3 Ways to Strengthen Your Marketing Leadership

These days, marketers don’t just want a chair at the table—they want to lead the meeting. But no matter how smart and fast your marketing team is, it’s only one piece in a larger puzzle that runs your company.

Whether you’re part of an in-house team or a member of an agency brought on to assist, it’s your job as a marketer to ensure the rest of the business understands that marketing influences all areas of a company. Sales, services, development—they all need marketing to amplify or clarify their message.

For these reasons and more, we are now seeing the path to CEO begin in marketing. But before you can lead, you have to gain the respect of the company.

While your marketing metrics might seem obvious to you, no one cares what an MQL or SQL is. If you aren’t making it a priority to change the way your company perceives your marketing initiatives, you’re undermining your own success.1  Your entire company should be invested in the success of the overall marketing strategy. To accomplish this, they have to understand what you’re doing and how it impacts both the individual and the company as a whole.

That’s easier said than done, but here are three critical ways to change your company’s perception of marketing.

1. Be a Leader

Every company has annual, quarterly, and even monthly revenue goals that are agreed upon by the executive team at the beginning of your fiscal year. But is the rest of the company aware of these benchmarks?

When you spend all your time on content, email campaigns, webinars, and events, it can be easy to get tunnel vision. It’s important to ensure that you’re keeping the company focus where it belongs. Marketing can take center stage in making these goals visible.

Internally, marketing the progress of teams and tying them back to company vision is an area of marketing that’s been largely forgotten. The most successful teams don’t allow this to happen. If you can’t see the forest for the trees, you’ll get mired down in routine and lose sight of the “why.” This causes even the best organizations to lose their way. Let marketing be the beacon it’s meant to be, steering the giant ship to port.

2. Connect to the Individual

Allow everyone to understand how their role contributes to company goals.

You already know that your efforts create business interest, leads, and revenue. But depending on their background, the department managers and the company executives might not understand exactly how marketing drives the bottom line.

When you finish a webinar that results in an impressive lift in a pipeline, share that internally. Champion the sales associates who use your content most effectively, and demonstrate your content to show others in the department your value, too. Not everyone cares about infographics, email open rates, and marketing tech. Everyone cares about revenue. Showing the company how you’re making a difference on the bottom line is the ultimate way to get them on your side.

Beyond the one-to-one results of some marketing campaigns, the number one shortcoming of marketing departments is their failure to produce accurate attribution reporting. Marketing is an additive process and one that is mainly rooted in influence. Recognize this, and educate the rest of your company around this crucial fact.

After you’ve pollinated the idea, be sure to enforce it with accurate and frequent reporting. If you are only able to produce simple “lead”-based reports, you’ll fall victim to the “eBook fallacy.” Everyone knows a prospect downloading an eBook doesn’t close deals. It certainly does help, though. Attribution reporting will allow you to show this influence rather than undermining your metrics by trying to take credit for revenue with nothing but a download to show for it. 

3. Dwell on the Past

Be a steward of results, and remind every one of successful initiatives. Marketing is often the victim of ignorance. Simply put, sometimes the organization doesn’t know what you’re doing.

Don’t sell yourself short. When you have a record number of qualified leads coming in as a result of a new campaign, send around a note to the company celebrating your success. When a piece of educational content goes viral on social media, let everyone know. Call out by name the other departments who helped you, whether it’s Customer Success bringing in great customer stories or Accounting who helped you meet your budget goals on a big event. Put your successful campaigns up for an industry award, and name people outside the marketing department. Then, put the plaque you get for winning right above the coffee maker.

By championing the success of the company as a whole, the marketing team changes the perception, gets more allies within the business, and encourages more excitement towards future campaigns.

Marketers and the companies they represent have a symbiotic relationship: You need each other. By explaining your approach, stepping outside your comfort zone, and crediting others with some of your successes, marketing can go from weird artsy kid to class president in no time.

There’s no time like the present to make the changes outlined above. Marketing is still shedding the stigma that has plagued it for too long. The modern-day marketer is an ambassador of the brand, the poster child for duality. Analytical and yet creative, today’s marketers can’t be ashamed to highlight how rare it is to see their rare skill set in one, highly effective executive. If the path to CEO is the CMO title, the vigor with which marketers perpetuate their brand must also be applied to advertising their results internally.

 Source: http://bit.ly/ideasnews

Marketing and Social Media News

6 Ways Startups Waste Money on Marketing

Marketing will be where the majority of startups spend most of their budgets. The average B2B marketer spends 42 percent of their budgets on marketing. Yet there are so many startups that don’t always get the results they want simply because most of their dollars are being wasted. If you are failing due to ineffective tactics and tools, this guide is going to show you some of the most common mistakes you may already be making, and how to turn things around.

Building a Following on Social Media

Your marketing budget should be spent partly on social media. But so many startups are convinced that building a following is going to lead to success. The problem with this is that social media reach is no longer what’s best for business. Facebook has seen organic reach crippled. Investing all this time into building a following is nearly pointless because what you’ll quickly discover is that you can have 100 likes on Facebook yet still make more money through advertising than someone with a thousand likes.

When only a fraction of your following will ever see your posts, building a following on social media is an entirely fruitless pursuit, so save your money.

Building a following remains important, but it should come through purchases of your products not through ‘like’ building campaigns.

Giving Up Too Soon

Startup owners believe that their product is so great that it’s sure to gain traction within a matter of days. Many small businesses begin with a twinkle in their eye and then realize they are not going to have an easy time.

Rather than persevering, they give up too soon. Many small business owners begin with high expectations and then when these aren’t met they believe it’s a problem with their business. You have unrealistic expectations if you demand that your business becomes a success within two years.

Not Understanding Your Audience

You can target any niche in the world with advanced marketing and advertising tools these days. To make the most of this you have to actually understand your audience, though. It’s necessary to have the image of your perfect customer, along with their likes/dislikes, and where they hang out.

If you are unable to understand your target audience, your targeting is always going to be slightly off. Conduct customer research before you start to waste your marketing dollars.

You Have No Idea How You Attracted Your Loyal Customers

The most loyal customers in your brand will be the ones who purchase every new product or service without question. These are the people you can rely on. At the same time, you need to know how you got them in the first place. It’s important for you to have a good idea for how you found your most loyal customers, so you can continue to replicate these tactics.

With most startups, the top fifth of your customers may account for up to 70 percent of your overall revenue, and this won’t change much as you grow.

Wagering Everything on One Marketing Campaign

Marketing is a game of trial and error whether you’re a small business or a large business. There are lots of things you can try and part of your growth period is to test out all these different tactics. But it’s difficult to do this when you’re wagering your entire marketing budget on a single campaign.

Don’t give yourself one shot to make your startup work. There’s a time and a place for this, but it’s not now. The best way to handle marketing as a startup is to start with extremely small scale tests.

Scaling up your marketing efforts should be done with extreme caution and only when you are sure that you are actually getting results. If it doesn’t work at a small level, it’s certainly not going to work at a higher spending level.

Not Tracking Your Results Well Enough

And then there are times where you are simply not tracking your results well enough. This tends to happen when startups gain a little bit of success in the beginning. They become so caught up in their success that they forget to track their results and compare them against the past.

Only by keeping track of your marketing results can you keep an accurate record of what works and what doesn’t. Without accurate measurements, you are going to repeat the same mistakes over and over again.

 Source: http://bit.ly/1VjevgT

You Won’t Be Successful Online Without Mastering These 7 Skills

I get that most people don’t want to spend all day every day learning how to be a web developer but these 7 skills are absolutely necessary if you want to earn good money on the internet.

1. SEO

I’m a huge advocate of SEO. SEO is amazing because if you can get to the top of Google, you can get free targeted traffic to your website all day.

And because those people are searching for what you offer, that traffic will convert.

But how do you master the art of SEO? There are many resources out there that will teach you SEO. I’ve personally been doing SEO professionally for 14 years and the person I trust the most to give you the most up to date information that is working right now is Brian Dean at Backlinko.

He gives no-nonsense training and backs it up with data. In other words, he’s not guessing.

One strategy that I invented myself and have been seeing a lot of success with is what I call building link maps. This, in essence, is the art of doing link building and then building links to those links (link stacking) in a strategic way so they become more powerful.

2. Email Marketing

It has been proven over and over again that nurturing leads through email will dramatically increase your conversions. People like Ryan Deiss teach very specific methods on how to do this.

There are a few good email marketing platforms that will make your job a lot easier. Here are the tools I actually use:

Aweber – I use them to collect email addresses and send out follow up emails automatically.

Mailchimp – these guys have pretty much the same features as Aweber.

Lead Pages – these guys have pop-up windows to collect emails that have been tested and proven to increase subscribers.

SumoMe – similar features to Lead Pages but they do have other tools as well.

In my own businesses, I have seen email follow up increase conversions over and over again and in many different niches. This is something that will mean more to your bottom line than anything else.

3. Evaluating Potential

If you’ve ever spent any time over at my Prosperity blog, you know that I love buying undervalued websites. I am only able to do this if I can evaluate the potential of a website and understand that it is actually undervalued.

Even if I’m not buying a website, if I’m starting an online business from scratch it is the same principle. I always look at what the market looks like, and then I look at what the competition is doing online. Are they proficient in SEO? Do they understand basic internet marketing principles?

When those key indicators match up, I know the potential is there and I feel confident moving forward. If the competition is extremely knowledgeable and deeply embedded in the industry, I will typically move on.

On the other hand, when I find a website that is trying to sell donkey socks, I am able to filter that out quickly because

4. Backend Website Administration

I hesitated including this one in this article because let’s be honest, you started falling asleep as soon as you read the heading for this section.

The reality is, if you really want to be successful online you must get a sound base in html. You must learn how FTP works. At the very least you need to become a WordPress master.

You also need to become proficient in working with images. I use a program called Fireworks from Adobe, but many people use Photoshop as well.

If earning a living online is something you are really serious about then you need to learn how to be a webmaster. Youtube tutorials need to become your new best friend.

5. Increasing Conversions

The only thing better than getting more targeted traffic is taking the traffic you already have and getting more of those people to give you money.

The reason this is so great is because it is completely in your control. If your website converts at a typical 1%, all you would have to do to double your revenue is to increase conversions to 2%. Easy.

How do you do it?

Split test, split test, split test. Also known as A/B testing, this means you show one version of a page to half of your visitors and show another different version to the other half. Then you see which version generated more sales.

I bought a website with traffic one time and just made a few (but significant tweaks) to the site and in less than 30 days the monthly revenue jumped by 968%.

Google Analytics offers a free AB tool in their software. There are other paid options but I will typically just use Google’s AB tool.

6. Pricing

If you don’t price a product or service correctly, this can quickly put you out of business either because you’ve overpriced your product and don’t get any sales or because you’ve underpriced and can’t cover expenses.

You must learn how to arrive at the perfect price so that you maximize revenue and customers. After all, it is so much easier to sell to a previous customer than to a new one. Maximizing number of sales along with revenue is extremely important for the long-term growth of your business.

This goes back to the testing part of this article. You need to test different prices to see which one performs better. This is not something you should guess on. There is too much at stake.

Get the price right.

7. Monetization

When I am looking to buy an undervalued website, one of the first things I look at is whether or not I can monetize the website in a way that will either greatly increase revenue or at least give me a good return on my investment of time and money.

Any site can be monetized by putting Google ads on it, but to me that is short sighted thinking. It has been my experience that Google Ads have generated the lowest amount of income on websites that I have owned.

So you need to learn what people want and what they will pay for or how to find good affiliate programs that are worth promoting.

For example, I used to run a website that was a directory of lawn care companies in the US. I sold advertising on the site and didn’t make very much money ($30-$100 a month). I had awesome traffic from SEO and knew I should be making a lot more money than I was.

I created a “how to start your own lawn care business kit” packaged with everything a person would need to know to start their own lawn care business. I priced it $97 and people bought like crazy.

Once I started selling the kit, the website made me from $30k-$50k every year.

It was a powerful lesson on monetization. I learned that I should always be trying to come up with new and better ways to monetize websites that I owned.

So those are the 7 traits I think are most important to master if you want to be successful online. Am I missing something that has been critical to your success? Leave it in the comments below.

Source: http://bit.ly/1S3W90E

How to Prepare Your First Round of Startup Funding

The majority of startups need some financing to get them off the ground. They need an injection of capital to get them over those first major hurdles. But getting ready for the first round of financing isn’t easy because you have more competition than ever before. Every industry is experiencing an uptick. For example, the payments industry saw corporate investment increase by 335 percent.

This guide is going to introduce you to some of the tips you need to follow in order to prepare your startup for funding.

Get Your Business Plan Ready

 Your business plan is the first thing investors will see. It will also be the primary marker they use to make a judgment call on you. Your business plan shouldn’t just stick to how you think your company is going to be successful. It should go into the big market risks facing you and the likelihood of you overcoming them.

The key to nailing your business plan down is to be honest in your evaluations. The majority of investments are rejected by investors because they don’t buy into overly optimistic predictions.

Be sure to have a section on exit opportunities. Not all investors will want to be in this for the long haul and they will want to know how easy it is for them to get their money back.

Perform a Financial Audit

Investors are going to want to know exactly what you intend to do with the money. Examine the financial needs of your company and identify where additional funding is needed. This serves two purposes. First of all, you are able to clearly tell investors what you will do with their money. And you’ll ensure that you won’t be wasting any money.

There are many potential options open to you and you won’t be able to utilize them all. Weigh up the pros and cons of each option. Put a tentative plan in place so you have the potential for change later on.

Do Your Homework on Investors

It’s amazing how many startups don’t spend time considering who they are going to approach. Just because an investor specializes in small business doesn’t mean that they are right for you. You are not just looking for an investor you are looking for someone who can take your company to the next level.

A startup with no outside help has a high chance of failure whether it happens to have a thousand dollars or a million dollars.

Be Smart in Approaching Investors

All investors want something different. Some are conservative and want to see guaranteed returns with a range of security measures in place to protect against loss due to banking and investment fraud. Others may want to take a punt, but they only want to take a punt on tech startups.

As you can see, winning over investors requires a different strategy every time. Don’t waste valuable time and effort by approaching the wrong people. Too many people have spent months seeking investment only to come back with nothing because they approached people who wouldn’t have had any interest in them in the first place.

When Will You Need More Investment?

The time to start thinking about when you are going to need more investment is now. Your startup should be prepared for both this round of financing and any future rounds of funding. You should attempt to look as far into the future as possible when preparing your startup for investment.

One important consideration is whether you are willing to give away any equity. Startups can either take on investments in the form of a loan or they can provide a share in their company in exchange for the money. Both options come with their own pitfalls and it’s vital that you weigh them up with a clear head.

Investment Is Not a Silver Bullet

Startups are often seen as a way of making more money than with a degree. They are seen as your ticket to a better future, assuming you can secure the investment you need. But the reality is that investment is no silver bullet and it will never provide you with a guarantee of success.

It’s not uncommon to see startups take a lot of money and throw it right up the wall because they don’t know what to do with it. The right team behind a startup with a solid business plan in place will always secure better results.

Investors know this and that’s why it’s often seen as so difficult to actually get first round financing. Come in prepared and make sure which startup funding tactic is the best option for you.

 Source: http://bit.ly/1q1Tj1C

5 Must-Have Tools for Every Startup

Let face it – you are struggling to get your startup on track but failing to manage everything on your own.  Well, you surely don’t have enough budget and investors to assemble a top-tier marketing team, nor do you have enough time to learn the basics of everything and become jack-of-all-trades.

In fact, the age of “if you build it, they will come” strategy is long gone and is never going to provide you the same exposure that it did in the past. However, making use of some tools will get you started in the right track and give you enough space to kick-start your profitable business in no time.

Check out these 5 must-have tools for every startups.

1. Content Marketing Tools

It has been reported that fifty-eight percent of B2B marketers increased their budget for content marketing in 2015. Content marketing tools are considered as the back-bone of most online businesses today as they help in creating, distributing, and measuring effectiveness of their contents. Here are a few content marketing tools that can be useful:

• Google Analytics – Google’s analytics tool makes it easy to customize reports, measure the impact of social media and mobile on website traffic.
• Alexa – Though this tool is currently neglected by many, it provides data and global rankings for commercial websites and their effectiveness on the web.
• SEMRush – This tool helps to track keywords and rankings, both paid and organic.
• Moz – This platform can be used to monitor social media, manage SEO campaigns, and measure different online metrics.

2. Social Media Marketing Tools

Social media is considered the future of online marketing and if you are to make you start up a word-of-mouth, you need to start promoting you or your brand on social media starting on day 1. While there are several social media platforms available, using them one at a time might be time-consuming and boring. There’s no need to worry as social media marketing tools are there to back you up. From creating, curating, managing, scheduling and analyzing, these tools will empower your brand to capitalize the market. Here are a few that might be helpful for you:

• Buffer– From creating a posting schedule to different social media accounts including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest and G+ pages, Buffer is a all-in-one social media marketing tool.
• IFTTT– Another all-in-one tool that has recipes for your social media needs, IFTTT lets you post, read and do all sort of things with almost all social media platforms available.
• Social Rank– This tool helps you to identify, organize and manage your followers and potential customers on different social media platforms.

3. Email Marketing Tools

Email marketing is probably the oldest and still one of the best ways that is proven, effective and important for any kind of businesses and startups. No matter what comes in and goes in the world of digital marketing, email marketing is what will exist forever and will always remain crucial to grab success. Here are a few email marketing tools you need to use:

• MailChimp– An ESP tool that has both free and paid plans, you get some pretty useful and powerful features with MailChimp.
• The Hemingway App–  Want to make you copywriting clear and conversational? This is what the tool will help you with; optimize emails.

4. Project & Employee Management Tools

Most startups and small businesses do not care much about using project and employee management tools as they handle a small number of projects and work in small groups. But, if they are to grow big eventually, they need to have the know-how of handling bigger projects and large employee and clients’ base.

Pingboard‘s CEO Bill Boebel says: “We found that most of our customers were still managing their org chart in PowerPoint or Visio — even with several hundred employees. These documents are time-consuming to maintain, difficult to share and often become out-of-date shortly after they are created. And quite frankly, org charts made this way are ugly.”

Here are a few easy-to-use and useful tools:

• Org chart software– This tool helps to create and structure the members, their relationships and relative ranks according to their positions and jobs
• Basecamp– From managing projects, groups and client works, Basecamp is an all-in-one tool to manage everything at one place.
• Trello– Another project management tool to give you perspective over all of your projects, Trello makes collaboration with employees and clients easy.

5. SEO Tools

If you or your company needs to gain quick attention and visibility online, search engines need to be on your top priority. From gaining leads, making sales and making an impact through online visibility, SEO is what every startup need to focus on first. Here are a few SEO tools to track and maintain the online presence:

• Ahrefs– From link profile data to content referral information, Ahrefs does everything you need to track you and your competitors.
• Schema Creator– Addition of schema or micro data can increase search engine visibility and Schema Creator is what does it in minutes to your website or blogs.
• MozBar-It lets you perform a range of SEO tasks from your browser, including keyword ranking data analysis, schema validation, and SEO metric reporting.

  Source: http://bit.ly/1WxKaID

Quote of the day.

"Beware of geeks bearing formulas." 

- Warren Buffett -

7 Ways You Can Power Your Mobile Marketing Strategy

Companies are investing in mobile and for good reason. The mobile marketing world has expanded rapidly, and it’s not slowing down. In recent years, mobile device usage has taken over desktop—and it’s becoming a preferred marketing platform for many.

Your brand’s marketing strategy needs to be up to date, and it deserves a good amount of planning to stay afloat. Below, we’ve rounded up the biggest, hottest trends sweeping the mobile marketing world. Take a look at them, and compare your current strategy with the industry’s greatest advancements:

Trend One: Smartphone Reliant Shopping

Sure, you might’ve heard of consumers using smartphones to browse the Internet. You might’ve even accommodated for “mobile-only” customers. Until you dedicate a significant portion of your marketing strategy to mobile web, however, your business will be behind. In 2015, 90 percent of smartphone-enabled shoppers compared prices, conducted purchased and left feedback via their devices. Beyond 2016, the smartphone will be a sole buying utility.

Trend Two: Mobile Payments

Mobile payments were slow to start, but they’ve definitely dominated modern shopping. In 2016, mobile pay will experience great adoption. In fact, the United States can expect a volume of $142 billion in mobile payments by 2019. Apple, Google and other providers are streamlining the smartphone’s security to enable in-depth payment options, and brands are generating secure apps to offer customer-centric deals.

Trend Three: SMS Polls

Where feedback is considered, text-based polling promises to be the business world’s newest “social feedback” option. This year has already birthed a plethora of poll-centric response options, and businesses are directly increasing product sales by way of integrative SMS polling. After 2016, leading industry gurus will adopt real-time, long-term polling campaigns to target market shifts before they happen.

Trend Four: Mobile Coupons

Digital offers are booming. Mobile coupons experienced great success in 2015, and they’re expected to achieve new heights in 2016. SMS-delivered coupons, currently, are 10 times as effective as their paper counterparts. Printed coupons are out, and texted coupons are in. Buyers beyond 2016 will only opt for digital turn-ins, reworking the way providers conduct business. 50 percent of consumers make direct purchases after obtaining a text-bound coupon, and, even more, are open to the idea of ongoing digital coupon offers.

Trend Five: In-App Advertisements

Experts agree that mobile apps will be the new frontier of mobile advertisement. In 2015, 79 percent of smartphone users engaged mobile apps daily. If you want to be a top-dog industry professional, you need to secure purchases and retain visitors via a mobile app.

Trend Six: Deep Linking for Mobile Web

SEO has finally hit its stride with smartphones. Google’s App Indexing has made online visibility important, and mobile user experiences have become reliant on contextual search. Emergent markets are reliant on Google App Indexing, and they’re crafting entire strategies around mobile web SEO. One of the best strategies is to outreach to writers in your niche to see if they would allow you to contribute your thought leadership essay on their blog. This strategy will boost ranking and referral traffic.

Both mobile websites and mobile apps are benefiting, as cross-channel accessibility between mobile websites and mobile apps is huge. To achieve maximum visibility in the modern age, companies must double down on indexing options.

Trend Seven: Mobile Video Marketing

A YouTube video, when distributed effectively, is an indispensable marketing resource. Facebook constantly hosts viral videos, engaging brand campaigns and interactive media. After 2016, this paradigm will take place primarily on mobile. Mobile video advertisement revenue is expected to reach 13 billion before the start of 2020.

As your strategy grows, it should be redirected to match the industry’s ever-expanding options. Smartphone technology grows quickly, and it won’t stop for business professionals to catch up. Double check your strategy, prepare for growth and ready your brand for the world’s newest, greatest innovations.

  Source : http://bit.ly/1R3MLGq

What Your Favorite Social Media Network Says About You

“You are what you eat,” or so the old saying goes, but I’m pretty sure it’s high time we update that adage to “You are what you tweet.” Whether you want to admit it or not, the things you get up to online say a ton about who you really are as a person. Read on to find out what your favorite social media network says about you:

Instagram

If you had to describe yourself in three words, you’d say: “Foodie. Adventurer. Storyteller.” You can’t remember the last time you ate a meal without organizing the items on your plate in a particular way. Your fantasize about quitting your office job, taking a cab to the airport, and never looking back. You know a lot about angles and lighting and teeth-whitening products. Your most overused saying is, “We should totally get together soon! I’ll text you!” You dream in shades of Perpetua.

Facebook

You’ve got friends in low places, high places, and downright bizarre places… And you always know where they are at any given moment because they’ve all “checked in” on Facebook. Duh. You believe that everyone has the right to hear your opinion. Your 2016 New Year’s resolution was to stop getting so invested in other people’s problems. You haven’t had much success keeping that resolution, unfortunately.

Snapchat

In your world, the weekend starts on Thursday night. You can’t remember the last time you turned down an invitation of any kind—you is an “up for anything” kind of person. You’re maybe a wee bit “much” for most people’s tastes, but you couldn’t care less, to be honest. You would describe your personal style as “Miley Cyrus meets Instagram model meets Blossom.”

LinkedIn

LinkedIn is your favorite social media network because it’s the only one you participate in. You simply can’t fathom why anyone would be so foolish as to have any part of their personal lives on the Internet for public consumption. Don’t they know that employers have Google, too?

Twitter

No one would ever accuse you of beating around the bush. You’re a straight shooter, and you like to keep things short and sweet. You aren’t afraid to call people out on their bullshit. There’s nothing you love more than a rousing debate, and you are well-versed in the world of Internet acronyms. You always have a dozen projects on the go, but you can’t seem to follow through with any of them. Your current undertaking? Writing a screenplay about a woman who stumbles upon a political cover up in action and live-tweets the entire thing.

 Source : http://bit.ly/1LmeWnj