Top 6 B2B digital marketing predictions for 2016

As we stepped in 2016, we looked back at the digital marketing landscape, which is evolving at astronomical rate in comparison at any other industry; that’s because the web, itself, is changing faster than ever.

With heaps of data pouring out of new devices, products and social platforms every minute, it is of utmost importance for marketers to understand how this data will impact their content & community marketing strategies in 2016.

Therefore, in this article, we try to boil down what changes are requiredfor tomorrow, what traditional strategies are no longer relevant, and what marketing trends will carry us forward in the coming year, especially for the B2B Businesses.

Here our 6 digital marketing trends to watch out for in 2016:

1. Be Mobile Ready –

This includes responsive websites, landing pages, mobile marketing, and mobile-specific content. With the number of smartphone users worldwide predicted to surpass 2 billion in 2016, this could turn out to be the game changer of marketing trends. In 2015, we saw brands allocating almost half of their digital advertising budgets to mobile, a 50% increase over 2014 spending.

In 2016, we expect location-driven mobile marketing to gain momentum through wearable technology, augmented reality, and the Internet of Things.

2. Be the veritable social butterfly –

It’s true, the importance of social media, social engagement, social networks and social sites can no longer be denied. The world has gone social, and marketing is the veritable social butterfly. In 2015, social media marketing was rooted in personalization. Brands can use platforms like Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter, to deliver targeted messages to their customers.

In 2016, in a bid to grab their share of marketplace attention, brands will need to connect with their customers in real time. Live social sites likeSnapchat will dominate the social media marketingdomain as Virtual Reality (VR) technology goes mainstream.

3. Watch out for content marketing as it continues to dominate –

As mobile and social media marketing takes over the more traditional forms of advertising, the demand for platform-centric content is going to get bigger than ever.According to CMI, 51% of B2B firms plan to increase spending on content marketing in 2016.

The biggest advantage of content marketing is that it helps prospective customers move through their Buyer Journey much faster because the brand is providing answers to questions that are being asked before the prospect is reaching out to the sales person.

In 2016, B2B firms will need to adjust their marketing budgets, increasing investment in content marketing– from people to vendors, to tech solutions, which manage, measure, and optimize content.

4. Be ready as search indexing evolves yet again-

Every year, Google comes up with almost 500 changes to their algorithms, so organic search is on a continuous cycle of evolution. Currently, we’re at the precipice of two major shifts in how people will be searching on the web, both of which will have a significant impact for B2B marketers to take notice this year.

The first major change will be in terms of how Google and other search engines index mobile apps. And the second significant change will be in the way that search engines incorporate virtual assistant app data, like Apple’s Siri, Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, and Facebook’s M.

In addition to the traditional keyword-based, social signal-based, and link-based SEO, B2B firms will also need to re-examine how their content is being crawled and indexed for the always on-the-go user leveraging one of these assistant apps.

5. Be ready to embrace video content –

While 2015 was a significant year for online video, according to a report the medium will become an even more essential part of the digital marketing mix in the coming years. With many teenagers preferring YouTube to traditional TV, online video is particularly key to engaging those under 18, or Generation Z.

Where user behavior goes, so must your digital marketing strategies, and B2B marketers who start video early will gain the first-mover advantages with their prospects as well as with the media.

6. Ride the marketing automation wave –

Over the last year, we have realised that a business with any number of customers needs to have a CRM system to manage customer information, send those customers time-based or trigger-based email communications, and recognize when a customer might be ready to buy again. This will not only ensure customer retention, will also facilitate repeat purchase from those loyal customers along with positive word of mouth.

While most of us spent a majority of our time looking for the ‘Next Big Thing,’ B2B firms need to ensure that their strategies are adaptable to the changes happening in the industry, while still positioning their brandfor success by staying ahead of the most important digital trends.

In 2016, B2B firms should focus on creating a refined, almost personalized digital journey that is consumable on all devices, at all touch point, and can be attributed back to the marketing efforts of the brand.

Source : http://bit.ly/1TOTfhT

5 of the Biggest Obstacles Facing Entrepreneurs

When you first decide to make the big leap and become an entrepreneur, you will face many hurdles along the way. However, if you know what these hurdles will be, then you can begin to take steps to overcome them. Here are five major issues that you will face once you have decided to become an entrepreneur and start your own business.

Financing Your Business

This is probably the greatest hurdle you will face. The great thing about this is that once you overcome this problem, everything else will be much easier. Some of the obvious solutions for this problem would be small business loans and crowdfunding campaigns; however, you can also get funds from friends and family. It is also important to realize that there are many other ways to get funding, including various business competitions and government grants.

Building a Customer Base

Once your business is up and running, you will need to attract customers. Social media is the first solution that you should start using right away because it is free. This tool also allows you to perform valuable research about individuals who need your products and services. In addition, you can promote your business with various marketing campaigns, such as topbargains.com.au offering online coupon codes and deals once you have a strong enough web presence. However, if your business is a local brick and mortar organization, then you also have other options, including flyers, word of mouth, phone calls, and door to door solicitation.

Quitting Your Day Job

This is a major factor to consider when you are thinking about becoming an entrepreneur. You need to make sure that you can pay your bills while you are starting your journey. The best solution is to have a nest egg tucked away that will give you the freedom to pursue your dream. However, if you can get financing rather quickly, then you might be able to deal with this problem a little more easily.

Building Your Team

This is one the most important issues you will face when starting your own business. You need to locate and hire quality employees that will be highly dependable and able to quickly adapt to any situation rather quickly. It is also important that your very first employees remain loyal to you because in the beginning stages of your operations, replacing them will be extremely difficult.

Creating Your Network

You need to begin building relationships with suppliers, sellers, and all of the other various entities that you will need to associate with in order for your business to function properly. You will probably have many choices, so you need to be well informed about the prices and the quality of the goods and services that they offer.

In Conclusion

When dealing with many of the troublesome situations that you may encounter, one of the best things you can do is examine your competitors and see how they overcame these problems. You can also look to other similar businesses and find out what they did or didn’t do in order to deal with any of the obstacles you might be facing in the near future.

Source : http://bit.ly/1YHfczt

TURN SOCIAL-MEDIA HASSLES INTO HAPPINESS!

Content Strategy… Sales Await!

You have your morning cup of coffee, turn on your computer and look at all of your e-mails and “To Do” list.

Then, that gnawing feeling hits you.

You need to post something on all of your social-media channels again. Ugh! It’s never-ending.

What to post?

Where do you find information to share?

Where do you post it and when?

It is such a hassle, but you know you need to be on social media. Well, it’s time to make a change and … 

Turn Social Media into a Sales Magnet in 3 Steps

Instead of dreading your social-media responsibilities, you can turn this process into a valuable part of your business success. And the best part is, it doesn’t need to be a hassle. Here are 3, simple steps to help you get started …

1. Create topics.

Simply write down various topics your customers are interested in hearing about on the top of a spreadsheet or piece of paper. This may include local, national and business news, valuable insights about your company, celebrity updates, industry trends, and more.

2. Add to your list.

Set aside some time to research various stories and news for each topic you have listed. Then, add a brief entry under each topic that you can post to your various, social-media venues.

3. Track and repeat.

Create entries for the month in advance, and then post accordingly on each site. Review the responses and communicate with your social-media audience when necessary. Then, repeat the entire process from step 1.

Simple, But a Start

By setting aside a few hours each month and following these simple steps, you can start a successful, social-media process. Instead of posting things “just to post something,” you’ll have an initial plan in place. Then, you can develop the process, and get more people involved to help you with research, strategy, posting, and responses.

Over time, you’ll interact more with customers and start to see brand awareness and sales increase. Then, your social-media won’t be a hassle. Instead, you’ll look forward to working on it as a major part of your organization’s marketing process!

Source : http://bit.ly/1SrmGDb

Don’t Say This to a Designer!

I have worked with numerous designers, developers, managers and other team members of all shapes and sizes. With some I’ve developed lasting friendships, with a few I have developed lasting white hairs. But we were all trying to do only one thing: make the product better. Unfortunately, good intentions don’t always translate to helpful comments. Here’s some things you’re better off not saying to your designer and what you can do instead.

“Can you make that bold?”

“Like designers, if you give a programmer a problem with parameters, they’ll apply every bit of genius they have to solve it in the best possible way. If you tell them how to do it, you’ll suffer the wrath of an angry God.” — Derek Powazek

But unlike programming, design is a collaborative process that benefits from constructive feedback.

So do tell your designer what you honestly feel. Raise questions about the interactions, talk about scenarios they may not have thought of, point out inconsistencies they might have compromised on, comment on the feel and the style if it doesn’t feel right. Your feedback can bring in a new perspective and help a lot. What doesn’t help however, is when somebody tries to micro-manage instead of explaining the problem.

Example time:

You are looking at a new design and it looks great but it is painfully obvious to you that that heading will look better if it is bold. So you tell your designer to “make that bold”.

What you don’t know is the context. Are the headings like this on all other screens and will making it bold here break the consistency? Are there complex visual hierarchies the designer has maintained? Will the clarity of some other element be sacrificed if she makes it bold? Did she already try it in bold and decided regular was the best balance? Is she already aware of the problem you are trying to solve but made a conscious trade-off for some reason?

Now, in most cases she will ask you why you think it should be bold and if the problem is legit, suggest a solution that fits best. But if you do this too many times (especially if you’re in a managerial position), she will start picking her battles and give you the smaller changes. This sucks for everyone because it sucks for the product.

So what should you do? Just frame the feedback better, that’s really all. Instead of telling her to “make that bold”, tell her that you don’t think the title has enough emphasis, or that the headings don’t stand out enough and then let her decide what to do about the problem. Also be ready to support all your feedback with arguments and examples.

“There were some problems with the design; don’t worry I fixed them.”

Never ever make design changes in the final product without consulting the designer. This is the worst thing you can do and you’ll instantly earn your designer’s absolute distrust. It is as if a designer took your production-ready code and made some changes because things didn’t feel right. The small changes you make on the fly might seem small but they will accumulate. If you’re not satisfied with a design, talk to the designer. Give them honest, constructive feedback and trust them to do their job well.

Side note for managers:

If you’re in a managerial position and find yourself making changes at the final stage without consulting the designer, that’s a symptom of a larger problem. If you have been giving your designer constructive feedback but still aren’t satisfied with the final designs, you need to either have an honest conversation with them or find a designer you can trust. You are paying them to do a job and if you have to do it instead, there’s no point keeping them around. If you don’t have the time to provide feedback and go through the iterations, you are about to lose even more time fixing the haphazard fixes later (these can accumulate really quickly, trust me), plus you will end up iterating in product cycles instead of at the design level
.

“Will moving that button 5 px to the left really make a difference?”

It’s our job to sweat the details. Mis-aligned UI elements is the stuff of our nightmares. But that’s not why you should care about those 5 pixels; you should care because every one of those 5 pixels strewn around the product accumulates and reflects on the final feel. Can you tell the difference between the millions of shitty-looking apps in the stores and the few high-quality, well-designed ones? Well, each of those painfully 5-pixel-aligned buttons contributes to making those high-quality apps look that way.

“Nope, can’t be done.”

Say that it will take too much time, more than the deadline permits. Say that it will lead to compromises in the code. Say that it’s not a priority. Say that you don’t think it’s worth the time to figure out how to do it. All of which can lead to a conversation rather than shut it down.

There’s nothing more frustrating than repeatedly hearing “That’s not possible” every time you want to try something new. We all want to enthusiastically build the best product. That involves going to 100% polished not just 70% functional. I realise that too much AfterEffects and Photoshop can sometimes keep designers out of touch with real-life constraints. If that is the case, please remind us of the limitations of the platform or framework. As designers we can dream up wonderful things, but we rely on your brilliance to help make these dreams a reality.

Source : http://bit.ly/1GHFInE

Fast and Furious Marketing News

How to Discover Social Media Influencers

Discover Social Media Influencers

 Ian Cleary  Created: March 26, 2014  Updated: June 17, 2015

You’ve probably heard that if someone doesn’t have a Klout score of above 80, then you should ignore them.

Or have you heard that Klout should be ignored? Read on and find out the truth…

There’s nothing like a bit of controversy to kick off a blog post!

Influence is important in social media, and social media influencers are people who have a lot of this highly-prized influence.  If you’ve got a large, relevant audience that listens to you, then you’ve got influence.  How much of it you are considered to have depends on what action your followers and fans take as a result of what you say.

If you can build relationships with people who have influence over your target audience, you can generate sales on the back of this.

But how do you assess influence and know who to approach?

This article could be very long so we’re making some assumptions:

• 1.  We’re assuming that the influencers you are looking into are influential with the audience you want attention from.
• 2. We’re assuming that this is online influence: someone might have one Twitter follower and be hugely influential in the real world!
• 3.  There is no tool that can measure influence accurately: it’s an art not a science.  How influential is a person offline and how can you measure that? It’s not easy!

Before we delve into this article here’s an interesting slideshare presentation on influencers     

So, bearing in mind those assumptions, the way to assess somebody’s degree of influence involves asking the following questions.

1.  Which other influencers are engaging with them online?

Influencers follow other influencers, so one of the best ways of finding them is looking at who they hang out with.

I recently tested out Littlebird and was impressed with the lists of influencers it produces.  You enter the topic of your choice, and then Littlebird will find out who is participating in that topic.

It then ranks them by how connected they are to their peers, on the assumption that if you are very influential, more people will have followed/connected with you.

Find the insiders!

Littlebird uses an ‘Insider’ score to display how many other influencers are connected to a person.  The theory is that the higher the number, the more influence the person has.

So this is a good way of building up your list of influential contacts.

Here are some of the other helpful features of Littlebird:

• Identify popular content – Based on the influencer list, you can view the most popular content shared on Twitter and then share some of it yourself.
• Discover connections – Find out who you are following who is not following you back, and vice versa.  Identify targets to connect with.
• Blogs – Browse through the latest posts shared out by the influencers.
• Location – Browse influencers by location so you can build up your network within a country of your choice.
• Network Visualization – View the network in a chart where you can view all the connections between all the influencers.
• Export your reports – Depending on your subscription level, you can export a set of reports.

2.  What is their Influence score?

There are tools that try to calculate a person’s influence and quantify it in a number, or score.  The higher the score, the more influential  you are meant to be.  These systems are not perfect and should never be used in isolation, but they do have smart algorithms that analyze your activity online and give you an idea of potential influence.

Klout – Klout gives you a score out of 100 and assesses which niches you are influential in.  You connect each of your social networks through the site and it analyzes all your activity. Klout notes who is sharing your content, the likes, comments, shares etc you get, and then a score is calculated.  This score can go up or down over time.

A rating of your Klout score over the last 90 days

Kred –  Kred offers 2 scores, calculated by your Twitter activity over the last 1,000 days.  If you connect your Facebook account too, this can also contribute to your score.    The two scores are:

• Influence – This is how much you get retweeted, replied to, mentioned or followed.  If you connect your Facebook account it will measure posts, mentions, likes, shares and event notifications.
• Outreach – This is how much you are engaging or sharing with other people.  You could be retweeting, replying or mentioning others.

Kred provides you with details of how it is measuring your score.  For example, you can view which of your tweets were shared by other people, and tweets where you were mentioned, and then view points that are awarded towards your score for those tweets (in the very right hand column).

This shows where your content is shared and how you are rewarded with points

The scoring systems do have some value and take away some of your groundwork.  It’s not something to use on its own but it can be one indicator that helps you to build a broader picture.

3. How much sharing happens on their site?

If somebody has a blog and its content gets shared, the level of sharing will help to assess influence.  This can also help you to identify topical influence, because you’ll see the kind of content people are sharing on their blogs.

If you find a blog that gets a lot of shares, then this is a good way of measuring influence.  If they write an article about your product or service then it’s likely to get a lot of shares, too.  If this audience is relevant to your business, then you can potentially get sales out of this sharing.

Social Crawlytics is a useful tool that crawls through a competitor’s website and creates a report based on social shares for all their blog posts.  You can then see a list of these posts and all their shares across each of the social networks.

View a chart showing what is popular. You can also view this in table format

4. What is their domain authority?

This is particularly important if you’re trying to find influential bloggers.   A blogger’s website is assessed by Google, which then decides if it deems the blogger to be influential enough to send it lots of traffic.  You are competing for traffic against other influential blogs, so the higher your domain authority, the more traffic you will get.

Moz are a company that develop inbound marketing and SEO software.  They have a rating system where they rate millions of websites out of 100 and allocate them a domain authority score each.  The higher your domain authority, the more likely you are to be able to compete with your competitors online.

You can check your domain authority using Opensite Explorer.

Check out your domain authority!

If someone approaches you and says they are an influential blogger and you find that their domain authority is 20, this means not many high authority sites are linking to them.

This is similar to the premise of Littlebird: influencers connect with influencers.  As your blog develops, if your influence is growing you will get more links to your site and your authority will go up.

5. How much traffic do they get?

The only 100% accurate way of finding someone’s traffic is getting access to their analytics.  However, there are tools out there that will give you an estimate of a website’s traffic.  And if you use the same tool to compare competitors, you’ll be using the same formulas to estimate their traffic so, although it may not be totally accurate, you should be able to compare sites successfully.

Getting a lot of traffic and having a high domain authority are generally linked.  It’s unusual for a very low domain authority website to get a lot of traffic because it’s hard for it to rank for content on Google.  If it gets a ton of traffic from social media, that’s not going to affect their domain authority.  However,  as people get to know about you through social media they will start linking to you from their websites, which is where the two factors are connected.

If you are looking into a relatively big site, you can use Compete or Quantcast (US focussed) to get an estimate of traffic.  Another tool that is useful for assessing traffic volume isSEMRush.  All these tools give estimates, so are not 100% accurate, but it’s great for comparing competitors to see who gets more traffic and how much more they get (e.g. 5 times as much).

6. How much influence do they have on a topic?

A key influencer may be able to change the direction of an entire industry, which can have huge revenue implications for companies.  But you don’t usually see an immediate revenue impact so it’s very difficult to measure this level of influence.

For example, recently Mark Schaefer wrote an article about a concept called ‘Content Shock’.  It’s about the fact that we’re coming to a stage where there is far too much content for people to consume, so companies will soon find it difficult to get attention.

This was an extremely popular article that was written about hundreds of times on many sites that have large audiences.  This influential post from Mark could affect the decisions of many companies considered their investment in content marketing going forward.

Twtrland categorizes people into 60,000 categories.  You can view somebody’s influence based on each category, so you can filter the most. Having so many categories is great, because it can really help identify the most appropriate people in your niche.

When you search based on category, you can then view people’s amplification, reach and relevance based on that topic.

You can hover your mouse over each person to get an understanding of how influential this person is

7. How much they do in sales!

This is a really interesting measure of influence.

If somebody talks about your products/services, and they then start to sell, that person is influential.  So you need to have some way of measuring this type of influence so you can track it and try to build relationships with the most useful people.  For example:

a). Check where your traffic is coming from, and the conversion rates that result from this traffic.

b). If you’re working directly with an influencer, set up an affiliate program so they can use an affiliate link when they share your content.  With an affiliate code they will get commission on sales, and you’ll be able to track how influential they are too!

c). If they are not comfortable sharing affiliate links, you could provide promotional codes that they can offer to their audience. The redemption of these codes can then be tracked.

Summary

Influence, and the measure of influence, are really hot topics and yet it’s a very difficult thing to measure.  Through a combination of several indicators you can identify and make a list of key influencers.

As you start tracking results, you may add some influencers onto your list and take others off.  There is no magic formula: you start with a good, well-researched list and adapt as you go!

Source : http://bit.ly/1EvzXbq