Remarkable Content Is The Highest Priority

January 17, 2011 by · 3 Comments

Inbound marketing assumes that people do not want to be bothered and that they ignore gimmicks. Buyers want remarkable content which helps them learn for themselves or pass on to others.  There’s too much good content to allow noise to enter into their buying process.

Your Content Lives Forever

Google will index every page you post on the internet. Your content will live. This becomes a durable asset for your organization and lends itself to a powerful strategy of driving sales. Your authority and credibility online will be measured by your ability to be found online.

You will be found either by strangers or by friends. Both are audiences which need to benefit from your value delivered by content which connects and informs. Effective inbound marketing should promote the following buyer behaviors:

  • Social bookmarking
  • Posting to Twitter
  • Comments which drive dialogue
  • Backlinking into your content
  • Repeat visits and increased buyer scoring
  • Downloads of other site content

Each of these activities carries a different weighting. Each needs to be measured as part of your inbound marketing strategy and system. It tells you what your pipeline looks like and how to engage with your sales process.

Managing Your Micro Market

While we may get caught in the euphoria of technology and tools to be a mass market phenomena, the reality is that everyone is not your customer. Your customers today moved through an intimate process to understand your value and eventually buy based on trust.

It is important to focus your lead generation process and lead nurturing process by working backwards. Ask yourself how many new customers you will likely gain in the coming year. Envision who these customers are. They are likely a small number compared with the masses.

For example, if you sell CRM consulting, get concrete and assume you are targeting 30 customers in the coming year.  These 30 customers are likely going to come from inbound marketing efforts of partnerships, marketing online and your network.  Each prospective customer should be given a complete buying process to follow with content that builds trust.  The timing, relevance and personal connection are critical for gaining 30 customers.  This may require at minimum the following work in the coming year:

  1. 50 relevant articles
  2. 3 white papers
  3. 5 automation processes

Target specifically with each prospect and ensure the content and processes work for anyone else as well.  Watch as each of your eventual customers partakes of the experience.

The marketing automation system which works for a few becomes an asset for your future customers with similar buying profiles.  You would be transforming your sales process to work on what will last – content which connects – rather than what is temporary and lost – calls and emails.

Inbound Marketing Best Practice

Think about it this way, the work you are doing is for a small and defined set of customers you will be meeting.  In the process, you are building something which constitutes a system.  It goes back to what Bill Cosby said, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.”  Try pleasing the ones that matter and keep your message highly targeted and relevant.

It’s better to be remarkable today with a few than dilute yourself with the masses.  I would love to hear your comments below.

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles, Inbound Marketing · Tagged: , , , ,

Managing Blog Categories

January 10, 2011 by · 1 Comment

For SEO and growing your blog content, managing your blog categories should be done with a few set of criteria in mind.  There are a variety of ways to organize articles on your corporate blogs.  Taking into account the user experience and the way you will get found online are critical for your inbound marketing strategies and lead generation process.

Here are some marketing strategies we employ as we manage marketing strategy for our clients:

  1. Minimize the number.  Using categories for navbar menus helps to organize the layout and flow of your site.  Between 5-8 is ideal.  This also focuses your content creation process so that you are writing for one of the primary categories that your blog needs to focus on.
  2. Use strategic keywords for your categories.  Your articles gets indexed by Google with the specific H1 header and url.  Ensure your keywords for getting found are captured there.  Furthermore, the more articles added under this category, the more authority you will get online for indexing.
  3. Avoid subcategories.  These can get buried and complicate your blog.  Keep on topic and help your readers see the natural focus of your overall blogs.  This keeps things clean and inviting.  Furthermore, it helps with load times as database queries are minimized.
  4. Use tags generously.  Blog tags are powerful for a secondary organization level.  We consider these less formal than categories and can be repurposed for another way to find content with a more organic organization of your blog.
  5. Avoid confusing your readers.  Your site visitors will have three methods for navigating your site: Search (via Google Custom Search), tags and categories.  Search is random and allows for a broad interaction with your content.  Tags are less formal and can be used for organizing less emphasized and more niche topics.  Categories are the overall themes of your content.

Navigating your blog content with strong categories that represent the major themes and keywords of your content to get found will have many benefits.  It will motivate writing when you are seeking further content as you have a natural organization by topics.  Your blog will grow with order around the order and design you choose.

How is your content ordered?

Filed Under: Blog, Inbound Marketing · Tagged: , , ,

Inbound Marketing Strategy With Value And Content First

January 4, 2011 by · 16 Comments

It is harder than ever to build trust today, thus, you have to focus on positioning.  Bring value through content first.  How you are perceived by your prospective buyer can be affected by the work or the lack thereof you do before you meet with them.  While many salespeople are trained in outdated ways of prospecting, there are new approaches which resonate with how we like to be approached as buyers today.

How We Regard Content

The internet has placed the power in the hands of the buyer.  We instinctively search, research and self-service with regards to educating ourselves about products, services and people.  As a salesperson, you are a product as well.  How you are displayed, perceived and positioned is entirely up to you.  The hard work comes in building the appropriate systems and carefully thinking through every mouse click and experience your prospective buyer will have.

If you are outbound in your sales process, here is a simple framework for connecting with credibility rather than low trust.  Trust is the key.

Focus On Your Prospect

There is something you would like to say with your prospect.  Typically, a salesperson would rather pick up the phone rather than write.  Second, it’s expedient to email.  Both tactics lose the strategic value which could be captured in building a system.

Your prospect has some kind of problem they are seeking to solve or are not thinking about.  Your job is to engage the discussion around the problem.  Thus, write an article which is housed on your professional blog system.  The article should be optimized for search engines so that it has lasting value.  Every article you write becomes an asset.  You are able to be found in the future and your authority and relevance will rise.  Contrast this with every email you write.  Every email becomes disposable and only consumed by one or a few people.  Though it is convenient, it does not have the same positioning.

Ensure your article connects both specifically and broadly.  Having a specific person to write for helps you focus the content.  In the meantime, there should be a dual tract in your thinking to allow it to serve multiple people like the person you are approaching.

Connect With Your Prospect

Social Media has evolved to become a new collaborative inbox for people.  Use Twitter and LinkedIn to make a connection with your prospect.  Review their tweets and posts.  Find something which connects and you are able to have a discussion around.

In Twitter, you can make a Mention of the person.  Simply use the “@” symbol before their Twitter handle, such as @ascendworks.  An example would be, “Enjoyed the article by @ascendworks on #positioning.”  Note the “#” symbol.  This makes the following word a tag in Twitter and anyone searching on that term will find your post.

The Mention will show up in the respective person you are trying to connect with.  They will likely comment back and follow you.  Once you both are connected, you have an avenue to open a dialogue.  In this go slow.  You are a stranger.  Send a message which delivers value by pointing them to the article you wrote.  Be sure to shorten the url at http://bit.ly.  An example message would be “AscendWorks, thanks for following.  I would love to connect.  I think this article would be valuable http://bit.ly/g66Mn4″

Thus, you have positioned with value.  This is a path to building trust.  Next, you want to watch for their digital body language.

Digital Body Language

A marketing automation system which gives you intelligence about what your prospect is doing with your content is critical for your approach.   You can see what they are reading and be alerted on the timing.  This allows you to have a personalized and timely engagement with your prospect.  Furthermore, you can see if trust is being built.  We call it a breadcrumb trail.  You may have several trails.  The goal is to entice your buyer into further engaging your content and get to know you.

The consumption of your content builds trust.  It positions you as an expert.  We trust and respect experts.  Our guard goes up with salespeople.  The work you do in driving a strategic approach will classify you as one or the other.  Experts work within strategic systems.  Traditional salespeople play a numbers game and abuse others time.  It’s better to approach fewer well-targeted prospects with value and precision than guess and interrupt many people.  You lose your credibility and are only building mistrust with no systems.

Syndication And Metrics

Your work is never wasted.  You are building a sales system rather just being a salesperson.  It revolves around content which is produced and proclaimed.

Within your blog system, be sure to have a search engine like Google Custom Search implemented.  This will allow you to quickly Google your own content for future one-to-one sales engagements to repeat the process.

Ongoing, you should syndicate your articles by posting on Twitter and LinkedIn to drive further inbound traffic.  Metrics show you who is coming and when to engage them.  Thus, your system creates a process for a person desiring to engage you rather than a process of interruption.

The process to be executed again is:

  1. Identify and research your prospect
  2. Write a personal, relevant and timely content piece
  3. Post the content in your professional blog system
  4. Connect via Twitter and LinkedIn using Mentions
  5. Provide value with followers using your article as a positioning piece
  6. Monitor digital body language
  7. Repeat the process with Step 2 or searching on your past content to recycle

Make it a goal to avoid risking mistrust through interruption and disregard for other people’s time and attention.  Instead, build and focus your value system.  You will not only be within the stream of the new economy, but you will be building an asset which has exponential value as you become found, recognized and regarded.

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles, Inbound Marketing, Miscellany · Tagged: , , , , , ,

Marketing Genius Is Perseverance In Disguise

December 30, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

Getting a customer is very difficult.  Starting with that premise helps to set the right expectations of what it takes to win a new customer.  It is a process which requires commitment.  The good news is that if you are willing to persevere and continue the process of refining your systems, content and approach you will have something repeatable and scalable.

A Tipping Point Exists For Perseverance

Natural laws seem to govern the vast majority of pursuits we undertake.  We have to push continually until the flywheel effect occurs.  A flywheel requires a lot of initial movement.  Inertia keeps it from moving.  However, once it is in motion, it has momentum of its own.

Likewise, your business will work if you can push towards the point of gaining momentum.  The sales mentality is extremely prevalent in people.  We want instant gratification.  Make enough calls, bother enough people or poster the landscape with advertising and we can settle for the less than one percent response.  It’s hope and abuse at the same time.

Look under the covers of any successful business or person and you will find perseverance.  Perseverance will help you find the right focal points and approaches in your marketing.  Our own perseverance is what allows us to serve our customers with extreme value in getting customers.

Create Content Consistently That Connects

The internet has allowed buyers to consume content at an unprecedented rate.  With content so easily available, buyers are looking for good content.  Good content builds trust over time.  Part of the perseverance of marketing genius is having ongoing timely, relevant and personal content.  Without it, you are always having to sell.  Content positions you and your brand.  It connects with the problem a seeker is trying to solve at the right time.

Your ability to be found and be consumed is critical today.  Your first pieces of content will be less potent than your one hundredth.  Nonetheless, you have to move the flywheel and write the first, second and continuous pieces to get to the hundredth.  It is a process of refinement.  Again, perseverance in disguise.

Refining Buying Systems

A buying system focuses on the buyer and the movements they make, especially online.  A selling system focused on the salesperson and making it easy for her to drive outbound activity.  The former is inbound and requires continual analysis and refinement of a system.

In our work with customers, we have a lot of upfront effort in building the systems for an inbound lead to take a purchasing step or engage in a discussion.  This has to be thoughtfully engineered and artistically engaging.  The larger effort lies in getting the last five percent right.  Creating valuable pathways for a buyer to take means analyzing the conversion points, looking at content value and a host of other metrics which need to be optimized.  The goal is to have a predictable process which creates a buying environment repeatably.

The Journey Never Ends

We all wish there was a magic on and off switch which would allow us to get as many customers as we like.  The truth is that there is a small subset of ideal customers in the universe for what you have to offer.  They are changing because everything around us is dynamic more than ever.  Thus, you have to be continually growing and remaining relevant.  Perseverance is a secret ingredient which anyone willing to work and commit to can adopt.  The successes you have had to date are likely connected to your willingness to persevere.  So goes any worthwhile endeavor.  What has been your learning to date on perseverance in your business?

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Marketing For The High Fidelity Sale

December 22, 2010 by · 1 Comment

In Kevin Maney’s book, Trade-Off, Why Some Things Catch On And Others Don’t, we learn about two categories of products and businesses – Fidelity and Convenience.  High fidelity businesses are inconvenient.  They typically have cachet and price points which make it more desirable for upper end buyers.

High convenience businesses are easy to get in terms of cost and access.  Maney’s message is that to succeed, you must position and commit to one or the other.  Otherwise, you are destined to fail.  Ted Leonsis, former president of AOL, sums it up, “A successful business is either loved or needed.”  The problem is when you try to be both.

Buying Process For High Fidelity

Choosing the high fidelity approach requires a focus on one of the 22 Immutable Laws Of Marketing, “It is better to be first in the mind than to be first in the marketplace.”  With an automated buying process, you have the opportunity to be first in the mind. Segmenting leads and delivering the right message and action at the right time with high value creates the conditions for a lead conversion.  The art of nurturing your leads should be designed with a continual focus on the positioning of your services.

The high fidelity sale demands that you show you are the best.  Within an effective nurturing system, ensure the communications contain a highly attractive and consistent graphical framework which elicits emotion from the potential buyer.  If you have nurturing emails timed to go out based on a campaign opt-in within a marketing automation system, your content should highlight beyond mere features and benefits.  Help the buyer to imagine.  Powerful stories of clients and their success with your firm increases the value perception to your high fidelity offering.

Furthermore, communicating the nuance of how your advice, strategies and acumen assures results moves the potential client to appreciate the problem and solution ahead.  They can see themselves using your service and over time, with effective nurturing, emotionally move from indifference to near obsession.

An automated buying process enables you to present your brand incrementally and build trust by familiarity and increased relevance.

Inbound Marketing Best Practice

The inbound marketing best practice for the high fidelity offering is to employ a system which delivers nurturing email campaigns with a high attention to design.  The content must connect and affect the emotions post by post.  Imagine building to a gradual crescendo.  The nurturing effect should be continually refined to produce a buyer from an uninformed lead.  Help them get to know your value and your delighted past clients through story–they will form a picture of who you are.  The picture comes into focus with each touchpoint delivered by your system.  Such campaigns enhance your high fidelity offering by building a case for being first in your customers’ minds.

 

Filed Under: Blog, Inbound Marketing, Marketing Automation · Tagged: ,

Less Is Better Marketing Strategy

December 20, 2010 by · 1 Comment

Unexpectedly, I had an indulging experience today within the busy flow of my work day.  A tweet got my attention, and I bought a book. Let me share a marketing strategy which I see as a new tipping point.

Impactful Executive Reading

I consume books.  However, it is a time and attention intensive activity — far different than music or movies.  Yet, the investment always increases my personal growth, strategy consulting, idea generation and leadership.  I have a busy mind, and reading helps me to focus through rich interaction with an author’s thoughts.

Today, I read Nick Morgan’s book, How to Read Body Language, on my Amazon Kindle.  It is a distilled and focused explanation on the art of persuasion and influence using body language.  There are powerful tools to identify the nuance of interaction between people based on body language.

The book is great.  The brevity with the impactful content is the remarkable aspect.  Like Twitter or a Haiku, the constraints create appeal.  Because it is a shorter book in digital form that can be read quickly during my workday – I can buy, begin and complete with little friction or distraction to postpone it.

A Next Generation Book Publisher

I have always believed that a publisher who could focus on less, with high impact, would meet a market niche.  This is especially true in today’s economy where speed and increased inattention prevail.  The tools of production within our hands have only expanded our work to fill the opportunity vacuum.

So how does a person stay on top of what is important as it pertains to knowledge?

At the book’s end, I found the platform which helped connect author with reader.  New Word City is a publisher which “is an entirely new kind of publisher — producing concise, original writings on business topics exclusively in digital form.”  What a descript and focused marketing message.  With the compression of time, the ease of digital delivery and a hungry audience for just-in-time business knowledge, I am excited to see what this publisher will do to drive a long tail of consumers and authors.  If they democratize authorship with quality, they are going to be a powerful hub.

Inbound Marketing Consulting Best Practice

There are a few best practices here to glean from a potentially great opportunity for authors, readers and New Word City:

  1. Narrow who your customers are by defining clearly.
  2. Create constraints in the medium, platform or rules.  Genius expands to fill the space allotted.
  3. Be potent.  With less, drive more remarkable content.
  4. Be found in the medium.  The book’s end worked to sell me on the book’s source.  I will be a repeat customer.

If you’re going to get calls or get found, the principles here will serve you well in a noisy world where everyone has access to the same tools.  The battle again comes down to the strategies which are irreducible in nature.

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles, Inbound Marketing, Miscellany · Tagged: , , ,

The Overalls Of Inbound Marketing

December 13, 2010 by · 5 Comments

The Ultimate Challenge

While the challenges of outbound marketing revolved around physical production – paper, billboards, sound, CD’s, phone systems, etc. – the attractions of inbound marketing are its transparency in mediums.  The systems are virtual and scalable for consumption.  The hard part is to ensure it is targeted, measured and effective.  Outproducing your competition has some merit; however, there may be a lot of wasted efforts as well.

Thomas Edison said, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it’s dressed in overalls and looks like work.”

The overalls in inbound marketing are the continual job of thinking.  Thinking about the strategy, the buyer and the process is hard work.  In today’s information age, it is a continual moving target as well.

Inbound Marketing Strategy Thinking

How to approach and engage your buyer has several dimensions.  Their psychological profile, urgency of need, and budget are a few of the criteria to qualify and create a profile which should be serviced specifically.  The buyer and their problem may be varied in your selling process.  Thus, the strategies which you implement may create multiple pathways for the buyer.

The hard work of thinking through each step requires empathy and an ability to disengage yourself as a seller.  Ask yourself, “Would I be interested in this offer?” and “Why?”  Would the gift you are giving to your prospective buyer be valued?  On a scale of 1 to 5 how do you ensure it is a 5 in value and not anything less?  Once you can do the hard work of thinking it through as a buyer, line up the process to ensure it is convenient and clear so that a step cannot be mistakenly missed.

Someone Will Want The Marketing Opportunity

If the overalls intimidate you, then your competition will gain an advantage.  With the barriers of mediums now gone, someone is willing to do the hard work and think through how the strategy and process work for utmost effectiveness.  Furthermore, the game of inbound marketing is relentless.  Winners win big and losers are obscure.  The rewards are worth it if you can embrace the overalls.

Filed Under: Blog, Feature Articles, Inbound Marketing · Tagged: , ,

Business Testimonials: 7 Marketing Tips And Strategies

December 10, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

Business Testimonial

The most powerful way to win new customers is through the business testimonial.  This is a form of building trust.  It tells the story of how you delivered your products or services and what it means to work with you.  New customers do not know you and are looking for what it will be like to do business together with you.

However, the opportunity to capture a business testimonial is often lost because we are so busy doing work and forgetting to capture the stories.  Those stories are what illuminate your hard work and help your future customers see themselves in the story of past customers.

Our team at AscendWorks has worked thousands of hours on marketing systems and sales process.  Many of the success stories of our customers are ones we talk about with each other.  However, we do have our own processes for capturing business testimonials that we thought we would share here as well.  Here are seven marketing tips to help you in your own process for capturing and distributing testimonials:

  1. Interview with video testimonials.  Video shows the facial expressions of a person and communicates their tone and enthusiasm.  Use video in a powerful way in the editing process to augment the tone and the story.  We have our onsite video consultants ensure the lighting and sound are perfect.  A tangential view of the shot with a casual question and answer helps your customer relax and answer candidly.
  2. Capture testimonials after success.  We seek to interview our customers right after a project launch or a key milestone has been achieved.  The emotion is fresh and authentic.
  3. Campfire Chat Tool LogoUse group chat meetings.  If we are unable to capture video, we move decisively towards setting up a group chat meeting using 37Signals’ Campfire chat tool.  This allows for real-time give and take and makes it easy to transcribe the content of your chat into a useful post on your blog.
  4. Post customer success stories online.  Use your corporate blog to categorize your business testimonials and success stories.  Ours are at our AscendWorks blog under the Case Studies category.  We keep it growing and it allows readers to peruse the stories ongoing. Our Salesforce Success Blog also has a Case Studies category with content and video for those specific projects and customers.
  5. Optimize your content.  Your content should be be found.  Ensure it is optimized for SEO with keywords and content scoring.  There should be hyperlinking to relevant sites as well.  It will live on the internet for those searching for testimonials or stories similar to their own.  Thus, your success stories are repurposed to attract new buyers as it is indexed online with the search engines.
  6. Use stories in your sales process.  For prospective customers that are in your pipeline, allow your business testimonials to be easily searched and found by your sales team.  They can send the links of these testimonials to relevant leads they are working with to help them see their story in one of your past customers’ stories.
  7. Create an ongoing process.  As part of your project management or service delivery process, formalize the process for capturing business testimonials and make it easy for anyone on your team to interview and publish the content from your process.  Lay out the process in an easy way for it to be natural and build up your library of testimonials this way.

By publishing your case studies in an easily accessible and organized manner, you will provide a self-service method for your leads to understand who you are and what you do.  They will see and hear it from credible sources – past customers that have invested in your products and services.

If you would like to learn more or get some help setting up this process or delivering this service, connect with us and we will be happy to help.  This is one of the most strategic marketing approaches for your business you can use to help build trust with new buyers with the stories of your customers.

What would a business testimonial process do for your business?

Filed Under: Blog, Inbound Marketing, Sales Process · Tagged: , , , , ,

Conversions And Clicks

October 7, 2010 by · Leave a Comment

Try Googling anyone in your field.  Look at the results and see how similar everyone appears.  This is your buyer’s experience.  They have access to choice from a simple search and start the buying process far before you ever have the opportunity to meet with them.

Some companies understand that buying starts with search.  They spend much on clicks in hopes for revenue.  The strategy only addresses the top of the funnel – getting attention to your value proposition.  Once the lead clicks, their inattention is a powerful force which can draw them away from your value proposition quickly.  This is the common broken process for companies that understand a small bit.

However, the real challenge is not in clicks.  It is in conversions.  How do you build trust and credibility with a stranger?  You must provide timely, relevant and personal content within the buying process.  There must be a system to nurture and lead the buyer.  This system walks with the buyer in a one-to-one engagement with various decision trees to help them say, “Yes.”  It takes the stranger and makes them a friend.  This is known as the middle of the funnel.  It is essential to avoid wasted dollars and time on incomplete marketing strategies.

How do you track with your buyers?

 

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The Convenience Factor

October 16, 2009 by · Leave a Comment

conveniencegallery

Filed Under: Blog, Inbound Marketing ·