7 Tips for a Highly Effective Elevator Pitch

If you’re a business owner, you should be ready to deliver your company’s elevator pitch at a moment’s notice but can it ever be counter-productive? The problem is that too often, an elevator pitch feels more like a windup into a long monolog with detailed descriptions of every product and service your company provides and why each is amazing. We’ve all been at the other end of this kind of pitch and as a result, we’ve developed personal exit strategies. The most effective one I’ve found is looking off in the distance and identifying someone I need to say hello to and quickly moving on.

Elevator Pitch Tips

The following seven habits will help you avoid elevator pitch overload:

Remember your vision. Why did you start your company and what are you really excited about? If you don’t know your “why” it’s going to be very difficult to motivate anyone else to get excited about your company. And if money is your key driver, your pitch will come across as a sales pitch. Think about the last time you were on the receiving end of this type of pitch. How receptive were you?

Get familiar with your ideal client. Instead of thinking of your elevator pitch as a one size fits all, try and imagine the one person who would be a great fit for what you offer. Who are they?  What do they care about? What is their pain point? When you understand your ideal client and what motivates them, you will gain insight and empathy for them which will make it easier to identify them. So when you find yourself speaking to that ideal client, your pitch will feel like the very thing they’ve been looking for.

Understand your value proposition. What makes your company unique? Are you the Uber of cookie dough? The Martha Stewart of auto parts? Once you understand your value proposition, embrace it and own it.

Get comfortable with rejection. The goal of a great elevator pitch to is identity your ideal client so when your pitch doesn’t connect with the listener, consider it a gift. You’ve just saved yourself weeks or maybe even months, chasing after the wrong client who is too polite to tell you that they don’t want what you have to offer.

Keep it short and keep it real. In our 24/7 social media culture, one minute is too long for an elevator pitch so keep it to 30 seconds and leave out any industry jargon or acronyms. Use real language that tells someone what you do in a way that piques their curiosity so they’ll want to know more. If you get a blank stare, go back to #4.

Think of your pitch as the start of a conversation. When you’ve connected with a potential customer, they will visibly nod and start asking questions. This is a really good thing!

Practice! It’s natural for a new pitch to feel awkward at first so the key is to practice it until it feels natural and meaningful to you. Then breathe and smile. Your elevator pitch will come across much better when you’re relaxed.

I’ve spent a decade crafting my elevator pitch which is why it now seems like second nature to answer the question, what do you do? with: “I align vision with relevant messaging that cuts through the noise.” If I don’t have you at hello, I smile and ask what you do. After all, someone I know could be looking for the very thing your company offers.

Source: http://bit.ly/2cW1Ah2

Quote of the day

5 Impacts a Social Media Campaign Can Have on Your Brand

Despite the plethora of studies, statistics and reports showing that an effective social media campaign has a positive impact on building a brand, many businesspeople (including marketing professionals) remain in a foggy “I know I should be using social media, but I’m not sure how or why” state. According to one report by Social Media Examiner, 85 percent of marketers who use social media aren’t clear on which social media tools would work best for their business.

To see the big picture of how social media can specifically help you, consider these five impacts a social media campaign can have on your personal or business brand.

1. Enhanced brand recognition and thought leadership. 

It’s simple math: The more frequently you show up on social media, the greater your brand exposure and the more recognizable (and credible) your company, personal brand, product and business become.

For example, let’s say you want to get more gigs as a speaker for your industry’s top events and conferences. Today, most meeting planners start their search on Google. If you come up -- not once, but dozens of times -- as an expert, you’re more likely to be seen as a thought leader and invited to speak. You can’t buy that type of publicity. Well, actually you can, but it’s expensive. It’s much better to get it for free through the smart use of social media.

2. Increased trust through leveraged credibility.

 Let’s say a major influencer in your industry retweets you, links to a blog post you’ve written or interviews you for an article on their website. What does this say about your brand to their audience -- and yours? Fundamentally it’s a thumbs-up that proclaims “We have enough trust in your expertise to put our brand behind yours.” That’s leveraged credibility, and it helps create the kind of trust necessary for brand success. A 2009 study from Mext Consulting showed that if consumers trust a brand:

• 83 percent will recommend it.
• 82 percent will use its products and services frequently.
• 78 percent will look to it first for the thing they want.
• 50 percent will pay more for its products and services.

3. Competitive advantage in cold conversions. 

The third social media marketing bottom line for your business or brand is a competitive advantage in converting visitors who come to you cold via internet search (as opposed to through referral or personal contact) into members of your tribe. Let’s say a potential customer has narrowed the field down to you and one other competitor. If you have an active (and quality) social media presence (be it with a blog, Pinterest, LinkedIn or another channel), and your competitor has a weak social media presence, which brand do you think is going to catch their attention? And the answer is ... the one with the more engaging social media.

While this might not be the only criterion that will factor into their choice, we know social media does influence customers’ decision making. A 2015 report -- “Navigating the New Digital Divide” -- from Deloitte noted that customers who use social media to shop before or during a visit to a store are 29 percent more likely to make a purchase that same day. A 2011 study from the ODM Group showed that 74 percent of consumers rely on social networks to guide purchasing decisions.

4. Greater percentage of referrals closed. 

A decade ago, if you were looking for a consultant in change management to facilitate your annual off-site retreat, you’d call up a few of your colleagues and ask for some recommendations.

Next, with your list in hand, you’d call (most likely from your land line) each of the candidates, interviews them and ask to be sent (through the mail) some marketing materials. After perusing their various promotional pamphlets, you’d narrow it down to a few finalists and ask them to come in for a second interview. Then you’d make your decision and contract someone to do the job.

Today, if you’re looking for a consultant in change management to facilitate your annual off-site retreat, you search the keywords “change management consultant,” and more than 26 million results pop up. You can eliminate about half the results on the first few pages because you can tell at a glance they don’t match what you’re looking for (job postings, Wikipedia entries, white papers etc.) and are left with six to 10 others that seem to fit the bill.

Next, you click through to each potential provider and, if you’re a typical user according to the Nielsen Norman Group, you spend less than a minute on each site -- 59 seconds, to be precise. A few consultants make the case within that time frame for why you should stay longer, by impressing you with their:

• Obvious expertise
• Social proof
• Overall credibility
• Clear brand visuals and messages
• Content that shows competency
• Easy user navigation

Having identified one to three consultants who look promising, for each of these, you might look at their LinkedIn profile, check out their Twitter feed, view one of their videos on YouTube or listen to their podcast, read a couple of their blog posts or skim through an Ebook, and, just for good measure, search their names. Satisfied that they’re serious players in the field, you fill out the contact form on their website.

You get a response back and, via TimeTrade, vCita or other online scheduling software, you arrange a time to talk by phone. At the top of the call, they begin telling you about who they are and what they do. Politely, you stop them, saying, “There’s no need to cover all that. I’ve already searched you and been to your website. What I need to know is this: Do you have experience facilitating these types of off-sites with some of the participants joining remotely from China?”

You repeat this process with all the finalists, make your decision and contact your choice. They send you an electronic contract to sign and you send them a deposit on PayPal.

The moral of this story is that the nature of referral marketing has changed dramatically, and like it or not, social media has become a factor. Even when someone you know refers a potential client to you, they’re likely to begin the evaluation process online. Once you’ve passed that hurdle, then and only then will they feel comfortable enough to reach out and begin a dialogue.

5. More cash and customers. 

Finally, while social media is by no means a total solution to increasing your sales, it can’t hurt. In fact, research from social sales expert Jim Keenan showed that in 2012, nearly 79 percent of salespeople who used social media in their selling process had better results than their counterparts who weren’t using it.

The takeaway here is that social media can act both as a flag to alert potential clients to your brand and as a funnel to flow those same people into your website, where it then becomes your job to convert them.

 Source: http://bit.ly/2aVIMTV

Are good leaders born or made?

For many an ambitious worker, the measure of success lies just ahead in a path toward management. Career arcs in a wide variety of sectors are simply built that way, and sooner or later the serious-minded employee finds him or herself champing at the bit to be a leader. “For those who are front-line employees thinking about a long-term future, the question of whether to go into management, whether it is good for you and for others, and figuring out whether you have the temperament to master it, is a career issue that many people are trying to answer,” says Michael Useem, Wharton management professor and director of Wharton’s Center for Leadership and Change Management.

And yet, not everyone is cut out for a role that requires setting aside doing the work of the firm in favor of empowering others to do the work. But can anyone, with enough desire and proper training, become a manager? In other words, are good managers born or made? “This is a question as old as management, and we have lost a lot of wisdom about it in practice along the way because cost-cutting trumped all other concerns,” says Peter Cappelli, Wharton management professor and director of Wharton’s Center for Human Resources.

The easiest approach and some might say the most meritocratic, Cappelli notes, is to give the management role to the best performer in the role below — a management theory popularly known as the Peter Principle.

“The problem is that … the competitiveness to win that often makes [an individual] the best performer is directly at odds with the requirements of managing other people and trying to get them to succeed,” he points out. “As in sports, where a lot of our lessons for business seem to come from, the best individual performers don’t necessarily make the best coaches.”

Unfortunately, even in the modern business world, becoming the office equivalent of a coach is what many workers are conditioned to aspire to, even if it’s not the best fit for them — or their would-be underlings. “We still have a pretty conventional view of the organization today, even though we have thought a lot about flatter organizations and more employee engagement,” says Virginia J. Vanderslice, founding a partner and president of Praxis Consulting Group in Philadelphia and an adjunct faculty member at the University of Pennsylvania’sOrganizational Dynamics program.

 “In this country, we’re pretty traditional in our view of what success looks like, and I don’t mean that as just inside the firm. As individuals, we think success looks like a bigger title and more money, and even in school we need to start shifting how we think about these things.”

You’re So Vain

Narcissism is often cited as the major personality hurdle standing between the desire to be a good manager and actually being one, and several studies show that the trait is on the rise. One nationwide meta-analysis and an examination of data within one campus demonstrated significant increases in American college students’ narcissistic traits over the generations, according to Jean M. Twenge and Joshua D. Foster in “Birth Cohort Increases in Narcissistic Personality Traits Among American College Students, 1982–2009,” published in Social Psychological & Personality Science.

“As in sports, where a lot of our lessons for business seem to come from, the best individual performers don’t necessarily make the best coaches.”–Peter Cappelli

“The larger cultural changes in parenting, education, family life, and the media toward greater individualism have apparently affected the personality traits of individuals,” they write. The nationwide meta-analysis shows that the increases are a little more than one-third of a standard deviation over one generation. These results were, rather strikingly, consistent with a large epidemiological study on narcissistic personality disorder, the more severe, clinical form of the trait, the study notes.

Narcissism can cut both ways in an organization. Sometimes, and for some employees, a narcissistic leader comes across as inspirational. Several studies, however, show that such leaders are more likely to commit transgressions of integrity, and to leave unhappy employees and destructive workplaces in their wake. “The difference between having healthy levels of self-confidence and self-esteem, which are appealing and useful qualities for leaders, and being narcissistic is that narcissists have an elevated sense of self-worth such that they value themselves as inherently better than others,” write Charles A. O’Reilly III, Bernadette Doerr, David F. Caldwell and Jennifer A. Chatman in “Narcissistic CEOs and Executive Compensation,” published in The Leadership Quarterly.“That said, the difference between those who are self-confident and those who are narcissistic is often difficult to detect.”

A ‘Deep Sense’ of Personal Security

Tests such as the Hogan Personality Assessments can be helpful in identifying employees with the kinds of qualities that might predict a good leader. Leadership can be learned, Vanderslice notes. “But my conclusion after 40 years of working with leaders is that there are a few core qualities that a person comes with that are the harder things to strengthen,” she says. “Not impossible, but really challenging. And the big one for me is a personal, deep level of self-confidence. And by that, I don’t mean, ‘Hey, I can beat my chest because I’m so good.’ I mean real self-confidence — a deep sense of personal security. If someone doesn’t have that, they are not going to be invested in others because they are too worried about themselves.”

So can any worker learn to become a manager if he or she wants it enough? “In principle, yes,” says Useem. “Most people in my experience can master what it takes to manage people. But I think we don’t appreciate how difficult that mastery is. Learning to manage others requires a very significant commitment, just like learning to play the piano or becoming a technical expert.” One way to think about how the average group breaks down in terms of being management timber: “A significant fraction is temperamentally ready to try out a managerial role if offered, another segment is likely to be indifferent, and a third sub-group would have no interest whatsoever,” says Useem.

“It is certainly possible for people to learn how to be good managers, but those who are not disposed to work with and through others are never going to be as good at it,” adds Cappelli. “If we don’t do training, and business is much less inclined to do so these days, and we appoint the best individual performers, we are bound to have problems.”

Part of the equation, Useem notes, is figuring out why someone wants to be a manager. Useem recalls hearing former Mexican President Felipe Calderón speak about why he decided to make the journey from community organizer to national leader. “As an organizer early in his career, he was working with people in a neighborhood to demand better services, but after a while, he said, ‘I’m helping to improve the lives of hundreds, but if I am willing to play a national role, I could affect millions.’”

Among other capabilities needed to make a good manager, Useem lists “a willingness to work with ambiguity, uncertainty, and unpredictability. If you want everything to be at right angles, that’s probably not the mindset you want if you plan to work through others.”

“As individuals, we think success looks like a bigger title and more money, and even in school we need to start shifting how we think about these things.” –Virginia J. Vanderslice

Managers must learn to appreciate how distinctive each individual is in what they want from work and what animates them to work well Useem notes. “As a company manager, for instance, you may learn that one employee wants to be home at 5 p.m. for family time with no after-hours obligations, while another is ready to shoulder far greater responsibility,” he says. “Coming to appreciate — and then manage — the great diversity in human motivation and purpose is essential for anybody going into management, and that requires becoming a lifelong student of human nature.”

Some firms are particularly good at cultivating management talent. Useem cites Johnson & Johnson as one. “They are very methodical at identifying front-line employees who can not only make pharmaceuticals and consumer products but can also manage others to help them get their jobs done.”

Getting Pushed Up — and Out

For many, no matter how good they are in their jobs, no matter how much recognition they receive, happiness lies in becoming a manager. The bank teller eyes becoming the branch manager, the associate plots of rising to partner, the section violinist dreams of one day leading the orchestra. But the criteria firms use for deciding who gets plucked for a management role often have more to do with how well that employee is doing in the work itself, and less to do with how they might manage others.

“A lot of us become very good at doing something — software engineer, investment banker, sales person — and we really build expertise in a subject and get very good at doing it, and then get pushed into a role where less and less of our time is spent doing whatever it is we were good at doing and more time is spent managing people,” says Wharton management professor Matthew Bidwell. “For a lot of us, we value expertise, so the big challenge in some areas is that we respect people based on coming up with brilliant solutions, and that’s not what a manager is supposed to do — and if they are trying to do that, they end up micromanaging.”

Thus, Bidwell adds, people struggle to make the shift to a manager, meaning they spend a lot of time trying to do the work and not enough time coaching, supporting and helping to develop employees, or running interference between them. “And that is really a central issue for people — letting go of the old role and embracing the value of the new one.”

Many companies allowed management training to fall by the wayside during the recession. Corporate spending on training dropped by 11% in 2008, and then another 11% in 2009, according to a Bersin by Deloitte survey. After a modest increase in 2010, spending experienced double-digit growth each year through 2013. The number-one area of spending was in management and leadership training, the survey says. Even so, in any economy, training is not what it should be. “Firms don’t train very much, full stop,” says Bidwell.

But many firms contribute to the problem by rewarding employees with management positions because of skills that have nothing to do with management. In one study in progress, data on salespeople at hundreds of firms were examined through a company that provides sales administration software through the cloud. Researchers tracked employees promoted to management and their resulting performance. The study, “When Good Tournaments Make Bad Matches: Evidence of the Peter Principle in Sales,” found that the best-promoted managers had displayed evidence of teamwork and cooperation before they were promoted. But organizations instead tended to promote the best salespeople, who did not generally make great managers.

“Coming to appreciate — and then manage — the great diversity in human motivation and purpose is essential for anybody going into management, and that requires becoming a lifelong student of human nature.”–Michael Useem

“Our study suggests that the greatest potential managers may not ever make it into management because firms pass them over by promoting their best salespeople,” says Alan Benson, a professor at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities, who co-authored the study with Danielle Li and Kelly Shue. “The same might be said of engineers, architects, lawyers, academics, or lots of others who can be promoted because they’re great at one thing that’s not necessarily related to management.”

If Not Management, Then What?

Some won’t ever make it in management. And in those cases, firms are often not always adept at recognizing when that is happening and coming up with solutions. “What do we do with good individual contributors who don’t make it as managers?” asks Cappelli. “The challenge is that working through others in most roles has a much bigger impact than one can have as an individual. That’s why a good executive running an operation is just more valuable than an equally good engineer working [in the same operation] could likely be. Many organizations have created ‘dual tracks’ to recognize and acknowledge those in individual roles, and those are a good idea. But those people just aren’t as valuable as leaders are.”

As an alternative to traditional management, Vanderslice suggests a master technician track, “where someone really good at the job is encouraged to further develop technical or professional skills and then be recognized for being the most accomplished. If they are the right person, they could take on an education or mentoring role with younger folks in the aspect of what they’re doing.” People who are masters of their profession — for example, lawyers, architects or engineers — may not be the most interested in or best equipped to do well-managing people, Vanderslice points out. “You don’t want to lose those people entirely or lose them into management if they are, for instance, a great architect. But they might be great teachers. The other thing for them and the firm is to think about how they can broaden what they know, as well as doing it well. What’s the newest thing in their field, and can you develop that?”

But not every firm makes these kinds of accommodations. Managerial aspirants beware. Says Useem: “For those considering a management opportunity, make certain you are ready for it and capable of mastering it. The costs and risks are high if you fail to do either. But the rewards and impacts are also high if you can do both.”

 Source : http://bit.ly/2al8NWl

20 Simple, Useful Content Marketing Tips That Often Go Overlooked (But Shouldn’t)

1) Look for Blog Topics Right in Your Email Inbox

You likely get a hefty stream of questions, comments, and inquiries about your business every day and, chances are, some of them keep popping up again and again. When you find yourself answering the same question from clients or buyers time after time, consider turning it into a blog post for your company’s site. In addition to acting as a one-stop-shop FAQ, this also makes your company more relatable, provides the consumer with valuable information and shows them you are thinking about their needs and concerns.

2) Embed Your Videos

Repeated studies have shown blogs with videos are more likely to get additional hits and shares than those without videos. That said, consider taking all of the promotional or educational videos your company has made over time and integrating them into blog posts.

In addition to providing customers with additional ways to consume your content, videos are also highly linkable, which means there’s a good chance your website will reach more people than just your existing customers.

3) If You Don’t Have Any Videos — Make Some

What does your company do better than any other company out there? What can you teach people? Is there a chance you could take that expertise and excitement and turn it into a video?

A company that sells fly fishing equipment could put out a series of videos on fly tying, whereas a content creation company could put together a few videos on publishing great blogs. There is a huge demand for knowledge in the world and when you share yours, people are likely to pass it around, driving more traffic and additional customers your way.

4) Compile a “Who-to-Follow” List

You’re an expert in your field and people know that, but people always want to learn more. Create a well thought-out “who to follow” list of other people who excel in your field to help them do just that. Doing this offers two distinct benefits: first, consumers will appreciate the fact that you’ve positioned yourself as a trusted source of information and, second, the people you link in the article will appreciate that you’ve directed traffic their way and are highly likely to return the favor.

A good portion of effective content marketing is developing a positive reputation. and there are few better ways to do this than by word-of-mouth and building relationships with other experts in the field.

5) Create a List of Facts that Supports Your Mission

People love learning new things and lists of facts are compelling and easily shared. To create a piece of content that has a high probability of being linked to, compile a list of facts that support your company’s main goal or mission statement and then publish it in a blog or infographic.

In addition to fulfilling the customer’s need for knowledge, this move also goes to show your company is thoughtful and has done its research.

6) Tell a Great Story

Anyone who has ever seen an Apple or a Subaru ad knows the power of those companies lies in their ability to tell a great story that moves their target audience. Take some time to consider what your company cares about and how that intersects with the company’s mission — be that sales or conversions — and then find a way to weave that into your content marketing.

If you’re selling a lifestyle product, tell a story about how the product provides happiness, comfort, or safety. By far the best way to gain customers is by tugging on their heartstrings and telling a compelling story.

7) Consider the Questions Your Customers Ask

When a buyer wants to purchase something, they almost always turn to the internet for advice and research purposes. When a person types a question into Google, they will be met with literally millions of answers and it matter whether or not your company’s answer is among those they see.

In today’s era of content, it is no longer enough to have a great product. People need to see it and rely upon it before they make a purchase and this requires a company to build authority right off the bat.

Consider what types of questions your customers are asking and answer them via your blog or website post. Doing this establishes you as an expert in the field and builds the consumer confidence needed to drive sales and conversions.

8) Make It a Date (Specifically)

While many companies offer ample opportunities for consumers to sign up for an email list or blog subscription, very few offer specific content at specific times. Author and lifestyle coach Tim Ferris often does this with astounding results.

By offering customers an invitation to tune into a podcast, webinar, or video conference in real-time, you build a more tangible connection than can be produced through an email list subscription. In addition to contributing to customer confidence, a move like this also helps build a community around your business or product and may well stem off into additional marketing opportunities, such as podcasts, down the road.

9) Put Promotion First

When a company goes to design a product, the first step is often making sure that there is a market demand for said product. If there is not, manufacturing the product has the potential to result in a huge loss of time and money. The same goes for content, believe it or not.

In order to employ great content marketing, think about how you will market your content before you develop it. If you can’t come up with a place to promote a given piece, it might not be worth the time and effort to produce.

10) Embed Yourself in the Community

Nowadays, there are hundreds of online forums and communities (Reddit being the best known) dedicated to discussing specific topics. Find a few of the communities that pertain to your businesses specialty and join in the discussion.

As you participate in the forum, mention that people can find more information back at your blog. In addition to further establishing yourself as an authority in the field, this approach also allows you to learn new things and gain a deeper understanding of your customers.

11) Upload Visual Content to SlideShare

SlideShare is a popular content-sharing platform that accommodates PowerPoint, PDF, KeyNote, and OpenDocument content presentations. Think of it as the YouTube or Instagram of slideshows.

The great thing about SlideShare is that once you’ve uploaded your content, the sky is the limit. Users can share, link and re-share your content to platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, which means more traffic for you.

12) Join & Use Pinterest

Often thought of as the place where mason jar inspired DIY projects go, Pinterest is an often overlooked social media platform that holds great potential to boost your business to the next level, with millions of active users and growing.

Create some great articles, link them with infographics or visuals and then post them to boards related to your niche. Pinterest allows users to share and re-share content, which means anything you create that is interesting and visually pleasing stands a good chance of being plastered over dozens or even hundreds of Pinterest boards, putting you in touch with new customers and expanding your company’s reach.

13) Recycle Content

For most companies, having a large content creation team is out of reach. For this reason, it’s wise to learn to recycle great content for extended use. Ways to do this include putting the relevant statistics from a blog post into an infographic or tweeting a previously published blog post’s important points throughout the course of a week. By learning to recycle great content in new ways, you save yourself from the burden of having to create great new content constantly without sacrificing

14) Aim for Evergreen Content

If you’re familiar with content marketing, you’ve probably heard the term “evergreen content.” Evergreen content is an important marketing tool that remains relevant no matter when it is published. This means that an article published today can be shared in five years without having to be amended.

This obviously does not apply to content that changes often, such as medical data or sales statistics, but can easily apply to how-to guides or informative content. By aiming to create evergreen content, you set yourself up for highly sharable content and backlinks that persist far beyond when the article was written.

15) Optimize Social Media

Nowadays, social media rules the internet and accounts for an estimated 23% of the total time consumers spend online. By optimizing your content marketing pieces for social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter, you increase your chances of being shared and passed around the Internet. Create an informative video to share on Facebook or create a killer infographic and send it out in Tweet form. No matter what you do, do not overlook the veritable content marketing gold mine that is social media.

16) Know Your Audience

Content marketing is a world in which you want to make things personal. If you don’t know who your target audience is, it’s nearly impossible to effectively customize content for them and even harder to get them to engage with your business or product. For this reason, it’s wise to spend some time with Google analytics or another similar tool to figure out who’s truly paying attention.

What do those people do? Where do they live? How old are they? What are their buying habits like? Chances are, you’re going to speak differently to an eighteen-year-old hipster than you would a 75-year-old retired nurse, and it’s important to tailor your content to fit the different sectors of your audience. One-size-fits-all content results in poor business performance and minimal customer connection.

17) Optimize Your Blog URL

This is a simple step, but it can be a big one in terms of accessibility. Before publishing a blog post, alter the generic URL to contain a keyword or relevant phrase rather than a string of letters and numbers. Always, always make sure your keyword is in this string. Your rankings will thank you later. In addition to giving new viewers an idea what the URL contains, this format also makes your URL’s easier and more attractive to share.

18) Opt for a 50/50 Split Between Text and Visuals

Content marketing research and the anecdotal evidence of those in the fieldhas repeatedly proven that a combination of text and images is more effective than either text or images alone. This might explain why infographics are so wildly effective.

Instead of being too text- or visual-heavy in your content marketing material, aim to strike a balance between the two. Write a blog post that is broken up by relevant images or create an infographic that overlies a helpful chart or icon with brief text-based interpretations of the data. Doing this provides the most value for your customers and helps you consistently create high-quality content.

19) Utilize Active Reading

Active reading, or the process of actively picking apart a piece of content to discern things like the narrator’s perspective and unanswered questions allows you to build knowledge and fulfill the gaps in the market, further enhancing authority and content presence in the online world.

Although there is a lot of great content in the digital sphere, much of it fails to meet all of a consumer’s needs and, by actively reading what else is out there, you can learn to identify and then fill in the gaps.

20) Be Original

Ultimately, every company does content marketing a little differently and while there may be some value in taking a hint from the world’s most successful companies, there is no use in trying to imitate them. Dedicate some time to figuring out what makes your company special and unique and build on that. Your customers will appreciate it.

Conclusion

A thread that runs throughout nearly all my points is originality. I cannot stress enough how important it is to be original in all you do. Use storytelling and visual content. Think about who you’re talking to. Then secondarily, think about keywords so you can keep your ranking potential high when you publish your content.

So, in conclusion, find your content marketing style and balance consistency, SEO implementation, and engagement.

Source : http://bit.ly/29fvSO4

The most common marketing mistake startups make

I ’ve seen the same basic marketing mistake play out at some of the best software companies in the world: If your marketing team needs help from engineering to update their website (publish new posts, edit copy, upload images, etc.), then they have been set up to fail.

This mistake is most often made when executives of companies (often engineers themselves) are unfamiliar with the day-to-day job of the marketers, website designers and developers they employ. I know of software companies with hundreds of millions, even billions of dollars of revenue on the line where marketers are simply unable to do their jobs and have to wait on engineering for days/weeks/months to make updates to their websites.

Launching new online campaigns can mean waiting for the engineering team of the company to de-prioritize working on product features to create time for marketing’s needs. It can become a large-scale organizational dysfunction.

This is insane (making the same predictable mistake over and over again) and it should stop. It’s 2016 — we should not still be having this debate.

In this post, I want to dive deep on how this problem gets created, why it can be ignored for so long and what marketers (and enlightened startup executives) can do to fix it.

What is a website?

There is a reason one of the first marketing investments your company made was building your website. When companies first get going they will often put up a website before they print business cards. Your website is literally the face of your company — it is instantly accessible by anyone in the world via the Internet, putting them at the strategic center of any digital marketing effort. For this reason, more dollars are spent on websites ($190 billion) than all of the digital advertising ($154 billion).

The website at early startups often is seen (and built) literally as an extension of the product — with flat HTML/CSS and deployed on the same code-path as the company’s core product. This makes sense when the same team that designed and built the product has all the marketing responsibilities themselves.

But some day you need to grow up, hire marketers and build a proper website. I know of multiple startups with >$50 million revenue where website updates require a new deploy of their core product. This means every time marketing wants to update their website copy, they have to convince engineering to make a new deploy.

A good marketer obsesses over messaging, writing, branding, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. Some of them can code, some of them are analytics engineers — but they are not software engineers (they are marketers!). Requiring marketers to learn how to submit a GitHub Pull Request and go through your engineering approval pipeline to do their job is taking dogfooding a few steps too far. You are now needlessly bottlenecking their work and making it needlessly challenging for them to do their jobs.

What is a website?

There is a reason one of the first marketing investments your company made was building your website. When companies first get going they will often put up a website before they print business cards. Your website is literally the face of your company — it is instantly accessible by anyone in the world via the Internet, putting them at the strategic center of any digital marketing effort. For this reason, more dollars are spent on websites ($190 billion) than all of the digital advertising ($154 billion).

The website at early startups often is seen (and built) literally as an extension of the product — with flat HTML/CSS and deployed on the same code-path as the company’s core product. This makes sense when the same team that designed and built the product has all the marketing responsibilities themselves.

But some day you need to grow up, hire marketers and build a proper website. I know of multiple startups with >$50 million revenue where website updates require a new deploy of their core product. This means every time marketing wants to update their website copy, they have to convince engineering to make a new deploy.

A good marketer obsesses over messaging, writing, branding, SEO, SEM, analytics, etc. Some of them can code, some of them are analytics engineers — but they are not software engineers (they are marketers!). Requiring marketers to learn how to submit a GitHub Pull Request and go through your engineering approval pipeline to do their job is taking dogfooding a few steps too far. You are now needlessly bottlenecking their work and making it needlessly challenging for them to do their jobs.

Let engineers code, and let marketers publish their content! Marketers who can’t control their content can’t do their job.If you delay too long and take this to the extreme, you end up with a marketing team of dozens of employees where they can’t update and control the content themselves. How would you like to work on an engineering team where in order to deploy code you had to wait in line in the copyediting queue to get marketing to approve the grammar and sentence construction of your code’s comments?

Enter content management

Simply put, content management software enables marketers to update the content of their websites themselves via a graphical interface. No coding, no pull requests, no code-review — no engineering intervention required. Content management works. Content management enables marketers to do their job.

Content management software has been around for more than 20 years but, strangely for such a large ($190 billion) industry, it has only recently matured. Drupal and WordPress between them now command 65 percent share of the market (going to 80 percent quickly). WordPress and Drupal have won the market primarily because the industry of professional website designers and developers have, by and large, standardized their work on the software. Increasingly over the last few years, if you are professional website developer you won’t get hired by marketers unless you use Drupal or WordPress.

Most marketers by now know how to use these tools and are comfortable using them (just ask them!). There is an increasingly robust vendor ecosystem (in which Pantheon competes) that specializes in operating — hosting, scaling, tuning, developing — WordPress and Drupal sites. But it is a specialized industry with its own tools and vendors, connected but separate from the wider software engineering industry. I’ve found many engineers at startups who are pulled into website projects but often are not up to speed on the content management industry, which contributes to this disconnect.

How website technology decisions at startups go down

Does this sound familiar?

• Pre-seed: The engineering and product design team for the company’s product own the website. It’s often flat XHTML/CSS hanging off product code base. Life is simple and engineers manage the content themselves. This works!
• Seed stage: You have your first marketer on staff. You try to teach them how to update the website. It’s pretty hacky, but it kind of works. You know you are bottlenecking them, but who has time to go implement a whole new website?
• Series A: You are now scaling up your marketing team. You have a marketing executive who keeps bringing up the website and how they can’t really update it themselves. They want WordPress. You suddenly remember how much a PITA that last WordPress site was that you had to manage, so you plead “I hear you, but I don’t think we can prioritize this right now.”
• Scaling: You now have a sophisticated marketing team built. Content marketers, writers, editors, designers, demand gen, the whole shebang. The marketing team has given up on owning the website. You’ll hear the odd grumbling now and then, but “it is what it is.” Your product team (designers and engineers) must be heavily involved in any new marketing campaign launch. Things seem to move much slower than they should, but the thought of re-building the website feels totally overwhelming to everyone involved. At this point, nobody wants to own it.
• Then: One night you are browsing a competitor’s or sister company’s website and you realize how much you hate your website. Your website may be well-designed, but it is incredibly thin on content. You know it doesn’t fairly reflect the quality and depth of your product and your company . You know demand-gen is suffering and you can see why —  the volume and quality of publishing on a proper website is incredible. You’re sitting in a (stunning) 1967 Camaro to drag race with a Tesla. Your website may look cool at first blush, but you are being left in the dust.

Even if you are convinced that marketing needs content management, it’s not like you can just snap your fingers. Let’s get into the real horse-trading that happens when it comes to managing your company’s website. And let’s make sure marketing is properly armed because it’s not always fair pitting a marketer against your world-class engineers weighing in on a technology decision.

Top reasons engineers will use to try to explain why you don’t need content management software (and what to tell them)

We can’t run WordPress or Drupal because it’s insecure.

This is a very lazy excuse. While it’s true that you need to manage Drupal and WordPress security updates, that is true of all software for which engineers are responsible. It would be like a marketer saying “We can’t invest in PR because it may result in bad PR.” Technically true, but wrong nonetheless.

It may be true that the engineer may not want to take on the security burden themselves, which is fair, but there are a number of great options for outsourcing this responsibility.

My follow-up question for your security-minded engineering: Do we really want to run our public, Internet-accessible website on the same infrastructure as our product and user data? Breaking out your website from your product can improve security via security in depth.

Our website developers don’t want to use WordPress or Drupal.

This often happens if you are borrowing engineers from your product team to develop your website. Engineers who build products for a living are more familiar with tools for software engineers — React, Ruby on Rails — as opposed to the tools professional website developers use, such as WordPress and Drupal. This can be especially tricky if these developers are shared between product and marketing; it is hard to ask engineers to flip back and forth between two very different kinds of environments.

However, to be fair to marketing, you are making an implicit trade-off. You need to sit down and decide what’s more important: for your front-end engineers to use the tools they prefer or for your marketing team to be able to manage their content. That’s a decision that requires thoughtful weighing of trade-offs.

Long term, obviously, the real answer here is to get marketing their own resources for developing the website. The sooner the better, because it will become increasingly hard for the product teams to carve out time to help to market; they have their “real” jobs to do, of course.

This flat-file website technology I use to update my personal website is way better than Drupal and WordPress, so we should use it instead. I’ll teach you how to make a Pull Request, it’s easy!

This is pure hubris. Marketers, not your engineering team, are experts in evaluating marketing software. What would happen if your marketer went up to your CTO and told them “I went to this conference and saw a demo of this data-center management software from Oracle that is SUPER powerful? I am really concerned that we are missing the boat here.”

If an engineer ever tells your marketing executive they know how to evaluate marketing technology better, your marketer should smile politely and stay firm (and feel free to send them to this post).

WordPress and Drupal are overkill, our engineers are going to build you a custom CMS that will work way better.

This is beyond hubris. It’s really stupid. Anyone planning to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars (let alone millions) building a custom CMS is on a fool’s errand. I am not understating the risk. In extreme cases (e.g. at digital publishers) I have seen these decision derail companies.

What would you say if your CTO came to the conclusion that in order to build your product they needed to develop their own proprietary replacement for the Linux kernel?

WordPress and Drupal are huge, established open-source projects with thousands of contributors and ecosystems of hundreds of thousands of professional developers, marketing users, and vendors. In terms of successful open-source projects, they are right up there with the Linux kernel. They have leveraged hundreds of millions of dollars of open-source engineering effort. They are incredibly robust products.

Your engineering team may be talented, but they are not going to build a replacement for WordPress or Drupal overnight. They are going to build you a complicated, buggy website money pit that your marketing department will be married to indefinitely. For a marketer, this can be job-ender.

If your engineering team came to this conclusion, you need to push them hard — your company cannot afford this mistake.

We are too invested in our current website stack right now and there is no way we can prioritize rebuilding it right now.

This is a tough one as it’s a high-level and high-stakes prioritization decision for your company.

You first need to answer for your company, how important is our website? I would start this exercise by finding out what percent of your leads originate on your website. (For software companies this is often as high as 95 percent.)

You will then need to weigh the cost (time and money) of rebuilding your website against the opportunity cost of having a high-functioning website. To be fair, you will need to weigh in the project risk of the transition itself as these projects can be complicated.

Finally, you need to answer: If we don’t rebuild our website now, then when will we?

Slowly, but surely rational business decision making will win the day.

 

 Source: http://tcrn.ch/1QWhGTW