Lots of entrepreneurs struggle with pricing. How much to charge? It’s clear that the right price can make all the difference—too low and you miss out on profit; too high and you miss out on sales.

Don’t ask, can’t tell: Asking people what they’d pay for and how much rarely works. [Tweet it!]

For one thing, people will tell you what they want to pay—which is obviously much less than what your product or service is actually worth. Second, what people say they would do and what people end up doing are very different things.

When it comes to money, people are unable to predict accurately whether they’d pay or not. It’s much easier to spend hypothetical dollars than real ones.

Also, it’s worth remembering that people really don’t know how much things are worth or what’s a fair price (which is the reason TV shows like “The Price Is Right” can actually exist).

William Poundstone, the author Priceless: The Myth of Fair Value, says:

People tend to be clueless about prices. Contrary to economic theory, we don’t really decide between A and B by consulting our invisible price tags and purchasing the one that yields the higher utility. We make do with guesstimates and a vague recollection of what things are “supposed to” cost.

People are weird and irrational, and there’s much we don’t understand. For example, why do shoppers moving in a counterclockwise direction spend on average $2.00 more at the supermarket?

Why does removing dollar signs from prices (24 instead of $24) increase sales?

What will work for you depends on your industry, product, and customer. When you try to replicate what Valve did to increase their revenue 40x, it might not work for you, but then again, why not give it a try?

Here’s a list of pricing experiments and studies you can get ideas from and test on your own business.

Note: CXL Institute has original research on SaaS pricing pages. Find out how you should order your pricing plans to generate the most revenue, and what happens when you highlight a “recommended” plan.

The Economist and decoy pricing

Dan Ariely describes this famous example in his amazing book Predictably Irrational. He came across the following subscription offer from The Economist, the magazine (he’s also explaining this in his TED talk):

Both the print subscription and print & web subscription cost the same, $125 dollars. Ariely conducted a study with his 100 bright MIT students. In it, 16 chose option A and 84 chose option C. Nobody chose the middle option.

So if nobody chose the middle option, why have it? He removed it, and gave the subscription offer to another 100 MIT students. This is what they chose now:

Most people now chose the first option! So the middle option wasn’t useless, but rather helped people make a choice. People have trouble comparing different options, but if two of the options given are similar (e.g., same price), it becomes much easier.

The same principle was used with travel packages.

When people were offered to choose a trip to Paris (option A) versus a trip to Rome (option B), they had a hard time choosing. Both places were great—it was hard to compare them.

Now they were offered three choices instead of two: trip to Paris with free breakfast (option A), trip to Paris without breakfast (option A-), trip to Rome with free breakfast (option B). Now overwhelming majority chose option A, trip to Paris with free breakfast. The rationale is that it is easier to compare the two options for Paris than it is to compare Paris and Rome.

A graph to describe this:

So if you add a slightly worse option that is similar to A (call it A-), then it’s easy to see that A is better than A-, which is why many people choose that.

How you can use it:  Add a decoy package or plan to your offer page next to the offer you really want them to take.

The magic of number 9

Go to Walmart and you’ll see prices ending with 9 everywhere. Does it really work? Surely all intelligent people understand that $39 and $40 are basically the same.

Well, in eight studies published from 1987 to 2004, charm prices ($49, $79, $1.49, and so on) were reported to boost sales by an average of 24% relative to nearby prices (as per Priceless).

In one of the experiments done by University of Chicago and MIT, a mail order catalog was printed in three different versions. One women’s clothing item tested was sold for $39. In experimental versions of the catalog, the company offered the same item for $34 and $44. Each catalog was sent to an identically sized sample.

There were more sales at the charm price of $39 than at either of the other prices, including the cheaper $34. The $39 price tag had both greater sales volume and greater profit per sale.

People used to download music for free, then Steve Jobs convinced them to pay. How? By charging 99 cents.

The explanation of why numbers ending with 9 work better has been much debated over the years. Mental rounding alone can’t explain it. Seems that 9 truly is a magic number.

Is there anything that can outsell 9? 

Researches found that sale price markers (with the old price mentioned) were more powerful than mere prices ending with the number 9. In the following split test, the left one won:

Number 9 not so magical after all? Not so fast!

Then they split-tested the winner above with a similar tag, but which had $39 instead of $40:

This had the strongest effect of all.

I’m wondering whether the effect of this price tag could be increased by reducing the font size of $39. Say what?

Marketing professors at Clark University and The University of Connecticut found that consumers perceive sale prices to be a better value when the price is written in a small font rather than a large, bold typeface. In our minds, physical magnitude is related to numerical magnitude.

Oh yeah, when you go to Nordstrom, you don’t see any prices ending with a 9. The subliminal message here is “expect to pay.”

Anchoring and the contrast principle

Do this test at home. Pour water in three bowls. Fill one bowl with cold water, the second with hot water, and third one with lukewarm water. Now stick one hand in the cold water and the other one in the (not too) hot water. Keep them there for 30 seconds or so. Now put both of your hands into the lukewarm bowl. One hand will feel the water is warm, the other one that it’s cold.

It’s about the contrast. The same principle applies to price. Nothing is cheap or expensive by itself, but compared to something.

Once you’ve seen a $150 burger on the menu, $50 sounds reasonable for a steak. At Ralph Lauren, that $16,995 bag makes a $98 T-shirt look cheap.

What’s the best way to sell a $2,000 wristwatch? Right next to a $12,000 watch.

This mental process has a name. It’s called anchoring and adjustment.

Anchoring

In the 1970s, two psychologists by the names of Tversky and Kahneman theorized that suggesting an initial figure to a test subject caused that subject to use that number as a starting point for estimating unknown quantities.

In their study test, subjects were told the number 65 and then asked to estimate what percentage of African nations were members of the UN. The average response was 45%. They then tested a second group but salted them with the number 10; their average response was 25%. Amazingly, the group that was primed with the number 65 estimated nearly twice the true answer (23%) while the group primed with the lower number estimated a lower percentage (much more accurately).

Anchoring influences prices

Poundstone describes an experiment done with real estate prices. The researchers invited real estate experts and undergrad students to appraise a home for sale. All the test subjects were given the information a buyer would normally have, including a list of houses that recently sold, nearby houses currently for sale and so on, as well as what the seller had listed the house for.

The subjects were divided into four groups, each given a different listing price, and were then asked to estimate what the home was worth.

These were the results:

Anchoring worked even on real estate pros that had been selling properties in the area for 10+ years. Next time somebody asks you for a rough estimate or a ballpark figure, make sure it’s high!

How you can use it: Start throwing out high numbers. Add some very expensive products to the selection (that you don’t even intend to sell). If the final price of your product (or service) is a result of negotiations, start high. If you’re competing on price, state how much others are charging before revealing your price.

Straightforward pricing

Ash Maurya, a startup entrepreneur, published an article on VentureHacks describing his pricing experiments with a photo sharing service.

He tested a single, straightforward $49/yr offer versus two plans ($49/yr and $24/yr) versus three plans (adding a freemium plan).

The result? Surprisingly, the single price offer won. Why? His own guess:

It does pay to align pricing with your overall positioning. Our unique value proposition is built around being “hassle-free and simple,” and people seemed to expect that in the pricing model as well.

It might also be that in these complex and fast times we live in, people yearn for simplicity.

Note: His freemium plan actually converted 12% more, but had the lowest retention. Be careful when offering free plans. You might just end up with a ton of free users to support and pay for.

How you can use it:  Consider your positioning and see if you can align your pricing to it. If you’re offering different plans right now, experiment with a single plan.

Pay what you wish

Pay what you want is a pricing system where buyers pay any desired amount for a given product, or nothing at all. In some cases, a minimum is set, and/or a suggested price may be indicated as guidance for the buyer. The buyer can also select an amount higher than the standard price.

Suggested price

Suggested price can be a good idea—remember anchoring? Setting a fair suggested price gives the customer a true sense of value. It won’t prevent low offers, but it will keep more buyers in your ballpark.

What about counter-offering lowballs? The danger here would be to appear that you’re just toying with them and it’s not really “pay what you wish.” GetElastic brings this example:

Coming back with counter-offers is merely e-bargaining. It reveals you have a reserve price, and instead of offering a sale, customers must “guess” how low you’ll go. At worst, customers may feel they are being gamed into pay more than a sale price.

Ashampoo Software (that’s not a typo) gets downright insulting when you sink too low below “regular price.” The snarky dialog box reads a condescending “This offer is much too low. Please enter a reasonable price.” Users don’t have time to play guessing games about what is a reasonable offer only to be ridiculed by a script.

Gap tried a variation of this too. They offered customers a one-day opportunity to name their price for certain styles of khaki pants on the www.gapmyprice.com microsite. Lowball offers were returned with slightly higher prices by the Gap, which the customer had one chance to accept or decline.

Since they’re not doing anymore, it probably did not go too well.

Well-known PWYW examples

In October 2007, the British band Radiohead launched their latest album, In Rainbows, on the Internet. The band allowed fans to download the album freely and offer, in retribution, any amount of money they would like. Later they disclosed that the download of their new album generated more profit than the accumulated downloads from all previous albums.

Panera Bread Co. used this same idea when it opened its first pay-what-you-want restaurant in Clayton, MO. The company ended up making over $100,000 in revenue in the first month alone. It opened its 4th restaurant of this kind in Portland, and said at the time that about 20% of the visitors to the cafes leave more than the suggested amount, 20% leave less, and 60% pay what is suggested.

But nine months later, it’s not doing so well. The Portland café is only making about 60% of the revenue of a regular, full-paying location, compared to an 80% take in the politer climes of St. Louis and Detroit. Also, the homeless tend to camp out there and stay all day if they aren’t shooed away, so Panera had to hire a bouncer.

It’s important to have fair minded customers for this model to work (homeless and hungry people probably care more about being fed than being fair).

Combine “pay what you wish” with charity

There’s some research that pay what you wish pricing works best when combined with charity.  Ayelet Gneezy, a marketing professor at the University of California-San Diego, conducted a field experiment at a theme park (sample size: over 113,000).

Customers were presented four different pricing schemes for souvenir photos: a flat fee of $12.95; a flat fee of $12.95 with half going to charity; pay-what-you-wish; and pay-what-you-wish with half going to charity.

At a flat fee of $12.95 per picture, only 0.5% of people purchased a photograph; when customers were told that half the $12.95 purchase price would go to charity, a meager 0.59% purchased a photo. Under the simple pay-what-you-wish variation, 8.39% of people purchased a photo (almost 17 times more than before), but customers paid only $0.92 on average.

The final option—pay what you wish, with half the purchase price going to charity—generated big results: purchase rates of 4.49% and an average purchase price of $5.33, resulting in significant profits for the theme park. This is a substantial result, especially since it came from a real setting.

Of course, the anonymity of the Internet removes the social pressure one feels after being served personally by a human being. It’s one thing to have the amount you choose observed, and another thing to download stuff without being seen.

The book Smart Pricing suggested that successful pay what you want programs are characterized by:

• A product with low marginal cost;
• A fair-minded customer;
• A product that can be sold credibly at a wide range of prices;
• A strong relationship between buyer and seller;
• A very competitive marketplace.

Offering three options

The old truth about offering three pricing options holds water. Here’s a pricing experiment in selling beer, again from W. Poundstone’s amazing book Priceless.

People were offered two kinds of beer: premium beer for $2.50, and bargain beer for $1.80. Around 80% chose the more expensive beer.

Now a third beer was introduced, a super bargain beer for $1.60 in addition to the previous two. Now 80% bought the $1.80 beer, and the rest $2.50 beer. Nobody bought the cheapest option.

Third time around, they removed the $1.60 beer and replaced with a super premium $3.40 beer. Most people chose the $2.50 beer, a small number $1.80 beer and around 10% opted for the most expensive $3.40 beer. Some people will always buy the most expensive option, no matter the price.

You can influence people’s choice by offering different options. Old school sales people also say that offering different price point options will make people choose between your plans, instead of choosing whether to buy your product or not.

How to test it: Try offering three packages, and if there is something you really want to sell, make it the middle option.

Price perceptions

I’m sure you know the classic “pennies-a-day” effect: “it costs less than $1 a day!” NPR stations ask people to donate by joining their dollar-a-day club. Framed in that manner, the donation seems quite reasonable—about the cost of a cup of coffee. Contrast that with what would happen if they asked people to join their “$365 a year” club.

Neil Davidson writes this about price perceptions (in his book on software pricing called Don’t Just Roll the Dice):

People base their perceived values on reference points. If you’re selling a to-do list application, then people will look around and find another to-do list application. If they search the internet and discover that your competitors sell to-do list applications at $100, then this will set their perception of the right price for all to-do list applications.

If your product is more expensive than the common reference points, you need to change the perception of the category you’re in.

How did Starbucks get away with starting to charge $3 and more for coffee, when most other cafes were charging $1 or so? They changed the experience of buying coffee, so the perception of what people were getting changed. It was like a different category product.

They also changed the name. Not just coffee, but Pike’s Place brew or caramel macchiato.

If you’re creating a new category, there’s no price reference, and people are much more likely to accept any price you name.

How you can use it: If you want to charge more than the market average, look at the competition: how they package their offering, what’s the user experience like, and change that. If you look like a new category, people are more likely to pay up.

On the other hand, if you can profitably sell something much cheaper than the other guys, great. Use their pricing as the reference point and you’ll win.

Context sets perception

You are stranded on a beach on a sweltering day. Your friend offers to go for your favorite brand of beer, but asks: “What’s the most you’re ready to pay for the beer?”

This was the scenario for a pricing experiment conducted by Richard Thaler.

They tested two scenarios. In the first one, the friend was going to get beer from the only place nearby, a local run-down grocery store. In the second version, he was going to get beer from the bar of a fancy resort hotel. The ambiance of the hotel was irrelevant, as the beer was to be consumed on the beach.

Invariably, Thaler found, subjects agreed to pay more if they are told that the beer is being purchased from an exclusive hotel rather than from a rundown grocery.

It strikes them as unfair to pay the same. This violates the bedrock principle that one Budweiser is worth the same as another, and it suggests that people care as much about being treated fairly as they do about the actual value of what they’re paying for.

Thaler considered what his imaginary grocer could do to boost beer sales. He advised “investing in seemingly superfluous luxury or installing a bar.” This would raise expectations about what the proper price of beer would be, resulting in more purchases.

We happily pay $80 for 6 things in Whole Foods, but would consider that way too much in a regular supermarket.

How you can use it: Invest in seemingly superfluous luxury. Use web design or packaging that says “expensive.”

Can I split test the price?

Technically, you can, but A/B testing your price is a dangerous territory. A number of companies (Dell, Amazon, and others) have been caught in the past and got in trouble for doing just that, showing different price for the same product to different visitors.

A better and safer approach is to test the price across objects. Don’t test the same product for $19 versus $39. You should test two different products that essentially do the same thing, but just have a different price tag.

Before deciding on your pricing strategy, it’s worthwhile to read Cindy Alvarez’s article where she makes the point that price is not the only cost to consider. When customers consider “what something costs,” they’re actually measuring three main drivers: money (cost), time (how long will it take to learn?), and mental energy (how much do I have to think about this?). Take into account the profile of your buyer.

Combine research from this article

It seems to me that you could combine a lot of the research covered here into a single pricing experiment. How about this:

1. You create three different plans/packages, and intend to sell mainly the middle one. If your product is expensive, make your website look expensive.
2. The first plan is a decoy. It’s similar to the middle plan, but offers visibly less value while costing almost as much. Think of it as A- (as per The Economist example).
3. Second plan, the one you want to sell, offers good value for money. The price ends with 9. Maybe it even shows that it has been reduced from a previously higher price or it’s a sale (either way, it has to be true/ethical).
4. Third plan is to serve as a contrast to the middle one, its role is to anchor in a high figure. Make it much, much more expensive than the middle plan. You don’t actually intend to sell it, but there’s always the type that wants the most expensive plan—so make sure you can actually deliver on it.

If you decide to give this a try, let me know the results :)

Thanks for reading.

The post Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know, But Can Learn From appeared first on CXL.

No hiring process in the world is designed to hire the best and brightest.

• Are you talking to everyone in the world that does that job? That could do that job?
• Are you able to measure directly the marginal value two years from now of hiring Person A versus Person B?
• Are you hiring based on efficiency of time and resources?
• Are you hiring based on total impact to the organization—or just what a potential hire will do with specific tasks?
• How about the fit to the entire organization, not just to the role?

No, you’re talking to who is available, without the ability to measure or know their impact, with only a smile, a suit, a piece of paper, and a few minutes of conversation to figure out things that have a massive long-term impact on your business.

Getting and managing the right people in your organization is vital to all forms of future success. So many organizations say they are who they are because of the people they have and how they hire. They say that their specific process has led to their success, and they would never change it.

The truth is that, while you may have a “process” and current people, you’ve done little to maximize the effectiveness of the process. Would you have been 10X your size or growth rate with different people? Would you be worse off? Most have stories but little else to stand by.

A growth mindset has to be part of every person you bring in. It has to be at the core of how teams are built and how success is measured. We can’t directly measure specific traits. But we can maximize the probability of success. To do that, however, we have to rethink the entire process.

How we hire now—and why it doesn’t work 

How many of the questions above can you directly, correctly measure in your hiring process? The answer for almost all groups is a resounding zero.

Some groups get parts right, yet none really connects the process and filters with the desired outcomes. Most groups just follow a set process because it’s what they’ve seen or what someone else told them to do.

We have a process that demands people tell you what you want to hear and make themselves more charming, not more valuable. We treat hiring as an afterthought or a bother instead of the greatest chance to improve our organization and growth rate.

What does hiring the best really mean? How are companies comparing their options? Are they relying on data or just “feel”? Are they confusing a potential hire’s impact on the business with the Halo effect of one specific trait?

What do you really get if you hire Person A vs. Person B? Is it a 10% difference? A 20% difference? How can you tell? Remember that all their experience simply lays the groundwork for Day 1—it doesn’t guarantee that they’ll be able to identify and tackle the problems for your organization, your use case.

For most people, hiring is nothing more than deciding who they want to date, not romantically but in a sense that they check off basic traits and then decide how much they like that person.

The question, “Do I want to have drinks with this person?” trumps the actual impact and value to the organization in almost every case, resulting in teams picking the best person of the first group they talk to, or, even worse, waiting forever to find the perfect “fit”—even if that’s an undefinable or unmeasurable quality.

Let that sink in. So many groups talk about finding the right people or how selective they are, but so few even understand what they’re doing.

So what makes for a successful hire?

Step one is defining “growth,” not some arbitrary growth “team.” You can never know if you’re successful if you don’t know what you’re trying to achieve.

Growth can be defined as “maximizing the resources and time of every action to create the most positive impact to the bottom line of the business.” In other words, just being able to do something isn’t good enough.

Can they improve what they’re doing? Can they find new opportunities? Can they try new things and consistently improve? Complacency is the death of value, so can they always question and find new ways to make the business work better?

This isn’t some greedy “only business matters” view. This is about the fact that more success for the business means more success for the people in the business—more hires, more new opportunities, more projects, and more impact.

It’s about maximizing the net impact from everyone and not just the localized personal impact (as in some distorted version of the Prisoner’s Dilemma). Under that agreed-on view of what we’re trying to accomplish, let’s see what does and doesn’t matter in terms of hiring.

Does experience matter?

Not as much as you think. Time in a position is not the same as time improving. Time in one industry also means a limit on other ways of tackling problems and assumes that two companies in the same industry need to act the same way. 

Specific tactics learned most likely won’t work, but if a potential hire can understand problems and discover solutions, then they have a better chance of being successful.

We want to maximize future value, so the wider their experience, the more they have been wrong or learned, the more they have challenged commonly held beliefs, and how and why they hold themselves accountable are what increase the chance of future success.

Most importantly, do they know how to scope and prioritize work correctly, or do they repeat the work from a previous job like some robotic parrot?

What about technical skills, like coding languages and portfolios?

Well, how long does it take to learn the differences between one language and another, as opposed to learning and building core systems and solving core problems?

Does a visually impressive portfolio translate to high-impact design? How many designers even understand the marginal gain of each design they’ve created?

Let’s instead look at the multitude of ways in which they can solve a problem. Can they get past what people want or what they think is best and instead pivot to what works best? How interested are they in the total impact? How tied are they to their stories and their portfolio?

These are the questions we need to ask.

How about more qualitative things like positivity and communication?

Well, let’s ignore the fact that all interviews are dog-and-pony shows for which people are on their best behavior, not unlike a first date. You’re seeing the absolute best of them. (Let’s also ignore the fact that positivity ties directly to awful decision-making.)

Let’s instead consider that no part of the process will show you what they send on the 10th hour worked on a Thursday night when under stress and managing five competing priorities. That’s when communication breaks down—not when everyone is on their best behavior with no skin in the game.

Instead, let’s ask if they’ll tell people what they need to hear and not what they want to hear. Do they stand up and disagree when everyone else in the room is just nodding their head? Can they talk to each group on their level? Does what they say add value or just make you feel good?

What about specific skills to the job—doing X analysis, using Y tool, familiarity with Z marketplace?

You don’t know where a new hire will be a few months in—what the marginal gain is not on Day 1 but Day 90. Simple math tells us that anyone who works for us for more than 180 days spends far more time representative of their 90th day then their first. 

With that in mind, let’s look at a few random requirement sections from jobs posted on LinkedIn. I’ve bolded items that tie to things that (1) actually maximize the chance of success and (2) bring the right mindset into your organization.

• 5+ years of Product Design experience (special consideration given to those with expert knowledge on the design of highly converting landing pages)
• Being fun to work with, open-minded, collaborative and creative
• Amazing portfolio, showing examples of cloud-based SaaS interfaces
• Equally strong in UX and UI, able to share detailed examples of your work
• Ability to take ownership over the entire lifecycle of a design project from research, wireframing, and rapid prototyping, to the delivery of final high-fidelity assets
• Experience working with a design system
• Commitment to a fast, self-driven, iterative approach to design
• Ability to spot issues with information architecture and hierarchy
• Experience conducting usability testing to gather feedback
• Ability to work cross-functionally
• Ability to communicate effectively

Or another:

• Strong Work Ethic
• Optimistic Problem Solver
• Team Player – willing to roll-up the sleeves and be a utility infielder as required
• Accountable & Dependable – consistently “Does What They Say They’re Going To Do”
• Resourceful – consistently gets the important things done with limited direction
• Self-motivated
• Strong Attention to Detail
• Trustworthy & Honest
• High Sense of Urgency
• Well Organized
• Quick Learner
• Seeks Team and Company Success Over Self-Promotion

Or yet another:

• Comfort working as a “full-stack” growth analyst to scope projects: ability to write and functionalize code, design and run tests, surface and visualize results, monitor outcomes, and present succinct strategies as a result of analyses
• High proficiency in SQL and working knowledge in at least one scripting/statistical language (R, Python preferred)
• Logical and structured thinking to handle ambiguous questions with ease
• Ability to communicate findings clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
• 1+ years of experience in analytically-driven roles (analytics, consulting, finance, etc.)
• Developer experience in Looker is a strong plus

Of the 29 bullet points listed, only 3 are (sort of) aligned with outcomes. Only one—even though unmeasurable—is fully aligned. If only ~10% of what you say you’re looking for has any tie to outcomes, why are you even hiring the position?

How to hire for growth

Instead of trying to fix a broken system, let’s reinvent it. First, consider the traits we want to learn about:

• Will this person be able to grow in the job?
• Will this person find new and different ways to tackle problems?
• Does this person bring something new to the organization?
• Will this person speak up and challenge the organization when things are going sideways?
• Can this person lead people?
• Will this person get stuff done or make excuses?
• Will this person grow to the point that they can lead a project? A team? An organization?
• Can this person find creative solutions to problems that work within specific constraints?
• Does this person understand efficiency?

None of these traits has anything to do with the specific role. Can I measure all of these? Of course not, but I don’t need to. Instead, I can focus on maximizing my chances of success (individually) and for building the right team.

There are specific skills you may need for a role (e.g., Can they code a page? Can they do basic design work? Can they manage multiple data sources and demands?). These are a minimum bar for evaluation but, outside of that, have almost no impact on the business.

Pretty code or a modern portfolio has little bearing on their impact to the organization. Are you hiring a tactic or are you hiring the ability to adapt and find the best way for your organization’s specific challenges?

Let’s stop focusing on Day 1 traits and instead focus evaluations on the long-term value adds.  Let’s also go back to that original challenge: How do we maximize our chances of hiring the best option while maintaining our ability to get the most out of that hire? Fragility, as usual, gives a great view on finding the best chance of success.

The more specific, high-value traits an applicant brings to the table—the stronger the growth mindset—the greater the chance that they’ll have a meaningful impact on the business.

If they can check off six of the above questions instead of three, they have twice as many ways to impact the organization.

Diverse teams are better teams

The more different a candidate is—the more diverse their skill set, point of view, personality, background—the greater the chance they’ll find something that no one else does.

Compared to the existing team, what do they do differently? Which specific skills are different? Which traits will they add to the entire organization? Team construction is even more important than each individual hire, so make sure that you’re adding to the team—not just going for more of the same. 

This also allows you to look outside a specific job title for the right candidate:

• Hiring an analyst? Does the person need to have been an analyst—or just good at understanding and solving problems?
• Hiring a designer? Does the person need to have three high-profile design jobs, or do they just need to be able to create high-value options that can improve performance?

The role doesn’t matter. What matters is that you can build a team that will do things differently, that can challenge each other, that can solve problems in new ways and challenge long-standing beliefs.

This won’t make managing the team super easy. You’ll have different and strong personalities. But are you maximizing what is easy—or what is best? Are you hiring a drinking buddy or someone to grow your business?  

You get pennies on the dollar by hiring people who don’t think or act differently. It doesn’t matter if it’s the lowest or the highest person in the organization. Ideas can come from anywhere and should be able to defend concepts from anywhere.

You want your developer to think of solutions differently than your product people and your designers and your analysts and your senior leadership. What you really want is a team of different skills and points of view all focused on solving problems, not just doing a series of tasks.

You want people who will shape your organization, maybe not today but sometime in the future—not just people who show up for a paycheck.

Groupthink is the death of good ideas.Maximize the diversity of tone, action, thought, and background.

You can’t hire for a growth mindset if your company lacks it

There will be “conflict” if people have opinions about how to achieve things and different points of view. This is great. Expressing different ideas allows the group to come up with new ways of doing things that draw on multiple strengths.

But make sure that your organization:

1. Keeps conflicts from becoming personal, and
2. Makes people get out of their own little comfort bubble.

We should be challenged (respectfully). We should want to change. People asking questions or representing a different point of view should be expected and encouraged, not avoided for potentially hurting someone’s feelings.

The challenge, of course, is that most organizations—no matter how much they want to grow—don’t really want to change. They want impact but don’t want a new person to step on their toes, to challenge their work. They are focusing, usually subconsciously, on what they’re losing and not what the organization is gaining.

The only way to get a new result is to change what you’re doing, yet we resist change at every step. We go back to what’s comfortable, we avoid risk, and we tell ourselves that—obviously—everything we’re doing is fine. (How else would we have gotten to where we are?)

We go with the person that is most like us, or who seems smart but whom we don’t feel threatened by. We go with experience over future growth. We go with either what is right in front of us and makes us feel comfortable, or we try to find the perfect candidate, not understanding that the marginal gain we could get isn’t the perfect fit but the right fit at the right time.

Conclusion

There are a thousand reasons to hire or not hire everyone we have the chance to bring into our organization. We choose which ones we focus on based on what we value, either consciously or subconsciously.

We tell ourselves this person was a great fit because I liked them, or that they won’t work because they’re too different. Those should be the exact opposite outcomes.

Is the polite applicant with a sharp outfit and impressive resume the best hire? Is the most charming person a sociopath, or is it real—and how would I know in 1 hour? 1 day? 1 week? 

The exact same person can be great to 10 people and the worst case for another, but does that really change what they bring to the table? Are you hiring for the right skills? Are you building a diverse team focused on outcomes and growth?

Or are you hiring based on comfort and familiarity?

The post How to Hire for Growth, Not Skills appeared first on CXL.

“Rare is the business that has a formal disaster plan, let alone one that covers a global Black Swan event.”

Tim Stewart, trsdigital

An article on growth and marketing in the middle of a crisis—the current one or any other—can seem tone deaf. But nothing gets better if we stand still.

Work can be a welcome intellectual distraction. It can also keep your employees employed or help you retain your job—a modicum of security in uncertain times.

We don’t have to go back far to find another period of economic disarray. The financial crisis of the late 2000s reinforced, countered, or updated many lessons gleaned from previous turmoils.

Historically, epidemic-inspired slowdowns have behaved differently (but consistently) compared to other causes. Still, no one knows how this one will play out.

This post surveys what people have done in the past—and what marketing leaders are doing now—to make it through tough times and thrive in the post-crisis era.

What the big studies have shown

In 2002, McKinsey published a study of 1,000 U.S. companies covering the period 1982–99, which included a recession during 1990–91.

The study focused on what happened during the recession that affected performance after the recession. Those who came out on top were classified as “leaders.” As the authors found:

While most companies tightened their belts, successful leaders, trading lower short-term profitability for long-term gain, refocused rather than cut spending [. . .] Yet in expansionary periods, successful leaders spent significantly less on [selling, general, and administrative costs] than did their former peers.

Greater discipline during boom times offered more flexibility during lean years. And getting it right during the lean years, Bain reports, has a massive impact on companies’ growth rate after things improve:

The authors of the Bain study use an auto-racing analogy:

Think of a recession as a sharp curve on an auto racetrack—the best place to pass competitors, but requiring more skill than straightaways. The best drivers apply the brakes just ahead of the curve (they take out excess costs), turn hard toward the apex of the curve (identify the short list of projects that will form the next business model), and accelerate hard out of the curve (spend and hire before markets have rebounded).

A Harvard Business Review (HBR) study of 4,700 public companies looked at the three years before, during, and after recessions. They divided companies’ responses—their “driving” strategies—into four categories:

1. Prevention. A focus on cost cutting—every decision is viewed through a loss-minimization lens. They do more of the same with less, often lowering quality and customer satisfaction.
2. Promotion. A heedless optimism that ignores the gravity of the situation and early warning signs. Companies in this category add features when customers desire greater value.
3. Pragmatic. A haphazard combination of prevention and promotion characteristics. These companies tend to over rely on reducing the number of employees.
4. Progressive. These companies get the prevention-promotion balance right by evaluating every aspect of their business model—making near-term changes that reduce costs now and after demand returns (unlike layoffs).

The HBR study contrasts Office Depot and Staples during the 2000 recession:

Office Depot cut 6% of its workforce, but it couldn’t reduce operating costs significantly. Although the company created an incentive plan to boost sales, its sales growth fell from 19% before the recession to 8% after—five percentage points below Staples’ postrecession sales growth rate.

By contrast, Staples closed down some underperforming facilities but increased its workforce by 10% during the recession, mainly to support the high-end product categories and services it introduced. At the same time, the company contained its operating costs and came out of the recession stronger, bigger, and more profitable than it had been in 1999.

As the authors found, “Firms that cut costs faster and deeper than rivals don’t necessarily flourish. They have the lowest probability—21%—of pulling ahead of the competition when times get better.”

Honeywell CEO Dave Cote also cautions against shortsightedness during economic downturns:

I’ve been a leader during three recessions and I’ve never heard a management team talk about how the choices they make during a downturn will affect performance during a recovery. There will be a recovery and we need to be prepared for it.

Trying to prepare for a recovery in the midst of a crisis may seem like a luxury. Indeed 17% of the businesses from the HBR study didn’t survive the recession period.

Yet as the Bain study concludes, companies that struggled post-recession had often “switched to survival mode, making deep cuts and reacting defensively.” That “survival mode” meant “that they later must spend far more than they saved in order to recover from their prolonged absence from the media landscape.”

“If your first reaction is to cut all costs, all people, all marketing,” cautions Tim Stewart of trsdigital, “you have fewer tools available for your remaining choices.”

So how do you figure out which tools you’ll need?

Frameworks for businesses during a crisis

The studies above argue for a balance of cost cutting and investment. That’s easy to recommend and hard to execute. Each study, however, offers a framework to help with decision making.

Bain offers a rubric based on your current market position and financial strength:

The HBR study builds a three-by-three block based on prevention- and promotion-focused strategies. Their recommendations derive from sales and EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) for the companies in their study:

As the authors conclude, “Progressive companies stay closely connected to customer needs—a powerful filter through which to make investment decisions.”

In other words, user research is more important than ever.

Knowing your customers—and how they may change—is key

“Behaviors and attitudes will change,” says Ben Labay, CXL Agency’s Director of Research. When it comes to identifying what has changed, Labay continues:

I’d think the first stop is analytics—who dropped off, what channels, who remained, etc., but polls and surveys are obvious choices, too.

Don’t use one source of data—triangulate from a mix of data to get a data-driven roadmap on how customers have changed behavior and perceptions, and how to respond and test accordingly.

Ross Simmonds of Foundation Inc. echoes Labay’s sentiment:

Search habits change. Social habits change. Email habits change. Smart marketers will recognize this and be empathetic to the realities of journalists, customers, and their industries. They will adapt the way they write, promote, and conduct outreach.

Customer segmentation is essential, not just to identify where buyers pull back but also to “reveal products primarily purchased by people still willing to pay full price. Use that intelligence to inform product portfolio and investment choices.”

Of course, some segments will be hit harder than others, as Ann Smarty has already experienced with her consultancy:

The only thing is that we have lost two travel clients pretty fast. They both started feeling the impact immediately and paused any marketing activity right away.

To identify risks and opportunities, write John Quelch and Katherine E. Jocz, you may need to change how you segment your audience:

Marketers typically segment according to demographics (“over 40,” say, or “new parent” or “middle income”) or lifestyle (“traditionalist” or “going green”). In a recession such segmentations may be less relevant than a psychological segmentation that takes into consideration consumers’ emotional reactions to the economic environment.

A psychological segmentation divides buyers into four categories:

1. Slam-on-the-brakes. The hardest-hit segment, which may reduce, delay, or eliminate spending. It includes lower-income buyers and high-anxiety buyers of all wealth levels.
2. Pained-but-patient. The segment with near-term anxiety but a positive long-term outlook. This is often the largest segment. Buyers economize across all areas. More bad news may push them into the slam-on-the-brakes segment.
3. Comfortably well-off. The segment that continues buying at almost the same level, with some additional selectivity about purchases. It’s made up mostly of wealthy consumers.
4. Live-for-today. A segment that skews young and urban, with a focus on experiences over stuff. They are generally unconcerned about savings, though they may delay major purchases.

The attitudes of those segments, in turn, affect decisions about different product types:

Where do your consumers fall? There are many ways to find out. Our CRO team uses ResearchXL, which is a comprehensive framework for identifying test ideas, though its methods apply broadly.

If you’re looking for quick answers via surveys or interviews, we have resources for that, too:

Research process

• The Optimizer’s Guide to Conducting User Interviews & Analyzing the Data
• Improving Survey Analysis: 3 Steps to Get More from Customer Feedback
• How to Create Customer Feedback Loops at Scale
• How to Boost Conversions with Voice of Customer Research
• The Advanced Guide to Qualitative Research
• How To Use On-Site Surveys to Increase Conversions
• 6 Ways You’re Messing Up Customer Surveys

Survey design

• Everything You Need To Know About Designing Valuable Customer Surveys
• Survey Design 101: Choosing Survey Response Scales
• A Guide to Open-Ended Questions in Marketing Research
• Good Survey Questions: Master the Art of the Ask
• Leading Questions: Great for Marketing, Terrible for Research

Once you’ve identified key segments, what’s the best way to reach them?

Marketing strategies for new and changing segments

There are options for every segment:

• “Prospects are reasonably good for value-brand essentials sold to slam-on-the-brakes consumers, who will forgo premium brands in favor of lower prices.”
• “Value brands can also effectively reach out to pained-but-patient consumers who previously bought higher-end brands, a strategy Wal-Mart aggressively used with its ‘everyday low prices’ policy in the 2001 recession.”
• “Repair services can market to the pained-but-patient group, who will try to prolong the life of a refrigerator rather than buy a new one.”
• “Premium-brand market leaders [. . .] can introduce a ‘fighter brand,’ a lower-priced version of the premium offering sold under a different name and backed by minimal advertising.”
• “Restaurants and other businesses often configure offerings by using key retail price points proven to resonate with customers, as with the 99-cent burger or the $399 dishwasher.”

Novel pricing strategies beyond the $0.99 something-or-other can help a range of businesses:

• “Results-based pricing, a concept pioneered by consulting firms that links payment to  measurable customer benefits resulting from use of a product or service”;
• “Changes in the pricing basis that would allow a customer to, for example, rent equipment by the hour rather than by the day”;
• “Subscription pricing, by which a customer purchases use of a product—say, a machine tool—rather than the product itself”;
• “Unbundling of a service so that customers pay separately for different elements of what was previously an all-in-one package, as airlines have done with checked baggage and in-flight meals and entertainment.”

Other ideas include:

• Reducing the thresholds for quantity discounts;
• Extending credit to customers;
• Having layaway plans;
• Reducing item or serving sizes, and then pricing them accordingly;
• For service businesses, lowering consumers’ up-front adoption costs and reducing penalty charges.

You can find more ideas here:

• Product Pricing Strategies and Techniques
• Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know, But Can Learn From
• Should I Lower My Prices To Compete?
• Constructing Pricing Strategy For Subscription Products
• Product Bundling Strategy: How to Get It Right

It may be easier to make radical changes—like revamping your pricing model—during a crisis. “Recessions offer opportunities for change,” says Raffaella Sadun. 

Others share her opinion:

When survival is at stake, it is easier to get companywide buy-in for revising marketing strategies and reallocating investments. Managers can defy old mind-sets and creatively search for superior solutions.

No matter what you choose, it will help—now and later—if those choices strengthen your brand.  

Why brand matters more than ever

“There is no better time to be real, authentic, and human as a brand,” writes Dave Gerhardt. He continues:

It’s OK to continue to operate. We need business to boost the economy. But you can do better than slightly editing the copy your lawyers would write.

A 2 minute iPhone video from your CEO would have such a bigger impact than a highly manicured campaign or corporate sounding email.

Laura Blue of LaunchLink PR corroborates Gerhardt’s message:

It is during these times that brands need to be especially considerate about what and how they are communicating to customers, partners and stakeholders. Are they genuinely aiming to help or are they obviously pushing product or another agenda?   

Businesses need to stay true to their brand and their overarching mission during uncertain times—as this is what really counts and what people will remember them by.  

“Your products probably aren’t high on people’s priority lists right now,” says Kristen LaFrance. 

But your community does matter. Your people, too. Authenticity requires imperfection. And right now, there’s no such thing as the perfect move, so don’t try to make it. Aim yourself towards the things that make you proud of yourself, your brand, and your people.

What does a thoughtful campaign look like? Hyundai’s Assurance program, which debuted during the 2007–08 financial crisis, is a great example. They offered car buyers the opportunity to return a purchased or leased car if they lost their income within a year of the sale:

Sky is hitting this balance now as well, affirming their commitment to current customers while subtlety explaining why they won’t turn their service into a free-for-all:

The overlap between marketing and PR increases during crisis times. “For so many companies,” explains Animalz’s Jimmy Daly, “content marketing is their only PR. And it’s more important than ever to communicate to their customers, prospective customers, and the rest of their industry.”

Some marketing strategies for a struggling economy can undermine a brand:

Marketers catering to middle- or upper-income consumers in the pained-but-patient segment may be tempted to move down-market. This could confuse and alienate loyal customers; it could also provoke stiff resistance from competitors.

Marketers that drift away from their established base may attract some new customers in the near term but find themselves in a weaker position when the recession ends. Their best course is to stabilize the brand.

De Beers made such an investment, even though a brand campaign could only soften the decline in sales during the 2007–08 crisis:

Ally faced a different challenge. As the recession wrapped up, they had to remind consumers of lean times. Because their brand challenged existing banking options, CMO Andrea Brimmer explains, they had to “fuel dissatisfaction” because post-recession customers would be “fat and happy again, not remembering what they missed.”

Brand campaigns can be a difficult sell—attribution is harder, and time-to-value may be longer. As Simmonds says:

Many leaders will view brand driven efforts or projects that don’t have a direct impact on the bottom line as expendable.

The questions that clients ask in the coming months are going to be more focused on business results and less on trends and vanity metrics. It’s very fair for clients to start questioning the results of their agencies, teams, and even CMOs. 

Yet, Stewart notes:

Brand campaigns “convert poorly,” but they are not meant to convert. They build trust and confidence, which is what is needed right now. It will reassure those who can’t buy now but will buy again later—and attract more of those who can or need to buy now but are being hard-pitched by everyone else.

So don’t skimp on brand. But what else can you do?

How to use tough times productively

Marketing budgets are always at risk—it’s easier to reduce ad spend than to close a manufacturing facility. But crisis periods afford companies with opportunities, too.

At the end of the day, says Stewart:

Business is about prioritization of resources. Building a method for production that makes this efficient enough for profit. Managing the means of production to fit the circumstances.

The temptation, therefore, is to stop everything, to clear bandwidth for some very real and very pressing crisis management. And, short term, that may be the only option. You can’t take later action if your first step prevents there being a later step.

But it needs to be a brief pause and reposition—not a hard stop. And that pause needs to be as short as possible, so you start on the new plan with as many of the original resources as possible in place.

Here are some things you can do.

1. Learn from forced efficiency

“I built my first startup in Argentina during the economic crisis-turned-revolution in 2001,” writes Frederic Kerrest, “and my co-founder and I started Okta in the depths of the U.S. recession in 2009.”

The added challenges, Kerrest argues, provided long-term benefits. There were obvious ones, like how scarce capital forced frugality. But there were others, too:

In 2010, Okta had only ten customers on board. We spent the entire year focused on their success, iterating and discovering what they needed and how we could best deliver. By 2011, we had 50 customers; today we have over 2,000. Use a down period to nail down the core product features, get your architecture right and make sure your first customers see value in the product.

The vacuum of innovation is the perfect time to bring new ideas to market, since it means that there is significantly less competition in the market for your idea.

Successful product launches, notes Jeff Neff, have often taken place in difficult moments. They were “natural offshoots of the conditions created by or causing the crisis, i.e. high gas prices spawning fuel-efficient cars, interest-bearing checking accounts that sprang from high interest rates in the 1970s and ’80s, or declining gas prices and gas-guzzling SUVs.”

As Rand Fishkin explained, Moz leaned into some of those advantages as it navigated the 2007–08 crisis:

The company’s structure—relatively few employees to revenue ratio, large cash reserves, and relatively frugal spending (until our massive funding round at least) made us a great candidate for survival and growth in rough times.

Competitive pricing ($39/month in 2007), Fishkin continued, and timing also played a role:

Moz succeeded in a recession because it helped people with an emerging form of marketing that spoke to recession-based concerns.

It helped companies save money on expensive ads by investing in high-ROI, but hard to measure and understand content marketing and SEO.

Moz grasped onto a fast-growing industry at just the right time. The reputation of SEO was finally moving away from slimy and manipulative, and Moz both helped to ride that wave and to amplify it.

Some timing is beyond your control, for better or worse. Amazon, for example, raised $672 million in convertible bonds a month before the dot-com bubble burst, giving it ample resources and eliminating competitors.

Even if you’re not so lucky, you may still enjoy less competition—for a while. 

2. Take advantage of less competition, lower costs

If you have the resources, competing may be less expensive during a downturn. As Simmonds notes:

The world is being struck with closures, quarantines, curfews, and work-from-home mandates. This means more people behind a screen, which means more opportunity across distribution channels.

Brands who double down on their investment while others pull back will likely see a lower cost for results, and brands who use this time to add value to their audience rather than sell, sell, sell will build relationships on trust and earn their customers budget/wallet by focusing long term.

Daly agrees:

We are also encouraging people to use this down time to ‘put money in the bank,’ i.e. add to their library, have content ready when things clear up, and maybe do some work on their sites that they otherwise don’t have time to do it, like pruning, refreshing, cleaning up internal links, etc.

Aaron Orendorff of Common Thread Collective offers a caveat:

CPMs have hit lows, harkening back to Facebook and Google’s golden age. The problem is that a low CPM doesn’t mean a high ROAS. Even less does it mean high transaction volume or revenue.

That’s because tough times make for hesitant buyers. For anyone that’s experienced a ROAS decrease by 10% or more over the last seven days, it’s crucial to pinpoint where those drop-offs are occurring.

Orendorff recommends setting up a funnel analysis in reverse to identify the top sales (not just low CPM) opportunities:

1. Cost per acquisition;
2. Cost per unique initiate checkout;
3. Cost per unique add to cart;
4. Cost per click;
5. CPM.

That, says Orendorff, can help companies test communications on key pages and “message the moment”:

Evaluate the effect of banners, header bars, and push notifications that address concerns like shipping and product safety. Look for opportunities within displaced groups like musicians, chefs, and minor-league sports figures (i.e., micro-influencers or content producers).

Consider hosting “show it off” on social events, particularly for products that depend on social non-distancing motivations. Think through options like family-friendly and kid-focused editions for an at-home audience. Or, the opportunity with special packaging and bundling for “care package” gifting.

The winners will be those who can creatively, sensitively, and analytically eliminate barriers while giving tight-fisted window shoppers every reason to say yes.

How you execute campaigns may change, too. Stewart again:

The half-life of learning will become shorter, the audience more volatile, how representative the current sample is to the current and later population less strong. Decisions need to be made on less data, in shorter periods, which is more difficult.

It may mean that the testing platform and team are not running true tests and exacting standards for statistics—they’re using their expertise and the technology to be flexible and reactive to support these low-data decisions, decisions that have to be made.

In normal times, it’s the antithesis of what is supposed to happen. But in times of uncertainty, it provides an option for flexibility and guidance based on current user behavior over guesswork.

Flexibility is essential for decision making and leadership, too.

3. Evaluate your organizational structure

“One [piece of] advice,” Sadun notes, “would be [to] really think carefully about your organizational structure because that’s one way you cope with uncertainty.”

Decentralization, Sadun argues, is key: “What decentralization does is match decisions with expertise.” Companies, she continues, have a tendency to hoard decisions during times of crisis, which limits the ability of an organization to adapt and experiment.

At the leadership level, Ronald Heifetz, Alexander Grashow, and Marty Linsky argue, crisis demands a precarious balance:

Keeping an organization in a productive zone of disequilibrium is a delicate task; in the practice of leadership, you must keep your hand on the thermostat. If the heat is consistently too low, people won’t feel the need to ask uncomfortable questions or make difficult decisions. If it’s consistently too high, the organization risks a meltdown: People are likely to panic and hunker down.

Crisis leadership is, the authors conclude, “an improvisational and experimental art” to “distinguish the essential from the expendable.”

“If you move fast, with less information, there will be mistakes,” admits Stewart. “Accepting that is key. Suspend normal targets and criteria for success. You’re no longer in a growth and acquisition position, so KPIs based on revenue targets, etc., are moot.”

He continues:

Inaction is almost guaranteed to cause greater issues, as by lack of action you are still making a choice, and an inflexible one that will limit choices you can make later, potentially fatally.

Likewise, with action, sticking to a rigid plan made when information was different is also likely to compromise chances for success (or survival).

Bill Sebald of Greenlane Marketing is preparing—as much as one can—for uncertainty:

Today’s situation is not something I’ve seen in my lifetime. It seems impossible to predict what will come next. That makes it quite hard to map out scenarios and contingency plans. So, Greenlane is taking the “business as usual…with some tweaks” approach. We’re also expecting curveballs.

Lessons learned during a current crisis can help companies navigate the next one.

4. Prepare for future downturns

“Do you know what the red flags are in your business?” writes Brian Moran, who shuttered his publishing business following the 2007–09 financial crisis.

That crisis saw a global spending decrease of 9%, with U.S. ad spend going down by 12% and agencies losing between 3 and 30% of revenue.

Moran highlights several ways to preserve flexibility and ask hard questions before the answers are a foregone conclusion:

• “Take time to look over your contracts and agreements. Is there an ‘out’ clause? Can you re-negotiate agreements into annual contracts? Even if it means paying a slightly higher rate or fee, you will appreciate the flexibility if the economy slides into a recession.”
• “Look at every segment of your business and ask a simple question, ‘What if?’ What if a recession hits our business? What if the bank pulls our line of credit? What if our largest customer goes out of business and takes our receivables with them? What if we lose our top salesperson?”

David Rhodes and Daniel Stelter suggest asking similar questions:

What effect would a 20% decline in sales volume and a 5% decline in prices have on your overall financial performance?” You may be surprised to find out that, even in the case of a still-healthy company with operating margins (before interest and taxes) of around 10%, such a decline in volume and prices could turn current profits into huge losses and send cash flow deep into the red.

Anxiety-provoking questions are far more pleasant to answer as hypotheticals.

Conclusion

“Crash diets don’t work,” says Stewart. “Trim some fat by working out more, don’t cut back on protein or energy to fuel the growth of tougher and leaner machinery. In other words, in times of crisis, smart companies use data and optimize more than ever, not less.”

You’re looking for the right balance of cost cuts and investment, of organizational flexibility and stability. Knowing your customers better than ever helps. Knowing that this crisis, too, shall pass does as well. And clinging steadfast to your brand is non-negotiable.

“Stress and economic uncertainties have already led a few clients to ask for a pause while they regroup,” says Sebald.

Of course, we’ll honor that—that’s what good partnerships are about. Even during that time, we will be available to everyone. For the sake of businesses everywhere, I hope this wraps up soon. But, the truth is we’re all in this together, and should be there for each other. The world isn’t actually stopping.

The post Marketing and Growth Lessons for Uncertain Times appeared first on CXL.

If you’re an active podcast listener, you likely use popular podcast platforms (i.e. “podcatchers”) like iTunes, Soundcloud, and Google Podcasts to download or stream one of more than 1 million podcasts available today.

This article is a podcast roadmap to get you from passive listener to active host. I’m sharing my learnings as a five-year podcast co-host and agency owner who has helped develop podcast strategies for clients. 

Podcasting is affordable, relatively easy to produce, and provides access to an engaged listener base. According to Edison Research, 80% of users listen to most of each episode, averaging 7 per week, while 69% of listeners agree that podcast ads make them aware of new products or services.

Brands have jumped on the podcasting bandwagon. Slack, GE, Shopify, Basecamp, and Sephora all have large, active followings.

Podcasts’ popularity means opportunity—and competition. If you don’t have a thoughtful strategy and process, it’s easy to waste time and effort. Let’s get started. 

Podcasting as a marketing channel

Podcasting technology dates to the early 2000s. The first shows were created in late 2003, and the term itself was coined in 2004 by combining “iPod” with “broadcasting.”

Later that year, former MTV VJ Adam Curry adopted the phrase, and it became popular when he launched his own podcast, Daily Source Code.

Validation for the medium, however, occurred when Apple provided support on its iTunes platform. The rest is history. 

While global brands have seen success with podcasting, it’s easy to attribute that success to funding and momentum. Not every brand has the budget or a large audience of potential podcasters ready to listen.

But podcasting does have a lower cost and barrier to entry than video (at least quality video production). You can have guests on your show without requiring their physical presence, which saves money and is a useful workaround for times like these.

Podcasting can drive traffic to a website, which, in turn, can generate leads or sales. Some marketers may also benefit by refining speaking and interviewing skills in a lower-risk environment than on a stage.

My personal interest in podcasting, however, is how it dovetails beautifully with voice search. Consumers can now listen to podcasts via simple voice commands and pause to ask Google, Siri, or other digital assistants questions inspired by the podcasts.

Those questions provide brands an opportunity to be the “best answer”—connecting casual listening behavior to, potentially, company or product research.

Start with a business objective

I’m a strong believer in not jumping into a technology, channel, or media format just because everyone else is doing it. As with any marketing effort, a podcasting program should start with a foundational alignment to marketing or business objectives.

Podcasting, by design, is ideal for generating awareness and building thought-leadership in your industry. While it can generate more tangible results, other channels are usually more effective.

Once objectives are identified and prioritized, your podcasting plan should outline strategies and tactics, which include format, frequency, duration, host/s, point of view, guests, research, syndication, and marketing.

We dive deeper into each topic below.

Upfront costs: The hardware and software you need to start a podcast

Unlike professional-quality video, the start-up costs for podcasting are quite affordable. The key hardware components include:

• Condenser microphone;
• Mic stand;
• Headphones;
• Sound mixer;
• Hosting;
• A place to record, which should include acoustic panels or fabric to isolate sound.

While it’s technically possible to start podcasting with a smartphone for free, investing in the proper hardware and software is highly recommended. A bare-bones DIY setup with an affordable mic, stand, mixer, headphones, and acoustic panels for a sound box starts around $75.

A mid-range setup, including condenser mic, stand, upgraded mixer, acoustic panels (for a makeshift recording room) and Adobe Audition CC software will run $150 and up.

For a professional-grade setup, including a dedicated studio, you should expect to spend $750 (not including talent, studio rent, or acoustic paneling). 

Hosting options for your podcast

Beyond hardware, the most essential tech component is finding a quality hosting solution. Hosting fees range from free to $99/month, but the most common starting point will run about $20/month for reasonably robust management and reporting.

We often recommend Libsyn to our clients. Libsyn pricing starts at $5/month for up to 50MB (about 50 minutes of show time), but I recommend the $20/month package for advanced reporting, which is essential for anyone interested in generating revenue from advertising or sponsorships.

Other platforms have similar pricing and features. Take some time to comparison shop.

Most hosting sites charge based on monthly usage, but some are based on lifetime data allowances. Podcast hosting sites allow you to upload podcasts directly, including descriptions and thumbnails.

From there, podcatchers (i.e. podcast directories) pick up and syndicate your podcasts for free via RSS feeds. Popular podcatchers include, but are not limited to:

• iTunes;
• Stitcher Radio;
• Spotify;
• Google Play Music;
• Podcast Addict;
• CastBox;
• Pocket Casts;
• DoggCatcher Podcast Player;
• Podcast Go;
• TuneIn Radio.

Podcast production

Regardless of content format (audio, video, text, or print), branding is essential. The podcast creative and voice should be authentic and consistent with your brand.

Your podcast content and format should be unique. Show descriptions should be intuitive but also keyword-loaded.

Consistency maximizes credibility. Commit to a season at a time, not one show at a time. Lastly, design matters. Create a compelling show logo and episode thumbnail design with consistent yet unique show titles. 

Thumbnail images or logos should be 1400×1400 pixels for iTunes and podcatchers. Specifications are available online, and 99Designs does a good job with its podcast cover design guide. 

Selecting a podcast host

Unless you can afford to hire Joe Rogan or Dr. Phil, it’s unlikely that you’ll make the list of the most popular podcasts right out of the gate.

The next-best thing is to find a known influencer or expert within your industry to host your podcast—if you can work out a deal that makes sense.

Short of that, use professional voice talent that has a soothing yet modulating tone. Most commonly, however, show hosts are passionate or knowledgeable about a given topic and thus work for free or at low cost as a hobby. This can still be true in a company, particularly with experienced or enthusiastic staff.

While previous experience is helpful, it’s not required, though hosting takes practice. To balance “on air” experience with industry knowledge, consider co-hosts.

For DadsUnplugged, the podcast I co-hosted, I was the “foil” to my co-host, who drove a Prius, meditated, and tried every modern parenting tactic available. Our personalities balanced each other well, and it more than doubled the “perspective” brought to the show.

Podcast format, frequency, and duration

Content is only as good as the format in which it’s delivered. Make sure you’ve created a structure that works for the host(s), guests, marketing, and the production team.

Based on your overall objective, host talent, and resources, you’ll need to finalize show format, frequency, and duration.

Format. One of the biggest questions is whether you’ll have guests. Well-known guests can help with marketing exposure, and interviews tend to fill air time easily. Drawbacks include up-front coordination and the increased likelihood of connectivity or tech issues.

Additional formats include creating segments (news vs. commentary) and live audiences. (While less common, live audiences can increase the energy of the show and attract higher profile guests.) Try out a few different formats in the first season (6–12 shows) and refine based on fit and feedback.

For best results, start with a storyboard or outline. This provides an opportunity to talk through the most important elements of the show, including segment timing and transitions.

Consider mapping out the show with minute marks, like the professionals. If needed, create a script for your hosts and questions for your guests (ideally provided in advance).

Segment the show if it’s longer than 10 minutes.  The standard late-night TV talk-show format can be a guide:

1. Introduction/monologue;
2. Feature segment;
3. Guest interview.

Make sure you have a strong open and close that includes calls to action like subscribing, sharing a link to your website, thanking sponsors, or reminding interested parties to advertise on your podcast (if relevant).

Frequency. The most common podcast format is weekly, but some shows are daily; others are monthly.

Duration. The most common duration ranges from 10 to 22 minutes, but daily podcasts may run 1–5 minutes. Monthly shows may run 60–90 minutes.

Post-production tips

Don’t forget the small elements that provide polish, like introductions or transition music (check out Serial for inspiration).

From a big-picture perspective, podcasting provides an opportunity to repurpose content. Whether it starts as video or audio, it can be turned into images, text, and other forms.

There are other benefits to thinking long term, even if your podcast doesn’t make it to a second season. Consider, for example, archiving your podcasts for free via YouTube.

Beyond saving monthly hosting fees for old podcast episodes, YouTube offers an opportunity to reach a global audience. (It’s the third largest search engine behind Google search and Google Images.) Include a compelling thumbnail as a visual element to support your podcast audio on YouTube.

Bonus content is king of the podcast world, so consider recording your podcasts with a digital camera (DSLR) or camcorder from Day 1. You’ll have native video and images ready for YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest, and other platforms.

Even without video, you can easily create bonus content by including additional audio (that may not have made the final cut) as well as an accompanying blog post, article, or even print collateral (resource lists, checklists, etc.) to support the show. 

Podcast distribution

Creating a compelling podcast is only half the battle—you still need to find listeners. One of the most effective methods is to optimize and syndicate your podcast to podcatchers.

To support distribution, the show title should be unique, memorable, relevant, and, of course, keyword optimized. Next up is the show description. Make it detailed yet intriguing (and, again, keyword infused).

One element podcasters typically don’t spend much time thinking about is the show category. The trick is to balance topical accuracy with maximum visibility.

For example, my old show covered a variety of topics about parenting and fatherhood, and each show was posted under multiple categories based on the theme (e.g., comedy, education, health & fitness, kids & family, sports, etc.).

Most podcasts pick a category and stick with it, but flexible show formats may consider unique categories for each podcast.

Podcast promotion

Google, like humans, prefers context with its content. Transcribing your shows is affordable, easy, and—with minimal effort—can be formatted into a long-form article or summary blog post.

Syndicate the blog or episode summary page via social media in addition to syndicating a link to a podcatcher or host site.

When syndicating each episode on social media, use hashtags, especially for Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Beyond industry-specific language, consider podcast-specific terms like #podcast, #podcasting, #podcastguest, or #instapodcast.

• For visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, use behind-the-scenes images or video as teasers for upcoming (and archived) episodes.
• For YouTube, create playlists that arrange relevant episodes sequentially.
• Boost posts on platforms like Facebook and consider testing a targeted ad campaign to grow your subscriber base via Google Ads.
• For business-related podcasts, post teasers and episodes to LinkedIn, as well as supporting them with targeted advertising. 
• Explore a pay-per-conversion affiliate program for referring site traffic that results in listeners, especially if you’re trying to generate revenue from your podcast.

Advertising can grow your listenership quickly and influence visibility on podcatchers. Generating significant listens in the first 24–48 hours can help earn a spot on iTunes’ New & Noteworthy section, for example.

Many podcasters forget marketing fundamentals when promoting podcasts:

• Remind listeners to support you with calls to action.
• Incorporate a link to your latest podcast or episode page in your email signature. 
• Promote episodes in your newsletter and on your homepage, and create a dedicated section on your website.
• Provide pre-made promos to guests and partners to maximize reach.

A more advanced strategy is to identify and engage “super listeners” (evangelists) with special incentives to promote your show. You may also want to explore cross-promotional opportunities with other podcasters/shows. 

Monetizing a podcast

If you want your podcast to generate revenue—not just be a marketing expense—you have a few options, depending on objectives, audience, competition, format, and talent.

Advertising and sponsorship revenue can cover costs, if not create a livable wage. Corporate marketers should be able to pull from the existing budget to cover start-up hard costs ranging from $150–1,500 (if not push for a full studio rental or even build-out).

A smart way to finance a podcast, or even a career, is to secure sponsors or advertisers. This can be tricky, however, without an existing podcast and listeners to sell against. Consider investing in the start-up costs and hosting a half-dozen foundational shows before reaching out for investment.

• Sponsorships are typically customized and based on personal relationships, so they’re easier to secure earlier in the development of a show.
• Advertising is typically managed by a network like Midroll or AdvertiseCast, which means you’ll need listener data (sometimes 10,000 listeners minimum) to get picked up by a network.

Don’t want to start a podcast? You can still take advantage of their marketing potential

One of the lowest-cost alternatives to hosting a podcast, while still generating awareness via audio channels, is to secure guest spots on industry podcasts.

It’s one of three ways to get some of the same benefits without the investment:

1. Be a podcast guest. I’ve been both a one-time guest on higher profile podcasts like the NutraCast Podcast and a regular (monthly) guest on Mr. Social Entrepreneur.

Benefits of guest appearances on podcasts include low time commitment, little-to-no cost, plus getting to reach a larger existing audience.

2. Sponsor podcasts. The second alternative to hosting your own podcast is to sponsor existing industry podcasts. Podcast sponsorship rates vary, as you might expect. According to AdvertiseCast, average sponsorship rates are $18 CPM for a 30-second ad and $25 CPM for a 60-second ad.

3. Partner with others. A third option is to create a strategic partnership with knowledge, technology, or resource experts within your community or industry.

For example, C’est What? is run by a futurist, professional speaker, and author who asked us for help marketing his podcast, Craving the Future. We connected him with a professional voice recording studio for his second season, resulting in exponentially higher quality for the finished product. 

Another example is closer to home. I don’t have a background in radio or broadcast, despite my experience as a co-host. I also have no first-hand experience with editing or producing podcasts. As a result, my agency partnered with Milepost Media to create Podcast for Closers. 

My second round as a podcast co-host has been more informative and productive, as both agencies co-sponsor the podcast series and benefit from the exposure. 

Conclusion

While this article is comprehensive, podcasting shouldn’t appear daunting.

Creating a podcast—like every other content marketing effort—requires some investment of time and money to do it right, but it’s far more affordable and approachable than video.

With self-distancing, remote working, and quarantines top-of-mind, audio branding is as relevant as ever.

The post Podcast Strategy: A Roadmap for Businesses appeared first on CXL.

Expecting a laundry list of skills or tactics? Don’t.

“Tactics are a dime a dozen,” says GrowthTribe’s David Arnoux, “and what works for me won’t work for you. In the end, it’s all about having a growth engine and running as many (quality) experiments as possible.”

We asked Arnoux and other growth experts what actually works, what matters most, and why so many fall short.

Four things came up over and over again.

1. Results, expected and exponential

This could be the whole post:

If your growth program—no matter how well staffed, no matter the velocity of experimentation, no matter the quality of ideas—isn’t making money, it’s failing.

Not all results are the same, either. “A ‘good’ growth team improves funnels for one-time bumps,” argues Lars Lofgren, CEO of QuickSprout. “A ‘great’ growth team focuses on levers for exponential growth.”

No one cares about a team or individuals’ “experience” with platforms or channels. The only thing that matters is translating that knowledge into more money. Anything else isn’t mastery—it’s academic.

The wins that go beyond one-time bumps require exceptional knowledge—but only as a starting point.

Executing on core tasks is table stakes for the company-changing work, as Laura Borghesi, Senior Director of Growth Marketing at MongoDB, details:

If every team member has strong business acumen, is a self-starter who acts like the “business owner” of their area, has top-notch execution skills, and helps others execute on their projects, too, I know that the planned things will get done.

Then, we can spend time pushing our thinking toward bold new ideas. That’s the biggest difference between teams that are “okay” versus teams that become the first movers.

Mailchimp’s Willie Tran agrees. Hockey-stick growth requires being ahead of, not in line with, conventional wisdom: 

The most impactful ideas won’t be found in “best practices.” Instead, ideas should be rooted from first-principles thinking.

You should be asking yourself, “Why would this work?” but answer the question in non-technical terms or with a real-life parallel.

Getting great—not just good—results already assumes that your team is executing on the most important tasks at high speeds. That’s not easy. 

“The hardest thing about running a growth team,” confirms Dan Layfield of Codecademy, “is picking exactly what to work on.”

2. Executing on the right tasks—fast

“The more you experiment, the more you can learn,” says Tran.

“Seventy percent of your experiments will be losses. This number is less daunting when you have a high experimentation output.”

Few are hitting that goal, according to Arnoux:

A team that doesn’t have the right capabilities will need to outsource those capabilities, which means handovers, which hinders the time it takes to run an experiment.

Can a team build their own assets? Manage their own copywriting? Crunch their own data? Run their own campaigns? Build their own feature list? Design their own onboarding flow? Create their own financial models—or even manage their stakeholders?

Assuming you are moving fast, it’s easy to get tempted by quick but short-lived wins.

“Great growth teams spend all their time on user-driven growth—invite flows, sharing, etc.,” explains Lofgren. “Good growth teams spend a lot of time optimizing a standard sign-up funnel. But picking the business model and building a product for user-driven growth is very difficult to do intentionally.”

That uncertainty doesn’t justify randomness, as Privy’s Dave Gerhardt cautions.

Merely “good” teams “do crazy experiments just because ‘that’s what growth teams do’ versus focusing on delivering real, clear business results.”

The ability to pick the right experiments, of course, depends on the range of options your team’s skills and experience can support.

3. Breadth of knowledge, depth of experience

“Potential hires don’t have a 10-year experience that confirms they’ll be great,” concedes Borghesi.

“So, the hardest part is to spot the potential and place a bet. Is the potential hire showing the grit, the flexibility, and resilience that tells you they’ll be able to figure it out along the way?”

At a hard-skill level, it requires T-shaped people. “T-shaped teams,” explains Arnoux, “possess a broad range of skills and knowledge while also being experts in a few specialized fields. T-shaped teams just move faster and smarter.”

T-shaped, at its core, is a commitment to ongoing growth. The T is to show you what to do next, not to congratulate you on what you’ve done.

Great growth people, affirms Gerhardt, have a curiosity that leads them to ask “who else has done this, who are role models, which patterns can we copy, etc.”

“The best marketing teams in the world today,” Joanna Lord told the audience at The Inbounder, “have T-shaped, domain-agnostic talent.”

“This is raising the bar,” Lord continued:

You’re asking every marketer on your team to have deep knowledge across the full funnel—deeply versed in analytics, well-versed in content, well-versed in landing page design, all of it.

The solution isn’t just to learn a platform or channel. It’s a willingness to ask hard questions about how you and your data fit into the rest of the organization. Answering those questions requires you to learn new skills—indefinitely. 

“You can become the best web analyst,” explained Simo Ahava, “but that’s really insignificant when you consider that analytics today is cross-disciplinary. You have financial analytics, you have business analytics, you have behavioral analytics, offline analytics.”

“I can put most of my marketers, any of them, interchangeably into any room,” Lord said, “and they can represent the entire team.” What’s the value of that? “Redundancy,” Lord explained, “helps you run faster than your competitors.”

Which new skills should you prioritize? It varies by company, says Arnoux:

It depends on the industry, the maturity of the product, the regulatory framework, the culture of the organization (including branding, compliance, legal), the business model, the metric they’re focusing on, the length of the sales cycles, and the resources available.

In other words, growth marketing tactics constitute only a fraction of the requisite knowledge.

4. A vision for the big picture

“The company context and the external context (the world) are shifting at a rapid pace,” says Arnoux. That reality is currently in sharp focus. “What the team learned or implemented three months ago,” Arnoux continues, “might not be relevant today. It’s exciting and terrifying at the same time.”

Paddle’s Ed Fry has a ready example. He touts “fully integrated event-based, intent-driven, account-based marketing” as his company’s most successful strategy in 2019.

“Any time one of our target accounts shows a buying signal,” he explains, “we’re able to react and engage them.”

And yet, change comes rapidly. “With the coronavirus outbreak,” says Fry, “the match rates for reverse IP lookup are declining. This makes it harder to engage target accounts digitally.”

The solution? They’re “doubling down on brand and content.” That shift would be impossible without speed, flexibility, and deep knowledge and experience across growth channels. It would also be impossible without organizational buy-in.

One of the hardest parts of growth, Layfield acknowledges, is “getting the organizational alignment for resources and a clear roadmap.”

Gerhardt agrees that a primary challenge is “finding out where growth fits inside of the company (product, marketing, engineering) and getting executive buy-in.”

That’s if it’s a fit at all, according to Lofgen: “The best thing a good growth team can do is move to a business or product that has the right conditions for exponential growth through optimization.”

He recalls an epic battle over a homepage redesign that, while crushing key metrics, struggled to gain support:

Multiple executives hated this page. I had to defend it regularly to keep it live. After I left, the homepage immediately changed to something more generic.

Now that I have more experience, I get it. When things aren’t going well, folks reach for easy scapegoats. An aggressive homepage makes for an easy scapegoat.

Remember this: Anything can be rationalized away. If a test or strategy goes against the instincts of the core people at the company, it will get nixed sooner or later.

A methodical program built on data and testing won’t spare you from the internal conflicts that happen at every company. Getting buy-in, building political capital, and wielding power internally are still essential for any growth program. Data isn’t a shortcut.

Arnoux has seen the same thing again and again:

I have so many examples of great teams designing a perfect experiment based on customer feedback, with realistic minimal success criteria, and data-driven assumptions that just simply could not run their experiment because they couldn’t get their hands on a credit card or were blocked from using certain off-the-shelf tools.

Capabilities plus context are everything.

Conclusion

Despite the changing, complex growth landscape, some things may always work:

• Arnoux: “Good content marketing, understanding the customer, and reducing friction as much as possible. Also, good branding will always be harder to measure but remain powerful and such a competitive advantage. Oh, and email marketing, that seems to keep surviving the test of time.”
• Borghesi: “Experimentation and high-quality content.”
• Gerhardt: “Copywriting.”
• Layfield: “Understanding your users, their problems, and trying to ship things to help them.”
• Lofgren: “Obsessing over a single channel and evolving with that channel. Tactics come and go; channels rarely change.”

It’s a long list, equal parts daunting and inspiring. The best teams are working simultaneously on multiple components, with the skills and buy-in to try (and fail) often.

Average, even “good” teams work more narrowly—and ploddingly—within their rigid skill sets.

You can guess who’s getting results.

The post What the Best Growth Teams Get Right appeared first on CXL.

You know that feeling in the pit of your stomach when you get a calendar invite for an all-hands meeting—with no warning or context? I got one of those in 2018, mere months after I started at data.world as their first growth marketing and demand generation hire.

My initial role was to grow the user base for our free, open-data catalog. But I soon found out our real challenge was monetization. We had built the world’s largest open-data community but—like so many startups—didn’t have a clear product-market fit. 

In that unannounced meeting, Brett Hurt, our CEO and co-founder, laid it out for us. To have the future we wanted, we needed to shift away from monetizing our open-data community and toward enterprise sales.

It wasn’t quite a flip from B2C to B2B, but it was close. Instead of getting people to sign up for a free account, I now needed to help six to 10 decision makers at big companies learn why they needed us and evaluate our data catalog.

To do that, we built a demand funnel that took us from nothing to 44X revenue growth in a single year. Here are the three lessons we learned along the way.

Lesson 1: Choose the right demand generation funnel.

A confession: I hadn’t actually done demand generation before getting my job at data.world. While they knew that—and that might seem weird—I did start my career as a sales development representative (SDR) selling demand generation SaaS products.

Having worked with demand gen marketers for years, I knew that building data.world’s first demand funnel was my chance to emulate the best of those folks. They always measured their performance against a demand funnel, so I would, too.

You might think a Google Images search would return a good representation of a demand funnel for you to steal borrow. But every diagram is biased towards the creator’s perspective.

With so many options, which one should you pick? Here’s the process of elimination I went through. 

The SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall (2006)

The first one I looked at was the SiriusDecisions Demand Waterfall. I remember my demand-gen friends raving about the insights they learned from SiriusDecisions (now Forrester), so I thought I would start with their demand funnel. 

Upon closer inspection, this older version seemed one-dimensional. It aligned perfectly to an inbound marketing model in which a marketing team sourced inquiries from prospects, qualified them, and passed them to sales to close or disqualify.

But such a simple funnel works only if you have a lot of inbound interest and a sales team focused on fielding inquiries. If you’re doing outbound, this version of the funnel doesn’t account for that.

Since we had a sales development team of our own, we needed to factor in their efforts, too.

SiriusDecisions Rearchitected Demand Waterfall (2012)

This is the model my customers referenced when I was selling them demand-gen software in 2014. At first glance, it might seem complex, but the complexity has a purpose.

Notice how the top of the funnel is split between inbound and outbound efforts. That difference cascades down the funnel, allowing you to track the ROI of your lead sources between inbound and outbound campaigns—all the way through to revenue. 

Ultimately, this is the one we chose to implement because it was just the right amount of complexity for our stage of maturity. Before we agreed on that decision, we looked at a couple of other options. 

Honorable mention: The DemandGen Framework

I also liked the DemandGen Framework because it considered customer expansion revenue in addition to the acquisition side, which is covered by the SiriusDecisions models.

If you’re in SaaS, expansion revenue is critical to success and, according to Profitwell, can separate you from your competition. But since we were still a young startup, we deferred customer expansion tracking. 

Honorable mention: SiriusDecisions Demand Unit Waterfall (2017)

We seriously considered using the most up-to-date SiriusDecisions waterfall, the Demand Unit Waterfall. I loved that it took the Rearchitected Waterfall to the next level while simplifying it—demand capture is the focus, not lead sources.

This model lends itself well to account-based marketing efforts that coordinate marketing and sales to identify and convert demand within large companies. Since we were just starting out—only beginning to test ABM—we wanted something simpler. 

Takeaways on demand funnel selection

Choose the model that aligns best with your business:

• How complex is your marketing and sales operation?
• Do you have dedicated inbound and/or outbound efforts?
• Do you do account-based marketing?
• How long is your sales process?

Each model has pros and cons. 

For more information on the SiriusDecisions frameworks, I recommend you read about them straight from the source. Also, Intelligent Demand has a great post that explains the nuanced differences between each of the SiriusDecisions waterfalls in a quickly digestible way.

Our next step was to adapt the funnel to fit our marketing automation platform and sales processes.

Lesson 2: Make your funnel airtight.

Most B2B enterprise demand funnels, like the ones reviewed earlier, have metrics like Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs), and deals or opportunities created from those.

Most importantly, the stages they map out are sequential, with specific criteria for passing from one to the next. In a perfect (and simplified) world, a lead starts at the top (MQL, in our case) and works their way to the bottom (closed-won opportunity). 

With that in mind, it’s critical to understand the recommended funnel stage definitions and handoff criteria between stages before you set up your marketing automation platform (e.g., Hubspot, Marketo, Pardot, etc.).

The combination of the model you choose and the tool you use entails different levels of effort to implement. It helps to have a strong marketing operations or sales ops person help you figure this out if you’re not well-versed.

Getting help from an agency that specializes in this work is also a great move. 

Align with your sales team’s view of deal creation

Once you have a firm grasp of your chosen demand funnel’s definitions for each stage and progression criteria, make sure those definitions align with your business’s view of how deals are created.

If the sales team already works marketing leads, ask them which leads are better than others (i.e. take more meetings) and when they consider a deal created. It’ll be easy to tell how close the definitions are when they tell you how they’re really engaging your leads. 

If they happen to be the same—great! Your definitions and measurements don’t have to change, and you can begin implementation. If not, you have some work to do. If you don’t align your funnel’s definitions with those of your sales team, your work will be in vain. 

I’ll go over some actionable tips that helped me align my team and our sales team’s understanding of the demand funnel. But first, a quick example of what you’re aiming for. 

data.world’s demand funnel definitions and progression criteria

Here are our stage definitions:

• Lead. A new email is created in HubSpot.
• MQL. A lead performs enough activity to reach a lead score of at least 19 (e.g., by downloading guides, using the open parts of our product, requesting a demo).
• SQL. An MQL is deemed worthy of a response from our sales team, and an SDR begins pursuing the SQL.
• Opportunity. An SDR books an initial meeting with the prospect and creates a new deal in HubSpot to begin tracking the sales process. 
• Customer. The deal is handed off from the SDR to an account executive, who eventually closes the deal. 

Feel free to borrow steal these. But I can’t stress enough that your stage definitions and hand-off criteria must reflect your actual sales process as it is today—not an aspirational state—so you can measure conversion rates between the stages and know where to focus when your funnel, inevitably, springs a leak. 

For example, if you have a 50% conversion rate from MQL to SQL, that’s not bad (depending on your volume). But if you have only a 5% conversion rate from MQL to SQL, something might be up. The only way to know is if those definitions and hand-off criteria are airtight, so that you can measure a baseline and begin optimizing it. 

Now, on to creating the coveted sales-marketing alignment!

Lesson 3: Get your sales team’s buy in.

Again, this shouldn’t be news. But if you and your sales team can’t agree on a shared view of your demand funnel’s staging and progression criteria, you’re at an impasse. You must find a way around.

Otherwise, sales and marketing folks will begin pointing fingers at each other when goals are missed. You won’t have a clear way to tie marketing efforts to real pipeline and revenue creation, and sales won’t be interested in helping you because you’re not helping them close more business. 

The good news is that doing this work pays off big time:

• 56% of aligned organizations met their revenue goals, and 19% beat their goals. Among misaligned organizations, by comparison, just 37% met their revenue goals, and just 7% beat them. (Source)
• Among survey respondents with a formally agreed-upon sales/marketing definition of what constitutes a qualified lead, 29.8% claim a lead conversion rate (to opportunities) of over 75%. Only 18.2% of firms lacking an agreed-upon definition boasted conversion rates at that level. (Source)
• Aligned organizations achieve up to 19% faster revenue growth—and 15% higher profitability than other companies. (Source)

What you’re working toward is a written document of your definitions and staging criteria, and an agreement between marketing and sales teams on their responsibilities within the demand funnel.

Go into as much detail as possible. Some might call this a Service Level Agreement (SLA) between your teams. That’s not a bad idea. The most important thing is that your teams agree to what’s written on the piece of paper. That makes it real to you and the rest of the company.

Here’s what we did to get our sales team’s buy-in.

Put yourself in their shoes. Think, “What’s in it for them?”

Some people think salespeople are greedy. While some might be, most are pragmatic. They understand their job is to make money for the company. And the more deals they close, the more money they make for the company (and the bigger their commission checks).

There’s certainly more nuance to it, but you can’t go wrong by approaching your sales team with a way for them to get more leads or help deals close faster. 

One thing that was helpful: framing my arguments in ways that helped them minimize losses and maximize gains. For example:

• For heads of sales (e.g., VPs, Chief Revenue Officers): “Here’s how I think we can help your team spend more time on deals that are more likely to close and quickly disqualify ones that don’t. The SDR team wants to qualify deals and pass along ones that meet their qualification criteria. If we create deals only after SDRs have had a chance to qualify them, those deals will be more likely to close and a better use of your account executives’ time.”
• For salespeople (e.g., account executives): “Don’t waste your time on bad opportunities. If SDRs are sending over better-qualified deals and disqualifying weaker ones, you’ll spend more time on deals that are likely to close and waste less time with unqualified prospects.”
• For sales development (e.g., MDRs, SDRs, ISRs): “Let’s work together to make sure the leads you work from marketing are likely to move forward to a discovery call and result in more deals.”

Remember, your goal is building consensus with the sales team that this demand funnel represents their world of converting leads into deals. There should be some give and take between informed opinions from marketing and sales.

Sales opinions carry weight because they’re the ones talking to customers and prospects all day and are responsible for the company’s future. So, hear them out, let them know you really listened, and think critically about how their suggestions might improve or detract from your funnel. Then get your agreement down on paper.

Building alignment between your sales team, executives, marketing team, and instrumenting your tools could take a while. With healthy debate and skin in the game from all sides, it took us about six months to launch our finalized demand funnel—all while working as best we could without a firmly defined one. 

Conclusion

After you’ve…

• Researched the different demand funnels;
• Selected the one that fits your sales cycle;
• Adapted the demand funnel’s stage definitions and hand-off criteria to your company’s maturity and sales cycle length;
• Won the sales team’s agreement; and
• Instrumented your marketing automation platform to track your leads within the funnel…

…you’re off to begin running campaigns.

If you’re a regular reader of CXL, you won’t be surprised to hear that you need to optimize your funnel to stay competitive. But they’re not the only ones warning against complacency: 

• Profitwell says overall Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is up nearly 50% over the past five years for B2B and B2C companies.
• SiriusDecisions says buyers encounter 32% more marketing campaigns now than they did just two years ago.
• IDC shows B2B businesses have to produce 50% more leads now to generate the same amount of revenue they earned two years ago.

The bottom line is that it’s getting harder than ever to do demand generation (even without the current crisis). There’s no time to rest—the world’s best funnel can still get better. 

The post How to Create a Demand Funnel (for 44X Revenue) appeared first on CXL.

There are only a few things I love as much as link building. 

Owning a new pair of high-end shoes has to be one of those. Damn, I’ll admit—I even have a tradition of treating myself with a beautiful new pair after a successful business trip or client acquisition. 

As a result, my closet is full of shoes that I’ve bought and worn only once. Above, you can see one of my fav pairs of those red-soled shoes (you got the brand, right?) that I took for a walk only once—but they’re so beautiful!

High-fashion, much like link building, is driven by trends. What was fashionable yesterday is old news today.

Take this email pitch I received recently. This person asked us to add a barely relevant link to our blog’s category page:

Sometime, somewhere, they read that they were following “best practices.” But they’re wasting their time. 

I’ve been in the B2B link-building game for almost five years, and the true value of link building isn’t quick fixes. It’s investing in long-term, scalable strategies that help you acquire high-quality links.

We’ve tested every tactic. Below are my tried-and-true strategies, including the pros and cons of each. If you’ve seen some of them before, it’s because they worked then—and still work now.

1. Guest blogging

Let’s start with an obvious one. Even if you never did it on your own, you probably know someone who wrote a piece or two for someone else’s blog.

Guest blogging entails searching for industry blogs that accept guest contributions, pitching a list of topics, writing content, sending it back to the editor, and finally getting your post live.

This all might look like an easy, stress-free way of acquiring links, but let me use one of the phrases SEOs like the most: ”It depends!”

Why? There are several factors: 

• Who’s sending the pitch? Is it a well-known author with tons of previously published guest posts? If the answer is “yes,” then the chances that it’s going to be accepted are good. But most of us—myself included—aren’t guest blogging superstars.
• Are you capable of delivering (or paying for) really good copy? The second most common reason why your pitch might be rejected is the quality of your copy. If you plan to outsource your writing, be prepared to spend $300 to $1,000 per 2,000 words of copy. B2B copywriting almost always requires more skill and time compared to B2C.
• Have you built a relationship with the editor? In most cases, an established relationship with an editor is a fast track to publication. 

Every situation is unique, but the variables listed above are the most common. If you decide to use a guest blogging strategy, here are some other things to keep in mind. 

Pros of guest blogging

Guest blogging is great! We’ve been using guest blogging to build quite a number of links back to our own site. 

Plus, I often guest blog to showcase my knowledge and share interesting findings with fellow link builders. Being featured on sites like Search Engine Journal (SEJ), Moz, Entrepreneur, and HubSpot is solid social proof.

A more practical value of acquiring links through guest posts is that you control the anchors and pages on which you get links. There’s also a chance for referral traffic and leads.

For instance, my post on Moz about the economics of link building, which included our link-building rates to help readers compare costs, brought me a number of inquiries. Still, those leads weren’t really turning into clients, which leads us to some disadvantages.

Cons of guest blogging

Guest blogging can be an expensive strategy—especially if you’re not a professional writer. You need well-written content, or you’ll end up being associated with lame guest posts, which won’t help you build a brand (or links).

Whether you plan to write the copy internally or hire an experienced B2B copywriter, the cost per 2,000-word post can surpass $500, even if you’re doing the bulk of the work yourself.

Normally, I need a few days to complete an in-depth guest post. After that, I send it to a copywriter who also needs a few days to polish it. It’s a process that can include a lot of back-and-forth.  

Also, keep in mind that well-known blogs won’t allow you to link back to blatantly commercial pages, as those links are “promotional” (i.e. don’t provide value).  In some situations, like with SEJ blog, I couldn’t even link back to my own (informational) content. 

2. Linkable assets

While commercial content is almost always frowned upon, certain types of content are naturally good at acquiring links—“linkable assets.” A linkable asset is a piece of content created specifically to attract links from other relevant sites. 

Quizzes, surveys, calculators, interactive videos, and games are all examples of linkable assets.  For example, SPD Load has a separate landing page with interactive resources, such as different calculators and guides, that people in their target audience might find useful and naturally link to. 

You don’t need to hire a developer to design your own calculator or quiz; there are plenty of tools, like SurveyAnyplace and LeadQuizzes, that let you create quizzes or surveys from scratch or customize ready-made templates.

If you have the budget, you could go with something more complex. Unique, engaging content usually means more links. Growth Design does an amazing job at this. They’ve taken case studies to the next level with their interactive comic book format.

Another great example of linkable assets are pages that aggregate industry stats, like this one. They’re easy to link to when you’re looking for data to back up your claims. The downside is that they’re simply a collection of stats that don’t really bring as much value as the initial source.

Personally, I’m a big fan of in-depth content—definitive guides and insightful research. This content can help you build tons of links, if done right.

Brian Dean’s blog, Backlinko, is a perfect example. He publishes only quality, in-depth content, which is why his graph of referring domains keeps growing:

Even if you’re not as famous as Brian Dean, investing in detailed guides and how-to’s definitely pays off. Last December, my good friends created this guide, which has already earned more than 40 referring domains:

Another hack to cut costs for industry studies? Give a new spin to already-published ones. For example, Reputation Management took a study produced by Forrester Consulting and updated it with new numbers and findings. 

Pros of linkable assets

Other than having a great piece of content that looks good on your website or blog, linkable assets carry other benefits:

• High-quality content can help you establish authority in your niche. Original research positions you as a credible and linkworthy source. If it’s something truly unique, you can even pitch it to journalists (more on that later).
• Linkable assets keep users on your site longer, increasing engagement and your chance to earn links, shares, and leads.

Cons of linkable assets

Creating linkable assets can be quite expensive, especially if it requires professional design and development.  Even if resources aren’t a barrier and you’ve created a great piece of content, content—no matter how good—doesn’t build links on its own. 

To illustrate, let’s take the Moz blog. It has hundreds of in-depth posts, but only about 25%—out of more than 1,400—have earned at least 100 referring domains:

Indeed, only two posts have earned more than 1,000 links. One thousand links is a huge number, but 99.9% of posts—on one of the industry’s best-known blogs—don’t reach that level.  

3. Content for round-ups and listicles

The above strategies are based on the following logic:

• You create something link-worthy.
• You pitch it to other sites.

This strategy requires a different approach. First, do pre-outreach. Pre-outreach helps you learn exactly what target blogs want to include in their content round-ups.

Create content only after you know what to create. Nothing’s worse than winning zero links with a piece of content you created solely for that purpose.

If you have no idea how to find blogs that publish posts like “XX resources to learn Topic A” or “Weekly Digest of XYZ,” take one of the following approaches:

1. Use advanced search operators to find sites publishing such content. Here’s a good post on the Ahrefs blog that should help you.
2. Look at your competitors’ backlink profiles by searching for specific terms in page titles. In the example below, I searched for “news roundup” in titles of referring pages:

Once you have a list of sites that feature content round-ups, it’s time to connect with their editors. The best way to do so is usually through LinkedIn. (I’ve found people are much more responsive there versus email.)

Before connecting with them, promote one of their recent posts on your social media accounts. (Don’t forget to tag them!) For maximum visibility, tag other companies that were featured in their post. 

Here’s a good tweet by Mark Scully that sheds some light on why outreach must be genuine:

While getting these links may seem like low-hanging fruit, keep an eye on the cost per link. There’s no point spending hours to build a few mediocre links.

Pros of round-ups and listicles

For one, there’s always a chance that the sites you’re reaching out to are also actively building links. You could end up building a relationship, not just a link, which could yield more opportunities.

Also, you may not have to create anything mind-blowing to get included in the round-up. Because “medium quality” content doesn’t require a ton of time and resources, you could play the quantity card here and try to secure more links in less time.

The pre-outreach strategy increases the chances of securing links.

Cons of round-ups and listicles

Easily acquired links are easy to acquire for a reason. Sites that are publishing round-ups and listicles probably aren’t the very best sites in your niche. 

Additionally, as the pages you’re building links to have mediocre content, most probably won’t rank well on Google. This is especially true in highly competitive niches.

4. HARO

HARO (Help a Reporter Out) connects bloggers and journalists with expert sources. HARO is a great workaround for businesses that want to be featured in media outlets but aren’t in a position to launch a proper digital PR campaign.

(Confession: I don’t give digital PR too much credit when it comes to link building. The cost per link can go through the roof, and traditional PR campaigns are able to get links only to specific pages, often your homepage.)

Once you set up your HARO account (it’s very straightforward), you can subscribe to journalist queries relevant to your business:

After this, you receive a daily list of topics with a brief summary of the info journalists and blog editors are looking for. To give you some context, here’s a recent HARO email:

If you click on any topic, you’ll see a more detailed overview that includes a short summary, contact name and email, niche, media outlet, deadline, and query description:

At first, you’ll be excited to get these daily emails, and you’ll work hard to get featured everywhere. After a week or so, you’ll realize that you’re spending days and nights sending insightful answers into the void. 

It won’t be long before you realize that you should use your limited resources wisely. To get the most from HARO, evaluate opportunities by:

• Quality of the site where you get featured (e.g., domain rating, monthly traffic, etc.).
• How long it takes to provide an answer.

My good friend Taru Bhargava from Genbook shared are a few tips to increase your chances of getting your HARO answer considered:

1. Submit before the deadline.
2. Make your answer succinct and actionable.
3. Show domain expertise by quoting personal experiences, backed with data.
4. Add a two-liner that lets the Editor/reviewer know who you are—a short bio or social media links to help them assess your authority quickly.
5. Connect with them on LinkedIn and follow up (but don’t harass).

Select only those topics that are really relevant to your experience. For any given answer, you’re likely competing with true experts; editors will pick only the best of the best.

Pros of HARO

For businesses just starting out, HARO might be one of the best sources of links. You get link-building opportunities delivered straight to your inbox. All you need to do is send in a few paragraphs (a lot less than an in-depth blog post). 

You don’t need to do link prospecting, pre-outreach, and other standard link-building tasks. HARO also connects you with sites that are regularly looking for and featuring experts (giving you credibility), as well as media outlets that you couldn’t get into with traditional outreach tactics.

Cons of HARO

HARO can be time-consuming and comes with no success guarantees. Even when you get a link, most point to your homepage, which is okay if you’re just starting out but less valuable if you already have thousands of links.

Those links may not justify the amount of time it takes to write up a good answer. Even then, your answer might get rejected or the site may not link back to you (or offer only no-follow links). 

5. Images 

Other than making your web pages look swell, images have a role in acquiring new links as well.

Simply following well-known practices, however, probably won’t result in many links. The goal, then, is to put a new spin on the strategies below: 

1. Find your images across the web and ask the website editors to add linked credits. This strategy is especially handy for niches that produce unique visual assets on a daily basis. It’s no secret that some sites use others’ images without adding a source.
   
   A Google image search or tool such as TinEye can easily find a list of sites that include uncited images on their pages.

Once you identify such pages, reach out and ask webmasters to add a link back to your page. 

2. Create infographics and images to improve the linkability of your content. While most link-building experts claim that infographics should be classified as a linkable asset, I see it as an image link-building strategy.
   
   An infographic can also help you turn a pretty generic piece of content into a good source for links. For instance, here’s a post comparing PPC vs. SEO for startup marketing. While the topic itself isn’t super exciting, the infographics turn it into a great post:

3. Create images/infographics to exchange for links. Images and infographics can also be used as a link-exchange currency. Some websites will give you a link in exchange for an image that you designed specifically for them.
   
   Myriad sites use ugly stock photos. Offer blog editors improved, original images in exchange for a link back to your site.  Even if you’re on a shoe-string budget, you can use tools like Canva or Visme to create beautiful visuals without design skills.

An easy way to persuade blog owners that they should care about images: Check their social media preview snippets on major platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

This is probably something they care about, and it doesn’t take tons of time for you to deliver a set of good-looking images to support their social media distribution. On Facebook, you can use the Batch Invalidator to check a list of pages:

NewMam Studios has had images they’ve created for clients picked up by prominent outlets like Forbes and Popular Mechanics.

Pros of images

Most people are visual learners, which encourages website owners to make their pages as visually appealing as possible. More visual content means better image link-building opportunities, too.

If people use your visual content without linking back to you, then it’s a quick way of building links. People are sensitive about copyright infringement and, in most cases, will just agree to link back to you.

That’s a stronger motivation compared to, say, convincing a blog editor to add a link to your content in an existing article.

Cons of images

Some niches just don’t rely much on visual content, which reduces your opportunities for image link building.

If you’re not a professional designer yourself, producing images also requires some additional resources. To do it at scale, you probably need to hire someone full-time to create those visuals. 

Another harsh truth: Links from images are not as valuable as contextual links. You need to balance acquiring links from images with those embedded in text content.

6. Unlinked brand mentions

Some sites will mention your brand because they like it—they might not think about links. You need to find and convert those unlinked brand mentions. 

Some editors leave brand mentions unlinked on purpose, so don’t be surprised if such people ignore your emails. To make the most out of this strategy, follow this step-by-step plan:

1. Uncover your company’s brand mentions with tools like Google Alerts, Mention, Brand24, and so on. The only downside of literally any brand mention tracker is that only a few of them show historical data. (The rest collect data once you set up your campaign.)
   
   One solutions that does provide historical mentions is BrandMentions:

2. Once you have a list of pages mentioning your brand, send an email asking to update the brand mention with a link back to your site. Write to the author of the post rather than the website owner.
   
   Exclude guest posts from this list—those authors won’t have access to past posts. Also, start the conversation on LinkedIn, then switch to email. Another workaround is to share the post on your social media platform and tag the author. 

If you have tons of unlinked brand mentions, it makes sense to use a tool like Pitchbox. Upload all the uncovered URLs with brand mentions to filter out spammy sites or those with a low Domain Rating:

Pitchbox automatically searches for email addresses associated with a particular site:

It also allows you to see how well your link-building campaign is moving through stages and helps you track your daily efficiency:

Pros of unlinked brand mentions

A brand mention means that someone already loves what you do. To drive additional benefits, you have to convince them to add a link to that text.

In most cases, your link-building request seems legit. I mean, if they’ve already mentioned you, the chances are high that you actually deserve a link. You don’t need to prepare any special piece of content, either—only a good pitch.

Equally important, you’re building relationships with industry peers who are already familiar with your brand and, as a result, might be interested in working with you on other projects.

Cons of unlinked brand mentions

You need a brand worth mentioning. Unknown brands won’t have many mentions, linked or unlinked. 

You’ll also have to hope that you’re able to contact B2B marketers who understand why links matter, and you may be asked to provide something in return. (As Sujan Patel, co-founder of Right Inbox notes, making any interaction mutually beneficial increases success rates.)

Once again, your link-building target is usually limited to the homepage.

7. Broken link building

This strategy identifies sites that link to inactive (i.e. broken) pages, reaching out to those sites, and suggesting that they link to your content on the same topic. 

This strategy requires really well-written content—no one wants to link to mediocre stuff. Plus, it’s not easy to scale identification of broken pages that still have a lot of links pointing to them.

There’s no point creating solid content to get only a link or two. Remember, only a subset of the potential links will pan out, so a broken page with 100 links may net only 5 for you. 

To speed up the process, check industry blogs for broken links in Ahrefs:

Among SEJ broken links, I found this URL with more than 100 quality referring domains:

Once you’ve found a target page, it’s time to see what kind of content it used to contain. With the help of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, you can easily get an earlier snapshot of the page:

Now, go and write a quality, related piece of content to pitch to sites that link to this 404 page. The most time-consuming and difficult-to-predict step is pitching the process itself. Check out this post, which sheds some light on how to structure your email outreach campaign.

Pros of broken link building

When it comes to broken link building, it depends on the type of opportunity you discover. With a little luck, you could dig into a gold mine of link-building opportunities. 

One advantage is that you’re usually building links on established, well-written pages. Moreover, analyzing other sites’ broken pages might help you uncover new ways to build links and scale your strategy. 

Also, you kill two birds with one stone—creating in-depth content and building links back to it.

Cons of broken link building

Ideally, you’d be able to insert existing content in place of the broken link you found. But if that’s not the case, and you need to create a new high-quality piece of content specifically for this purpose (and then scale the process). That requires a solid investment.

Also, sites that link to broken pages aren’t always willing to link back to your site. This is especially true if a broken page is located on a well-known site and your brand doesn’t ring a bell.

8. Relationship-based link building

Each of the seven tactics above are just that—tactics. When it comes to long-term strategy, you need to think about relationship-based link building. This is the always-on, ever-improving part of your link-building work. It may not start a program or meet near-term needs, but it should anchor your efforts.

So what is it? If you’re really into link building, you’ve most probably noticed that it takes a gigantic number of hours to establish a relationship with a new site. And if the process of building one link is so time-consuming, you need to maximize the efficiency by:

• Connecting with sites that are also actively building links.
• Getting more than one link from a site (e.g., guest posting regularly, connecting with partner sites).

Start by joining industry groups where people are looking to promote their content. A popular one is the B2B bloggers boost group.

Unlike closed LinkedIn communities, Facebook allows you to see a list of group members. The next step is to connect with them on LinkedIn by sending a message like this:

Review your current circles that include partners, clients, and even leads. (I detail this strategy in my email outreach guide.) Those people are much more responsive—they’re familiar with your brand and might already be building links on their own.

You can also scrape SERPs for keywords that have decent competition and volume. Many of the sites that appear in those SERPs are actively building links. For example, if you look through pages that rank for “content strategy,” notice that some pages have a lots of links but not a high domain rating:

That’s definitely a signal that those sites are in the phase of acquiring links. However, to ensure that they’re building links right now, check their growth of referring domains.

If you see a graph like this, then they’re obviously working hard to acquire links:

(At the same time, check that they’re getting those links from quality sites—high “link velocity” from bad websites is a telltale sign of spammy link building.) 

For this strategy to work, you need to find a way to link back to those sites—that’s what they’re looking for. I don’t like any strategy that involves a direct link exchange, which goes against Google’s recommendations.

A better way is to use guest blogging to return links to partners’ pages on a number of sites.

Pros of relationship-based link building

Building relationships alone is well worth your time and effort. Building links while doing so is an added benefit. 

You don’t need to produce tons of content to build up to 100 links per month. You simply need 10–20 partners writing guest posts on industry sites.

Your partners can then connect you with their partners, potential clients, etc. This way, you’re expanding your circles and building a solid community around your brand. This results in more links from relevant, quality sites on well-written posts.

Cons of relationship-based link building

Building relationships isn’t easy. It requires skills. You can’t fake it (though many try).

Another potential deal breaker is that you need to return links to your partners. This means that you need to contribute to other blogs or get them links through other partners. 

Lastly, it’s not scalable beyond your niche. We still struggle to build links in niches beyond our circle of relationships.

Conclusion

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution. Sometimes, you won’t know what really works for you without spending hours on getting through a how-to stage. You’ll likely settle on a combination of strategies. 

Following well-known link building strategies—without giving them a new spin—won’t bring you thousands of high-quality links. Literally any marketing strategy that can be found on Google is unlikely to drive you past the competition. 

A few final tips:

1. Track all acquired links. Sites have a tendency to turn them into no-follow links or even remove them completely. We use Pitchbox, but you could give less expensive solutions, like the SE Ranking Backlink monitor tool or Linkody, a try.
2. If a site looks suspicious, check the top traffic-generating keywords and newly acquired links. I use a combination of Ahrefs and SEMrush. In Ahrefs, I review the newly acquired links; in SEMrush, I look through pages and keywords that bring traffic to the website.
3. Don’t build links for the sake of links. Build links for the sake of future growth. You don’t need links from sites that aren’t investing in their online visibility. At the end of the day, those links will turn into dead weight. 
4. Don’t follow strategies that could backfire. Don’t write shitty guest posts that you would never show a potential client/partner. Write less but with a strategic focus to grow your backlink profile and brand.
5. Search for your own ways of getting things done. The more creative you are, the better results you’ll get. Some companies are sitting on an enormous number of untapped link-building opportunities. Which unrealized opportunities does your site have?

Unlike my shoes, which go out of style after only a few months (that’s just my excuse to buy new ones, but shhh!), I’ve been using these B2B link-building strategies for years.

I can vouch for one thing—they’re not going out of style any time soon.

The post 8 B2B Link-Building Strategies That Never Go Out of Style appeared first on CXL.

Legendary Harvard Business School professor Michael Porter defines competition in business as the struggle to attain a profitable, unique position in the market. Instead of “competing to be the best,” you should “compete to be unique.”

Differentiation strategy is about standing out from the noise and giving people a reason to choose you over others. You’d think companies would be all about that.

Curiously, not so much. In fact, it’s the opposite—the world has a massive sameness problem. Sameness is the default for most companies today.

Let me tell you why that is, and how you can differentiate.

What’s sameness?

Sameness is the combined effect of companies being too similar in their offers, poorly differentiated in their branding, and indistinct in their communication.

The language they use is vanilla, the product/service they offer like any other, and the marketing message is identical to that of their competition.

If you visit websites of competing companies, you’ll find that most offer no meaningful differentiation. They say pretty much the same things. 

Most state their value proposition as if they were the only company doing what they’re doing. Like this one here: 

Why sameness is so pervasive

1. You can’t compete on features (for long).

Can your differentiation be features? 

A lot of companies seem to think that. They’re working on incremental improvements instead of differentiation. “We have feature X that they don’t.” 

The problem is, any feature that’s meaningful and popular gets copied. You can toot your horn for a few months, but they’ll catch up. As soon as Snapchat Stories caught on, Facebook copied it. 

Even if you have some really innovative stuff, you might have a two-year runway. The differentiation has to come from places other than features. They’ll always catch up.

Tesla has all the long-range electric cars now, but every single car maker will get there soon enough. Tesla needs to remain a constant innovator to play that game. Maybe they can pull it off—with a lot of money and excellent execution—but most can’t. 

The result? Commoditization

If you look at any mature category, you’ll find it full of products that are basically the same.

Take A/B testing tools. Or heat map (mouse tracking) tools. Or session replay tools. Or email marketing tools. They all have similar features, with minor differences. It’s increasingly hard to say how one tool is different or better than others. 

People ask me all the time: “How is this A/B testing tool different from that one?” I usually say, “They’re pretty much all the same.” I’m a category connoisseur in this case. I can explain some key differences if you really want me to, but “they’re all pretty much the same” is 98% accurate.  

Commoditization is increasing in every category. Once novel features are now table stakes. 

Almost all smartphones have great screens. It wasn’t always like that, but you can’t really compete on display screens anymore. Maybe you could compete on battery life, but if you make a better battery, you can ride that wave only so long. They will catch up.

A long time ago, toothpaste manufacturers competed on only a few dimensions, like “freshens breath” and “fights cavities.” Today, consumers expect even generic toothpastes to remove plaque, prevent gum disease, and whiten teeth.

What used to be novel is now table stakes. 

2. Markets are getting only more saturated.

Never before have we had so many brands out there. The barrier of entry to starting new businesses has never been lower. 

There’s the old guard and new upstarts—”challenger brands.” What do challenger brands believe is their biggest threat? Market saturation.

Scott Brinker maintains the marketing technology landscape project. In eight years, it has grown more than 4,500%. There are more than 8,000 martech tools out there. 

You want your me-too tool to be picked by someone? Odds are heavily against you. What stands out, gets picked. 

3. Over time, competitors become more similar.

The more competition, the stronger the commitment to differentiation should be. 

But mostly the opposite is true. 

Constant comparison and benchmarking leads to conformity, and competitors become less differentiated over time.

As the number of products within a category multiplies, the differences among competitors get increasingly trivial, almost to the point of ridiculousness.

If you want to see sameness in action, just look at hotels. Almost every single hotel gives you shampoo, lotion, and some other toiletries (shower cap?!) for free, but no toothpaste or toothbrush.

How did that come to be? Because they all copy each other. 

Most everything I’ve done I’ve copied from someone else.

Sam Walton, founder of Walmart

Hotels clean your room, change sheets every day. Why is this the default—at almost every single hotel? Why isn’t “choice” the default?

Because you become like your competitors over time. 

You could say that people expect free shampoo, and you might be right. But meeting expectations is table stakes. You need to match it and go far beyond to avoid the sameness trap, or have a completely different take on it. 

You can see the same in software. Your competitor has feature X, you need feature X. You build Y, they build Y.

If 10 startups launched tomorrow tackling the exact same space—but they couldn’t see what others were doing—what would happen? I bet we’d see some wildly different companies. 

Sadly, companies focus too much on the competition and not enough on original thinking on how best to serve the user. 

One of the hardest things to do is be original. 

If you only read what everyone else is reading, you will likely think just what everyone else is thinking.

Haruki Murakami

Copying is easy. Being original is hard. It’s just much easier to be a copycat. 

Making something that people already know they want seems like a smart idea and easy to do, which is why so many go for it. 

What they’re often missing in the process is thinking about second-order effects—that they’ll end up with something just like the other stuff out there. 

This is why most brand messaging is nearly identical. Instead of doing the hard work of gathering insight from customers and discovering open positions in the market, companies look at their competitors for direction. 

Original thought is hard, so marketers use messaging they’ve seen before. Often, they go for the obvious—stuff like “easy-to-use” email marketing. Or, in some cases, they don’t even bother to make it clear who it’s for. 

Sure people want it, in principle. But if you go to market with this message, you’ll go nowhere.  

Being original means doing the hard work of thinking for yourself.

Real differentiation is hard 

It’s not enough to be just a little bit different. The differentiation needs to be big enough to tilt the decision in your favor. 

Adding words like “robust” to your email marketing software description won’t do much.

You need to be really different. And that involves risk, change, and venturing into the unknown. 

Why should someone buy from you?

The easiest way to think about differentiation is to think about giving people a reason to choose you over others. That’s what a unique value proposition (or unique selling proposition, USP) should do, right?

USPs originate from the 1940s and were created for TV ads. Back then, it was easy to have a unique proposition since there weren’t that many products around. Making one-of-a-kind claims was easy. Things have changed dramatically since then.

Before the quality revolution, buying shitty products was actually a thing—lamps, TVs, and radios didn’t work or broke within weeks. This is unimaginable today. Ninety-nine percent of products—even from no-name brands—just work. We assume a certain level of quality. 

Former key arguments like “cheaper,” “faster,” “stronger,” “longer-lasting,” etc., are now table stakes. We expect things to be long-lasting, support to be fast, and service to be courteous. 

And if you’re going to go for a superlative—the fastest, easiest, etc.—people just won’t believe you. Extraordinary claims need extraordinary proof. 

If you’re using table-stakes arguments to sell your product or pitching it like you’re the only game in town, you need to rethink differentiation.

Differentiating with price is not sustainable.

You can start with lower pricing as your competitive advantage and differentiation, but without a structural advantage, it’s not sustainable. If you make price the main reason to choose you, you’re playing a fool’s game—anyone can mark down a price. Somebody can and will be cheaper.

Odds are, you’ll eventually need to move upmarket as you need margins to fuel your growth and hire better people. 

Walmart and Southwest have used pricing as differentiation, but they have the structural advantage to do so sustainably. Cutting prices is insanity if the competition can go as low as you can.

Small, subtle differences are not enough.

Some people are new to your category of products. Others are experts—folks who know this category intimately. Most are in the novice category. 

Where a category connoisseur sees differences, a novice sees similarities. A connoisseur also knows to look for them—a novice lacks the necessary experience and filters to find or assess those minor differences.

That means that being just a little bit different is not good enough (at least not when you’re trying to increase awareness and gain market share).

It’s scary to be different.

It’s tempting to be a safe and boring company. To do safe and boring marketing, post safe and boring stuff. It’s inoffensive and, thus, beyond criticism. 

You don’t stand out but also won’t get hit. Nobody will call you out. You’re just like everyone else. 

The problem is, of course, that nobody will care, either. If you’re an old, established company with deep pockets, you can get away with it. If you’re an upstart looking to grow, it won’t serve you. 

Sure, some people prefer to buy from boring companies, but they already have one and aren’t looking for you.

You need radical differentiation.

When it comes to differentiation, companies don’t have an issue with being different. It’s the radically different part that’s hard.

Radically different is not a safe choice. Most deem it too risky. It’s hard to predict how it’ll play out.

Consumer research won’t tell you much about it since people in interviews prefer options that they already know and have seen. They want better and slightly improved. Innovative stuff does poorly in focus groups and user surveys. 

Coming out with something new is an area where you need to rely on imagination and guts. Pay attention to the “jobs to be done,” the end goals of the user. Don’t look at the competition when it comes to how to deliver it—or you get more sameness.

When differentiation doesn’t matter

Byron Sharp and the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute have criticized differentiation, arguing that its role in the B2C setting is less important. 

Some research shows that consumers can’t really see a difference among brands—they don’t even see different categories.

For example, consumers usually rate competitor companies A, B, and C similarly on attributes such as trustworthiness and efficiency, and their rapport or relevance.

Not only that, but the attributes consumers associate with particular brands tend to overlap with other brands. Ford is just as different and unique as Toyota or Mitsubishi.

Instead of differentiation, Sharp and his colleagues advocate distinctiveness, which is about increasing the visibility and recognition of a brand in its competitive environment. 

Differentiation matters much less if you have a big market share. 

If you’re already an established, well-known brand in a mature category, differentiation is less of an issue.

Nike vs. Adidas vs. New Balance. It’s all brand differences. Only category connoisseurs could highlight some functional differences between the shoes. 

Mailchimp is number one in email marketing. It doesn’t need to be different; others need to be different from Mailchimp. The fact that people know it exists is everything.

“Familiar” often beats “differentiated.”

People have a very limited consideration set. A lot of what marketing has to accomplish is to get into the small, even tiny, consideration set of buyers.

There are hundreds of email marketing tools, yet most still consider only MailChimp plus three or four other top vendors. Mailchimp even gets recommended by people who’ve never used it—because they’re number one. People know its name. 

It’s hard to get noticed.

That means that brand reach and awareness is key. However, if you’re perceived as “pretty much the same,” it’s an uphill battle. If you’re an email marketing upstart with no significant differentiation from Mailchimp, it’s extremely difficult to make it (unless you have a lot of money to spend, which probably won’t save you anyway). 

You can get away with sameness in a fragmented, young category. But over time, the one with the most money (or whoever gains the most market share) will come out as the leader and position themselves as such in consumer minds. If you’re exactly like them, it’s going to hinder your growth. 

It’s better to go for a particular positioning from the get-go and play to win that category. ConvertKit is “audience building for creators,” and they’ve seen great growth, rising to number one in that market.  

Market share is more important than being different.

Market penetration/popularity of a brand contributes significantly toward people liking a brand and thinking it’s good. 

When you ask people to recommend a tool, you inevitably hear the biggest, most popular names in the category—not necessarily ones that score best on a spreadsheet. (Most people are satisficing anyway, not doing detailed comparisons and analysis, which is way too much work.)

People often recommend tools that they’ve never used but see all the time (e.g., Salesforce, Intercom, Hubspot, Drift, Optimizely, etc).

I giggle every time I see a Twitter convo in which one freelancer recommends Optimizely to another freelancer to use on their blog for A/B testing. These guys have no clue how A/B testing works, the sample sizes you’d need, or that Optimizely runs you ~$150,000/year. But they’ve HEARD of it, so they recommend it. 

Gaining market share is the best thing a brand can do for its loyalty metrics, word of mouth, and getting into a consideration set of buyers.

The more people know you exist, the more people like you. The more popular you are, the more popular you get.

Meaningful differentiation that people can easily articulate goes a long way when you still need to carve out your share of the pie.

Strategies to differentiate

The marketing classic Differentiate or Die offers ideas for eight types of differentiation (commentary provided by me):

1. Be first. Getting into the mind with a new idea or product or benefit is an enormous advantage: HubSpot and inbound marketing; Coca-Cola, “the original.”

Of course, being first is one thing; staying first is another. It takes hard work and enormous energy to stay on top with a new product or idea. Continued innovation is a must.

2. Attribute leadership. This is when you double down on a single attribute—you’re known as the best for one aspect or use case. Zappos did it with customer support. WP Engine used speed. Copytesting is the only audience intelligence tool that’s 100% focused on copy.

You cannot own the same attribute or position that your competitor owns; you must seek out another attribute. Don’t play the game of category leaders. Find an opposite attribute that allows you to play off the leader. 

Obviously, some attributes are more important to customers than others. You must try to own the most important attribute.

3. Be the preferred provider. This is the “more doctors smoke Camels” and “dentist-recommended toothpaste” type of differentiation. Tylenol has been doing the “#1 Doctor Recommended Brand” for decades. 

Can you become the preferred tool/service of a particularly influential segment?

4. Heritage. History has the power to make your product stand out. It can be a commanding differentiator because there’s a natural psychological importance to having a long history, one that makes people secure in their choices.

Levi’s built America. Red Wing Shoes were the primary suppliers for the U.S. Army during both World Wars. Pizza “like your grandma made it” comes from Sicily.  

5. Leadership. While people love underdogs, they usually bet on winners. Consumers love a leader. It feels safer to choose Optimizely over a smaller A/B testing tool. Optimizely is the leader, after all—there must be a reason for it!

Sometimes, people don’t know you’re the leader, so make sure they know. Maybe you’re the sales leader. Or maybe you have the highest customer satisfaction rating, or the best track record, or you’re a leader in some aspect or for a specific segment.

Whatever the exact measure of leadership, any such claims must be specific and credible.

6. Specialize in your market. Focusing on a single target user or use case will make you a specialist, differentiating you from the many generalists. People perceive those businesses to have more knowledge, experience, or understanding of their area, giving customers a reason to choose them. 

Paperbell is not just a scheduling and billing software but scheduling software for coaches. Pilot is payroll for international employees (differentiated against Gusto or ADP).

USAA is a highly touted and specialized (military) financial services company that has $155 billion in assets, $30 billion in revenue, and $2.5 billion in profit from a consumer base of only 12.4 million.

7. Make your products in a special way. Focusing on the unique design or technology in a product can help distinguish it in the marketplace. This can be a secret ingredient or a branded methodology. It doesn’t matter if anyone understands it as long as it sounds impressive and credible. 

Allergan’s CoolSculpting has been growing like crazy these past years. Do people really get how it works (other than “freeze your fat off”)? No. Does it matter? No.

8. Be hot. This is about tooting your own horn. It’s the Kim Kardashian strategy: You’re popular because you’re popular.

Zoom has been the hottest thing during the crisis. It could’ve been Skype, Google Meet, GoToMeeting, or anyone. But Zoom became hot. And that led to way more hotness. 

Clubhouse is all the rage these days. Notion is conquering the world. Roam Research has a cult. Momentum becomes the reason to choose you.

Being hot or experiencing tremendous growth can get your product or company some altitude; once you’re there, you can figure out something else to keep you aloft. 

Customer experience as a differentiator

The customer experience is how customers perceive their interactions with your company. It can be a powerful, driving force of differentiation among companies—a true differentiator.

Most companies focus on customer acquisition, not providing the best experience. They spend way more money getting the customer in the door than keeping and delighting them. Everyone calculates their CAC and LTV, but what about CKC (cost to keep a customer)?

Standing out with a better customer experience is relatively low-hanging fruit as a way to differentiate. The bar is quite low. 

If you wanna learn more about this, I highly recommend the book Never Lose a Customer Again, which lays out a fantastic framework. 

Blue ocean strategy

Blue ocean strategy is a famous concept that largely deals with the very same issue. It originated from a study that took place over 10 years and analyzed company successes and failures in more than 30 industries. 

In their classic book, Blue Ocean Strategy, Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne coined the terms “red ocean” and “blue ocean” to describe markets. 

“Red ocean” stands for mature markets rife with competition (red from the blood of competition), with everyone heavily commoditized. Profit margins are increasingly low. In a red ocean, companies focus on satisfying existing customers’ needs. They fight for existing customers and prioritize existing demand. In red oceans, it’s impossible to use both differentiation and a low-price strategy simultaneously.

“Blue oceans,” in contrast, are new markets—unexplored space without competition. It’s about creating a market that’s yet to be discovered by a wide audience. Over time, every blue ocean can turn into a red one as it matures, attracting more and more competitors. 

A blue ocean strategy is the simultaneous pursuit of differentiation and low costs to open up a new market and create new demand. If a company can identify what consumers currently value and then rethink how to provide that value, differentiation and low costs can both be achieved. This is termed “value innovation.”

How blue ocean strategy is distinct from a differentiation strategy

Blue ocean strategy is about pursuing both differentiation and low cost, while traditional competitive strategy differentiation is achieved by providing premium value at a higher cost to the company and at a higher price for customers.

The way to beat the competition is to stop trying to beat the competition. There is no competition, but there’s also no demand—yet. (You need to create it.) You can simultaneously use differentiation and low-price strategies.

The key point is satisfying consumer needs. You focus solely on the customer—not the competition—as you’re the only one in the market.

Category creation

When Drift entered the already crowded market of live chat tools, they didn’t say, “We have this feature that makes us different.” They called the whole game something else—”conversational marketing.”

“We entered that market knowing that we had to go out, create a new category, and be the only way to conceive of it,” said Dave Gerhardt, former VP Marketing of Drift. 

They changed how people should think about them. They stood out. They were different. 

They did this by creating a category.

Category creation is not about being first to market with a new product or service. Sometimes this is the case, but often it’s not. 

Creating a new category educates the market not only about a new solution but often about a new problem (that isn’t top of mind). Category creation sells that problem, not the product, and thus positions your innovation as the best solution to the problem. 

It requires radical product/service innovation, combined with business model innovation, aided by data about future category demand. Category creators, by definition, have no direct competition—they are the market leaders. And the market leaders make the most money.

Jack Welch, the legendary CEO of GE, reviewed the company’s businesses and decided to focus on nine categories where they held one of the top two positions (or were close to achieving it).

If GE couldn’t be first or second in a category, they would get out of that business. If you can’t be the first or second in a category, your best route might be to create your own.

There are two pretty decent books on this stuff:

1. Play Bigger. I hated the self-congratulating style and low-hanging examples, but the ideas are good.
2. Category Creation. A mix between interesting stuff and basic marketing, but worth a read anyway. 

Brand

Companies used to compete on features (i.e. who does what). At the start of mass marketing, they competed on benefits and experience. 

In recent decades, it’s increasingly about brand. Functional differences get replaced by values, ideals, and identity.

Who am I if I buy your brand? What does it say about me?

• I buy Patagonia because I believe in sustainability, and I care about the earth.
• When I buy Nike, I champion women’s equality and oppose police brutality (among other things). 
• I buy CXL Institute because I think of myself as a go-getter who’s going places. 
• I buy jewelry from Tiffany’s—and pay a premium for that diamond—because I value the best.

Your brand is your defense against commoditization.

A strong brand is your best, most sustainable long-term marketing asset. Invest in it before you need it. It’s something your competitors can’t copy. It can be your strongest “why” for choosing you. 

Functional/attribute differences matter, and innovation goes a long way, although that’s not a game that everyone can play. But pretty much anyone can compete on brand.

Soft innovation and emotional points of difference go much further in our world of endless features and benefits.

Things have finite value, but the meaning we attach to stuff—the stories we tell ourselves about it—have exponential value.

How to be different through branding

In her excellent book Different, Harvard professor Youngme Moon details three types of brands that stand out in the competitive landscape today:

1. Reverse brands;
2. Breakaway brands;
3. Hostile brands.

1. Reverse brands. Most brands continually improve their value proposition because they assume customers can never be fully satisfied. However, Reverse positioners assume that although customers do want something more than the baseline product, they don’t necessarily want more features.

So, reverse brands remove certain aspects from a product that customers might expect and add in new, unexpected things. Case in point: IKEA. 

While classic furniture stores are full of salespeople and furniture that lasts a lifetime, IKEA provides no in-store assistance, and the furniture might not last very long. While classic furniture outlets do home delivery, IKEA shoppers must build their own furniture from parts. 

But you get great design at affordable prices. Its stores have an airy, ultramodern look. There’s a restaurant offering Swedish meatballs and other delights. 

It works. While U.S. furniture stores have steadily lost out to retailers like Walmart, IKEA has become the largest furniture store in the world (and second largest in the United States). 

And nobody has been able to copy IKEA.

2. Breakaway brands. Breakaway brands recognize that product categorization is arbitrary. We wouldn’t eat cookies for breakfast, but lots of people eat sugary cereal with the same nutritional value because “it’s cereal.” 

Diaper manufacturers had a problem. Most parents were embarrassed to buy diapers after their baby turned three, so parents potty trained them well. Then they invented Pull-Ups, diapers that look like underwear. The use case was for 3–5 year olds. Social stigma was gone, and profits soared. 

That’s what a breakaway brand does—you take an existing category and redefine its use case. Cirque du Soleil did this when they reframed the circus, exchanging animals for amazing acrobatic and physical feats by humans.

3. Hostile brands. Hostile brands play hard to get. The antithesis of “feel-good brands,” hostile brands defiantly demand a decision—love me or leave me. They’re intentionally polarizing.

Hostile brands are unapologetic about aspects that some might consider shortcomings, even flaunting their flaws. When Mini Cooper launched in the United States, the brand made no apologies for being a small vehicle in an SUV-loving country. They boasted that the vehicle was tiny, an anti-SUV.

Hostile brands may make us uncomfortable (like some clothing brands being made exclusively for skinny people), but in the end, their polarizing nature makes them stand out in the sea of sameness.

Traits of successful commodity brands

In his book Bigger Than This, Fabian Geyrhalter discusses eight “brand traits” of successful commodity brands. 

1. Story. This is the best way to stand out with a commodity brand when you don’t have any innovation—have a story. Fishpeople Seafood is a B Corp that tells the story of meticulous standards for sustainability and accountability. They focus on their founder stories, but, most importantly, you can trace the fish you’re about to eat and get the story behind it. 
2. Belief. This is about shared values—where a brand connects deeply with its tribe through a shared belief, achieved by understanding its members. This takes a lot of monitoring, listening, and, most of all, conversing in an open, casual manner on social media, at events, etc. Passionate beliefs become the driving force of your business. Black Rifle Coffee Company is a pro-gun company that gained national attention in 2017 for supporting Donald Trump. They live their values, and thus attract (and repel) a certain group of people. 
3. Cause. Aligning your brand’s existence with a cause can give you a strong brand positioning. Your business exists to right a wrong, to do some good in the world. TOMS shoes comes to mind. 
4. Heritage. Connect your product with consumers’ desire to form a deeper connection with a place, real or imaginary, or even a time in history. Nostalgia in branding has always worked, even back in the day. It’s why Coca-Cola shows us the old Santa Claus year after year. They pulled it off, but heritage can be hard to scale. 
5. Delight. This is similar to the customer experience focus discussed previously. Small, unexpected gestures lead a consumer to see you as a friend. When you repeat this step and way of thinking, you move from friendship to community creation. Aim to create a brand vibe no one can steal.
6. Transparency. Leading your brand with transparency gains immediate trust with your consumers. I instantly think about Buffer and their transparent salaries. Moz and ConvertKit have also been very transparent. Transparency and honesty takes a serious commitment. What if you ran a radically transparent company?  Live-streamed internal meetings? Made strategy documents and the like public? Nobody is that brave. But you’d have no competition, that’s for sure. 
7. Solidarity. Solidarity is the idea of aligning your brand with someone else’s dream. It requires you to show deep empathy for a very specific audience and align your offering, your story, and beliefs and messaging with your followers’ point of view. You need to exemplify the values of your tribe in everything you do and say.
8. Individuality. Personalized products and experiences. A unique story and customized product wins consumer attention through individuality. Surprise your tribe by being personal, thus making your brand personable. Wonderbly made a splash with their Lost My Name books.

Personal brands

Another way to give people a reason to choose you over others is through personal branding. If prospects like the people associated with your company, they’re more likely to buy from you.

Tesla has Elon Musk. If I like and respect Elon, I’m more likely to buy a Tesla. Who’s the name behind Chevrolet or Mazda? No clue.

Microsoft had Bill Gates. Apple had Steve Jobs. Huge companies still use personal brands. Google. Virgin. HubSpot. Salesforce. It’s just so much easier to relate to another human rather than an entity.

I like Rand Fishkin and enjoyed his Whiteboard Fridays, so I’m more likely to sign up for Moz (even though he’s no longer with the company) than SEMrush. I’ll give Sparktoro a spin because I like Rand. 

You don’t need to be the founder or CEO to use a personal brand for differentiation. Look at what Dave Gerhardt did with Drift when he was the VP of Marketing there. Now he’s at Privy, and while most folks have no idea what Privy is, they already have a favorable gut feeling about it because of Dave’s personal brand. 

As Basecamp’s founders wrote in Rework, pouring yourself into your product is a powerful way to stand out from the crowd:

If you’re successful, people will try to copy what you do. But there’s a great way to protect yourself from copycats:

Make you part of your product or service. Inject what’s unique about the way you think into what you sell. Pour yourself into your product and everything around your product too: how you sell it, how you support it, how you explain it, and how you deliver it.

Competitors can never copy the you in your product.

One-hundred percent. And because I might be a fan of the outspoken founders of Basecamp, I will choose Basecamp over other project management software (or at least include it in my consideration set).

Double down on your differentiation 

Identified your key differentiator? Now double down on it. Optimize your machine to deliver on that promise.

• Are you faster? How about you make it 10x faster. 
• Cheaper? Go way cheaper—make it all about cheaper. (This works only if the competition can’t match that due to your unit economics or a structural advantage.)
• Better quality? Make that quality advantage 10x better than anything else out there (as long as it’s specific).
• Better customer experience? Go for the 11-star experience. 

That way, your differentiator will become truly that.

Conclusion

Marketing is a game of attention. If you do what everyone else is doing, it’s hard to get it. 

If your goal is to gain market share and awareness but your product isn’t clearly differentiated, that’s a problem. Unfortunately, it’s not a problem that’s easy to solve. 

Differentiation requires all-in commitment. It can’t be delegated to low-ranking marketers. It’s not a tactic somebody can ship. It’s not a line of copy one writes. 

Differentiation strategy needs to be driven by the C-Suite. The CEO needs to own it. It’s a strategic decision—one that may determine your company’s long-term success.

The post Differentiation Strategy (and the Sea of Sameness) appeared first on CXL.

You’ve spent hundreds of hours perfecting your product and countless meetings defining your brand. You feel great about your team, and it’s obvious to your customers that you care. 

Yet, despite your best efforts, your competition gets all the buzz, and you struggle to stand out. Should you change your prices? Add a new feature? Raise more capital? 

Before you go back to the drawing board, reconsider your product positioning. 

What is positioning?

April Dunford, author of Obviously Awesome, describes positioning as “context setting.” Without setting the right context, your products and services can be difficult to understand:

When customers encounter a product they have never seen before, they will look for contextual clues to help them figure out what it is, who it’s for, and why they should care. Taken together, the messaging, pricing, features, branding, partners, and customers create context and set the scene for the product.

All things equal, effective positioning is often the difference between a thriving business and one that gets lost in the sea of competition. 

“You might even think we know everything there is to know about positioning by this point,” writes Dunford. “You’d be wrong. Many of us know what positioning is, but very few understand how to do it.” 

So what exactly are the ingredients of good positioning? How can you put your products in the best position to succeed? 

Effective positioning has two phases: 

1. Recognize where positioning can improve. 
2. Address weaknesses via an effective positioning process. 

Recognize where positioning can improve

Empty your cup so that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.

Zen Proverb 

If you’ve spent time learning how to better position your product, you’ve likely come across the product positioning statement, popularized by the book Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

While a positioning statement can help you think about your product positioning, it doesn’t always provide actionable insight. You don’t know what you don’t know—filling out a worksheet doesn’t guarantee effective positioning. 

Your products also change over time, and tweaking your strategy regularly helps you stay current with the market.

Here are five signs that your positioning could be improved. 

1. You aren’t considered the preferred brand. 

LaCroix was once the number-one brand of flavored water in the United States.  

Thanks to a variety of great tasting flavors and effective marketing, they became a household name. But as the competition for flavored water grew, LaCroix struggled to fight off other brands. 

“Customers have since discovered other brands offer acceptable substitutes [. . .] and LaCroix doesn’t have much that distinguishes it from the competition in terms of intellectual property or added value,” Laurent Grandet, a beverage analyst for Guggenheim, told CNN. 

You may genuinely have one of the best products in the market, but if you’re not considered the “must have” brand by your customers, sales and marketing will struggle. 

Brendan Dell, author of the 12 immutable Law of High-impact Messaging, suggests considering whether you are cotton candy, a “nice to have,” or whether you’re the meat and potatoes. 

Is it obvious to your target market that you’re the best choice? If they choose a competitor, is it clear what they are missing?

If internally or externally the answers are unclear, you can improve your positioning. 

2. Your team struggles to express your value.

Are you confident in your team’s ability to express your value clearly? Do you have a consistent tone of voice? According to HubSpot, “brands that are consistently presented see an average revenue increase of 23%.”

If you promote different benefits in your ads versus your landing pages, or if your brand tone changes from social media to email, that inconsistency can be costly. After all, if your team isn’t on the same page, how do you expect prospects to know why they should choose you?  

Further, as Dunford notes, “For your team to develop a new position, they need a common understanding of the goal and expected outcomes.” While having 100% of your organization aligned at all times isn’t realistic, a weak foundation of understanding makes positioning incredibly difficult. 

Even increasing your marketing budget when your team can’t effectively express your value is a lost cause. “If customers don’t know what they’re paying for, and managers don’t know what they’re charging for,” Richard D’Aveni writes in HBR, “it’s almost impossible for companies to identify their competitive positions.” 

Can you clearly identify and communicate your primary benefit? Is your product messaging consistent with how you internally view your offerings?

Once you’ve identified benefits that appeal to customers, you can “use the equation to decide which features to develop, at what cost, and how soon they must create the next differentiator.” 

3. You try to appeal to everyone.

Without targeting a specific audience, you risk blending in with your competition.

“One of the most common mistakes that brands make when crafting messages for their website,” affirms Ross Simmonds, CEO of Foundation, “is trying to speak to everyone. It’s completely fine to sell to multiple personas. But you don’t need to try and sell to every single persona on the same page.” 

Few companies have suffered the effects of appealing to everyone more than Evernote. Once a promising note-taking startup used by millions, Evernote began drifting away from its original vision at its peak, creating a host of other offerings that didn’t stick. 

“In addition to its flagship app, Evernote built a chat app, a recipe app, a contacts management app, and a flashcard app,” detailed Erin Griffith in The New York Times. “It hosted elaborate conferences for its partners and users. It sold business gear—including $32.95 Evernote-branded Moleskine notebooks—in an ambitious e-commerce effort.”

With their attention scattered, new note-taking apps such as Notion and Bear quickly stepped in to serve those who felt that Evernote had lost focus. 

4. You think you’re the sole source of company info.

In an excellent article, Dunford explains that customers now have more control of where they choose to spend their money, and businesses must adapt quickly. 

“Social media and digital channels have given prospects the power to connect to each other and gather data from sources way beyond the company itself,” Dunford writes. “They now form their own opinions about brands and are increasingly skeptical about messages coming directly from companies.” 

How are you engaging your current customers and prospects? How often do you interact with them? What other sources are they using to learn—and form opinions about—your company and products? 

If you’re messaging prospects and customers only when you’re trying to sell, it’s obvious. Add value to your community with high-quality content and engage with comments, questions, and concerns on social media. 

5. You aren’t actively refining your positioning.

Positioning is an active, evolving process that requires constant refinement. If you’re not regularly adjusting your strategy and experimenting with how you market and sell, you’ll struggle to position yourself effectively—even if, historically, you’ve been well positioned. 

“Positioning today is balancing who you say you are with who they (your audience) say you are,” says Amanda Goetz, VP of marketing at The Knot. “Brands that focus solely on brand values, mission, and sentiment without listening and reacting based on cultural and generational feedback will lose relevance quickly.”

When the competitive landscape or your target market changes, how long does it take you to adjust messaging? If you can make minor changes in days—rather than waiting until your next quarterly strategy meeting—your positioning can and should change.

Those are the symptoms of weak positioning. Here’s how to alleviate them.

Address weaknesses via an effective positioning process

Improving your positioning isn’t as straightforward as writing a great blog post headline. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t concrete steps to work on it. 

Let’s look at the process of effective positioning. 

1. Go beyond features and benefits by telling a story. 

“If Dove, a bar of soap, can find an amazing way to tell a story of real beauty, there is literally not a brand in the world that can’t find their interestingness, their sort of inner meaning, and figure out how to tell their story,” says Linda Boff, CMO of GE. 

When you craft a compelling story, you help change the conservation from comparing features and benefits to communicating the end result your product provides. 

A good story has a villain and a clear strategy to save the day. John Legere, former CEO of T-Mobile, used the villain narrative successfully to compete with their biggest rival, AT&T. 

“As we changed our business and rebuilt our network,” Legere shared with HBR, “we began pointing out the contrast with our rivals—loudly. Every good narrative has a villain, and we picked ours early on: AT&T [. . .] AT&T had exclusive rights to the iPhone when it was launched, and people felt the company had taken advantage of that in pricing and customer service.” 

While features and benefits are important, they’re easy to replicate. They often don’t say anything compelling, and, many times, the customer doesn’t actually care about your “groundbreaking” new features.

Joel Klettke, founder of Case Study Buddy, agrees:

One of the most common misconceptions is that your features ARE your positioning. While your features may be a reason to choose you, they do not define your position or brand.

To cite April Dunford, positioning well means understanding your true competitors, what makes you unique from them, and who cares about those advantages a lot. There’s more to it than a feature list.

When crafting a story to communicate what your products are about, get specific. Hone in on the exact outcome you want customers to have—and how only you can offer it. 

“If you’re telling a story about helping other people,” says Brendan Dell, “everyone can get behind that.” Showing who and how you help, however, doesn’t require droning on about your “greatness.”

Aaron Orendorrf, VP of Marketing at Common Thread Collective, breaks down the value of negative attributes to craft a fuller narrative:

Traditional positioning revolves around positive statements: e.g., what we sell (product or service), who it’s for (audience), how it works (features), and why it matters (benefits). However, as a market gets crowded and commoditized, negative statements become far more valuable. 

For example, at Common Thread Collective—because paid media buying has become a race to bottom on agency fees—we lean hard across our messaging into who we aren’t and what we don’t do.

By actively positioning themselves as what they’re not, Common Thread Collective creates separation from competitors—and in prospect minds.

2. Identify and learn from your best customers.

Instead of spending hours in meetings, nose deep in spreadsheets, reach out to your best customers to find out why they chose you. While it may be tempting to survey everyone, your top customers often give you the key data.

Which customers were quick to adopt your products and services? Which consistently refer you business? Customer interviews are a great place to find those answers.

Your top customers can provide insight into how they see your competition, which may be drastically different than how you perceive them internally. 

Here are a few questions you can ask:

• Why did you choose us?
• Have you referred others to us? Why? 
• What alternatives, if any, did you try before us?
• If you switched from a competitor, why? 
• Did any particular marketing campaign nudge you to buy?
• What is your favorite part of our product/service?

Remember, the point of customer interviews isn’t to sell anything but to understand your strengths and weaknesses. 

3. Establish a clear value proposition.  

What does your product do best? Is it simple and easy to use? Is the support you offer world class? Internally, you may have answers to these questions, but does your branding and messaging communicate that to your target audience?  

Evaluate your current value proposition by checking whether it answers the questions below:

• What product or service is your company selling?
• What is the end-benefit of using it?
• Who is your target customer for this product or service?
• What makes your offering unique and different?

You can use the headline/paragraph/bullets/visual formula to structure the answers:

• Headline. What is the end-benefit you’re offering in one short sentence? It can mention the product and/or customer. Make it an attention grabber.
• Sub-headline or a 2–3 sentence paragraph. A specific explanation of what you do/offer, for whom, and why it’s useful.
• 3 bullet points. List the key benefits or features.
• Visual. Images communicate much faster than words. Show the product image, the hero shot, or an image reinforcing your main message.

Talking to your best customers can help clarify where you excel.

Take the online bank Simple, which positions itself as a trailblazer in the new way of banking, a story they tell on their about page: 

Way back when, in 2009, after another frustrating banking experience involving hidden fees, unnecessary products, long holds, and complicated conversations, Simple’s future founder Josh Reich emailed his friend (and future co-founder) Shamir Karkal, with some big questions:

Why is banking so complicated?
Can a bank exist to help people, not confuse them?
What if banks didn’t charge so many ridiculous fees?
What if your bank taught you to feel confident with money?

The answer to each question was Simple.

Simple leveraged the common frustrations of traditional banking and communicated that difference clearly.

Of course, they’re no longer the only ones to focus on simplicity. They can claim that they were one of the first to do so, but that’s still a weakened position compared to where they were a decade ago. For them, it’s time to re-separate from the pack.

4. Communicate a simple promise.

What can you promise customers if they invest in you? How can you communicate that in the simplest terms? 


ConvertKit, a popular email service provider, does this extremely well. Their simple promise is “Audience building for creators. Share what you love to connect with your followers and grow your business.”

With nearly half of the U.S. population under the age of 35 reporting they have at least one “side hustle,” the creator label resonates well.

ConvertKit doesn’t lead with features. They don’t claim that they offer the most advanced email automation or that they’re great for enterprises, too. The promise is simple and tailored to a specific group.

Another great, and perhaps more familiar, example is Geico’s “15 minutes could save you 15% or more on car insurance.” In a single sentence, they set expectations and promise value.

Vague promises, in contrast, are everywhere. Take Time Warner’s “enjoy better” and “better starts here” messaging. What was better? Pricing? Service? Selection of channels? The campaign was ambiguous and fueled consumer skepticism.

And while Apple and Google can often succeed without perfect positioning for every product, that’s the exception, not the rule. Even Microsoft wasn’t immune to poor product positioning. Remember Zune?

5. Make positioning a team effort

“A positioning process works best when it’s a team effort, ideally from across different functions within the company,” writes Dunford. “Each team, from sales to marketing to customer success, can bring a unique point of view relative to how customers perceive and experience the product.” 

Including all teams in the positioning process ensures that everyone is on the same page. It can also help unlock insights that may not always reach across departments. 

For example, maybe your customer service team notices that 15% of cancellations result from frustration with a feature that isn’t explained well during the sales process. Or maybe your product team can improve your onboarding, which improves trial activations. 

Your positioning affects multiple departments; every leader should have a seat at the table. You’ll need company-wide buy-in to reap the benefits of strong positioning. 

6. Change the conversation 

It’s tempting to compare yourself to the competition. But the most effective positioning often changes the conversation entirely.

Once again, storytelling can help. Orendorff shares a favorite example:

There is perhaps no one who embodies it better than the single-blade razor company, Supply […] The brand’s flagship SKU sells for ~5x–7x the usual cost of a razor.

That means it has to position itself negatively against competitors as well as positively for consumers. As a result, Supply’s product pages are masterclasses in copywriting, educating, and positioning.

Strong positioning often makes your customers feel like you’re the way of the future, and that choosing anyone else would be a mistake.

Just don’t expect to arrive at that kind of messaging via a single “Aha!” moment. Trial-and-error and constant adjustments based on customer feedback help develop a unique message over time, which is exactly how Drift did it with “conversational marketing.” 

The benefits, Dell notes, are obvious: “It’s easy to dominate your market when you’re the only one in it.” (Just make sure you’re in a market that actually wants to be served.)

Conclusion 

Strong positioning starts by rethinking traditional ways and using real-time feedback and engagement from consumers. 

Your positioning will never be 100% complete. There’s always more work to be done. But a strong process ensures continual improvement: 

1. Unlearn the old ways of positioning.
2. Determine if your positioning is off.
3. Go beyond features by telling a story.
4. Learn from your best customers.
5. Establish a clear value proposition.
6. Make a clear and simple promise.
7. Make positioning a team effort.
8. Change the conversation.

As Dunford says, “Positioning is a secret superpower that, when harnessed correctly, can change the way the world thinks about a problem, a technology or even an entire market.” 

The post Nailing Product Positioning (w/ Examples) appeared first on CXL.

Each spring, the annual State of Agile Marketing Report sheds light on how Agile ways of working are being adopted within marketing. This year, for the first time in the report’s three-year history, Agile techniques overtook those maintaining traditional processes. 

Those who know Agile as a buzzword will likely tell you it’s a way for teams to go faster. For marketers, some of the most overburdened members of our organizations, that is certainly part of the allure. 

Fifty-three percent of marketers are, in fact, experiencing faster times to get their campaigns released than if they were using a traditional process methodology, like waterfall. 

But Agile is about more than just speed. The most recent report shows other benefits: 

• 53% of marketers experience higher levels of productivity with their teams.
• 53% prioritize their work more effectively.
• 51% can change gears quickly based on feedback from customers.
• 51% achieve higher quality of work.
• 46% increase visibility into project status during the work process.

This post expands on the findings from that report to show you which Agile practices are proving most useful to marketers, and how to implement them.

Agile for developers is not Agile for marketers.

The differences between how agility manifests in a marketing team vs. a software team can be striking. While software developers prefer more prescriptive methods, like Scrum, marketers borrow heavily from the Kanban framework.

To operate as a pure Scrum marketing team, marketers would need to timebox their to-do list and commit to getting a specific cluster of tasks out the door after 2–4 weeks of active work.

For this structure to work for a marketing team, the team would need a finite scope of work and little to no unplanned requests—which rarely happens. 

Most marketers simply don’t have this visibility, and the success of their projects often relies on prioritizing unplanned requests. That’s why they opt for a continuous model of value delivery with the Kanban framework, which accounts for the spontaneity of the marketing context.

The most recent stats show that 47% of marketers are using a hybrid approach, and only 14% actually use pure Scrum. 

There are other differences. In a software team, a full-time Product Owner and separate Scrum Master work together to ensure the team is working on the right work at the right time, but they stay away from rolling up their sleeves and executing work. 

(Image source)

Marketers, on the other hand, are used to wearing many hats and are unlikely to step away from execution work to focus on process alone. By blending the role of the Team Lead and Process Owner (Agile Coach or Scrum Master) into one, marketers take advantage of the methodology’s benefits without losing an execution team member.

While developers may measure success based on “working code,” a functioning campaign is not enough for marketing success.

With actual customer outcomes in mind, marketers spend longer in planning and insist on more access to customer data. In department-level planning sessions, marketers are much more involved, not only in understanding overarching strategy but in influencing it, too. 

In the marketing version of Agile, the execution team and partners develop an in-depth understanding of the customer first to make more informed decisions as they plan on the tactical level. 

To top it off, marketers even have their own Agile marketing manifesto, separate from the Agile manifesto created by software developers in 2001. This document, published in 2012, transforms the original manifesto into a codex of Agile values and principles in the marketing language.

Examples of principles that appear in the Agile marketing manifesto—but not in the one for software development—include:

• Simplicity is essential.
• Continuous attention to marketing fundamentals and good design enhances agility.
• Build marketing programs around motivated individuals.
• Deliver marketing programs frequently.
• We welcome and plan for change.

To embody these principles and others that figure in the manifesto for marketing, marketers have adapted five Agile practices.

5 Agile practices adapted for marketing 

According to the most recent findings, daily stand-ups, user stories, retrospectives, frequent releases, and digital Kanban boards are the most popular Agile practices that marketing departments implement for Agile success. 

1. Daily stand-ups

These daily, short-term strategy sessions among direct team members are a marketer favorite. When things are moving fast, this quick 15-minute touchpoint with the team is essential to keep complex initiatives with lots of moving parts from derailing. 

Fifty-eight percent of marketers are practicing some form of the daily stand-up, making it the most popular Agile practice in marketing departments. 

In the Agile software development context, a stand-up might follow the structure:

• What did I do yesterday?
• What will I do today?
• Am I blocked on anything?

If all team members are working on the same projects, this format can be particularly helpful to help keep everyone on track.

But when clusters of the team focus on entirely different initiatives, each micro team presents project updates that are irrelevant to others, causing people to disengage. With this in mind, marketing teams have taken the Agile software structure and crafted their own set of recommended questions.

The preferred adapted stand-up format that keeps this meeting as productive as possible focuses instead on questions like:

• Am I blocked on anything? Do I need help? An opportunity for impediments to float up immediately and a way for the group to rally around them at the very start of the stand-up meeting.
• What will I do today to move forward on strategic projects (not BAU)? The focus is only on relevant OKR-related projects that the team members are all aware of or working on together. Updates on independent projects can live on the team’s visual workflow, where they’re accessible to all team members.
• Have I discovered a new learning or hack to share with my teammates today? A way to increase the collective knowledge of the team and skill-share quickly and regularly (without setting up a special, separate meeting for this purpose).

2. User stories

While software developers implement user stories to describe the desired functions of their products, marketers have found many and varied uses to “see through the eyes of their customers.” 

A whopping 46% of marketers are already using user stories as a solution to a common marketing problem: lack of alignment with strategic, tactical, and internal goals. 

Strategic-level user stories guide marketers in their tactical decision-making. These user stories are overarching and encompass large initiatives defined by leadership during quarterly planning, referred to as Big Room Planning. This forum includes the perspectives of marketing leadership as well as input from execution teams, who are closest to the work.

Consensus around quarterly objectives is what drives confident execution. A typical structure for a strategic-level user story is: “As a customer persona type X, I want PRODUCT X, so I can achieve goal X, Y, Z.”

Tactical-level user stories are heavily influenced by strategic user stories. At the execution level, however, objectives break down into more granular, detailed pieces. To ensure daily work continues to align with objectives, marketers might phrase their actionable tasks in the following way:

As a potential online conference attendee, I would like a user-friendly landing page about the upcoming event, so I can get acquainted with the program, plan ahead which talks I want to attend virtually, and RSVP, so I can add the date to my calendar.

Internal team user stories are granular enough to give actionable directions to the team. However, their focus is not the customer; instead, they focus on the needs of the internal team during the work process.

To understand the tasks initiating from within the direct team (e.g., process improvements, automations), a marketing team’s workflow includes internal user stories such as: 

As a marketing team member, I would like a robust tool with heat mapping to measure how customers are interacting with new landing pages to help develop new hypotheses that I can test.

If you think that’s excessive, consider the fact that marketers’ raison d’être is to be customer-centric in all and everything that they do. By switching to a short-form structure that leaves the customer out of daily tasks, marketers risk working on outputs that don’t achieve the customer outcomes their organization needs.

3. Retrospectives

Meeting to discuss what went right and wrong in the work process is a newer habit among marketing teams. This valuable practice is at the heart of continuous improvement. 

That is why 43% of marketers have already embraced retrospectives—but admit that they’re still getting their footing in regards to keeping retros fresh.

Most marketers are already straying from the typical retrospective format of “Stop, Start, Continue,” in which the team uses Post-its to brain dump some of their best and worst process practices, and moving to more creative means of expression to keep the team engaged. 

The Sailboat Retrospective technique, in which the team maps out their anchors (what’s holding them back), wind in their sails (what’s helping them move forward) and rocks (potential risks they might face in the future) is an alternative way to coax out the key challenges the team might be experiencing.

While considered too “artsy” for some software teams, the Sailboat technique is popular among more creative departments, like marketing. 

4. Frequent releases

Before Agile entered the picture, it often took years for software developers to deliver any value to their customers (e.g., waiting years for a 90s-era Windows update—and hating everything about it when it came out). 

Similarly, marketers have adapted this practice to move away from their own 6–8 month campaign release times and start delivering value to their customers every 1–3 weeks. 

Forty-one percent of marketers say they’re making use of more frequent releases by delivering smaller initiatives regularly to build up to larger campaigns, instead of going for a Big Bang. 

By adjusting how larger projects are developed and then released, marketers can collect feedback from customers as they deliver incremental value. The alternative—launching huge, expensive initiatives all at once and hoping customers respond well—bears the same risks as a radical redesign. 

Unlike software developers, who collect lines of code that combine into features for the next product release, marketers have more frequent touchpoints. For example, a marketer can release new collateral to customers every day if it aligns with customer demand. You’d be hard-pressed to find a software team shipping new features daily.

5. Digital Kanban boards

A visual workflow is any Agile implementation’s bread and butter. Thirty-eight percent of marketers are already using this essential Agile practice with their teams. 

However, unlike software developers, marketers (being the creatives that they are) are more experimental with how they structure their workflows. 

A simple development workflow on a Kanban board might look like this:

Marketers also use horizontal swimlanes to separate work by the business unit from which it originated (or type) and color code to indicate work that should be treated differently as it flows through the process (e.g., urgent, deadline, maintenance):

Due to external dependencies, most Kanban boards include a “Pending” (PEN) column. Tasks in this process stage are still visualized in the team process yet outside of the team’s control (e.g., legal or compliance review). Enterprise teams will be all too familiar with the column.

A crucial role of any marketing team lead is to monitor this area of the workflow and influence external stakeholders to meet their SLAs. 

Visualizing the queue of Pending work items that depend on other departments (dragging their feet) helps the team lead rally the appropriate parties and speed up the marketing process.

Conclusion

If you’re a marketer looking to apply Agile ways of working, you’re much more likely to reap the full benefits by tailoring existing frameworks and practices to fit your unique context. Replicating another team’s implementation is not a best practice when it comes to process change.

That’s why education about Agile values and principles, as well as its two most popular frameworks of application, Kanban and Scrum, is essential on your journey toward marketing agility.

Know your options to make informed decisions about how to use tried-and-tested Agile techniques in your daily work. 

The post 5 Agile Practices That Are Fueling Marketing Teams appeared first on CXL.

Sales and marketing misalignment reduces revenue, lowers the quality of customer service, and can even dampen company culture. So how do you get aligned?

This post, based on our experiences, covers: 

• What misalignment looks like—and what it costs;
• What alignment looks like—and what you get;
• Four steps to go from wherever you are now to greater alignment.

What misalignment looks like—and what it costs 

According to The B2B Lead, sales reps spend about 50% of their time prospecting unproductive deals—while missing 80% of the most qualified leads. Not an optimal use of time. 

Of course, it isn’t just your sales team that suffers. Marketing often works hard on positioning and other marketing initiatives that the sales team undervalues.

As Douglas Karr explains it:

An analogy I’ve used for quite a while with marketing is fishing. If you’re a sales driven organization, you just want to get out on the water and throw your lure. The more rods you have and the faster you can get them all in the water, the greater the chances that something will bite.

The problem is that the fish may not be where your boat is, may not like the bait you’re using, and as productive as you are—you may come home empty-handed.

How can you tell if your marketing and sales teams are misaligned? 

• Your sales team repeatedly voices their frustration at “low quality” leads. 
• Your sales reps disqualify a large percentage of MQLs right off the bat. 
• Despite an increase in ad spend and marketing budget, customers aren’t engaging with your ads, content, and emails.
• Marketing collateral and educational resources go unused by your sales team. 
• Your marketing and sales team operate independently much of the time.

One of the most common reasons for marketing and sales to be out of sync is that the customer journey is too segmented between teams. Any stage at the edge of either team’s responsibility lacks accountability (but not finger-pointing). 

“There’s a blurring of what marketing is responsible for, and what sales is responsible for [. . .] and we do need to align marketing and sales around a common view of the entire funnel,” says advisor of LoopVOC, Jill Rowley.

Clarifying those responsibilities is lucrative.

What alignment looks like—and what you get

When sales and marketing are aligned, good things happen. According to research by SiriusDecisions:

• Annual company revenue increases by 8.2%.
• Brand awareness increases by 8.0%.
• Average deal size increases by 6.1%.

Alignment starts with clear communication, a focus for Josh Normand, VP of Strategic Sales at Hootsuite:

We over-communicate at multiple levels, not meeting for the sake of meetings—we’re very respectful of people’s time. There’s an agenda. Everyone has clear roles and responsibilities.

Strong communication within teams yields consistent communication to customers. When Dell needed to align marketing content with the sales team’s lead nurturing, they organized content in automation tools to keep sales and marketing on the same page.

Instead of traditional sales emails, Dell developed interchangeable content blocks based on customer interests. Contacts entered into the lead-nurturing program based on digital activity (usually visits to certain pages on Dell.com).

The sales team saw this solution as sales enablement—ongoing nurturing of not-ready prospects. That collaboration worked for Dell, with the aligned lead-nurturing program delivering a 35% higher average order value for nurtured contacts versus non-nurtured contacts.

ZoomInfo solved misalignment by creating a service-level agreement that required a dedicated member of their sales team to call MQLs:

ZoomInfo had long struggled with warm MQLs. We tried giving them to our sales development team, then tried our special sales SWAT team. No matter what we tried, we couldn’t get the conversion rate above 4%.

To align our sales and marketing teams, ZoomInfo created a sales role 100% dedicated to calling warm marketing-qualified leads. (Yes, calling them.)

Our conversion rate went from that stubborn 4% to 15%! We found the sweet spot 150 dials (yes, dials) per day.

Your company may do just fine by scheduling a weekly meeting between key members of marketing and sales. Or you may need that SLA to make it happen.

Here’s the process for figuring out what you need to do, and how to do it.

4 critical steps to align marketing and sales

Your sales and marketing alignment should center on four priority steps: 

1. Define and understand your target audience.
2. Create core messages to speak to your target audience.
3. Define shared terms and internal language.
4. Create a process for working with leads.

It starts by getting everyone focused on the same audience—potential buyers. 

1. Define and understand your target audience.

“Spray and pray” marketing results in messages that go unnoticed (or even blocked) by consumers. It’s marketing without a target audience. For marketing and sales alignment, both groups need to have a common target audience—one that buys products, not just shares blog posts. 

“In sales, the rubber meets the road with revenue, not with likes, and favorites, and retweets, and popularity stats. It’s all about building a pipeline to revenue,” says Rowley. 

To define your target audience, consider a few resources:

1. Firmographic data;
2. Source information;
3. Customer behavior.

Firmographic data is a set of characteristics related to companies that, together, form market segments. Firmographics give deeper insights for B2B marketing teams to target accounts that get the most benefit from their products or services.

Firmographic data forces you to answer questions like:

• Who is the lead?
• Where do they work?
• What is their position?
• What is their professional background?

InsideView recommends adding a few questions to ensure your firmographic data is reliable:

• Companies pivot, are reorganized, or get acquired. How often is company firmographic and industry data updated?
• Webforms are usually short, and people sometimes enter incorrect information. Do inbound leads get their emails validated and firmographic data appended?
• Much research has shown that B2B data decays quickly. What’s the average age of our contact/account records?
• How often do we formally clean our CRM data?
• Are we doing anything to capture buying intent signals and can we overlay that with ICP to prioritize leads?

Source information tells you: 

• How your largest audience finds you. Why do more people from that source come to you? What types of people are in that group?
• What people are interested in. Are they coming from competitor pages or looking up broader, top-of-funnel information? 

At ActiveCampaign, for example, if someone comes from a competitive review site like G2, we can assume that they generally know what our product is but that they’re also comparison shopping. 

How we interact and engage with people in this group is different than somebody who may have come in through a branded search, which allows us to deploy our sales resources more effectively.

Customer behavior analyzes what users do—the site content or emails they interact with—to help tell sales and marketing teams exactly how good (or bad) of a lead they are.

• A person who visits a pricing page likely has high interest—they aren’t just looking at what a product does, they’re thinking about spending money.
• A person who created a trial is likely more qualified than someone who hasn’t. They’ve moved beyond awareness and are interacting with your product.

With an agreed-upon target audience, you can dig into what those people need to hear from first interaction to final sales call.

2. Create core messages to speak to your target audience.

Your messaging—in marketing and sales—should fall into three buckets:

1. What we do;
2. How we do it;
3. Why we do it.

When what, how, and why are aligned, you have a filter to make it easier to make marketing and sales decisions about your core message. 

The Golden Circle, introduced by Simon Sinek in 2009, is a helpful framework. Here’s how it works:

• Why: The belief or the motivation behind your business. This asks the question, “What is our purpose?”
• How: The process—actions taken to realize the why.
• What: What you offer and the result of why.

Your core messaging begins with purpose—why you do what you do. It’s your cause, what you believe, and the thought behind your every action and product. Not having a common cause as an organization is a fast track to continued misalignment. 

La Marzocoo sells espresso machines. But they also run communal coffee shops. Their “why” is what coffee offers: a shared experience with friends, family, clients, or simply a good book.

Their product enriches lives, an idea central to Sinek’s description of the “why”: “to build relationships so that we enrich the lives of others.”

As Sinek says, “people don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.” For us, our Golden Circle approach looks like this:

• Why: We exist to help growing businesses meaningfully connect and engage with their customers.
• How: We do this by bringing together the entire customer experience, allowing these businesses to see, interpret, influence, and improve all aspects of their customers’ experiences.
• What: We do this by offering a CRM, sales automation, email marketing, messaging, and an integration layer.

Our customers don’t start off wanting a CRM; they want a way to keep track of their customers and opportunities. They don’t search for an email marketing tool; they want a way to reach their customers easily. 

When you buy a product, do you think about the nuts and bolts that you’re buying? Or do you think about how you’re going to use it and what life problem it solves?

The Jobs-to-be-done framework can help you learn the job that consumers hire your product to do. But you’ve got to be willing to talk to customers. Here are a few questions you can ask:

• Why did you choose us?
• Have you referred others to us? Why? 
• What alternatives, if any, did you try before us?
• If you switched from a competitor, why? 
• Did any particular marketing campaign nudge you to buy?
• What is your favorite part of our product/service?

Remember, the point of customer interviews isn’t to sell anything but to understand your strengths and weaknesses.

Translate what you learn into your core messaging, which should focus on the why. Remember different audiences will have different whys, and you’ll need to address those needs consistently, with the same language, at every stage.

3. Define shared terms and internal language.

Sometimes, marketing and sales misalignment comes down to people talking about the same thing with different terminology. You may think your team is already aligned on language. But confusion is common:

• What is a lead? 
• What defines an MQL?
• What defines an SQL?

In the early days of ActiveCampaign, MQL and trial were used interchangeably, which led to misunderstanding. Sometimes a trial was considered an MQL, although not all trials were actually MQLs.

After noticing frustration, a couple members of the leadership team sat down in a one-on-one meeting to talk through everyone’s understanding of term definitions and set a final, mutual definition. 

Without that intervention, miscommunication could’ve caused a domino effect of problems. One team might use “lead” to describe an email capture, while another might use “lead” to describe someone on the verge of buying.

To define the terms that your marketing and sales teams use, first catalog everything you want your definitions to cover. According to the Unified Compliance Framework, there are multiple types of definitions, but two are most widely used:

• Intensional. Begins with the category, properties, or features shared by other concepts or things like it. Continues with what makes this concept or thing different than the other members of its category (e.g., “Baked goods are foods that are cooked in an oven of some fashion that uses prolonged dry heat, usually based on flour or corn.”).

• Extensional: Lists as many objects, properties, or features as necessary that represent the concept or thing being described. Explains how those objects, properties, or features fit into a more generalized category. (e.g., “Baked goods are breads, cakes, pastries, cookies, biscuits, scones and similar items of food that are cooked in an oven of some fashion.”)

Once you know who you’re trying to reach, the messages that resonate with them, and how you categorize those people internally, you can transition from research and internal discussions to consumer-facing work.

4. Create a process for working with leads.

Misalignment creates two funnels—a marketing funnel for generating pipeline and a sales funnel for closing the pipeline. When you have multiple funnels and multiple lead-nurturing processes, sales and marketing teams operate at difference paces toward different goals.

A fractured process is one of the three key challenges, the other two of which are addressed in preceding steps:

To create your process for working with leads, consider three areas:

• Routing. Where do leads go between marketing and sales? Are they tagged in a CRM or segmented in your email service provider?
• Priority. What’s the order in which you reach out to leads?
• Timing. How fast should you reach out, how many times, and over what timeframe? 

At ActiveCampaign, qualified leads that fall within the target audience go to a sales representative. For leads who aren’t qualified, they stay with marketing and go into a nurturing sequence. 

The higher quality a lead is—that is, the more boxes they check within the target audience—the higher priority they become.

For example, leads coming from review or comparison shopping websites are contacted within two hours, while leads coming from branded search terms are contacted within six hours. All leads are contacted four times within the first seven days of identification.

When a lead goes to a sales representative, can you automate the first outreach, or will direct human contact work best? Does this vary based on the quality of the lead? Can subsequent follow-ups be automated, and, if so, on which channels should that follow-up take place? 

Remember,  your customers don’t want to feel stuck in some impersonal automation loop. Consider adding personalized touch within your lead process. 

We’ve developed a “Fit & Intent” matrix to help drive decisions on engagement between sales and marketing

• Fit is how well our solution solves the needs of the customer.
• Intent is how motivated our customer or prospect is to make a change in an area we serve.

Here’s how the model works:

• Low fit/low intent leads should probably never go to sales, and marketing doesn’t need to spend much time on them. Don’t ignore these leads, but be mindful of your investment. 
• High fit/high intent leads where your sales reps should move quickly with marketing offering support. These leads are the classic “don’t overthink, don’t oversell” scenario. Close the deal.
• Low fit/high intent leads may not totally match up with your target audience, but you can see if you can help them. For these leads, marketing can use educational content or collateral (such as an ebook or whitepaper) to try to push them into the high fit/high intent category. 
• High fit/low intent leads are the ones you need to convert to grow your business. They might be using a competitor and fall in the middle of your target audience. 

Find out where leads can fall—it might be more than one quadrant—and decide: Where does the responsibility fall on marketing? Where does the responsibility fall on sales?

Here’s the breakdown:

• Low fit, low intent: In this quadrant, there is no core ownership. This area focuses on nurturing leads, which can fall on both marketing and sales (depending on the lead source). 
• High fit, high intent: A lead who falls into this quadrant is ready to buy, which means it’s time for sales to own the process and drive the conversion. Marketing is there to support sales as needed.
• Low fit, high intent: A lead in this space needs more information to see if your business can help them. The marketing team primarily owns the responsibility of this quadrant, with support from sales as needed.
• High fit, low intent: This quadrant requires joint ownership, with support from marketing and sales. This can include top-of-funnel content, sharing pricing information, or phone calls with sales representatives.

Conclusion

Sales and marketing misalignment is by no means an easy fix. That doesn’t make it any less essential.

But don’t jump straight into consumer-facing work if you haven’t yet:

• Agreed on a target audience;
• Identified the messages that resonate with them;
• Aligned on internal definitions.

Then, and only then, will your marketing and sales teams work on the same audience with the same messaging—no matter where those people are in the buying process. 

The post Sales and Marketing Misalignment Is Costly—But Avoidable appeared first on CXL.

Never-ending to-do lists, department priorities, and bosses who require you to switch focus to action on their “big new idea” at the drop of a hat. That’s the day-to-day reality for most people in any business.

Then, you turn up to people’s desks like an unwelcome door-to-door salesperson, trying to convince them of the virtues of customer-centricity. You’re not just adding more to their plate but also to think about new ways of working—ways that may conflict with their current priorities. 

So how do you convince people with little motivation—throughout the entire business—to focus more on your customers? I spoke to six customer-focused leaders in a range of businesses and roles to see how they got people in their businesses to care.

Here are their top four recommendations.

1. Give people the data  

Data is incredibly powerful, helping to motivate and convince—but not if you use it (as politicians do) to support a narrative. When collected and used without bias, however, it’s hard for anyone to refute what’s staring back at them in black and white. 

So how can data help you? 

Challenge opinions

Marty Hayes, Online Business Manager for UK Consumers at Dell Technologies, uses data to show people why customer centricity is important and to get people to start questioning opinions: 

I once worked for an online womenswear retailer, where our target market was fast-fashion-craving teenage girls and young women. The CEO, a 40-something man, thought he knew what was best in terms of creative, copy, user experience, and value proposition.

Once he saw videos from What Users Do of real customers trying to use the site, pointing out where things didn’t quite resonate or sounded contrived, and shared suggestions for improvements, the penny started to drop that he wasn’t our customer, and that they probably knew best. 

Show the financial impact 

Sometimes, data isn’t enough to convince people of your cause, especially at the top of the business, where people weigh the costs of making changes in the business.

Hayes explained how to persuade the C-suite when data alone isn’t enough: 

If you can’t win the argument on data alone, I’ve found that modeling an improved conversion rate based on incremental customer experience improvements can get the wheels in motion.

Money talks, and if you can show that, by improving the customer experience, it might lead to a 1% increase in conversion, and that could lead to $XXXX more revenue per year, that can help put things into context.

Share data or insights company-wide

It’s not just the top of the business that needs to hear things directly from the customer. As Chang Chen, Head of Growth & Marketing at Otter.ai explained: 

Everything any team does will have an impact on the user experience, from back-end engineers to customer success specialists. Enabling our teams to hear directly from the customer, to gain insights on how our product is impacting their work and life, is the key to aligning the teams.

We record, transcribe, and summarize all our customer interviews and share every single one of them.

But there’s a downside to giving everyone access to customer data, something Dan Moross, Customer Experience Director at Moo, found:

Some people will be looking at only one data point. And it doesn’t mean anything unless you can join it with all the other data. It’s always been a bit of a challenge—people making assumptions based on very little information.

Chen offered a common example:

The customers we talk to might not be representative of our target customers. If we focus too much on one customer’s feedback, we might be sidetracked and might not drive a better user experience for the majority of our customers.

We need to collect enough feedback and focus on the customers in our targeted segments, as well as combining the quantitative data with the qualitative data to validate the learnings. 

To avoid these situations, you could produce insight reports for teams, analyzing the data and triangulating findings to ensure the data isn’t misinterpreted. Putting the findings into a context that different teams understand can help.

For example, rather than just giving the ecommerce team data on searches that return no results on the site, Hayes presented his findings in this context: 

If a customer searches for a product that they don’t stock, they’ll likely reach a “no results found” page.

Imagine that replicated as a real-world experience–a potential customer walks into your shop and asks the sales assistant if you sell XYZ, and the member of staff just says “nope” and walks off. I don’t think that customers would stay in the shop very long.

Relating it to the in-store experience seems to really work in terms of highlighting issues and opportunities for improvement.

2. Help teams experiment 

Once you start sharing customer data or insights, teams will want to start making improvements. It might feel like you’ve achieved what you set out to do, but the hard work doesn’t stop here.

Some new ideas or initiatives can be costly but result in big payoffs. Others can actually make things worse for your customers and harm revenue. Unless you’re providing teams a scientific way to test these ideas, you won’t know which is which. 

Moross talked about how he came to this conclusion at Moo: 

Something I learned a lot from joining with the design team is you shouldn’t just build a thing that takes you a year and put it out and hope it’s going to work. You should do something over a course of a month to a subset of customers, and then tweak it and iterate it.

So how can you help your teams manage the risk of implementing new ideas? 

Create a center of excellence 

Rather than employing experts in customer research, UX, psychology, testing, optimisation, and data analytics into every team across the business, you can create a “center of excellence” (CoE)—one expert team that works across the business, either performing the experimentation tasks for other teams or running education programmes to help upskill others to experiment. 

Sometimes, this function has an expiration date—once other teams are upskilled, the CoE disbands. In other cases, it’s a permanent fixture and a source of innovation. They’re usually put in place to help govern the overall approach to customer-centricity and experimentation, setting working practices across teams (e.g., agile methodologies, aligning tools stacks).

Another important role of the CoE is helping with change management—communicating the CX work and results while also facilitating discussions across teams (when you still have functional teams) to get people working together on customer-centric improvements. 

Our client Laura Borghesi, Senior Director of Growth Marketing at MongoDB, talked to us about how she created a CoE. At MongoDB, the growth team is divided into different parts of the user journey (e.g., acquisition, conversion, onboarding, activation, etc.).

The CoE team is a layer that cuts across all growth teams. It’s not the job of the CoE team to own any part of the user experience but to enable other teams to run experiments in their areas. 

At the beginning, Borghesi explained, a CoE team is likely to be more involved in actually running experiments for other teams. But down the line, their role is more about helping others run their own experiments. The CoE team then oversees the integrity of experiments being run across the company—ensuring that individual teams’ work fits into the overarching roadmap and that experiments are set up in different swim lanes.

The CoE team also helps with change management by getting everyone involved and excited about improving the CX. She said they hold bets on which experiment treatments will win when tested—something that everyone enjoys that also embeds a culture of customer centricity. 

3. Get CCOs to represent 

Whether it’s a Chief Customer Officer or Customer Experience Officer, to be successful in customer-centricity you need someone at the top who’s got the customers’ best interests at heart.

Grassroot changes can happen bottom up, but having a CCO who can influence people across the business—and has direct access to the CEO—will increase company-wide buy-in. McKinsey illustrates how this works in practice (and what you need if you don’t have a CCO in place):

4. Tweak your company structure 

I can run as many workshops as I like to try and get people to be connected to the customer. And they might score high on “being customer-centric.” But if you don’t have the right systems in place, and you don’t have the right ways of working, then it’s just lip service.

– Dan Moross of Moo

Most of us work in teams organized around functions. Different departments have clear boundaries of what they work on. This functional-based structure means your teams are responsible only for small sections of the overall customer journey, meaning that they have to negotiate with and influence other departments to make holistic improvements.

While this functional structure might make sense internally, it can fail to produce a great, cohesive customer experience. One approach to tackle this is cross-functional teams organized around the customer (journeys or segments). 

Tom Carrington Smith, Co-founder of CharlieHR, wrote about the issues he faced with functional teams that lead them to restructure the business: 

We have the company set up in the obvious way. Four teams each focused on their role disciplines; product design, engineering, customer experience, and growth [. . . ] We found that everyone needed a touchpoint with everyone else at some point to hit their objective.

This was slowing us down, as it relied on a huge volume of communication (resulting in a lot of miscommunication) across the company [. . .] When we drilled down further into how departments were working together, we found that teams were often compromising their own objectives to fulfill other departments’ objectives.

This was building a feeling of scarcity, and the frustration levels were mounting.

But then he had the following conversation: 

So he set about creating new cross-functional teams that looked more like this:

Simon Harrow, Chief Customer Officer at iG04, shared with me how they restructured their teams—and the benefit he’s seen since then: 

Our solution was to formally bring together all the functions that customers would interact with. This created accountability for the customer experience across the functions and removed conflicting priorities when looking at operating models and the technology underpinning our capability.

This moves any issues from being within a company function to being centered on the customer. It also allows us to understand the impact of the problem across functions—where we can then prioritize activities and shape roadmaps with a holistic view of the customer impact.

Should you restructure to cross-functional teams?

Thirty percent of Fortune 500 firms already organize themselves around customer groups in cross-functional teams. But a reorg of your business functions isn’t right for everyone. A study quoted in the Harvard Business Review found that: 

• 69% of businesses structured around their customers, which operated in highly competitive markets had lower performance compared to their product-centric peers.
• Businesses that reorganized to be customer-focused who were operating in low-profitability industries (where customers don’t particularly value customization or responsiveness), performed 20% lower than companies whose structures were not aligned with customers.

So, a reorganization isn’t for everyone. It’s a big commitment that can take up to three years before you reap dividends. But in the right markets and for the right businesses, this approach can provide a real competitive advantage. 

McKinsey found that companies focused on customer journeys had a 50% wider gap in customer satisfaction than those that focused on touchpoints. Customer-focused structures can give businesses a distinct competitive advantage.

Moving toward cross-functional teams 

To restructure your organization, you’ll need buy-in from your senior management team. Having that CCO advocate will help. 

Still, as the adage goes, Rome wasn’t built in a day. And neither will your new customer-focused structure. For many businesses, changes happen in a stepwise, sometimes organic way over a few years, as was the case for Moross at Moo.

A way to curry favor with the C-suite for your cross-functional dreams is to show what’s possible when teams align. Dell’s Hayes offered a great example with site search reports, which can give you insights into trends, what people think you should sell, naming conventions, customer service pain points, misspellings etc. These insights could impact the product, digital experience, store locations, merchandisers, marketing, and customer service teams. 

But if you give that same information to each functional team, the way they plan improvements and prioritise may differ—leading to a confusing, disjointed experience for the customer. A cross-functional team means that insights from customer data are actioned consistently across the experience.

How do you set up a cross-functional, customer-focused team? 

Not every team in the company needs to be organized as a cross-functional team. Some may follow “channel and delivery” units (e.g., retail stores). Some disciplines will remain as functionally structured teams or “flow to work” groups, such as corporate support activities like HR.

Then you have the more fluid cross-functional teams, which can be organized around certain customer journeys or customer segments. There are a few key elements needed to create successful cross-functional teams:

Autonomy 

Your team needs to have all the skills to work on the end-to-end journey (e.g., engineering, product, marketing, etc). But don’t make your teams too big—after a certain point they become ineffective. Use Jeff Bezos’ “two-pizza rule”: If you need more than two pizzas to feed everyone on your team, your team is too big. 

Be accountable to KPIs 

Set KPIs and reward teams for achieving them—and let them decide how to achieve them. Nordstrom’s famous employee handbook has one rule: “Use your best judgment in all situations. There will be no additional rules.”

Their employees know that customer satisfaction is the main KPI, and this “handbook” helps reinforce their accountability. The expectation from the business is that they will act as they see fit to achieve their goals. 

Here’s an example of how Nilan Peiris, the VP of Growth at Transferwise, is setting up teams to be accountable:

Our performance marketing team (the team responsible for advertising on Facebook and Google) has a product manager and developers working within it [. . .] The performance marketing team can make changes to any part of the product that they believe will improve conversion from performance.

This focus on our customers and our KPIs gives us incredible focus and stops us from prioritizing abstract notions that do not matter, but the things that will make a difference to our customers. We have no roadmap meetings, no strategy sessions, our KPIs and teams give us clarity on where we should focus.

As we’ve got KPI ownership rather than product/code ownership, this works. Teams can work across the entire experience to move their KPIs.

This sounds great in theory, but when a team has 50 things they could do to improve their KPIs, which do they do first? If your cross-functional teams aren’t permanent and go back to their functional departments, they’re likely to prioritize elements that benefit their “home team.” 

A practical way to help teams prioritise is by using even-over statements. Pick one good thing that should take priority, even over another good thing (typically in conflict with one another). 

For example, customer satisfaction even over revenue, or security even over UX. Get your team to vote on their top three, with each person getting three votes. This helps the team set their priorities. 

James Robinson, Head of Conversion Rate Optimisation at Sofology, shares how setting priorities achieves the best outcome:  

I’ve proposed a whole raft of improvements to a customer account area in the past. Backed with good data and research, expecting it to be picked up almost immediately given the case.

Then, I found out that the systems that it sat on were old and unsupported, and there was a risk they could stop functioning at some point. The “customer-centric” priority was to do the work behind the scenes—failure would have been much worse than waiting a few more months for the improvements.

Give authority to make decisions 

It’s easy for teams to fall into the trap of consensus. As humans, we generally avoid conflict and are mostly happy to go along with the flow. However, this approach doesn’t always lead you to do the right things. 

Therefore, early on, it’s important to set out the who and how for team decisions. Priorities and KPIs help, but who has the ultimate say? 

At the very start of team formation, determine who has what decision-making power. When is someone required to get additional people involved? When shouldn’t decisions be made in isolation? When are multiple perspectives needed?

Below illustrates how this might look in reality: 

Delegating the decision-making power within the team means they’re more likely to listen to customer rather than internal stakeholders wants, as Peiris explains:

Our teams are autonomous and independent [. . .] no one can tell a team what to do. For example, we have a currencies team. It decides each quarter which currencies it’s going to launch. No one tells the team what currencies to launch.

Anyone can challenge the team on what it’s doing, and the team should have a rationale for explaining why it’s focussing where it is. What this means in practice isn’t anarchy—but empowering teams to listen to customers and not to “someone high up.

Conclusion

Getting everyone to care about customers can feel like a hard slog, but once people across the business start along this path—and the structure and behaviours are established—they’ll be no turning back.

The benefits to the customer and business can set your business apart, and you can finally challenge anyone who wants to do something based on a hunch, rather than what’s actually best for your customers.

The post How to Get Your Company to Really Care about Your Customers appeared first on CXL.

Sean Ellis coined the term “growth hacking” over a decade ago in 2010. Since then, the term has taken on a life of its own.

“Growth hacking” is the focus of dozens of books, new roles, new departments and teams, new methods of thinking, hundreds of articles, hundreds of guides, hundreds of webinars… you get the idea.

Yet, it still feels very elusive. High-growth companies simply have something most companies don’t, right?

Wrong. The truth is, they simply had a solid growth marketing process.

Growth process > Growth hacks

If you’re familiar with CXL, you know that we preach process over tactics to optimizers. Growth experts largely believe the same. One of my favorite quotes on the topic comes from Paul Graham of Y Combinator who once said…

Paul Graham, Y Combinator:

“Whenever you hear anyone talk about ‘growth hacks,’ just mentally translate it in your mind into ‘bullshit’.” (via How to Start a Startup)

Yet, marketing teams continue to make decisions based on what has worked in the past, what has worked for other people and what appears to be working for competitors.

In our State of Conversion Optimization Report, which many people in growth roles completed as well, we found that…

• Only 32% of small companies (less than 500 employees) say they have a documented, structured optimization process.
• Even at large companies, that number only increases to 42%.
• 26% of all companies meet with their optimization team “only when necessary”.

The takeaway is that process, though supported by the experts, is still not the norm. Rob Sobers of Varonis confirms…

Rob Sobers, Varonis:

“While traditional marketing teams might appear to operate like growth teams in terms of the channels they use (SEM, content marketing, email, etc.), many are run purely on intuition and conjecture, which can be poisonous.

Decisions about what actions to take, when to take them, and how much money to spend are made in the blind or based on what may have worked historically.” (via RobSobers.com)

Worse, the idea of golden “growth hacks” is still alive and well…

Growth without effort, growth without resources, growth without spending money. It’s a recurring theme.

Morgan Brown, co-author of the upcoming Hacking Growth, says it best…

Morgan Brown, Inman News:

“They look like they’re silver bullets, right? They’re full of unicorns and pixie dust and promises of like, ‘Hey, do these 9 things and you’ll get remarkable growth.’

No great company was ever built on the back of a listicle.” (via CXL Live)

You’re not going to find your next major growth breakthrough in a growth hacks listicle. But since a silver bullet that works for everyone all the time is so appealing, it doesn’t stop many people from looking.

As David Arnoux of Growth Tribe explains, the successful growth hacks you’ve read about from tech superstars are merely the result of a finely-tuned process…

David Arnoux, Growth Tribe:

“What people call a growth hack is usually running through as many experiments as possible until we find something beautiful that works perfectly. We call it the golden nugget, the silver bullet, the growth hack.

It’s that beautiful moment when you’ve found a perfectly working playbook that will help your company grow.” (via Growth Tribe)

Though, as Morgan explains, a major growth breakthrough is rare. Typically, it’s a game of continuous small wins that add up over time…

Morgan Brown, Inman News:

“It’s a feedback loop.

The growth process is designed to be a positive feedback loop, to find small wins and optimizations across the business and then compound those over time as fast as possible.” (via CXL Live)

So once you find that golden nugget, silver bullet that works perfectly, as David said, it’s back to the loop, back to the process.

It starts with the product

It goes without saying, that growth starts with the product. If you don’t have a validated product or business model yet, stop here. Do not pass go, until this is complete.

You can’t growth hack your way into problem-solution fit or product-market fit, so really focus on that first.

Make sure you have a good understanding of your value proposition, cost structure, revenue streams, customer segments, etc. before continuing.

Ideation x Execution = ROI

The ROI of a growth process is ideation multiplied by execution. If you have a great idea, but it’s executed poorly, it isn’t working to its full potential. If you have a bad idea that’s executed flawlessly, it won’t work.

That’s why growth processes are designed to make both ideation and execution smarter and more efficient.

Of course, there a lot of different growth processes. Just as there are a lot of different conversion research models you could use or prioritization models you could use.

Here’s Growth Tribe’s G.R.O.W.S. process…

And the process Brian Balfour teaches…

And the process Morgan teaches…

But, you’ll notice that they all follow a similar flow…

1. Come up with ideas.
2. Prioritize those ideas.
3. Plan out the execution of the highest priority idea.
4. Execute the highest priority idea.
5. Analyze the outcome of the idea.

Then, you start over again, armed with the knowledge from your previous experiment.

You’ll see how steps three and four focus on smarter execution while steps one, two and five focus on smarter ideation.

Set the goals and the timeframe.

Let’s back up a bit first, though. Before you launch a growth process, you’ll want to consider your goals and your timeframe for each goal. That starts with setting your objectives and key results (OKRs).

There are a lot of different ways to approach this, depending on your business model and your goals. But I really like a concept that Drew Sanocki of Empire Growth Group teaches in CXL Institute’s Ecommerce Growth Masterclass…

Drew Sanocki, Empire Growth Group:

“We get caught in tactical manoeuvre hell, where we look at all these tactical opportunities and get stressed out about optimizing this entire thing when it really only boils down to these three multipliers.

And the power of these three is that improving any one of them is good, but if you can improve all three, the results multiply.

For example, in a year, do you think you can increase your retention by 30%? Can you increase your average order size by 30%? Can you increase your total number of customers by 30%?

Any one of these in isolation, I think, is really doable. The trouble people get in is when they try to find the silver bullet that will double your total number of customers in a year. It’s really hard.

But if you look at only moving each of these only 30%, you’re going to more than double the business.” (via Ecommerce Growth Masterclass)

So, to run with what Drew teaches, you could set three key results that, when multiplied together, would double your revenue. Drew talks about this in the sense of ecommerce (number of customers, AOV and retention), but you’ll find that the formula works for a lot of other business models as well.

Hyper-focused growth cycles

Now you have three core goals for the year. Then, you introduce the sprint mentality. If you break the year into four 90-day, hyper-focused growth cycles, you have more than enough time to focus on each of the three multipliers.

So, why 90 days?

In a value packed, podcast episode, Brian Dean and Noah Kagan talked about Todd Herman’s 90-Day Year concept. Brian explains…

The 90 days is perfect because you can’t really procrastinate but it’s also not absolute panic.

It’s a short enough timeframe that you feel the pressure, but not so short that reaching your goal feels impossible. If you don’t hit your “annual size” goal in 90 days, you have the fourth 90-day period to fall back on.

But the beauty of combining these two concepts is that you aren’t dealing with “annual size” goals. You have the Drew Sanocki-inspired multiplier goals, which are, by design, more easily attainable.

(Note: Drew suggests starting with the retention goal first.)

It can help to be laser-focused for a full three months, but you can alternatively focus on all three core goals throughout the year. Just ensure each new idea added to your backlog (more on this shortly) is tagged with the correct multiplier.

Your tempo and resources

You’ll also want to ask yourself…

• How many experiments will you run per week?;
• What resources do you have available to you during this timeframe?

As Sean Ellis, co-author of Hacking Growth, explains, that second question is vital…

Sean Ellis, GrowthHackers:

“Some growth experiments can be implemented by the marketing team, others by product managers and others require deep engineering skills.

Balancing the workload of top priority experiments across different teams makes it much easier to hit our tempo goal.

While our goal is to launch at least three tests per week, we generally shoot for five tests per week. That way if we hit roadblocks on some tests, we still hit the tempo goal.” (via GrowthHackers)

Be realistic from the beginning about what resources you’ll need and what resources will actually be available to you so that you can choose growth ideas and execute accordingly. There’s nothing wrong with being ambitious, but you want to have your strategy supported by reality.

Come up with experiment ideas.

Now, you can move on to ideation. It’s the first step of the G.R.O.W.S. process you saw above…

David Arnoux, Growth Tribe:

“The first step is G, gather ideas.

It’s important because this is where you’re gonna create a huge backlog of every idea that you and your company has on how to improve this one metric.

We like to use this technique called mindstorming where basically everybody comes up with ideas separately and then during a meeting or online, we bring them all together.” (via Growth Tribe)

What’s great about the method David describes is that it doesn’t rely on the traditional brainstorming model, which is surprisingly ineffective. You’ve definitely been part of the traditional model. A whole team around a desk, calling out ideas on the spot.

Instead, David’s mindstorming has everyone come up with the ideas separately and then bring them together (and build on them) in a meeting.

It’s important, though, that this step is done as a group. As Sean explains, problems arise quite quickly when only one person is responsible for ideation…

Sean Ellis, GrowthHackers:

“If one person is responsible for all ideation, they generally run out of ideas within a few weeks (at least ideas worth testing). Even within a dedicated team, ideation can become ad hoc and stagnate without a process in place that acts as a springwell of new ideas.

To jump start fresh ideas for growing GrowthHackers.com we opened the ideation process up to a much broader team.

Naturally this includes everyone on the growth team, but we also invited our interns, engineers, salespeople, support people and more.” (via GrowthHackers)

Opening ideation up to the entire team can provide you with new perspectives. It’s the same reason copywriters turn to sales teams and support teams when they conduct their research.

Introducing… the Growth Team

But let’s back up a bit to the idea of a growth team. What exactly goes into a growth team? Is it the same thing as a marketing team? Morgan explains it really well…

Morgan Brown, Inman News:

“At the heart of it is a new organizational structure called the growth team. Lots of companies are experimenting with growth teams because they’re cross-functional, they break down these silos and they help drive experimentation and learning at a faster rate by pulling together really smart people from across the organization.

This is the original Facebook growth team:

• PM Growth
• Analyst
• Growth Engineer
• Digital Marketers
• Specialist(s)

Lots of people use it as a template. You have a product manager, an engineer, data scientists… you have leadership there.” (via CXL Live)

The big takeaway here is that it isn’t just digital marketers. So a traditional marketing team and a growth team are not one and the same. You have growth-minded experts from a number of different areas of the company.

This speaks to how modern teams are changing. We are slowly emerging from our narrow silos, according to Morgan…

Morgan Brown, Inman News:

“I think for too long optimizers have been put into a narrow silo, a narrow bucket. Just worried about landing pages and funnels and interfaces and not being turned loose on the entire product.

I think what growth hacking is is taking that optimization, that experimentation mindset and taking it far beyond any website or funnel and applying it to the entire product and the entire business model itself.” (via CXL Live)

Forming a growth team or even getting the whole company involved with ideation starts with a culture of experimentation. I recommend reading this article by Alex Birkett if you are trying to foster that type of culture.

Creating your backlog

Once you start collecting ideas, you’re going to need a place to store them. This is often called a backlog. Sometimes they’re in Excel…

(You can grab this template by clicking here. To change the drop-down items, highlight the cells and select “Data validation…”)

Sometimes they’re in a third-party tool, like Projects…

Note that Projects has prioritization, which we’ll get to shortly, built-in.

In the Excel template, you’ll see that I label ideas based on product, multiplier and channel. Each tool you come across will likely do things differently. For example, Projects asks you to pick a growth lever…

You’ll also notice the tags section. This all speaks to the importance of personalization. You might label ideas in your backlog based on multiplier, channel, product, stage of the funnel, growth lever, etc. Choose what works for you and your team.

Filling your backlog

When you’re first looking to fill your backlog, I recommend going through the full conversion research process. (You can learn how we do it at CXL by reading about the ResearchXL model here.) This is another example of how growth and optimization overlap and work together.

Beyond that, you’ll need to rely on your team for constant ideation. Of course, that can slow down as busy teams get, well, busier. Sean explains what they did at GrowthHackers to keep ideation going…

Sean Ellis, GrowthHackers:

“After the ideation started to slow down, we decided to add a leaderboard to celebrate the people who were generating the most ideas. The leaderboard re-energized the ideation process, so that we are now adding about 2 – 3X more ideas per week than we can test.

Therefore, we are continuing to grow our backlog of hundreds of ideas.” (via GrowthHackers)

Prioritize your experiment ideas.

So now you have a massive backlog of ideas. What do you do with those dozens or even hundreds of ideas? As David explains, the next step is to prioritize them…

David Arnoux, Growth Tribe:

“The second part is R for ranking those ideas, prioritizing them.

To do that, we use prioritization frameworks. They allow you to, in a semi-scientific way, allocate scores to each idea so we find out which one has the highest score and is the one that we want to start experimenting with right now.” (via Growth Tribe)

This is what the number beside my ideas in Projects is, a prioritization score. If you recall, they have you rank the idea based on impact, confidence and ease. This is called the ICE model, but there are others…

• PIE: Potential, Importance, Ease;
• Hotwire’s method.;
• PXL, our method.

ICE and PIE are simple and commonly used by tools, making them more accessible. However, they are subjective, especially when you have the entire team submitting ideas.

For example, a colleague might consistently overestimate the potential of his ideas while another might consistently underestimate the potential of his ideas. A colleague might think all of her ideas will be easier to implement than they really are while another colleague might think all of her ideas will be harder to implement than they really are.

As you can imagine, serious consistency and objectivity issues can arise quite quickly.

At the end of the day, you’ll want to choose a prioritization model that works for you and your team. Aim for it to be as objective and customizable (e.g. perhaps branding is super important to you right now or the PPC channel) as possible.

Creating your experiment doc

So, what happens when you prioritize your ideas and you’ve selected an idea to start with? According to David, it’s time to outline your experiment design so you nail the execution…

David Arnoux, Growth Tribe:

“The third part is O for outlining and experiment design.

That’s basically the part where we take our highest ranked ideas and we design an experiment which we’ll execute to verify whether that was a great idea or just a really bad one.

To outline an experiment, we use an experiment sheet. This experiment sheet has four parts: what you believe, how you will verify it, what you will measure, and what conditions need to be met to say whether you were right or wrong with your assumption.” (via Growth Tribe)

An experiment sheet or an experiment doc should outline…

• The objective you’re serving;
• Your hypothesis;
• Your start / end dates;
• The metrics you’ll be using;
• The pages that will be affected;
• Who you’re targeting;
• What the variations will look like;
• Your analysis and conclusion;
• The next iterations / steps.

Here’s an experiment doc example from Morgan, which I really recommend. The idea is that you’ve…

• It really thought through the execution of the experiment;
• It considered the external factors;
• And it created something that anyone looking back on this experiment will be able to use.

Creating your hypothesis

When you’re putting together an experiment doc, one of the first things to consider is the hypothesis. You’ll have to take your idea from the backlog and turn it into a real hypothesis to explore. Morgan has some sage advice…

Morgan Brown, Inman News:

“If you create a growth process and throw a bunch of garbage into it, you get garbage out.

Hypothesis quality dictates the impact and the performance of this growth process. They have to be data- and evidence-based, they have to be testable, they have to be defensible.” (via CXL Live)

Here’s the formula Craig Sullivan, a veteran optimizer, uses…

We believe that doing [A] for people [B] will make outcome [C] happen. We’ll know this when we see data [D] and feedback [E].

And the formula Drew uses…

If successful, VARIABLE will increase by IMPACT because ASSUMPTIONS.

So, your hypothesis might look something like this…

By reducing distractions on the product page, our target audience will better understand our products and take the logical next step (purchasing). We’ll know this by observing revenue per visitor.

Experiments should be designed in a way that means you will learn something concrete, regardless of the outcome. If your hypothesis is not proven successful and the experiment is considered merely time and energy wasted, you’ve done something wrong.

Run the experiment.

Finally, the fun stuff. As David (and Rihanna) put it, this is the work, work, work step…

David Arnoux, Growth Tribe:

“The next part of the process is the W.

It’s the work, work, work, get shit done. This is really the part where you see the difference between that highly competitive company or team and the one that comes back two weeks later with excuses.” (via Growth Tribe)

More or less, this is the part where you do what you said you were going to do in your experiment doc. But, there are a few things to consider.

1. Read about smoke testing to save yourself (and your developers / engineers) a lot of grief. You’ll be able to validate your ideas quicker while consuming less resources.
2. Be aware of external factors that are at play and that could be influencing the results of your experiments. Do what you can to limit them, but know that you can’t eliminate them. This article on sample pollution will give you some ideas. Always add external factors to your experiment doc.
3. The more rapidly you can move through this growth process, the better. Consider high velocity testing / experimentation.
4. Experimentation is not synonymous with A/B testing. You can run an experiment without running a test. However, that doesn’t mean that your experiments should never include testing. Take advantage of it if you can, but only when it makes sense.

Analyze the results.

After the experiment has concluded, you’ll of course want to analyze the results. For David and his team, this is the last part of the process…

David Arnoux, Growth Tribe:

“The last part of the G.R.O.W.S. loop is actually one of the most important, but it’s one of the ones where people spend the least time. It’s the S, to study the results of your experiment.

Now, what tends to happen is we look at the hard, quantitative data of our experiment, but what’s really important is to look at the qualitative reasons why an experiment won or failed.

This is how we can learn more about our customers and our product and how we can make our next experiments even stronger.” (via Growth Tribe)

Here are some questions you might ask of your experiment…

• Did you execute the experiment properly?
• If your hypothesis was incorrect, why?
• Would the results be different if you segmented the data?
• Should you optimize the experiment and run it again?
• If your hypothesis was correct, why?
• What can you take away from the experiment to run smarter future experiments?

If an idea works, optimize it and double down on it. How might you be able to apply what you’ve learned from the success elsewhere?

If an idea doesn’t work, determine whether it’s worth optimizing and trying again, or if you should move on. But don’t get too attached to an idea. If it’s just not working, know when to let go and move on. Speed is, largely, the name of the game.

Weekly growth meetings

Every Monday (or your favorite day of the week), meet with your growth team to discuss the previous week as well as the upcoming week. You’ll want to cover…

• How many experiments you were able to run last week;
• How many scheduled experiments weren’t run last week;
• New learnings from concluded tests;
• How you’re performing against your OKRs;
• What experiments you’ll run next.

Morgan has created a great weekly growth meeting agenda template that you can steal. Please don’t be the type of growth marketer that meets with her team “only when necessary”.

Trends over time

Over the long-term, you’ll want to ask yourself…

• Are your hypotheses getting more accurate?
• Are you getting more wins?
• Are the quality of your insights improving?
• Are you running more tests in a week?

Chart this data over time to see how your growth process is improving (or not). The longer it runs, the more efficient and smarter it should become.

Archive and distribute the learnings.

After reflecting on your experiment, you’ll no doubt record what you’ve learned in the experiment doc. That’s half the battle! Approximately 22% of the people who responded to the 2016 State of Conversion Optimization Report said they don’t archive results at all.

Morgan clearly explains the need for a central experiment doc repository…

Morgan Brown, Inman News:

“Learning must be accessible and clear, whether it’s in a wiki, whether it’s in a shared Google Doc. But too often test results and experiments end up lost in an email thread or missing on some Google Drive.

And if the team members can’t go back and look at a test result and learn from it, well, then did it ever even happen? They’re starting from zero.” (via CXL Live)

Why You Should Archive

A well-maintained, easily accessible, easily searchable archive is important for a few reasons…

• You’ll be able to create clearer, more robust reports for internal distribution.
• You’ll avoid running the same experiment twice or learning the same lessons over and over again. (It happens, especially on high velocity teams.)
• You’ll be able to bring new hires up to speed quickly.
• You’ll run smarter tests in the future.

Note that Brian has a “Systemize” step in his growth process that you saw above…

There are two ways we can systemize. We try to systemize as much as we can with technology and automate things. Certain things we can’t automate. Certainly things in content marketing and stuff just require a human involved, and for those things we write playbooks.

You would automate or create playbooks for the same reasons.

We’ve written an entire article on the art of archiving results, so I’ll leave it at that.

Why you should distribute

Distributing your newly acquired insights is equally important as archiving, though. You want to share your learnings company-wide for a few reasons…

1. To prove the value of your growth process and get buy-in.
2. To ensure your insights can be used by other people in other departments.

There are so many resources out there for presenting data and insights in a persuasive, meaningful way. If you’re presenting A/B test results, I recommend reading this. For everything else, I recommend reading through the lessons here.

Conclusion

This growth process can work for any type of business and any function of marketing as long as you’re purposeful and diligent. And, of course, as long as you’re willing to shake that growth hack addiction.

Here’s what you need to remember…

1. Validate your product and business model before launching a growth process.
2. Choose a repeatable, data-driven process over throwing tactics at the wall.
3. The ROI of your growth process is ideation multiplied by execution.
4. Set the goals and the timeframe.
5. Come up with experiment ideas.
6. Prioritize your experiment ideas.
7. Run the experiment.
8. Analyze the results.
9. Archive and distribute the learnings.

The post The Growth Marketing Process: Stop Looking For The Magic Pill appeared first on CXL.

No-code and low-code tools are on the rise, with thousands of businesses and makers turning to a faster and cheaper way to test, validate, and build out their ideas. Leading the way, you have companies such as Zapier, Webflow, and Airtable transforming the way we work. 

As the reliance on these tools continue to grow, so too does the opportunity for technical and non-technical marketers alike to gain an edge and advance their marketing skill set. Marketers and businesses who take advantage of no-code and low-code now will be in position to reap the rewards. Those who ignore the shift will be passed by. 

So, as a marketer, what skills should you learn now to set yourself up for future success? For businesses, what’s the most effective way to approach building applications and software using no-code? We’ll take a look in this article. 

No-code vs low-code and why the distinction matters 

In theory, no-code tools are just that—tools that require zero coding. But many no-code tools require some knowledge of coding to get the most out of the software or app. Low-code tools on the other hand, are by their very nature technical and do require some coding ability. 

Let’s take a look at a few examples. 

No-code: Zapier allows you to quickly build custom automations without writing a single line of code.

Low-code: While the payment processor Stripe, has integrations with other no-code tools, the reality is, you can’t get far with their functionality unless you know how to code. Mastering Excel or Airtable also requires you know formulas as well. 

Hybrid: The popular CMS Webflow has done an excellent job branding themselves as no-code, but without some technical knowledge of HTML and CSS, for example, you’re limited to what you can build. 

If you only know the basics of no-code, you’re at the mercy of the rest of your team. Instead of bugging your devs to help with basic tasks in Webflow because you haven’t learned HTML, why not spend a few hours teaching yourself what you need to make the changes yourself? 

No… No-code won’t make developers obsolete 

With no-code becoming commonplace, there’s a lot of discussion around how much no-code will impact developers. While that’s outside the scope of this article, no-code in many cases is beneficial for developers. 

First, no-code tools have to be written by those who know code, so as long as no-code tools remain popular, developers will always have an opportunity for work.

Second, as more marketers begin to embrace no-code to mockup and produce MVPs, developers can spend less time working on projects that don’t move the needle. 

For the developers, I think [no-code] is a great thing for them. They won’t be wasting their time on projects that don’t work. People should have more conviction around the thing they’re trying to build before they speak to the developer.

Ben Tossel founder of Makerpad told The Future is No Code.

In a similar light, there’s often talk that AI is going to replace copywriters and content marketers. While that may be the case in the future, good marketers find a way to deliver value regardless of the changes in tools. 

“I don’t think coding will become less important in the future than it is today […] and this is the more important part—coding is for building custom things,” reflects Tomi Mester of Data36.com 

The pros and cons of no-code 

As with any trend in marketing and business, no-code shouldn’t be viewed as a magic bullet. Just as having a chatbot or launching a podcast isn’t going to triple your sales, no-code tools aren’t going to transform the way you do business overnight. Despite the many benefits, no-code does have limitations. 

Predictably, many criticize and judge those that use “no code” tools. While they come with tradeoffs, it’s inevitable that more products will be built — or at least MVP’d — without writing code, including by programmers that can code.

Ryan Hoover founder of ProductHunt. 

Let’s take a look: 

Pros

Easy to learn

“For non technical folks like me, it’s a way to create and also a way to get some independence so we don’t have to ask devs for everything,” says Corey Haines, creator of Swipe Files, which he launched using no-code tools. 

It’s easy to become ‘good enough’ quickly—no coding required. Compared to investing 3-6 months of extensive study to learn a new programming language, you can get familiar and proficient with no-code tools in just a few hours. 

Want to build a landing page that then deploys a 5-day email sequence for pre-selling an upcoming product? You can use Carrd and ConvertKit. Need to mockup a sales page for your copy? You can use Webflow to see how your copy looks on the page. 

What you see is what you get

If you’ve used WordPress or Medium, you’re familiar with the term WYSIWYG. No-code tools give you the ability to see and create your work visually—what you see is what you get.

For testing and validating ideas, there’s no need to know how the tool works, you can just drag, drop, and tweak until you’ve reached your desired outcome. Will it be perfect? Unlikely. But at least you have a foundation to share with your design or development team. 

Building with no-code gives you the opportunity to see first hand how a finished product will look, rather than guessing, or going back and forth updating your code. 

UX designers have the biggest opportunity, because they are able to bridge this gap of: I designed it, but now you have to go send someone else to build it or send this design to someone else to build it.

Tara Reed founder of Apps Without Code told The Future is No-Code,

Using no-code tools such as Figma, marketers can design and prototype their ideas. A mockup in Figma is far more valuable than a “hey I have an idea” message on Slack. 

More forgiving of mistakes

In addition to allowing you to create easily, no-code tools also have the added benefit of being more forgiving of mistakes. 

Making a mistake while editing a PHP template in WordPress can crash your site. With a no-code landing page builder such as Unbounce or Leadpages, there’s very little risk in trying different approaches to your design and build. 

Quick prototyping—instead of weeks of development investment—also makes it cognitively easier to abandon bad ideas: “If you build something in a couple of hours, the emotional attachment might not be as strong, so it’s easier to let go,” says Emil Lorento, Head of Growth at Voiceflow. 

No-code tools create a testing mindset given how little time and low stakes required to bring your ideas to life. 

Cons 

As with any part of your tech stack, there are tradeoffs. No-code is no exception. 

Reliance on no-code tools

Using no-code tools means you’re relying on someone else’s vision. If they make changes to their product, you’re stuck with them. If you need additional customization, too bad. Those limitations also limit the available solutions—and your professional growth.

I believe that understanding code has other, significant benefits, that give “coding marketers” advantages which they might not achieve by mastering no-code tools. Learning a programming language teaches marketers problem solving, abstract thinking, and, last but not least – the underlying mechanism of the tools and product that power their day-to-day…Maybe, at some point, marketers will be able to get the same level of freedom with no-code tools, but for now, I believe that as long as you’re limited by your tools, you’re not really free.

Dan Carmel of Tshaped.io

A significant amount of no-code software relies on integrations with other tech tools to work as intended. A change in terms of service, price, or even a tool going out of business could affect your workflow. 

“As soon as you encounter that inevitable edge case required by your app, all of a sudden you don’t have the building blocks out-of-the-box to implement that specific piece of business logic required,” says Declan Healey on Codebots.

Just as it’s recommended to build your audience using platforms you control, such as having your own email list, as opposed to social media only, there is risk of relying too much on any one tool to run or market your business. Having some knowledge of code allows you more flexibility in case a tool no longer works or functions as intended.

Limited in functionality 

No-code tools have limited functionality.

Eventually, you’ll likely need to work with your development team to build a more sophisticated solution for scale. While no-code can in some cases get you all the way, it should be viewed as just part of the process for most.

If you’re using no-code tools primarily to validate and test your ideas, this isn’t a major concern—they are great at increasing the rate of experimentation. But as you continue developing your project (or product) using no-code tools, know it comes with greater risks and restrictions.

Sure, you can build your website with WordPress and Elementor. You can analyze your website with Google Analytics. You can run your marketing automations with Zapier. Point-and-click tools are great and work well in most cases — because in most cases you’ll have to solve standard problems.

Tomi Mester of Data36

With no-code tools there is some risk of falling into the sea of sameness. The same issue can occur when using a template for your website theme. Because no-code tools are accessible to everyone, it can be a struggle to differentiate what you build.  

Mester continues:

My website needs more or less the same back-end and front-end solutions as 99% of other websites out there… So, indeed, it makes no sense to start from scratch and build the very same HTML + CSS + JS + PHP solution that many people have built many times already. But if you want to create something unique, something non-standard, something truly innovative: you’ll have to code.

Tomi Mester of Data36

Working to improve your technical knowledge such as learning Python and Javascript can help you get more out of no-code tools and give you the ability to get the most out of whatever tools you use. 

How to get the most from no-code based on your skillset

Right now you may consider yourself a non-technical marketer, or you may be somewhere between a full stack technical marketer. No matter where you’re currently at, here’s what to do next. 

No-code for the non-technical marketer   

If you consider yourself a non-technical marketer, you have work to do.

To succeed today, marketers and general practitioners should get acclimated with the landscape of tools to know which tools are best for different tasks. The tools I’d recommend starting with are Carrd, Webflow, Glide, Zapier, and Bubble – these will provide a toolkit to build a variety of different types of apps and websites for different use-cases.

Seth Kramer creator of the No-code MBA

Not knowing how to code is no longer an excuse as to why you can’t build, test, and ship landing pages or UI markups. If you’re still turning to your dev or design team to transform every single idea into something more than text, you have to improve.

Start with tools such as Zapier and IFFT and experiment with various automations to improve your workflow and productivity. If you’re feeling ambitious, mock-up some marketing designs in Figma. While Figma in itself won’t make you a world-class designer, it will help you better communicate how you envision the final product.  

If you’re a content manager, you could set up a basic automation to have your blog posts auto post in Slack to let your team know every time a piece of content goes live.

We post copies of our social media posts into a dedicated Slack channel… Each post notifies the whole company. That way, the whole company sees our social posts in real time, and is encouraged to like/comment/share—IMMEDIATELY after the posts are published.

TJ Kelly of FansRaise shared with Databox

If you’re a copywriter, instead of just sharing your copy in a Google doc for review, build a landing page with a tool like Carrd and show your team how the copy looks in a live environment.  

Maybe you’re a marketer looking to apply to apply for a new job. Instead of sending in your resume and hoping for the best, build out a landing page and host your resume there. Showing you have some technical knowledge is infinitely more impressive than listing you’re “proficient in excel.”

“I tell every marketer they should use Webflow, simply for the fact that it’ll allow for more creativity, experimentation, speed, and independence,” says Haines. 

If you’re a semi-technical marketer

If you’ve ever created automations in Google Tag manager or have some coding experience, you fall under the semi-technical marketer category. As you progress in your no-code knowledge, there will be times that require for you to learn more “technical” skills’ such as database structures.  

The most helpful technical skill to come in with when starting no-code is database design. If you’re building an app, you’ll want to make sure you structure your database in a way that makes sense. This can definitely be learned as you go, but is helpful to know beforehand.

Seth Kramer creator of the No-code MBA

While no-code tools are often used to create apps, websites, and landing pages, there’s opportunity to enhance how you view and understand your analytics as well. 

As shared on the Krit blog, Steve Shulman used no-code to develop an analytics product, known as B3i, using two Excel workbooks for top-tier universities.

One of the workbooks actually takes in data about the current economic and political climates and runs different scenarios on how those factors may affect your bottom line. The other workbook is slightly less complex and is focused solely on university data. Eventually, Steve had enough sample data to build out a comprehensive spreadsheet that he started showing to his clients and getting feedback on whether they’d be interested in using a similar product.

Using tools such as Airtable for example, you can also turn raw data into actionable insights.

Conclusion 

As no-code continues to gain momentum, it’s growing increasingly clear that having some technical knowledge can help you use no-code tools to get a raise, establish the value of your current role, or even improve the way you collect and analyze your analytics. 

While not knowing how to code or relying on your team used to be acceptable in the past, the lower barrier to use these tools no longer leaves you an excuse. What used to require months of learning now requires just a small step. 

While you’ll still have to delegate and rely on your dev and design colleagues, the best marketers today will continue raising their standard. As Webflow, elegantly stated, “the no code movement rests upon the fundamental belief that technology should enable and facilitate creation, not be a barrier to entry.”

Wise marketers will take note.

The post No-Code is Here to Stay: What’s the Play for Marketers? appeared first on CXL.

Back in 2016, I read a book called Sprint by Jake Knapp, founder of Google Ventures. Knapp talks about focusing on only the essential activities for shipping new products and testing new ideas.

As advocated in the book, I felt the idea of using restraint would help me quickly execute on new ideas. And so, the concept for a digital PR service was born. The goal was simple: validate demand or move on.

Using my existing skills and resources (including an old domain name), I tested a productized digital PR offer. I put together a one-page website, a list of 100 people to reach out to, and a cold email script that would make seasoned sales professionals cringe.

To my surprise, I closed my first client in under two weeks. Another three came on board 45 days later. My service startup quickly grew and became a platform to identify new problems we could solve for clients.

About 18 months later, we pivoted our messaging to evolve beyond digital PR. Today, Grizzle is a full-service content marketing and SEO agency that provides B2B and SaaS companies end-to-end services.

Here, I’ll show you the journey we took to finding our place in the market by testing, pivoting, and re-pivoting our serving offerings and value propositions so you can grow your agency faster, without fewer wrong turns.

Why—or why not—pivot your agency service offering?

These days, many agencies start as a lean operation. For example, KlientBoost started out as a small Google AdWords (now Google Ads) agency, run entirely by founder Jonathan Dane, and a designer—his first full-time hire:

Now, KlientBoost is a $750,000+ MRR agency with over 70 employees, serving clients an array of paid media services with a widely recognized brand:

Starting as a lean operation allows you to build processes in a manageable way, serve clients without burning out, and generate cash flow early. To do this, you need to offer a specific service to a particular group of people (i.e. “niche down”).

But eventually, you’ll come to a crossroads where expanding is an attractive—and lucrative—option. You’ll end up pivoting not only your service offering but the people you serve and your value proposition.

If your network has expressed an interest in additional services, pivoting is a no-brainer. When clients ask, “Do you do X?,” it’s a good sign they trust you enough to take care of fixing that problem, too.

Naturally, pivoting (or expanding) is an option if you’re hungry for growth. For example, a productized service allows you to start quickly. But if you’re looking to build a $10 million agency, you’ll need to expand several times throughout your business journey.

Inversely, if you’re using the agency model to fund another startup or product, you should probably keep things lean. Pivoting and expanding will distract you from your true goal.

If expanding services is the right move, what should you offer?

3 ways to find proposition pivot or expansion opportunities

1. Conduct client development interviews.

My agency wouldn’t have expanded beyond digital PR if it weren’t for early client conversations. Churn rate was high for a service that many organizations saw as a “nice to have.” I knew we needed to change things up to survive. So, I got on the phone with existing clients and asked the question: What else are you struggling with at the moment?

Turns out, getting high-quality blog content delivered consistently was a big one. Luckily, we already did this as part of our digital PR offering and had already cemented trust. During our first discovery call, our client upsold themselves. In 30 minutes, Grizzle pivoted from a productized digital PR service to an SEO-focused content marketing agency.

Your existing clients trust you, but they won’t assume you can help them beyond your current mandate. It’s up to you to find the overlap between the services you provide, your capabilities (and those of your team), and your client’s challenges. It starts by asking clients the right questions.

It starts with a simple email. Invite clients to join you on a call, letting them know you’re looking to improve your services. If you feel it’s necessary, let them know you won’t be trying to sell them anything. It’s simply a fact-finding mission.

Go into the call with a handful of broad questions. The real gold lies by digging deeper into their responses with relevant follow-up questions. Here are three we use whenever we chat with our clients:

1. “First of all, it’s been a pleasure working with you for the last eight months. What do you feel is the biggest challenge we’ve helped you solve?” An additional objective for this call is to find out why clients invest in you. It’s easy to assume they work with you because of your deliverables. However, you don’t always see the impact you make behind the scenes.
2. “What other content marketing challenges are you facing?” (Replace “content marketing” with whatever your agency offers.) This question is where the gold lies. You’ll hear a lot of objective responses (and “jobs to be done”), but your follow-up questions will uncover why these are important.
3. “If I found a service or solution to help you with [challenge], would it be something you’d evaluate?” I know this language sounds formal and stuffy, but high-ticket service sales cycles are long. Asking clients if they’d invest in a solution without understanding it doesn’t make sense. Evaluation, however, implies a journey of discovery. Most B2B buyers know this.

When asking follow-up questions, pull on relevant threads that will help you get the insight you need. For example, if a client says a challenge of theirs is “converting more users who visit product pages,” ask them what they currently do, what’s worked, and what hasn’t.

After three or four of these calls, you’ll likely start to see patterns in how to solve challenges using your capabilities. In our initial calls, we uncovered our clients were struggling not only with getting high-quality blog content, but the time it takes to edit and polish it and, if necessary, find a new supplier.

To solve this problem, we built out an end-to-end editorial capability to ensure content is polished before delivery. Content creation is the capability, but the bigger problem we solve is making sure that clients save time dealing with writers and providing feedback.

Much like our digital PR offering, we started with a lean operation:

• We used Google Sheets to manage content operations across all accounts, along with dashboards that each client had access to.
• We then used Zapier to allow these two sheets to “talk” to each other, meaning we could avoid gaps and delays in content delivery.

We decided to create the content in-house for the first few projects. Why? Because we wanted to document every aspect of the process before partnering with new freelance writers. This allowed us to guide and train new writers, while maintaining the level of quality that our clients had already come to expect.

You can apply this philosophy to any service. For example, you may design beautiful looking websites, but your clients want something that looks great and performs as a lead generator. You may need to expand your capabilities, but it’ll be worth the time or investment if you can consistently deliver on both needs.

2. Respond to shifting market priorities.

Interviewing your customers can reveal the priorities they’re aware of. However, as an agency, clients expect you to be knowledgeable about shifts in the market, new technologies, approaches, tactics, and methodologies.

Relying on client development alone will give you only part of the picture. You must constantly educate yourself on the shifts and changes within your market. This applies to new offers and how you execute what you already offer.

The former is simple. For example, after looking at the broader market, we saw that a service that helps marketers scale their video content was in demand. In the context of content marketing alone, these challenges would not have come up in our client interviews unprompted.

How you execute on existing services should also evolve. For UX agencies, one example is offering technical or UX writing services. Beautiful UI is no longer enough. How you communicate as a function of that design is a critical problem that you should aim to solve.

Here are some practical approaches to identifying shifting priorities:

1. Embedding yourself in social media. Listening to conversations among your peers is one of the fastest ways to find changes in the way they work. Sure, you shouldn’t take one person’s word as gospel. But if several people are expressing similar opinions (in relation to how something is being done), it’s worth paying attention.
2. Talk to other in-house practitioners. Outside of business development, outreach is an excellent opportunity to make friends with and learn from other in-house marketers, creatives, and senior decision-makers. For example, if you offer ad services to startups, make time to connect with in-house paid media specialists at larger companies. Bonus points if you can create a community that brings them together.
3. Learn from your competitors. Other agencies have likely done some of the hard work for you. The best agencies are continuously testing new approaches and methodologies. Don’t be afraid to learn from them, take their lead, and adapt to new ways of doing things.

When I first started my agency, I often compared myself to the competition. Now, I embrace the excellent work they do. For example, I recently had a call with Ryan Law, Director of Marketing at Animalz, a fellow content marketing agency:

Many old-school agency marketers might consider this as fraternizing with the enemy. But we have a lot in common, and I learned a lot from our conversation.

There’s a caveat to this advice: Competition is worth learning from only if they’re thought leaders in your space. Sacrificing your own methodologies just because someone is opinionated about their own may backfire. However, if they’re sharing new ways of improving upon your craft, it’s well worth listening.

There’s plenty of pie to go around. But, more importantly, your competitors are continually setting new standards for working. It’s your job to embrace, adopt, and build upon them.

3. Choose to expand vertically or horizontally.

Traditional advice tells us to niche down when starting an agency. While this is solid advice, eventually it will feel limiting. Especially as you approach a natural decline in growth.

To alleviate this problem, it’s common to take a broad leap by expanding in one of two ways:

1. Broadening out into different service offerings (e.g., “SEO” for a content marketing agency);
2. Serving new industries and markets.

While talking to existing clients and uncovering new problems yields additional services, expanding your capabilities means offering something entirely new.

A dramatic example of this is a software development agency offering UX and UI services. The two are interlinked but require wildly different capabilities and resources.

There’s no right or wrong answer to this, and for established agencies it requires a slow and deliberate plan. A safe approach is to partner with contractors and freelancers to fulfill new business. This way, you can focus on business development, communications, and awareness to build a sales pipeline and “validate” early demand.

The hard work is building out a team that can deliver on those services, along with leadership that can ensure a smooth operation and a stellar service for clients.

This approach takes a lot of work, so it’s worth taking a lean approach when starting. As I mentioned earlier, we started expanding our own services by doing things in-house, building out simple systems that allowed us to scale steadily without sacrificing quality.

For ambitious agencies, taking an MVP approach can unlock incredibly lucrative revenue streams. Start small, and then start hiring new talent to expand upon what you’ve started.

How to communicate new services to potential buyers

For agencies, getting new services to market can seem like a daunting task. I’ve found the simplest (and fastest) method is to craft highly specific offers.

By communicating the following, you can turn a list of vague services into crystal clear propositions:

1. Who the offer is for;
2. The problem the service solves;
3. What exactly the service is and how it works.

Let’s look back at my agency’s beginnings. Starting as a productized digital PR service, we solved a single problem for a specific audience: getting martech companies featured in marketing blogs.

Why this audience? Because that’s where my track record was at the time. Here’s what our very first landing page looked like in 2016:

This landing page wasn’t pretty and broke many copywriting rules in the book. However, it did communicate everything a potential client needed to know and was responsible for my first $9,000 in monthly recurring revenue. As a solo-founder at the time, that was huge.

When crafting offers like this, we rely on a messaging framework called SCQA, which stands for:

• Situation. Set the stage by demonstrating you understand your prospects current reality. Lead with a statement that your audience ultimately agrees with. Define a problem that’s either top of mind or one that they’re constantly aiming to overcome.
• Complication. What are the hurdles that prevent them from overcoming this problem? This is your chance to present them with cold hard facts, which are most powerful when accompanied by third-party statistics and data.
• Question. Now it’s time to release some of that tension, and bring existing thoughts to the forefront. Your question is simply another way of stating, “How do I overcome this?”
• Answer. Your offer, value proposition, and call to action.

Let’s dissect our guest blogging offer against the above model. Here, we outline the situation:

As a marketing leader growing a B2B organization targeting other marketers, you’ll be more than familiar with the challenge of utilizing content marketing to capture a wider audience and discover business opportunities. According to a HubSpot survey, 36% of marketers believed the biggest challenge of all was creating engaging content in the first place.

Not the best paragraph in the world, but it gets the audience nodding. Why? Because I used the exact language spoken by marketing executives (despite the apparent buzzwords). From here, I touch upon a simple but powerful complication:

When marketing a B2B company solving a marketing challenge, you’re faced with an overwhelming array of choices. The amount of marketing options available can be confusing and distracting. Yet one thing is clear: content marketing is important. In fact, 76% of marketers plan to produce more content in 2016 compared to 2015 (Content Marketing Institute). 

The problem is, only 30% of those marketers believe their organizations are effective at content marketing in the first place.

Back in 2016, not everyone knew where to focus their content marketing activities, and fewer were pleased with the results. These statistics present facts, but painful ones. Now’s our chance to set the stage for our solution:

So, how do you produce content that’s proven to engage and expand your audience, generate opportunities, build high quality backlinks – all while positioning yourself as a thought leader at the same time?

The above question sets the stage in two ways. First, it aims to read our audience’s mind. It could have simply said, “How do you produce content that gets results?” and had the same effect.

But it’s in the specificity that draws curiosity. Generating backlinks and establishing thought leadership are two common content marketing objectives. By presenting an approach that achieves these, we build anticipation and draw the reader toward the answer: our solution.

I know, the copy is terrible. But the problem, value proposition, and offer are clear. While this follows a simple long-form copy structure, there are plenty of other ways to lay out the information your audience needs to make a decision.

The purpose of your offer is to “land and expand.” Attract new clients to start a commercial relationship. Time and time again, I’ve found that reaching out to prospects with a broad offer fails to get the conversation going. Create an offer to solve a specific problem, show clients you’re a reliable partner, and nurture accounts over time.

What to do when your pivot doesn’t work

At the end of 2019, I noticed an increasing shift toward organic marketing in the ecommerce and consumer technology space. People like Web Smith from 2PM, and others in the D2C space, were advocating and sharing examples of brands who used content to build organic audiences. After some initial digging, there was a clear opportunity to offer our methodology to this market.

Expanding into a new market was exciting. Not only because I’m fascinated by consumer brands, but the opportunity to make an impact was huge. Competition, at an initial glance, is far lower than the current B2B environment.

Long story short, penetrating this market was challenging. After a few months, we realized that not only did we have zero track record in this market, but we didn’t truly understand their motivations. Many of our ideal target accounts (in terms of size, number of employees, and marketing team structure) still prioritized performance marketing over other activities.

When conducting a post-mortem, it was clear we expanded too early. There’s still plenty of opportunity in a space where we have a strong track record, plenty of results, and great logos to organically carry us forward.

So, we “un-pivoted.” It was a tough decision, as we spent a lot of work researching, developing offers, and producing our messaging. But to expand successfully, we’d need to dedicate ourselves to in-depth customer development, persona conversations, and perhaps take on some projects for free (but only if you have a limited track record in the new space you’re looking to expand into).

The biggest mistake was ignoring our own advice. We should’ve started by sprinting a handful of specific offers to this audience. This would have given us the feedback we needed much earlier.

If you’ve made significant changes to your value proposition and overall positioning—and you don’t see results—take the time to evaluate why this might be before deciding what to do next. 

When we conducted our post-mortem, we aimed to answer the following questions:

• Why do we feel this isn’t working?
• What go-to-market activity have we already tried?
• What is the data from those activities telling us?
• What go-to-market activity could we try?
• To commit to this change, what do we need to do?
• Is there any publicly available data that can help answer these questions?
• If we need to un-pivot, how would we do it?

The answers to these questions will help you decide whether to press forward or rollback. There’s no single clear-cut approach to this. You’ve got to figure out what’s right for the business, and what your immediate priorities are.

For us, that priority was the sales pipeline. We couldn’t grow to where we wanted to go without increased revenue. So we went back to a proven approach.

Other warning signs included a lack of responses to our high-performing outreach campaigns, along with the fact that new content wasn’t performing well. All-in-all, the message we were putting out to the world didn’t match the needs of the audience.

This philosophy applies to the service offers we talked about earlier. Only this time, the consequences aren’t as harsh. You can test an offer, review the feedback, and then pivot or move on quickly. It took us a lot of trial-and-error, but until we’re ready to expand into broader markets, this experimental methodology is the one we stick to.

Conclusion

For my agency, our journey has come full-circle. We started by offering something that clients want. But the further we moved away, the more we realized the need to go back. Funnily, we now use our very first offer as a method to acquire new clients.

Specific offers are an entry point for new business. They may not generate the largest deals, but they certainly get your foot in the door. Do a damn good job, and you’ll develop those deals into bigger accounts over time.

All clients want from you are the results you promise and a supplier they can rely on for years. It starts by proving you’re the exact partner they’re looking for.

The post How to Craft (Or Pivot) Your Agency Value Proposition appeared first on CXL.

Codecademy started out in 2011 as one of the first free products that taught people to code.  Since then, we have helped over 45 million learners improve their lives through programming while making major improvements to our product—driven by experimentation. Our goal is to empower the world through tech education, reaching as many learners as possible to support our vision. 

As a subscription business, we knew that small repeatable wins could compound to earn us millions of dollars in additional revenue. As part of the growth team, we were tasked with experimenting on any part of the business that could drive an impact, so we focused on the big, key levers of our monetization flow. 

From spaghetti testing to strategic testing 

When I think back to where we were two and a half years ago, the biggest issue with our testing program was that we tried several small ideas in different places and didn’t iterate enough on concepts. Our ideas were driven by individual opinions and changes that we saw our competitors making, which is one of the worst ways to run a testing program. 

The tide turned for us when we began focusing on our own learners and what we knew about them—their perceptions of our product and consumer behavior that was supported by evidence.  

This research informed better hypotheses, which allowed us to launch better tests and start unraveling bigger problems—problems we couldn’t solve without changing fundamental parts of our business. That’s what led us to strategic testing. 

Once we realized this, we had to prioritize which areas of the business to test first. We already had a really strong brand and top of funnel traffic. So we settled on growth levers at the bottom of the funnel–experimenting with pricing, the checkout page, plan mix, and our trial model. 

Wins deep in the funnel would have an immediate impact on the business and deliver the growth we needed. The following are some of the strategic tests we ran at Codecademy. 

Resources to help you to do this:

• The Great Divide Between BS and Intelligent Optimization
• How CRO Experts Build and Maintain Testing Roadmaps 
• Your Users Are Frustrated – Here’s a Way to Fix That and Make More Money
• The Advanced Guide to Qualitative Research

Testing our pricing strategy and plan-mix  

In my opinion, price and plan-mix are the two most powerful growth levers in any subscription business. You can capture more money upfront, lower churn, and increase user motivation all by experimenting in these two areas. 

All users make a pricing decision when purchasing, making it one of the few truly global levers in your business.  

Experimenting here is no small undertaking, however. Price and plan-mix are complex areas to test because they impact several areas of your business and product, so any changes need to be made carefully. In addition, you need to coordinate with other teams that touch pricing, such as marketing, finance, customer support, and sales.

The first experiment we ran was around exaggerating the difference in price between the monthly and annual plans in high-GDP countries, which had a massive positive impact on the number of annual subscriptions. 

If you can find ways to incentivize users to enter an annual plan, you’re probably capturing more revenue upfront than the revenue generated from the average lifetime of a monthly user. While it’s a large undertaking, experimenting is likely to have a big payoff in these areas. 

Resources to help you to do this:

• 9 Case Studies That’ll Help You Reduce SaaS Churn 
• 10 Product Recommendation Techniques to Improve UX & Conversions
• Product Bundling Strategy: How to Get It Right
• A Subscription Pricing Strategy that Works
• 10 Principles of Effective Pricing Pages
• How to Increase SaaS Prices the Right (and Profitable) Way

Testing our checkout process

When we started working with CXL Agency, one of the first tests we ran was on the checkout page. We started by reordering the plan cards, so a user’s eye would be drawn to the most attractive plans first, followed by the less-attractive plans. We also highlighted the savings on the checkout page. 

This test leaned on a psychological principle called the Rule of 100, which suggests that users perceive dollar amounts over 100 as being greater in value than percentages, despite both equating to the same amount. Because the savings on our annual plan was above $100, we tested it by showing dollar amounts. 

We saw a 28% lift in annual Pro plans, as well as a small bump up for overall page conversions.

It was good to see a classic psychology principle play out successfully in our experiment.

Before:

After:

Resources to help you to do this:

• How to Design an Ecommerce Checkout Flow
• How to Design Mobile SaaS Pricing Pages that Don’t Suck
• Pricing Experiments You Might Not Know But Can Learn From

Testing our free-trial models 

After seeing success in our pricing and purchase flow, we then moved on to test our free-trial model, which is the way that free users can experience the paid product before fully committing. This was one of the harder tests to execute and had a high level of risk and reward because we were tinkering with the company’s core revenue engine. 

The best trial models are the ones that align incentives to start a trial closest to where your users find value. But back in 2016, we had no trial model at all. Users entered the site and if they wanted, they could upgrade. Unsurprisingly, only a very small number of users opted for the paid Pro version.  

In 2017, we shifted toward a trial model where everybody who enrolled in our free plan was automatically enrolled in a trial of the Pro version. While this was better than where we were before and had an impact on paid conversions, it did come with a few downsides. 

For one, users experienced the whole product at once, so they weren’t able to differentiate between paid and free features. 

Additionally, because we were experimenting with the core revenue model for the business, we wanted to do it in a slow and measured way. We didn’t want to ship something that we saw succeed within the experiment window but would have a long-term detrimental impact on the business.

So we shipped our ideas in three stages: 

1. The first was aimed at existing users who had used the product for 60 days or longer. We showed them an offer for the Pro trial, which they had to opt into. We saw a strong positive result, so we kept moving.
2. In the second round, we tested whether a “credit card upfront” trial model would work better for new users than the control. This was perhaps our most important test because the new user experience is one of the core pillars and revenue engines for the business.  We shipped a variant, monitored it for two months, but didn’t see the results we were looking for. We went back to the drawing board to see what went wrong.
3. We shipped the third version a month or so later with a slightly different paywall structure. Finally, we saw a variant beat the control. It was ultimately a huge success for the business and the product. 

Resources to help you to do this:

• Freemium vs. Free Trial: Which Gets You More Paying Customers (Not Just Freeloaders)?
• When “Free” Converts (and When It Doesn’t)
• Optimizing the Free Trial Signup – How Flow Got a 17% Lift [Case Study]

Testing our messaging, clarity, and propositions 

We then moved up another step in the funnel, focusing on our checkout page messaging and key decision points in the app.  

The most successful tests we’ve run are based on understanding our users’ perceptions, problems, objections, fears, and uncertainties. The way we use these insights, even in small tactical testing, ultimately ladders up to bigger strategic areas, such as helping our users understand our free versus paid product. 

We tested generic content versus more personalized content at checkout, based on up-funnel navigation patterns. Our aim was to increase the clarity and relevance of our product to specific users.

Such tests helped us understand which messaging really resonated with our users and what triggers them to sign up. This insight can help us in marketing—as well as product development—moving forward. 

Before:

After:

Resources to help you to do this:

• Using Message-Mining to Pinpoint a High-Converting Value Proposition for Your Product
• The Presentation of Your Value Proposition Matters [Original Research]
• 6 Ways to Use Clarity to Improve Your Conversion Rate
• Should You Optimize for Micro Conversions?

Conclusion 

To move away from testing irrelevant ideas to more strategic experiments, you need to gain real insights and data about your users. Use experimentation to test the business’s most highly guarded areas, such as price, proposition, and even the product itself.

If you want to grow way beyond the local maximum, the only way to do that is through testing the strategic parts of your business. 

The post How Codecademy Saw 5X Growth with Strategic Testing appeared first on CXL.

Traditionally associated with development and product management, agile is a lightweight and, well, agile framework for software development and bringing features and products to market.

But what is “Agile Marketing?” And how can you apply the principles to your own marketing efforts?

As marketing becomes more data-driven, quantitative, and iterative, we can use many of these same management practices to hone our marketing campaigns, mitigate risk, and ultimately ship more effective marketing campaigns.

Before we dive into the marketing applications, however, let’s briefly cover what scrum is and how it came to be.

An introduction to Scrum and Agile development

“Scrum is a framework for developing and sustaining complex products.” sourced from the Scrum Guide.

Developed in the early 90’s by Jeff Sutherland and Ken Schwaber, Scrum is:

• Lightweight;
• Simple to understand;
• Difficult to master.

While the Scrum framework was originally developed for tackling software development, it’s a flexible and functional framework that can be adapted to the problems a digital marketing team faces as well.

For the most part, this guide will parallel the original Scrum guide, with some diversions and alterations to better align with the slightly more ad-hoc nature of marketing & optimization work.

Many of these learnings are based on an experiment we ran on the HubSpot Academy with the goal of moving away from waterfall project planning to a more Agile Marketing Scrum strategy.

Don’t reinvent the wheel: Stick to the framework

The Scrum framework is made up of Scrum Teams and their associated roles, events, artifacts, and rules. While it can be tempting to pick and choose parts of this framework, you’re best served to stick as closely as you can as this framework as possible for best results.

Successful use of the framework does depend on a certain level of maturity and alignment around a few core values:

• People personally commit to achieving the goals of the Scrum team.
• Team members have the courage to do the right thing and work on tough problems.
• Everyone focuses on the work of the sprint and the goals of the Scrum team.
• The Scrum team and its stakeholders agree to be open about all the work and the challenges with performing the work.
• Scrum team members respect each other to be capable, independent people.

Ultimately, if your team can commit to these principles, then it is worth the initial learning curve to try implementing this highly effective and collaborative framework.

Basics of Scrum Framework

The basics of the Scrum framework fall into 3 categories:

• Team;
• Events;
• Artifacts;

Team is about unique roles on your team that enable the rapid and high-quality output that Scrum is famous for. Scrum events are a set of five repeating events that form the backbone of the framework. Finally, artifacts are the organizational tools such as sprint backlogs that let the team move efficiently with maximal self-organization.

Roles on a Scrum team

There are three key roles that need to be filled. On a smaller team, you may find it makes sense for a team member to be a Developer (Individual Contributor) in addition to holding either Scrum Master or Product Owner roles.

The Product Owner

According to the Scrum Guide, the Product Owner is the sole person responsible for managing the Product Backlog. This includes:

• Clearly expressing Product Backlog items;
• Ordering and prioritizing items in the Product Backlog;
• Ensuring that the Product Backlog is visible, transparent, and clear to all, and shows what the Scrum Team will work on next;
• Ensuring the Development Team understands items in the Product Backlog to the level needed.

The Product Owner roles likely already map well to what a traditional Project Manager at an agency or a Program Manager might be doing. Basically, the Product Owner handles work requests, schedules deliverables and works with Clients and Stakeholders.

If you don’t already have someone filling this role, consider having an individual contributor step up, as it’s very important to have a singular person as the manager of the backlog and as a bottleneck to insulate the development team from distractions, requests and shifting priorities.

The Product Owner is the only person who is able to modify the Product Backlog, change work priorities for the Development Team and accept or reject incoming work requests.

This is a lot of responsibility but already maps well to what a good Project Manager will be doing in an organization.

The Development Team

The Development Team consists of those who do the work of delivering client/business ready work increments for the Scrum Team. In a digital marketing context, these people may already have job titles like Digital Marketing Manager, CRO Manager, PPC Specialist etc.

In a by-the-book Scrum framework, these people all lose job titles and become simply “Developers,” who contribute their strengths and weaknesses to the team to deliver the goals of the Sprint.

The Development team is tasked by the business to self-organize and manage their own work. This helps to de-silo marketing teams and get more work done.

Per the Scrum Guide, Development Teams have the following characteristics:

• They’re self-organizing;
• They’re cross-functional;
• Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer, regardless of the work being performed by the person;
• Scrum recognizes no sub-teams in the Development Team, regardless of particular domains that need to be addressed like testing or business analysis;
• Individual Development Team members may have specialized skills and areas of focus, but accountability belongs to the Development Team as a whole.

One important note to call out here is the expectation that the development team is cross-functional. While this is ideal, it’s not always doable in a marketing context.

For example, a small agency may only have one videographer, but enough clients to justify two separate Scrum Teams.

In this case, flexibility is key. The way we handled it on our team was to have the videographer budget several time slots per week to each team. This way, it’s known when we can reasonably tackle recordings so that the sprint doesn’t get held up on that dependency.

The Scrum Master

The Scrum Master is a bit of a spiritual leader and coach to the Scrum Team. It’s a very meta role in that it exists to optimize and implement the Scrum framework.

The Scrum Master is a servant-leader for the Team. They act as a resource for those outside the Scrum Team to understand the process and adapt to it. The Scrum Master helps the organization optimize their interactions with the Scrum Team to maximize value created by using Scrum.

Here are some specifics of how the Scrum Master services various stakeholders pulled from the Scrum Guide.

Scrum Master service to the Product Owner

The Scrum Master serves the Product Owner in several ways, including:

• Finding techniques for effective Product Backlog management;
• Helping the Scrum Team understand the need for clear and concise Product Backlog items;
• Ensuring the Product Owner knows how to arrange the Product Backlog to maximize value;
• Facilitating Scrum events as requested or needed.

Scrum Master Service to the Development Team

The Scrum Master serves the Development Team in several ways, including:

• Coaching the Development Team in self-organization and cross-functionality
• Helping the Development Team to create high-value products
• Removing impediments to the Development Team’s progress
• Facilitating Scrum events as requested or needed

Scrum Master Service to the Organization

The Scrum Master serves the organization in several ways, including:

• Leading and coaching the organization in its Scrum adoption;
• Planning Scrum implementations within the organization;
• Helping employees and stakeholders understand and enact Scrum and empirical product development;
• Causing change that increases the productivity of the Scrum Team
• Working with other Scrum Masters to increase the effectiveness of the application of Scrum in the organization.

Scrum Events for Conversion Rate Optimization

In traditional Scrum, there are five key events that every Scrum team participates in. The power of the events structure is that it’s a repeatable, iterative and straightforward to optimize process that a team of marketers can use to produce more work, better, in less time.

The image above is a simple summary, we’ll dig into each event individually.

The Sprint

You’ve probably heard of a “Sprint” before. It’s definitely the most well-known Scrum Event.

The Scrum guide describes the sprint as “a time-box of one month or less during which a “Done,” useable, and potentially releasable product Increment is created.”

This concept has already made its way outside of the software world, with aptly titled books being written about it.

So you only need to modify the concept slightly to use it for your marketing team. We may need to alter the time a bit from the strict one month prescription the original Scrum framework allows, or at least get creative in chunking tasks to fit that timeframe.

We’ve seen success with relaxing the requirement that each sprint needs to have a releasable product at the end. Instead, each sprint must cross a milestone.

For example, if you’re running a two-week long sprint in which your team is doing an analytics deep dive to prepare for a round of experiments for a client’s site, you can set “Send audit findings to Client” as your sprint goal. Your next sprint after that might be to “Send test variation wireframes to Client”.

One more defining feature of a sprint is that it’s typically set in stone what the goal will be, and any extra requests for work that will derail that goal will be put in the backlog and considered for inclusion in the next sprint. This can be tricky if you’re handling clients, as you know the process can be derailed by emergencies and urgent needs.

Take this into account and consider scheduling time into the week that’s not considered part of the sprint to handle “musts” from clients.

Sprint planning

Before a sprint goal can be established, a Scrum team needs to run a sprint planning session.

This planning session is where the whole team collaborates on defining the work to be done and the sprint goal for the upcoming sprint. Sprint planning time should be no more than 2 hours per week of the sprint. So a short two-week sprint should have a maximum of four hours of planning time before kickoff.

Sprint planning answers two key questions:

1. What can be delivered in the upcoming Sprint?
2. How will the work needed to achieve the sprint goals be completed?

What can be delivered in the upcoming sprint?

This is where the Scrum team comes together to decide on what backlog items to focus on for the next sprint. Once the team has decided what to prioritize, they then work together to establish the overriding goal for the sprint.

Deciding on a singular sprint goal may not always be practical for an agile marketing team with a variety of projects or clients ongoing. You can address this by establishing several goals for your sprint.

If you’ve been in CRO for a while, you undoubtedly know how to compile a test idea backlog. And if you’re using PXL, it should be relatively easy to decide what to focus on based on your prioritization score.

Once the team has decided on backlog items to work on this Sprint, and the overall goals for the Sprint, they can then focus on how to achieve the goals and complete the items slated for the upcoming Sprint.

How will future work be done?

When you decide what to focus on and how to conquer those items, you place them on a Spring Backlog.

This sprint backlog is what the team will reference during the sprint as their source of to-dos during the sprint. This planning is done collaboratively as the team self-organizes. The Product Owner can set some minimal guard rails for must-haves in the work.

The Daily Scrum (Standup)

Many marketing teams already do daily standups, so the daily Scrum (standup) shouldn’t be a novel idea. According to the Scrum Guide,

The Daily Scrum is a 15-minute time-boxed event for the Team to synchronize activities and create a plan for the next 24 hours. This is done by inspecting the work since the last Daily Scrum and forecasting the work that could be done before the next one. The Daily Scrum is held at the same time and place each day to reduce complexity.

During this meeting each team member answers three key questions:

1. What did I do yesterday to help the team reach the sprint goal?
2. What will I do today to help the team reach the sprint goal?
3. Do I see any roadblocks ahead that will interfere with my ability to meet the sprint goal?

One of th biggest benefits of the daily Scrum is that it eliminates wasteful meetings that plague many companies. Rather than 5 different ad-hoc “touch bases” meetings every week, the team can tackle things up front, on a daily basis, in the daily Scrum stand-up.

Debrief & Share with the sprint review

Take a deep breath, your sprint is over!

Hopefully, the team was able to work efficiently and flexibly and hit the sprint goals. With the sprint over, it’s now time for the sprint review. This is the team’s chance to show off a little to the stakeholders in the work.

This meeting should take no longer than one hour per week of the sprint.

According to the Scrum Guide, the sprint review includes the following elements:

• The Scrum Team and key stakeholders attend the meeting;
• The Product Owner explains what Product Backlog items have been finished;
• The Development Team discusses what went well and what problems occurred;
• The Development Team demonstrates the work that has been done;
• The entire group collaborates on what to do next in order to improve subsequent Sprints;
• Review of how the marketplace or potential use of the product might have changed;
• Review of the timeline, budget, potential capabilities, and marketplace for the next anticipated release of the product.

Coming out of the sprint review the team will have crossed items out of the Product Backlog as completed and Done. This will help set the course and objectives in the next Sprint.

Use the Sprint Retrospective to improve over time.

The sprint retrospective (retro) is where the team takes a critical look at itself and it’s wins and losses over the last sprint. The objective here is to nail down improvements for the next Sprint.

Much like iterative optimization and testing, this is a time and space for the agile marketing teams to make themselves better with each and every sprint by identifying inefficiencies and deciding on optimizations to correct them.

The Retro is after the sprint Review but before the next round of sprint planning. This meeting should be no longer than roughly one hour per two weeks of sprint time.

This meeting is hosted and facilitated by the Scrum Master as they are the primary person responsible for making the Scrum team maximize efficiency and increase velocity.

Per the Scrum Guide, the Retros purpose is to:

• Inspect how the last sprint went with regards to people, relationships, process, and tools;
• Identify and order the major items that went well and potential improvements;
• Create a plan for implementing improvements to the way the Scrum Team does its work.

While improvements to the team’s processes can be made at any time, having a formalized and iterative process in place with the Retro can bring focus and ownership to how the team works and how to improve it.

Scrum “Artifacts” for Agile Marketing

In Scrum, there are three structures designed to provide transparency and accountability into the team’s work:

• Product Backlog;
• Sprint Backlog;
• Increment.

These things are key to creating the infrastructure that enables the iterative work processes that give Scrum its reputation for supercharging teams. They’re necessary for facilitating agile marketing in organizations.

Product Backlog (Client Backlog)

According to the Scrum Guide:

The Product Backlog is an ordered list of everything that might be needed in the product and is the single source of requirements for any changes to be made to the product. The Product Owner is responsible for the Product Backlog, including its content, availability, and ordering.

One distinction worth making here is that the term “Product Backlog” comes from software and product design, and can be changed to “Client Backlog” when looked at in the context of agency, or “Test Backlog” for a CRO team in any context.

The Product Backlog lists all “features, functions, requirements, enhancements, and fixes that constitute the changes to be made to the product in future releases. Product Backlog items have the attributes of a description, order, estimate, and value.”

For a CRO-focused agency team, the “Client Backlog” might list all “Studies, tests, reports, and design work” that a client needs.

Product Backlog refinement is how the team builds and maintains the Backlog. This step is done by the Product Owner (Client Owner) and the Team.

This is an ongoing process in which the Product Owner and the Development Team collaborate on the details of Product Backlog items.

Items at the top of the Backlog will usually be clearer and more detailed than lower items as they get closer to being moved into the sprint backlog. Product Backlog items that are ready to be worked on and can reasonably be finished in the next sprint are considered “Ready.”

Sprint Backlog

According to the Scrum Guide:

The sprint backlog is the set of Product Backlog items selected for the Sprint, plus a plan for delivering the product Increment and realizing the sprint goal. The sprint backlog is a forecast by the Team about what functionality will be in the next Increment and the work needed to deliver that functionality into a “Done” Increment.

The sprint backlog is the one place where the team tracks and monitors progress on items through the sprint as they work toward the goals of the Sprint.

It’s important that the sprint backlog have enough detail that changes in progress can easily be understood in the Daily Scrum (Standup).

The Team modifies and moves items during the sprint from sprint backlog to In Progress to Done. Kanban boards are a common way to visualize and track this flow. See the example below for how this might look:

Increment

One restriction that is key to maintaining the integrity of the sprint is the concept of an “Increment.”

In software, this means a working new version of whatever is being worked on, but for a CRO or agile marketing team, this is a little different.

Basically at the end of a Sprint, whatever has been queued up as a sprint backlog item must be DONE. Not almost there – DONE.

This way as a sprint wraps up, the tasks are finished as well, allowing the team to proceed to the next round of sprint planning with a clean slate and finished work.

Any task not finished is considered waste at the end of the sprint and should be re-planned.

Customizing Scrum to work for Agile Marketing and CRO Teams

Throughout this article, I’ve tried to include considerations for where the software roots of Scrum not mesh with the way digital marketers work. However, if you’re creative, you can apply almost all of this pretty directly.

The key challenge we faced implementing this on our content marketing team at HubSpot was that we tried to run Scrum half-time instead of fully committing. The downside to this strategy is that it actually ended up creating more work and stress for the team as we had both our personal backlogs as well as the Scrum backlog to manage and work on.

If I can recommend one thing to anyone who has read this and is going to test implementing Scrum, go all in. If it doesn’t work for your organization that’s okay, but commit to the test.

Conclusion

Scrum is a framework for agile product development, but the principles can just as easily be applied to create an agile marketing organization.

The benefits to this are many: faster iteration, more work throughput, better campaigns. An agile marketing organization is the perfect context for an experimentation or optimization team to thrive. It breeds a culture of experimentation – a data-driven and iterative culture.

In addition to this article, here’s some further reading to really master agile marketing:

• Planning Poker;
• Burndown Chart;
• Sprint Velocity.

How do you operate your marketing department? Is it more like the traditional waterfall marketing, or do you operate an innovative and agile marketing team?

The post Agile Marketing: How to Implement Scrum for Digital Marketing appeared first on CXL.

Where to start? This year was…something. Despite everything going on, we still published, and you still read—and got better at data-driven marketing.

Here are the most read articles of the year.

10. Machine Learning for Paid Ads: Best Practices in a New Era

While “machine learning” has been talked about by marketers and advertisers for years, it’s no longer something you can ignore. If you’re not using the machine-learning capabilities of popular ad platforms, you’re getting left behind. Here’s how to keep up—and get ahead.

9. 30+ Killer New Content Ideas in 30 Minutes (and How to Prioritize Them)

Creating quality content consistently is incredibly challenging, even for the most experienced marketers. At some point, everyone’s content ideation well runs dry. Here’s how to refill yours—based on what your business needs most—in just 30 minutes.

8. How to Use Google Optimize & Tag Manager for Personalization

Personalizing your marketing efforts is one of the most effective ways to get ahead. While using Google Optimize for personalization has its limitations, Google Tag Manager can overcome them. Learn how.

7. UTM Parameters: A Complete Guide for Traffic Attribution

On the surface, using UTM parameters may seem simple. But only a thoughtful strategy will give you the data you need. Go beyond the basics and learn everything you need to know about using UTM parameters for traffic attribution.

6. Behavior-Based Attribution Using Google BigQuery ML

Multi-channel attribution is valuable—and difficult. Google BigQuery ML can make it far easier and more useful. Learn how.

5.  Differentiation Strategy

Marketing is a game of attention. You must differentiate your company to get it, yet hardly anyone does. What’s the secret to standing out from your competition? How can you avoid being overlooked? Stop chasing trendy tactics and build a real differentiation strategy.

4. How to Use Google Data Studio to Build Better Dashboards

Data is valuable only if it influences decision-making. Informative, elegant dashboards are an essential part of that process. Here’s how to use Google Data Studio to better understand (and take action on) your data.

3. On-SERP SEO: The Future of SEO

It’s no longer enough to rank first among the blue links. Learn how to optimize a search results page for more organic visibility in 2020 and beyond.

2. How to Scale Organic Traffic (Without Writing a Million Blog Posts)

How do you rank for millions more keywords without producing thousands of new articles? Learn the content marketing process that’s worked for Quora, Spotify, and other widely successful organizations.

And, drum roll please…the most read CXL article this year:

1. Marketing and Growth Lessons for Uncertain Times

Uncertainty. Anxiety. Risk. Crises are challenging times. “Marketing” may seem secondary. But nothing gets better if we stand still. Let’s take an honest look at how marketers can continue to thrive.

Bonus: The most-watched CXL lessons of 2020

In addition to publishing 80+ articles on the blog, CXL was hard at work shipping new courses, launching 40+ trainings to help marketers level up.

Here are the most-watched lessons: 

10. “Conversion-Focused Formatting & Layout” from our Sales copywriting and product messaging course.

9. “Tracking Engagement: Clicks & Time” from our Google Tag Manager for beginners course. 

8. “Message Hierarchies” from our Sales copywriting and product messaging course.

7. “Mining Messages From Your Customers” from our Sales copywriting and product messaging course.

6. “The Golden Ads strategy” from our Facebook ads course. 

5. “Research to get insights for your A/B tests” from our A/B testing mastery course. 

4. “Getting Started: Filters: The Basics” from our Google Analytics for beginners course. 

3. “B2B: Content Strategy for Lead Generation” from our Content Strategy course. 

2. “Crafting Effective Unique Value Propositions” from our Sales copywriting and product messaging course. 

1. “How to Conduct a Copy Teardown” from our Sales copywriting and product messaging course.

Conclusion

On behalf of the entire CXL team, thank you for reading. We’ll see you in 2021! Happy New Year! 

The post The 10 Most-Read Articles of 2020 appeared first on CXL.

If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking. – Haruki Murakami 

Becoming the best at what you do is a never-ending process. The best of the best have an insatiable hunger for knowledge—for new and better ways to get things done. 

Knowing where to turn for inspiration and guidance can be the difference between spinning your wheels and becoming an “overnight” success. The right book, read and implemented, can transform your life, business, and career. 

That all assumes you can find the right book. We can help. We put together a (non-comprehensive) list of some of the best marketing books, both new and old, to help you become a better marketer—and a better person.

Some were suggested by our readers; others were recommended by the CXL team. Let’s dive in!

On mastering psychology and behavior 

Influence by Robert B. Cialdini (1984)

Often we don’t realize that our attitude toward something has been influenced by the number of times we have been exposed to it in the past. – Robert B. Cialdini 

Influence is often regarded as the go-to book for all things persuasion and is filled with dozens of real-world examples on how to persuade and change behavior. 

Cialdini breaks down the six universal principles of influence: reciprocation, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity and shows exactly how each of the principles can be used to improve every area of your life. Cialdini also wrote an additional book exploring the 7th principle of persuasion.

Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely (2008)

Individuals are honest only to the extent that suits them, including their desire to please others. – Dan Ariely

We like to think we’re rational, but hundreds of the decisions we make each day are far from it. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely breaks down the hidden forces that shape our decisions and affect everything from what we buy to what makes us tick. It’s full of counterintuitive insights.

After reading, you’ll be well equipped to better both your customers and yourself. 

Hooked by Nir Eyal (2008)

Products that require a high degree of behavior change are doomed to fail. – Nir Eyal

What does it take to build products your customers love to use? What separates a wildly successful product from one that fails to gain traction? In Hooked, Eyal explores the “Hook Model” framework, a four-step process used by some of the most well-known companies and products today.

Based on years of behavioral science research, Hooked reveals exactly what it takes to engage and retain users now and in the future. 

On branding and positioning 

Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout (1980)

The mind, as a defense against the volume of today’s communications, screens and rejects much of the information offered. In general, the mind accepts only that which matches prior knowledge or experience. – Al Ries 

Published in early 2001, Positioning remains as relevant and actionable now as it was then. One of the first books to explore the challenges of an increasingly fast-paced media and marketing landscape, you’ll learn how to position yourself to remain top of mind. 

From naming your product to using your strengths to your advantage, this short read gives you plenty to implement in your own marketing and branding efforts. 

Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh (2010)

What’s the best way to build a brand for the long term? In a word: culture. – Tony Hsieh

How did the shoe company Zappos become one of the most respected brands in the world? In Delivering Happiness, the late Tony Hsieh details how he built an incredible company culture and went to extremes to make customers and employees happy.

Written in narrative form, Hsieh shares why the trifecta of profits, passion, and purpose is key to success. 

Unconscious Branding by Douglas Van Praet (2012)

The future of marketing and branding depends on our capability to shift from this competitive mindset to a creative mindset. We need to live in the conscious presence of the frontal lobe, the part of the mind that doesn’t fear that the other guy will steal our slice of the market share pie, but envisions ways to bake a bigger pie. – Douglas Van Praet 

Many of our assumptions about our customers are flat-out wrong, especially when it comes to understanding user behavior. Unconscious Branding reveals why marketers are often asking the wrong questions and shares the steps needed to market to a world that is run largely by unconscious behavior.

You’ll get an inside look into some of the most successful marketing campaigns of all time.

Obviously Awesome by April Dunford (2019)

Positioning is the act of deliberately defining how you are the best at something that a defined market cares a lot about. – April Dunford 

Why do so many companies fail to differentiate? What’s the key to standing out from the noise? In Obviously Awesome, April Dunford walks you through what so many companies get wrong with positioning and provides the step-by-step process to effectively position your brand, startup, or service.

On business building and strategy

The E-myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber  (1995)

Contrary to popular belief, my experience has shown me that the people who are exceptionally good in business aren’t so because of what they know but because of their insatiable need to know more. – Michael E. Gerber 

The harsh reality of entrepreneurship is that no team, person, or idea is immune to the risk of defeat. Most startups and businesses fail. 

In The E-Myth Revisited, Michael Gerber looks at why so many companies fail and how to avoid the common pitfalls that prevent success. Based on the idea that we all have an entrepreneur, manager, and technician inside of us, the book equips you to make the most of each skill set. 

Covering everything from strategy to productivity, it’s a must-read 

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée A. Mauborgne (2004)

While good strategy content is based on a compelling value proposition for buyers with a robust profit proposition for the organization, sustainable strategy execution is based largely on a motivating-people proposition. – Blue Ocean Strategy 

While competition is often viewed as a good thing, Blue Ocean Strategy argues that too much competition can lead to a “sea of red,” causing your company to get lost in the noise. Instead of going head-to-head with your competition, you can find a new corner of the market to dominate (which of course, is easier said than done).  

With an in-depth look at 150 strategic moves of dozens of companies, Blue Ocean Strategy shows you the path not only to stand out from your competition but to make them irrelevant. 

The Lean Startup by Eric Ries (2011)

We must learn what customers really want, not what they say they want or what we think they should want. – Eric Ries 

Why do so many startups fail? Is it a lack of talent? Product-market fit? Many promising startups and companies struggle because they fail to focus on the right things. 

The Lean Startup explores the scientific process of creating products and services your customers love—without spending months or years walking toward a dead end.

Whether you’re just getting your company off the ground or want to take your organization to the next level, the lean startup methodology will help you focus on what matters. 

On personal effectiveness and leadership

The Effective Executive by Peter F. Drucker (1966)

Knowledge has to be improved, challenged and increased constantly, or it vanishes. – Peter F. Drucker 

Peter Drucker, as influential a management thinker as any other, reveals what it takes to be a top performer in business and life.

From managing your time more effectively to making better decisions, The Effective Executive gives you the blueprint for doing the things that matter most. Any marketer or leader will come away with dozens of ideas. 

Radical Candor by Kim Scott (2017)

Make sure that you are seeing each person on your team with fresh eyes every day. People evolve, and so your relationships must evolve with them. Care personally; don’t put people in boxes and leave them there. – Kim Scott 

Getting the most from your team requires the ability to navigate many challenging situations. How do you give candid feedback to an underperforming employee? How do you make those in your organization feel safe and respected? Radical Candor shares the keys to creating a culture that values feedback and aligns a team with your goals and vision.

Who Not How by Dan Sullivan and Benjamin Hardy (2020)

One of the biggest challenges of being an entrepreneur? Falling into the trap that you have to do everything yourself.

In Who Not How, authors Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy argue that the idea of a lone genius is a myth and highlight the negative consequences that arise from believing you need to be involved in every aspect of your business. 

Instead of asking, “How can I do this?”, we’re better off asking, “Who can do this for me?” If you’re looking to advance your career or grow your business without burning out along the way, Who Not How gives you the mindset to do more with less. 

On marketing and advertising 

This Book Will Teach You How to Write Better by Neville Medhora (2013)

“Be interesting! Even if you have something interesting to say, your delivery can make people read, or run.” – Neville Medhora 

In this incredibly refreshing (and brief) read, Neville Medhora reveals the timeless principles of effective and persuasive writing. Whether you’re looking to reword a call to action or write sales copy, this book teaches the art of putting words on a page.

By using simple and straightforward language and copywriting frameworks, you can dramatically improve your writing and communication. 

Everybody Writes by Ann Handley (2014)

As content strategist Jonathon Colman, who works for Facebook, told me: “Start with empathy. Continue with utility. Improve with analysis. Optimize with love. – Ann Handley 

Writing well is an underrated and often overlooked skill for marketers and entrepreneurs. From the copy on your website to the emails you send to customers, knowing how to communicate effectively is critical for staying relevant and top of mind. 

Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need perfect grammar to create content that converts. Covering everything from social media to content marketing, Everybody Writes will help you create content that your customers and community will love. 

Ponderings of a PPC Professional by Kirk Williams (2020)

More than a book of PPC tactics, Kirk Williams explores the thinking and strategy behind essential digital components that affect every facet of your work. 

From attribution to pricing to what works in PPC today, Ponderings of A PPC Professional is an excellent read for those new to PPC and seasoned professionals. Covering both the “what” and “why” of PPC, you’re left with plenty of actionable insights. 

Looking for even more must-read books for marketers?

Conclusion

Even the most comprehensive list will leave out “obvious” choices. This list is no different. While it’s a great list to get you started—and to keep you from getting overwhelmed—we know it’s incomplete. We’ll continue adding more books over time. 

In the meantime, grab one or two you like, dig in, and put what you learn into practice. 

Have a book you think we should add to the list? Let us know in the comments.

The post The Best Books for Marketers (New and Old) appeared first on CXL.

It’s been ten years since I started the CXL Agency. 

We started off with a value proposition “we build websites that sell”. Most of our time went into building WordPress websites. The initial vision was to templetize and scale building conversion optimized websites. There were many problems with that, and we quickly learned, and adapted. 

Two years after the start we had evolved into a pure conversion optimization agency, and later it would become one of the world’s leading CRO agencies.

As the agency has changed and adapted over the years, so has the world.

We now live in The Retention Economy. 

For too long businesses have focused on short term wins chasing revenue over long term value. As a result VC’s now value businesses based on customer retention rather than multiples of revenue. Because customer retention is a better way of working out the true value of a business. 

The losers of the retention economy will be those who continue to focus on short term wins and vanity business metrics. 

But to thrive in this new reality, we need a shift in our thinking. 

So, as of today CXL Agency will be changing its name to Speero. But it’s way more than just a name change. 

We think CRO agencies that focus solely on conversion rate are broken. You need to think of the full customer experience, the brand, and focus on down-funnel metrics like CLTV, retention, pipeline dollars, and so forth. 

That’s why we’re shifting to focusing on Customer Experience Optimization, CXO. Speero’s new CX optimization program will include the fundamentals (research+testing), but we’ve designed new methods and processes for what we do, to improve the results we can achieve. 

The changes are;

1. We run regular ‘research sprints’ throughout the program to gather new data, form new hypotheses and validate ideas as they arise. 

With the world changing faster than ever, you can’t just speak to customers once and be done with it. It has to be an ongoing process. Covid has made many businesses realize that consumer needs and expectations can change on a global level within a matter of days. Our research sprints mean we’re able to keep these changing needs in mind.

2. We use data to understand and measure not only CR, but customer experience, retention, and lifetime value.

Way too often customer data sits within siloed teams across businesses. But when valid data from the entire customer journey is available it changes your focus from short term to focusing on bigger business metrics like retention. Leading to a much higher payoff from our work. 

3. We run our experimentation maturity audit to understand and benchmark where you are when we start working together.

It helps us recommend what changes you should make in your business across tools & data, people & skills, strategy & culture, and process & methodology. We’ll do it again at the end of the 12 months, to chart your progress. 

4. More education. 

We give you five free passes to CXL to fast track your team on everything CXO. We also run a number of collaborative workshops so your team can learn through working alongside our awesome team. 

5. We map your customer journey and create data backed personas. 

By looking at the broader experience customers go through, we can create even stronger hypotheses for experimentation and drive higher revenue. 

But that’s not all, there’s more news from Speero:

My co-founder and managing director of the agency Viljo Vabrit is joining me on the board, making way for research director Ben Labay to step up as the agency’s new managing director. I know his infectious enthusiasm will help drive the agency forward. We’re lucky to have him. 

We’ve also expanded the team with some great new hires, some of their names might be familiar to you;  

Emma Travis has joined our UK team. Her previous role was head of CRO at Epiphany Search in Leeds. She brings ten years’ of experience in UX, research and CRO. Emma also has experience building and developing optimisation teams, processes and cultures, most recently at one of the UK’s fastest growing airlines. She worked with Jabra, Carphone Warehouse, Irwin Mitchell and First Direct.

Paul Randall also joins the UK team from British shoe retailer, Clarks. Paul has used a design thinking mindset to enhance customer experiences for over eight years. His empathy towards customer behaviour comes from conducting hundreds of usability studies and experiments. Paul has previously worked with Screwfix, Maximuscle and Flogas.

Two seniors hires for our US team too. Kristina Rowe, who joins us from her role as the senior digital optimization consultant at American Cancer Society. She previously worked with Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Progressive Medical.

And Jason Keough who spent the past 13 years’ as director of conversion optimization at Allianz Worldwide. He has presided over 10,000+ experiments aiming to help solve client and customer problems. He’s also worked with Delta Airlines, Priceline, Orbitz, Ticketmaster, and Tickets.com.

Great changes, great team. Check them out over on the new Speero agency website. 

Meanwhile, CXL and the blog will continue to operate under the CXL brand name, and will integrate Adeft into its offering. 

Watch this space. 

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