sales team to use as part of these conversations.

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7 sales enablement tips for every entrepreneur

By David Ronald

Some business people think that sales enablement is simply sales training.

It’s a common misperception that can lead to millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours wasted. Instead, sales enablement is about getting the right content into the hands of the right reps, at the right time through the right channel. It sounds easy, but it’s not.

(Click here to read our white paper on sales enablement: http://bit.ly/1Lbl1z7.)

Here are 9 tips that will help ensure that your sales reps are being supported by an effective sales enablement strategy.

1. Develop impactful sales collateral

An effective library of sales collateral includes crafting content that is relevant to specific buyer personas at each stage of the buying process. Avoid the mistake, for example, of talking “speeds and feeds” to someone in finance, or profit and loss to someone in engineering. Identify your key buying personas, understand their business issues and create content relevant to each one.

2. Create great sales playbooks

The role of a sales book is, essentially, to guide your sales reps through every interaction with buyer at the moment, from the first contact to the sales close (and beyond, if your business model includes seizing post-sales opportunities). Spend time developing playbooks and update them frequently as your interaction with prospects expands—learn from your failures and your success. And look upon the time you spend developing playbooks as an investment, not a chore.

3. Provide frequent training

Be sure to identify the necessary competencies, skills and knowledge that your sales team needs to be successful. And keep in mind that continuous education should be provided to all reps at all levels of your sales organization. Develop a blend of internally-led training and consultant-led programs that enable you to offer both the relevancy and inspiration that your sales team will benefit from.

4. Introduce a certification program

The purpose of a sales certification program is to identify gaps in the abilities of your sales reps so you know where to focus coaching and training. Develop a program that educates and reinforces key learnings. Provide incentives, hard and soft, that motivate your reps to strive for the next level of certification.

5. Leverage gamification concepts

The concept behind gamification is to apply game design techniques to engaging and motivating people to achieve their goals. Gamification can, therefore, play a huge role in increasing sales productivity—spiffs, stack ranking, and president's club trips have been widely used because salespeople respond to friendly competition, visibility, and recognition. Identify additional fun contests to incentivize to your sales reps.

6. Coach constantly

Coaching is about supporting your sales team, especially the junior reps, throughout the sales process. Coaching differs from training by being the rhythm which allows for constant reinforcement of best practices and remedy of poor ones.

7. Collect and act on data

It’s crucial to measure as many performance indicators as possible. For example, track how many opportunities are in the pipeline, how the pipeline to quota ratio is changing and your revenue run rates. The more you data you collect and analyze, the better informed you’ll be— and the more information you have, the high the probability that the decisions you make concerning sales strategy will be the right ones.

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6 content marketing tips for every entrepreneur

By David Ronald

Content marketing can play a significant role in helping your business to grow—it is one of the best and most effective ways for you to connect with your prospects and differentiate yourself from competitors.

The problem is, however, that when it comes to developing and implementing content marketing strategies, it’s not always easy to know exactly where to start.

(Click here to read our white paper on content marketing: http://bit.ly/1GHDSxB.)

Here are the six tips that will help you use content marketing to grow revenues.

1. Tell better stories

Your words are your ambassadors and convey to your customers and prospects who you are. Many companies still don’t differentiate themselves enough through their writing voice. A compelling brand story gives your audience a way to connect with you, one person to another, and to view your business as what it is: a living, breathing entity run by real people offering real value.

Make truth the cornerstone of everything you create. Your marketing content should feature real people, real situations, genuine emotions and facts. As much as possible, it should show, not tell. It should explain—in terms people can relate to—how your company adds value to the lives of your customers.

2. Answer questions that people are asking
Remember and apply the most important tenet of content marketing: answer the questions your prospects ask. When buyers of any kind begin their journey, they fire-up Google ask a question, and will find an answer. As a marketer, the question becomes: will it be your answer they discover?

This idea should drive the content on your blog. Ask people to leave questions and use them as the basis for your blog posts.

3. Learn the skill of writing headlines

Headlines were the key tactic to make people buy newspapers, buy books and magazines. Now they make people click and share on the web and your mobile phone. Bloggers, publishers and content marketers are always on the lookout for attracting attention to drive traffic, engage with their readers and customers and make money. No clicks and you have no traffic. It’s that simple. So where do you start?

Nothing has changed. The headline is still the step and tactic that attracts attention and drives action.

4. Maintain a consistent narrative
Early in my career a marketing leader told me to “tell your story in three ways”—and that make me see the power of integrated marketing campaigns. Think about select 3-5 themes that tell your story (eg, product, company and industry) and evangelize theme across “integrated” campaigns consisting of blog posts, white papers, press releases and so on. This should increase the probability of them moving through your sales funnel.

5. Think about content promotion first 

Content promotion is the difference between brands with fans and anonymous content. Most people create content first, then think about content promotion as an afterthought. You’re better off flipping this on its head—plan out how you will promote your content before you create it.

If, for example, you want media coverage for your business, produce content that you think they want to cover, instead of trying to get media to cover things you want to talk about. This approach is much more likely to get the results you need, especially in the longer term

6. Use employee-generated content

Content is an ongoing activity, never a one-off campaign. Building your content funnel with employee-generated content will make it more varied and more likely to attract viewers. Best of all, employee-generated content is more often trusted by prospects—studies have highlighted that company advertising is trusted 47% of the time while company experts are trusted 66% of the time.

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7 tips for entrepreneurs who are managing for the first time

By Sharon Lee

Becoming a manager can be both a positive and overwhelming experience—management is not easy and requires a broad range of skills that take tie to acquire such as communication, coaching and motivating. But everyone needs to start somewhere and there some important steps that can make the transition a bit smoother.

Many entrepreneurs find themselves becoming first-time managers when the company they founded begins expanding. In this blog post I’m going to provide some tips for new managers who want to start strong and thrive as employee count grows.

1. Lead by example
Through the good times and bad, who are people going to look to when they need inspiration or an example for how to act? The answer is simple: you. You are now the example that others need to follow. The values you demonstrate, the way you handle adversity and ambiguity and the way you persevere through the biggest challenges, is now considered the measuring stick for how others will act and behave.

You are going to need to be very mindful of your emotions and how you react in certain situations. You are going to need to slow down, be patient and develop an informed perspective, so you can lead in a way that people will admire and model.

2. Stay in the trenches
Now that you are a manager it doesn’t mean that you don’t have to do the “dirty work” that helped your business succeed in the first place. It is an endearing quality that your direct reports will respect when you are willing to do any job at any time to help them move forward.

Keep an eye on things day-to-day and when there is an opportunity to jump in and help, grab the opportunity and run with it. At the end of the day the success of the business is what matters and a culture where anyone, including you, is willing to do whatever it takes to accomplish things is a culture that will thrive and endure.

3. Understand the importance of delegation
You are going to find early on that you want to be involved in everything your team is working on. The challenge here is that you cannot be everywhere at once. You need to create an environment where you are actively relying on others to help carry projects. You will still be informed, but you need to let others lead so they can grow their abilities and perspective.

When you need someone to step up and lead on your behalf, be clear on your expectations but also stress to them how important the opportunity is for them personally. When they know how important their role is they will feel even greater ownership towards ensuring an optimal outcome and their contributions will feel even more valuable.

4. Prioritize your one-on-one check-ins
Individual time with your direct reports is critical towards their success and overall career development. It is during this time that you need to keep an honest watch on priorities, metrics, and any questions that might be on their mind.

Set up the one-on-ones, so they happen at a regular and predictable cadence. Block the time on your calendar and do your best to respect this time.

5. Find a mentor
One of the first steps you should take is to find a mentor that you can go to when you have questions or need support. Find someone who has excelled at being the type of manager you want to be; ideally someone who has experience handling a diverse set of situations, so you can understand first-hand the pros and cons for handling certain situations certain ways.

Look outside your company, perhaps someone you worked with in a previous job, and find out if they are willing to provide guidance and feedback.

6. Be consistent
If you constantly flip-flop on decisions or how you make decisions, your team will start to lose trust in your ability to strategically lead. To be a consistent leader you need to be a patient leader. Take your time. Don’t respond to emails with irrational feedback. Don’t make a decision in the moment just because people are pushing you to do so. Find outlets that allow you to think through things. Write up emails and step away before you send them. This can be very hard for people at every level but sometimes the best thing you can do is just slow.

7. Know that relationships have changed
It’s not unusual for an entrepreneur to build a team with people who they have worked alongside in the past. Once you become their manager the relationship changes and you need to be transparent about that—you can never allow past relationships to cloud your business judgement.

You may need to set clear ground rules early on. But be as transparent as possible and if things feel weird, talk about it so you can collaborate on a solution.

Management is an important part of any business but it takes time to develop the skills you need to be effective at it.

Be patient with yourself and believe in yourself.

Your rewards will come in time…

9 secrets of successful video marketing campaigns

By Scott Mason

No other form of marketing can have the emotional impact of video.

Some business owners, however, consider video to be difficult to create: time-consuming and expensive. And they are sometimes disappointed with the amount of effort it takes to produce a video versus the amount of exposure and visibility that it actually receives.

In this blot post I’m going to provide 9 tips that will increase the probability of your video appearing high in a search engine list and being viewed by thousands of people.

  
1. Create compelling content

Before creating a video, think of what the online community will be interested in—making a video that is compelling to a niche audience will result in great organic growth. In my prior post I described seven different types of video (here's a link to that post: bit.ly/1VqdBMv). Think carefully about the one that will resonate best with your audience.

2. Optimize your content

Once your video has been completed think about what keywords you want your video to rank high for. Since Google owns YouTube, the search engine giant gives a lot of weight to videos posted on that property when compiling organic search lists.

3. Create a strong call-to-action

During the video editing process create a lower third graphic that is unobtrusive to the video content. Include the website URL that you’d like to promote as well as your logo and a phone number because this is ideal for driving traffic from the video to your company’s website.

Another good idea is to create an end screen for the video that has a call-to-action. This will be the last memory the viewer takes away from your video so give them a reason to visit your website!

4. Upload your video to YouTube

YouTube is the second most popular search engine in the world—over one billion unique users view content on the site each month and more than six billion hours of video are watched every 30 days. Uploading your video to YouTube provide the possibility of content being seen by a huge global audience.

5. Share, share, share

Share your video across numerous blogs and social media channels. The more often your video is shared, the more visibility it will receive—as in link building, if your video is picked up on numerous websites, the search engines will view this content as more powerful which can improve your organic ranking for the video.

6. The more interaction, the better

The more “likes” you receive on your video and the more comments you obtain, the better. Just like a social media post, the more buzz that your video receives will result in greater exposure. For example, if a video receives 20+ combined comments and “Likes” and also generates over 100 views, the more likely there will be spike in YouTube and organic search results.

7. Add a transcript to your YouTube videos

Most people are not aware that you can upload a transcript on YouTube—creating a word document based off of what the subject featured in the video is saying. Since major keywords that you want to rank high for will likely be included in the script, this will provide SEO “juice” for your video.

(Click here to learn more about creating YouTube transcripts: bit.ly/1KnJDkF.)

8. Seek subscribers
The more subscribers you have, the easier it will be for you to gain publicity for a new video that has been recently uploaded. Did you know that when someone subscribes to your YouTube channel, your most recent video will appear on the homepage of their account—therefore, you can expose your content to wider audiences by subscribing to other channels that are interesting and actively participate in comment discussions.

9. Upload your videos to other networks

Although YouTube is certainly the best bet for obtaining online exposure for your video, properties such as DailyMotion, Vimeo and Break will also provide added exposure. (Sites like Vimeo cost money to sign-up for but, depending on your wants and needs for your video, it could very well be worth it.)

Okay, enough from me…

Now is a great time to get started with video marketing campaigns—with compelling content and good SEO exposure, this rich form of media will help you obtain more publicity. Happy story telling!

Good branding will accelerate your business’s growth

By Sharon Lee

A strong brand gives you an edge over your competitors.

Branding is not only about getting your prospects to select you over the competition, it is also about getting your prospects to see you as the sole provider of a solution to their problem.

Your brand is the sum total of many aspects of your business. Branding includes a name, term, sign, symbol or design, or a combination of these elements that identify products or services of a seller.

The objectives that good branding will achieve include:

• Clearly delivers the message
• Builds your credibility
• Emotionally connects your target prospects with your product and or service.
• Motivates the prospect to buy
• Creates user loyalty

To succeed in branding, you must understand the needs and wants of your prospects and customers. This achieved by integrating your brand strategy through your company at every point of public contact—think of branding as the expression of who you are as a company or organization and what you offer.

If your brand could speak, how would it complete the following statements:

• I am ________________
• I exist because ________________
• If you relate to who I am and why I exist you might like me, you can buy me and you can tell others about me

If you are effective in creating a good brand, it will live within the hearts and minds of prospects and customers. It is the sum total of their experiences and perceptions, some of which you can influence, and some that you cannot.

A strong brand is invaluable when you battle for customers every day. It's important to spend time investing in researching, defining, and building your brand. After all, your brand is the source of a promise to your buyers.

 A brand is a foundational component of your marketing communications and one you do not want to be without. A brand is strategic and marketing is tactical and what you use to get your brand in front of consumers. That's why it carries a great deal of importance within a business or organization as well.

Your brand serves as a guide to understanding the purpose of business objectives. It enables you to align a marketing plan with those objectives and fulfill the overarching strategy.

The effectiveness of brand doesn't just happen before the purchase, but it's also about the life of the brand of the experience it provides to buyers. Did the product or service perform as expected? Was the quality as good as promised or better? How was the service experience? If you can get positive answers to these questions you've created a loyal customer.

And it’s important to realize that good branding not only creates loyal customers, but also loyal employees. It helps them understand the purpose of the organization or the business—a strong brand gives your team something to believe in, something to stand behind.

Defining and developing a brand takes expertise, care and effort…

9 simple rules for creating ads that work

By David Ronald

All businesses need promotion. After all, no matter how awesome your company’s product or service is, if you don’t advertise, nobody will know about it.

Advertising is a little bit of a black art. Some ads go are highly effective while others hurt more than help. It can take a bit of trial and error to create an advertisement that really works. Here are 9 simple tips that will increase the odds of your success.

1. Determine what will make you stand out—identify and evangelize the key things that will make your prospects pay attention to your company’s product or service. Show your potential customers why your business should be their number one choice and why they shouldn’t even consider your competitors. If you do this effectively, there is a good chance they won’t.

2. Use a headline that grabs viewers’ attention—people are exposed to multiple ads each day and can’t possibly read each one. This is why you have to make sure that your ad actually grabs and keeps their attention. Some headlines are newsworthy, such as in the release of a new service or product. Others have a very strong benefit. Most are specific, as opposed to general, in their facts.

3. Focus on benefits—explaining the features of your products or services is important, but articulating the benefits for the buyer is what it’s all about. After all, people are more interested in what they get from your services than what you do.

4. Make people an offer they can’t refuse—buyers love a bargain, so offer them a good one increases the probability of a sale. Once you come up with your irresistible offer, make sure that you advertise it proudly. When people see that you have something great to offer them, they will have a difficult time resisting it.

5. Make your offer as risk-free as possible—people are nervous about spending their money. And if people fear that they’re going to lose their money and regret their purchase, they are unlikely to purchase your product. But, if you remove these doubts, people are given an incentive to give your product or service a try. So it’s a great idea to offer a money-back guarantee.

6. Use testimonials—people trust other consumers and want to know what they have to say about a company. You can’t make people look for online reviews about your business, but you can give them the same peace of mind by adding a testimonial from a current client who is pleased with what you have to offer. Seeing that other buyers just like them are happy with your product can encourage potential customers to give you a try.

7. Include a call to action—don’t just inform your prospects about what your company has to offer; encourage them to take action. Tell them directly to click on your ad, order your product, pay for your service, etc. For example, your call to action can encourage people to email you for more information, to fill out a form to find out more about your services, to join your weekly or monthly email newsletter or purchase your product.

8. Create a sense of urgency—you don’t want to just plant a seed with your ad, you want people to move forward. Consider, for example, making an irresistible time-limited offer. Or bring in an upcoming season or event when your product will come in handy to make people buy now.

9. Complete contact information—your ad should include a link to your website for more information as part of the contact information. If your offer include an offer to download collateral, consider making that item gated (ie, the viewer has to provide their contact information before accessing it). Include a QR code if your advertisement is in hardcopy format.

Advertising is important and good advertising will help your company succeed.

Thanks for reading.

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