The world’s best marketers don’t get to the top of their field by accident. They consume the right sources; they read the right books. They take what they learn and put it into practice. 

But with the daily demands of most marketing professionals, it’s often an uphill battle to take a step back and set aside time to learn new skills. All too often, that quarterly report or urgent client request takes priority, time and time again.

So how do up and coming and advanced marketers prioritize professional development? How much of an impact does having dedicated learning time each week help you grow as a marketer? 

We asked digital marketers via our newsletter and social media to take a brief survey to better understand the patterns and challenges faced by those climbing to the top.

Though offering just a small glimpse into marketers’ learning habits as a whole (just shy of 400 responses received), the findings were telling. 

Let’s look at some of our most interesting takeaways as well as some of the most effective ways to build the habit of “sharpening the saw.”

Key Takeaways from the Learning Habits of Digital Marketers

If you want to get ahead, you have to put in the work. That’s table stakes for becoming one of the best in your field. 

1. Structured Learning Yields Better Results 

Nearly ⅔ of respondents reported not having a study routine. On one hand, that suggests many struggle with building the habit of structured learning or it’s simply not a priority. On the other hand, that means having one can put you ahead of your colleagues and peers. 

Here are just a few of the study routines shared through our survey.

Watch a video (max 15 mins); take notes; rewatch video if I don’t understand; Google external resources (usually more videos) to get a better explanation of the things I still don’t understand. Repeat.

It depends on my objective — sometimes I study to obtain a certification to reinforce my ‘skills signals’ (narrow study) — which usually means running through e-learning modules and quizzes in a tight time frame to increase the chances of information retention to pass the final certification module. 

For actual in-depth study in subjects I care about, I try to translate learning into practical application (which typically isn’t included as part of the publisher’s education experience). An example of this — using a dummy site or google tag injector to keep my google analytics knowledge and practice up to date. For deep study of a new topic, I block 30min after lunch purely for information absorption, then take a 20min nap, and then another 30min to try and put the info down, or into practice — if / when applicable.

Of those with a ‘study routine’, roughly ⅔ reported spending 16 to 60 minutes of focused learning in a single session.

Compare that to those who still spent time learning throughout the day but didn’t have a formal learning routine. 

While 16.7% of those with a dedicated study routine reported learning for more than 90 minutes on average in a session, that number drops significantly for those without a routine—with just 6.8% reporting studying more than 90 minutes or more. 

Additionally, those who did not report having a study routine were far more likely to study less than 15 minutes in a single session than those with a routine. More structure equals more learning. 

Those who spent at least 16 to 30 minutes learning each day reported the most promotions within 12 months compared to other learning session lengths. 

2. Having a Study Routine Matters More than When You Learn

There was no significant correlation between the preferred time of learning and whether or not a promotion was on the horizon from our limited data set. 

Nearly ⅓ of respondents favored learning in the early morning hours, often before work.

• “30 – 60 min Monday-Friday with a hot cup of coffee before the day’s distractions begin.
• “Early in the morning after workout, I watch 30-45 min of online courses. In the evening, if I have the energy, I read.”
• “1 hour after waking up.”
• “I have no fixed study routine, but whenever I get some free time, it is easy to read or watch a course.”

Some 40% preferred learning in the evening.

• “After working hours, having dinner, and exercising, I usually sit down for an hour (or more) and study. I usually use the Pomodoro technique since it can be quite tiring studying after a long day. Having these programmed pauses help me a lot in keeping track of my studying and not lose focus.”

Others preferred the middle of the day or no particular time:

• “I usually prefer to learn something when I get an extended break, and I don’t want to waste it on Facebook.”
• “I typically allocate an hour every day to study. It doesn’t matter what hour I happen to do actual studying; I just have to do it.”
• “I don’t necessarily have a complex routine, but I try to dedicate at least 1 hour of learning daily either by taking an online course, listening to a podcast episode, reading a newsletter, or going deeper into a topic I’m interested in.”

No need to become an early bird if you prefer learning at night. Having a study routine is by far the most significant factor in increasing your chances of promotion. 

How to Make Time to Sharpen the Saw 

Okay, spending a few hours a week at minimum learning new skills can help you get ahead. 

But how do you carve out time for learning, especially if you feel as if you don’t have any time?

Let’s take a look.

1. Plan Ahead and Block Time on Your Calendar 

Don’t let the simplicity of this practice fool you. The only way you’re going to learn new skills is by investing the time to do so. One of the first things we tell new CXL members is to block off time on their calendar to go through the material.

Why? Because it works. 

Just as saying you’ll go to the gym when you feel like it is seldom effective, neither is saying you’ll take that course or watch that video on SEO when you have ‘extra time.’

If advancing in your career is important to you, there’s no excuse as to why you can’t set aside at least an hour or two each week to focus solely on learning. 

Don’t overcomplicate it. You don’t need to spend two hours each day studying. A few 30 minutes blocks throughout the week are more than enough to make progress.

Only 18% of those who reported learning 90 minutes or more each day reported receiving a promotion within the last 12 months. Compare that to the nearly 80% of those who spent 31-60 minutes on average studying.

After a certain point, the diminishing returns on time spent is clear. 

While small might not be sexy, it is successful and sustainable. When it comes to most life changes that people want to make, big, bold moves actually don’t work as well as small, stealthy ones. Applying go big or go home to everything you do is a recipe for self-criticism and disappointment.

Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything by BJ Fogg

Just as with setting any meaningful goal, it’s important to be specific. 

“Get better at A/B testing” isn’t a clear enough goal. 

Instead, get specific.

• “I’ll watch 30 minutes of videos on Google Analytics.”
• “I’ll spend an hour signing up for three of the most popular no-code tools.”
• “I’ll attend that ClickUp webinar so that I can be better organized and efficient.” 
• “I’ll go through my newsletters and focus on nothing else.”

As we’ll see, more and more companies are working to make learning hours and professional development a priority both for recruiting and retaining top talent. 

2. Make Professional Development a Priority, Not an Afterthought

In our survey, we also wanted to learn more about whether companies openly supported the idea of learning hours during the workday. 

Unfortunately, based on our responses, there’s still quite a bit of room for improvement, with only 39.8% reporting their employers offer or support learning hours during work. 

Perhaps, not surprisingly, many reported spending an hour or two before or after work learning new skills. 

• “I usually study late evening or late night after my work hours.”
• “On weekends, I do two sittings. One in the afternoon and one in the night.”
• “When I am done with all the work stuff, I fire up the course I’m doing on my laptop and spend 20 min to an hour to go through a couple of lessons on my couch. I occasionally take notes or pause the video to check on my own examples. Most courses I do at 2x speed but slow down when I am unfamiliar with the topic.” 
• “Becoming better at my work is one of the most valuable things I can do, and my employer agrees, so I block 2 hours in the morning to study during my workday.”

Whether you’re an employee looking to move up the ranks, or a marketing manager trying to get the most from your team, professional development shouldn’t be an afterthought.

There’s a reason why leading startups and businesses today place such a heavy emphasis on development. 

I would make the argument that it costs more to hire and train someone who leaves than it costs to develop them and have them stay and be productive.

Mike Warren adjunct business professor at Brandman University. 

Take a look at the hiring pages and perks of Zapier, Doist, and Buffer, for example. 

Here’s Buffer talking about their unlimited Kindle and Audible books perk:

Kindle and audible books: Each teammate and one dependent may receive unlimited, no-questions-asked Kindle and Audible.com books. Reading is a cornerstone to our value of self-improvement, and this has long been a favorite benefit of working at Buffer. During a teammate’s first 45 days, US teammates will be gifted with a Kindle Paperwhite, and international teammates are invited to purchase a Kindle on their own and expense this through Expensify.

They all place a heavy focus on development, both personally and professionally. 

Professional development won’t just help your employees become better at what they do; it can also help your team feel more connected and excited about their work. 

Deepening existing skills, learning new skills, broadening your knowledge into another area, getting really good at what you’re passionate about… these are the primary purposes of professional development.

says Stacey Christiansen.

We even make a note of our investment in professional development here at CXL on our hiring page.

If you’re leading a marketing team, an investment in professional development must come from the top. 

At CXL, each Thursday, we have what we call “study minutes,” where we set aside time for deep learning.

For example, I recently spent time watching a webinar on Clickup so I could become more efficient with my content marketing project management. 

Learning hours aren’t nice to have; they are a necessity. 

3. Discover How You Learn Best 

Dedicating time on your calendar and making professional development a priority is a good start. But ultimately, discovering how you learn best will yield the best results long term.

You may not like watching Youtube videos on SEO. You may not be able to retain information listening to an Audible book at 2x speed. You prefer listening to podcasts rather than reading books. That’s okay.

What’s important is understanding how you operate best. As with most things in marketing and business, best practices aren’t always the best solutions for you. 

Here’s how Ash Read, editorial director at Buffer, suggests stepping into professional growth as a marketer:

Try to form habits around whatever discipline of marketing you’re most excited about:

If you’re into video, download some stock footage and start editing it. 

If you want to become an SEO master, try reading as much content as possible from places like Moz, Ahrefs, and Backlinko.

If writing is your thing, set aside time on your calendar each day to sit and write

It can be daunting to look at marketing and think you need to fully master: analytics, data, CRO, SEM, advertising, copywriting, SEO, community, and more.

But in reality, to be a successful marketer, you don’t need to be an expert in every channel: one or two areas of expertise will be enough.

However, before diving right in and choosing an area or two to focus on, experiment with a bunch of different skills to see what’s the best fit for you.

Here are some more study routines and methods to consider as you find what works for you.

• “I typically listen to videos at 2x speed while I read the materials. I slow parts down that are important and/or that have an action step.”
• “Clear desk, headphones, drink nearby, split screens between lesson and a google doc for notes.”
• “First preference is to learn by reading books, and second preference is to learn by using videos.”
• “Open up a separate laptop that is not work in a separate environment and work until I reach a small milestone (e.g., done three segments of a course.)”

Conclusion

Being the best at what you do is difficult and putting in the work to get there is a never-ending battle. By making learning a priority, you can rapidly advance your career and continue to hone your craft.

1. Block time on your calendar for “study minutes” each week.
2. If you’re a manager, build professional development into your culture. 
3. Discover how you learn most effectively; the sooner you know, the more your efforts can compound. 
4. Don’t overdo it. We found no correlation with those who spent 90+ minutes learning, receiving increased promotions compared to those who spent 30-60 minutes a day on average. In fact, those who studied less than an hour a day were more likely to receive a promotion. 

The post How the Best Marketers Get Ahead: They Make Time to Learn appeared first on CXL.

In today’s competitive environment, having a great product or service is table stakes for building a profitable and successful business at scale. 

Many companies, after all, have great products but struggle to keep the lights on. While many factors ultimately determine whether a business thrives or shutters, your market positioning strategy plays a critical role. 

This article will explore what market positioning is, how to position yourself effectively, and look at some examples from both established and up and coming brands. 

What is Market Positioning? 

At the most basic level, market positioning refers to consumers’ perception of your product, service, and brand. How do you stack up to the competition? How do your customers describe you? 

The 4 P’s are often used as a guide to building an effective positioning strategy. 

• Product: How does your product compare to the rest of the market? Do you offer unique features that your competitors do not? 
• Price: Do you charge premium pricing but deliver better service? Are you priced to appeal to a market that makes their decision largely based on cost?
• Promotion: How effective is your advertising and branding strategy? How do your customers discover you? 
• Place: Where do your products and services live? Are you primarily online? Are you a retail store serving the local area?

Although other factors affect your positioning’s effectiveness, thinking critically about each of the 4 P’s can help you shape your brand’s narrative and influence your consumers’ perception of your brand.

With or without a market positioning strategy, your customers will still compare you to your competition. Having a positioning strategy in place gives you far more control of how positive that perception is. 

Why Position Statements Aren’t Always a Good Idea 

When you first begin thinking about how you’d like to be positioned in the market, it’s commonly suggested to use the classic positioning statement to clarify your strengths, weaknesses, and unique selling proposition. 

As Kevan Lee, former VP of marketing at Buffer, shared on his newsletter: 

Positioning is a bit closer to the heart of marketing. I often ask product marketers to be positioning experts on behalf of the company, and I’ve also seen how valuable positioning is for PR, customer service, and any external communications.

This is the simple positioning statement I like to use:

For [target customer
Who [main pain point or challenge]
[Your Company] is a [product category]
That [key solution your company provides].
Unlike [competitors and alternatives],
[Your Company] is [differentiated in these ways].
This type of framework is useful for:

Internal consistency in how you think about the product and the needs it solves for customers. It can be very helpful in aligning product and marketing teams.

Consistency of website messaging and lifecycle messaging.

While these types of exercises can be valuable when strategizing at a high level and keeping your teams aligned, it often only scratches the surface of effective positioning. In addition, a classic positioning statement doesn’t always reflect how your customers actually perceive you and can frequently lead you to dead ends.   

As B2B positioning expert, April Dunford, shared on Lenny Rachitsy‘s newsletter which was summarized in a tweetstorm: 

Positioning statements can be useful for getting clarity but shouldn’t be relied on as the end all be all. Going beyond word docs and slide decks and talking with your customers can further strengthen your positioning strategy.

The biggest mistake I’ve seen with marketing positioning is when the company doesn’t understand who they are because they’ve stayed too close to the product and internal communication. They haven’t “walked out their own door” and talked to the people using their product.

says B2B SaaS content marketer and consultant Adrienne Barnes

Effective positioning is not something you can check off your to-do list and call it a day. It’s not just a catchy slogan or well-designed website. 

Let’s take a look at a few examples of brands that won the positioning battle. 

How Roam Research Took on the Note-taking Goliaths 

When you think of note-taking apps, what first comes to mind? For most, Apple Notes, Evernote, and Notion reign supreme. These note-taking apps are established, well-funded, and a core part of many note-takers daily routines. From the start, Roam Research faced an uphill battle in positioning themselves competitively in the market. 

To make things even more challenging, their UI was objectively unpleasant and hard to understand. There was a massive learning curve to get the most out of the product and they were also significantly pricier than other note-taking apps at $15 a month. 

And yet, despite all odds, they were able to carve a name for themselves in one of the most competitive markets, even getting hundreds of users to sign up for their $500 “Believer” plan. 

As Colin Eckert shared on his Substack:

When analyzing or devising a positioning strategy, the only thing that matters is what’s already in your prospective user’s mind. Thus, positioning is how you differentiate yourself in the mind of the prospect. Positioning can apply to anything — a product, company, service, person, etc — and when asked about a particular category, we typically think of one brand first.

People rank products and brands in their minds. A good way of conceptualizing this is to visualize ladders, each representing a category and each step being a brand.

Reflecting on Roam’s newfound success, he expands further:

Roam is a truly new product. When they decided to enter the market, they had to look at what’s already in the mind for the note-taking category (i.e., Evernote and it’s tree organization structure), and reposition that model as the old and itself as what they are not — a new, bi-directionally linked network. Roam Research is the “note-taking tool for networked thought.” It is the driverless car to Evernote’s horseless carriage.

While note-taking was certainly the foundation of what Roam Research offered, they went to great lengths to highlight how they were different from what was already being offered. 

Yes, it may take time to learn and get used to. Yes, it may not have the nicest design. But unlike its competition, it was a note-taking tool for networked thought. Roam Research’s market positioning was so effective, their community became known as the #RoamCult. Now, that’s the power of good market positioning.

Lemonade: A Seemingly Pleasant Insurance Experience

For many, the thought of lemonade brings back memories of a pleasant childhood experience or the refreshing sensation of cooling down after a hot summer day. Contrast that to how one feels when hearing the word “insurance.” There’s quite a difference. 

Lemonade, which broke into the insurance scene in 2015, is set on not only delivering a better experience for those who need insurance but transforming the entire business model as a whole.

Reflecting on the state of insurance Daniel Schreiber, co-founder and CEO shared:

At the end of the day, when you’re demanding money from an insurance company, every dollar they can avoid paying you drops to their bottom line. You end up with a business model where there’s a conflict of interest at the very core of the sector.

From the start, Lemonade positioned themselves as a company that puts their customers first. Perhaps most notably was their decision on how to handle premiums and unclaimed funds as they explain on their FAQ page:

Traditional insurance companies make money by keeping the money they don’t pay out in claims. This means whenever they pay your claim; they lose profit. This is why getting your claims paid fast and in full is sometimes so hard. Lemonade was built differently. In essence, we treat premiums as if they were still your money and return unclaimed remainders in our annual’ Giveback.’

In addition to their unique business model, Lemonade emphasized the customer experience from the beginning. Here’s what  Growth and Convert had this to say about their process.

The questions are in simple, direct language, that leave little room for confusion. As the signup process progresses, it takes on the feeling of a personalized conversation.

It also reduces unease. When users sign up, they feel a sense of certainty about each choice they make. There is no sense that something is missing from the process or that any “i’s” have not been dotted.

The entire process takes 5 minutes or so, and then she generates a quote. You choose your start date and enter your credit card details. Then, you are asked which charity you would like to donate your unclaimed premiums to. The experience is quick and requires zero paperwork, and can be done via the website or app.

Instead of having to fill out an endless list of lengthy forms and go through dozens of steps just to get a quote, learning more about the plans they offer is truly just a few clicks away. 

Is There Room for Yet Another Language Learning Bird? 

If you’ve ever tried to learn a second or (or third) language, you know how challenging and time-consuming it can be. You’re also likely familiar with the likes of industry-leading language apps and programs such as Duolingo and Rosetta Stone. 

Despite the many language programs already out there, Toucan believed there was room for one more. Unlike apps such as Duolingo, Toucan was designed as a Google Chrome extension with the goal of seamlessly integrating with your regular browsing behavior.

Once the extension is installed and your desired language is chosen, a handful of words are automatically translated into your target language. Just hover over the word, and you’ll see the definition. No additional steps necessary. 

The core promise of Toucan seems to be that learning progressively in context can make an overwhelming experience feel effortless, and they apply that same insight to how they release new features and design the main focal points of the product. Simple, uncluttered, hardly noticeable.

Joey DeBruin of ProductKitchen 

I spoke with the Co-founder and CEO of Toucan Taylor Nieman to learn more about their positioning strategy and how the idea came to be. 

The idea initially stemmed from our backgrounds working in the best consumer tech companies across LA. One of our most amazing experiences was working at Headspace, where we were asking people for only 10 minutes a day to meditate, which was quite hard to do. Not only once but really over and over again. That’s really where we started to learn everything around habit formation and how it’s actually so hard to do.

Thus, when we started approaching the education space in general and asking ourselves how we can get people to learn new things not just once but every single day. We decided we didn’t want to compete against time. Because that means you’re not just competing against friends, family, work, and school but competition against Netflix, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, etc.

When asked about the admittedly competitive language learning market, Nieman didn’t share an “us vs them approach.”

We view every single mobile app, tutor marketplace, digital classroom, and physical textbook related to language learning as a partner for Toucan. We intend to partner with every single one of them. Because if people are taking time out of their very busy days, that is amazing, and Toucan can take all of that progress and accelerate it as they’re going about their day browsing the web.

Based on their early success, Toucan is a prime example of how doing what’s best for your users is sometimes all that it takes to carve out a spot in an already mature and competitive space. 

Conclusion

An effective market positioning strategy can’t be drawn out in an afternoon. It’s a continuous process that changes with both the market and your consumers needs.

Here’s what to keep in mind. We hope these examples gave you plenty to consider when working to craft yours. 

Remember: 

1. Getting clear on the 4 P’s, product, price, place, and promotion can help build a strong foundation.
2. Positioning statements can be useful in some contexts but are always the starting point, not the end.
3. Talk to your customers; your assumptions are just that, assumptions. 
4. Even the most saturated of markets still have room for one more.
5. Highlighting your competition’s flaws can be effective for positioning.
6. Viewing your competition as partners can also be a winning strategy as well. 

The post Market Positioning: The Keys To Getting It Right appeared first on CXL.

The chatter of the “Retail Apocalypse” began long before the recent events of a global pandemic. However, the last year has accelerated the need for retailers to go digital, leaving many struggling to adapt.

Despite the challenges retailers face, there are opportunities to not only survive but to thrive. But to take advantage of these opportunities requires the understanding that the pre-pandemic rulebook no longer applies.

In this article, we’ll look at the nine retail trends shaping the new world of retail and how marketers can adjust.

Simmer on this: at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, 10 years of ecommerce growth happened in just 90 days.

In a nutshell: the future came early. Now what do we do about it? 

Retailers have proven amazingly resilient in the past year, as they’ve worked through the mass shift to ecommerce and balancing the demands of lockdowns and shifting consumer behavior. 

To navigate these challenges successfully, we need flexibility, innovative thinking, and a focus on the new ways that consumers are meeting their needs to transition into a different reality.

Is the Retail Apocalypse here? 

In a word: no. 

The in-person shopping experience can’t be replicated online, and that’s good news for retailers.

Shopping is multi-dimensional. We want to see and touch and smell and try on and (sometimes) taste the products we’re buying, and the eCommerce experience can only go so far. 

Think about Cinnabon- the way that you can basically smell it, even if it’s been years since you’ve been in one of their stores (sorry for making your drool). 

How about trying on outfits and seeing which materials feel best for you?

Small retailers are the bedrock of our communities, and consumers will still choose to shop retail when the experience is worth it.

Harley Finkelstein, President of Shopify, put it this way: “Retail will never die, it will only evolve.”

So let’s talk about the ways that retailers can proactively adapt to the new reality and grow, even in the chaos of 2021.

Retail in 2021 (and beyond)

While retail isn’t “over” it has been irrevocably changed. 2020 transformed the world of commerce. We’re now in a period of rebuilding across industries. 

Shopify research shows:

• 46% of buyers in the US and Canada have made purchases from local, independently owned businesses since the beginning of the pandemic.
• Of that group, 34% reported doing this more often than in the pre-pandemic era.
• 57% said they specifically seek out local, independently owned businesses to support with their purchases.
• 61% of buyers said they plan to buy from local and independent retailers six months from now. That’s significantly more than those who reported doing so in the first three months of the pandemic.
  

In many cases, consumers are excited to buy from smaller, local businesses, but there’s a catch—their habits have adapted to the changes brought on by the pandemic and their expectations have shifted accordingly. 

In nine of 13 major countries surveyed by McKinsey, at least two-thirds of consumers say they have tried new kinds of shopping. And in all 13 countries, 65 percent or more say they intend to continue to do so. 

Here are the top trends we’ve uncovered through our twice-a-week podcast, Resilient Retail:

1. Getting the most from ecommerce

Having a digital presence is table stakes, and the data backs it up. 

• 52% of buyers say they’ve shifted more of their spending to online due to the pandemic.
• 51% of those consumers said they felt uncomfortable with in-store shopping during a pandemic.

It’s this simple: without a a digital presence it’s virtually impossible to succeed in retail.

Before the pandemic hit, Minnesota brand TC Running had two brick-and-mortar stores and zero ecommerce presence. When shelter-in-place hit last March, forcing their doors to close, their revenue dropped to nothing overnight. 

In about a week, TC made a huge pivot and brought $1.5 million of inventory online and recovered all their lost POS revenue with online sales. 

“It took us just over a week to get our online store and POS up and running. We have a lot of SKUs, and Shopify made it really easy to set up products and inventory counts.” said Jeff Bull, Brand Manager TC Running

Not only that—they took things a step further and launched their Run Squad membership program. They pivoted quickly and found new ways to stay top of mind for their customers, even without foot traffic.

Your online store might have been a temporary stopgap to help your business survive shutdowns, but consider building it into a permanent aspect of your strategy.

How to embrace this trend:

• Make sure your inventory is unified across all channels; 
• Use tools such as Shopify Compass to navigate the fundamentals of eCommerce success;
• Flesh out your website with eye catching product images, a strong brand story, and engaging product descriptions;
• Use your social channels, email list, and other communication tools to let your customers know to check out your online store;
• Direct people online within your physical location with signage and QR codes.
  

2. The rise of new fulfillment methods 

Curbside pickup, local delivery, contactless payment, and Buy Online Pick up In Store (BOPIS) continue to rise in popularity.

But these fulfillment methods make sense even outside of a pandemic situation. They’re quick, convenient, and fit really naturally into consumer lifestyles. 

For example: roughly the same percentage of consumers who used curbside pickup in the early months of the pandemic (40%) say they will continue using it in the future (38%). 

Denver-based small retailer ReRoot embraced these new fulfillment methods with open arms.

The first thing that I did was start asking on Instagram. ‘What do you guys want? Do you want us and want us to offer curbside pickup? Do you want us to offer delivery?’ They said yes to all of the things that we wanted to do. We did them.

Paige Briscoe, founder of ReRoot

There was an overwhelming demand for curbside pickup, so Paige and her team turned their tiny retail space into something closer to a fulfillment center. 

Local delivery has also been a saving grace for a lot of retailers with close ties to their community. 

For example, when the initial waves of the shutdowns hit Canada, Great Lakes Brewing had 15,000 gallons of beer sitting in their silos. And no one to drink it. 

With no way to serve it in their restaurant, their revenue flattened. Thus came another resilient pivot.

Within a few weeks, the Great Lakes Brewing team transitioned their operations to meet the needs of their community by offering free delivery on orders over $50.

Soon after launching their local delivery program, they were averaging over 500 orders per week.

And the benefits go way beyond pure revenue. It’s a brand builder. A community connection, and as Troy Burch puts it, a much needed reminder of their WHY.

We have branded vehicles to get the brand out there, if you will. You can see our vehicles all over the city. And that not only saved jobs, but it also gave our staff another sense of community, again, to get out there and interact with our supporters from behind a door or glass window.

They were able to have that one on one connection. “Hey, how you doing?” “Are you OK?” “How is your family?” And the smiles on the faces of the people that we are delivering to at the end of the day, made it so much… It was shining a bright light on a dark day.

-Troy Burtch, Marketing and Communications Manager, Great Lakes Brewing

How to embrace this trend:

• Connect with your customers to find the best ways to serve them (ReRoot found local delivery wasn’t the best option, but curbside was);
• Work through the logistics (What is your delivery schedule? What are your delivery borders? Do you need to hire additional staff to complete the drop-offs? Will you charge a fee for delivery?)
• Look for ways to streamline so your customer experience remains simple, efficient, and convenient from beginning to end;
• Communicate new options for fulfillment clearly through onsite signage and digital announcements (like social media and email);
• Think about the right ways to update customers at every touchpoint  (confirmation email, text message, etc.) to keep the experience seamless
• Create on-site signage that clearly directs customers where to go for curbside pickup.
  

3. Holistic (omnichannel) commerce

Having an online presence alongside a physical store alone isn’t enough: your channels need to work together to build a holistic experience. 

Omnichannel retailing is a fully-integrated approach to commerce, providing shoppers a unified experience across all channels or touchpoints.

Whether you’re selling wholesale, or you own your own retail space, or you sell at popups, the digital channels need to be intimately connected to the physical space.

Curbside pickup and BOPIS already toe this line, but there are plenty of ways to take this process to the next level. 

Digitally-Native brand, Mack Weldon, is an exceptional example of true omnichannel commerce at work. 

You can purchase Mack Weldon products directly on their website:

In their Hudson Yards store:

And on modern marketplace, Huckberry:

An omnichannel commerce doesn’t require you to be everywhere possible, just the right places for your customers.

In my interview with Brain Berger, Founder and CEO of Mack Weldon, he told me how to approach this multichannel strategy:

It’s about being really strategic around how you position your brand to your customer and what channels in which you do that. So for us it’s not, ‘Oh, we’ve conquered digital or reached a level of scale, so now we’re just going to start opening up stores at a rapid clip.’ It’s really about thinking about the role of each channel and how it fits into your overall game plan.

-Brian Berger

How to embrace this trend:

• Map out common customer journeys with a focus on both online and offline sales;
• Reach local customers by using geo targeting in your paid advertising;
• Use in-store signage to drive customers to your online store and social channels
• Collect email addresses at the point of sale;
• Build a loyalty program that rewards both in-person and online sales;
• Use the physical space of your brick’n’mortar store to produce content for social media, product images, etc.
• Offer virtual styling and video chat with store employees through a digital tool like HERO to improve the experience of your online customers;
• Consider using augmented and virtual reality to bring your physical experience online;
• Use SMS notifications for curbside pickup and local delivery (then use the channel to engage customers post-purchase)
  

4. A focus on local

Community is everything, especially during hard times.

Whether it’s Zoom happy hours, TikTok dance competitions, or  Kickstarter campaigns to save local institutions, we’re all craving real, human connection. 

That translates to the ways (and the places) where we shop.

Young people are particularly invested in supporting smaller, independent retailers right now, with 63% of 18-34 year olds saying they seek out locally owned businesses to support. 

On top of that, nearly 80% of people who chose to shop locally made that choice to protect local jobs or support their community. 

We’re even seeing cities build out programs designed to drive local support for retailers. Check out this example in my hometown of Colorado Springs. 

The takeaway here is simple: lean into your neighborhood.

Moving online opens up many new markets, but focusing on your local community and their needs, then building outwards means that you can maintain the connections and the passion that drove your business from the beginning.

I really think that one of the biggest reasons why we survived was because of our community. They were the ones that were spreading the word about ReRoot. They were the ones that were showing up for curbside. Our community really showed up.

-Paige Briscoe, ReRoot

That can mean sourcing local ingredients, underwriting local events and nonprofits, or a huge range of other community-oriented moves. 

How to embrace this trend:

• Use hashtags that encourage local support (#shoplocal #shopsmall);
• Connect with local media to build press hype in your area;
• Partner with other local retailers to drive awareness for both of your brands;
• Create Instagrammable signage or experiences that drive passersby to stop and share;
• Leverage local influencers to connect with your audience;
• Highlight the different ways that your business supports the local community using in-store signage, social media, and your website;
  

5. A different kind of store associate

There continue to be major shifts in the roles that different team members play within a business, and often that requires retail employees to wear multiple hats.

Think about virtual shopping, or tools like HERO that allow customers to video chat and text with store associates while they shop online.

Adam Levene, CEO of HERO explains this trend:

What HERO does is connect a shopper who’s online who needs that same assistance, same inspiration and guidance as they would usually find in the physical store, and we allow them to get that whilst shopping online. But instead of speaking to a bot, instead of speaking to someone in the customer service center, they’re speaking to an expert, a sales associate from the store nearest to them and through text and through chat, through video calling, they’re able to connect and get that same IRL experience online.

While these experiences may not be traditional, they present unique opportunities for your customer service to shine.

It might sound daunting, but bringing your store associates into new roles that balance brick’n’mortar work with digital consultations creates the kind of one-on-one connection that shoppers crave.

Knix Wear has found massive success with their virtual styling program, making it a permanent piece of their business.

“We’re seeing about a 70 to 75 conversion rate from appointments in terms of purchase,” said Joanna Griffiths, Founder and CEO. 

Joanna continues: “What we’re hearing from people is they’re actually preferring it over an in real life fitting because it’s almost more intimate, but without the awkwardness. Now it’s a big part of our company.”

It’s more personal, more helpful, and inspires loyalty on a level that is difficult to match with a traditional ecommerce experience.

How to embrace this trend:

• Train your retail staff on ecommerce tools, tech, inventory, and the ways that these digital elements play into their day-to-day roles;
• Enable live chat on your website, and train store associates to run the account
• Use a tool like HERO to add live video calling and online consultation to your store;
• Build a virtual styling program;
• Host live Q&A sessions with store associates;
• Highlight your store associates on social media and use them as brand ambassadors. 

6. Experiential, personalized in-store experiences

With in person shopping down over the last year for obvious reasons, that means associates can spend more time with the people shopping.

Think of it as something closer to showroom retail: one-on-one personalized experiences that give the customer a sense of what they really mean to your business. 

Universal Standard is taking this approach and getting amazing results. And it makes sense- as fashion brands, they’re able to leverage their associates as style consultants, guaranteeing customers an unprecedented level of time and attention.

Alexandra Waldman, Co-Founder and CEO of Universal Standard told me about this non-traditional approach:

“We wanted to create a much more personal experience. So we created a space where you were one on one with a stylist. You made an appointment, or even if you dropped in. It is very much your space.”

As we continue to move through this “new normal”, heightened in-store experiences and community connection will be highly sought after.

We can look to modern retailers, like Daily Paper, for evidence of this trend. Jefferson Osei, Co-Founder explained why the team built experiential spaces, like a rooftop cafe, into the design of their brand new flagship store in NYC.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible at this moment in time but looking forward, we really think that the store in New York will become a community hub where all these people can get together and link with like minded people. And the space will also serve as an educational space. We will dedicate certain areas to host certain initiatives, work with young talent in and around New York, and also collaborate with local initiatives and other parties.

How to embrace this trend (post-pandemic):

• Look at ways to reshape your physical layout to encourage customers to spend more time in-store;
• Add tablets or QR codes for customers to engage with in your physical location
• Create spaces (like Instagrammable mirrors) that drive engagement with the space and your brand alongside purchasing;
• Train your store associates for longer, more intensive interactions;
• Host community events like workshops, meetings, or trainings
• Offer your space for rent for your customers;
• Add extra experiences, like a coffee bar, into your store;
• Lower your stock and build out the experience. For example, that could mean using a 3PL or warehouse to make more space and offering buy in store, ship to home

7. Micro-retail

Moving forward, there are tons of opportunities for brands to offer smaller, boutique experiences that still provide the physical, “three-dimensional” approach to shopping that we crave.

So what does that look like? It can be a micro-retail location, as in the case of online bakery Klado, which chose to open a 50 square foot storefront. For founders Jen Prado and Jesse Klee, it was about creating an intimate “hole in the wall” experience for their customers. 

Pop-ups are another exciting way to offer tons of opportunity for low-cost experimentation, and even if inventory is limited, these spaces can drive traffic to your online store, setting up a multi-dimensional connection with customers.

Even opening a location inside of another store can be a great opportunity to connect with a new audience. Sephora has been doing this for well over a decade, but more recently Birchbox has seen great results opening up a popup inside of the Washington DC location of Rent the Runway.

Basically, low overheads, deeper community connections, and a novel shopping experience make micro-retail a great opportunity for growing brands.

The trick here is to lean into the things that already work for your brand. Knowing your strengths and amplifying them in a smaller space is your best bet.

Is the breadth of your inventory a big draw? Micro-retail might not be the right move.

However, if customers love interacting with your associates, putting that experience front-and-center in a smaller space can build lifelong connections.

How to embrace this trend:

• Partner with other brands to build micro shopping experiences;
• Host community events;
• Explore the unique experiences a smaller space can offer;
• Prioritize safety using digital tools- i.e. tracking the number of customers in-store
• Collect email information or phone numbers to create digital connections after sale;
• Get creative: Retail doesn’t always mean four walls;

8. Local partnerships

While 2020 was full of uncertainty, one positive that we’ve seen, is new partnerships between businesses offering exciting customer experiences.

Many cafes have started selling groceries from local farms. My go-to cycling studio in Colorado Springs sources their t-shirts from the printing shop next door.

Common People Shop, a small retailer in Ontario who was forced to close down their store, has leveraged a local partnership to keep curbside pickup as an option.

Steph LaPosta, co-owner of Common People explains:

When we decided to face the reality that now was no longer the time and space for our Brick + Mortar, we knew the decision to close would not only impact the growth of our business, but our connection with our community.  As we began to experiment with ways to keep that connection alive we knew one thing — we had to find somewhere local that we could partner with, to still offer curbside pickup.  That’s where Parkdale Pet Foods came in.  Partnering with them meant we could drive traffic and attention their way, give them a portion of our profits, and keep both our brands alive and thriving in the Parkdale community.

This kind of collaboration is really common between DTC brands (anyone remember the BarkBox + Glossier toys?), and it’s so exciting to see retailers branching out in similar ways. 

It’s all about finding businesses with complementary offerings that don’t compete with yours. Think creatively about the different needs that you can meet for your customers and the ways that other brands in your local economy can help that partnership.

Having a strong sense of your own audience and that of potential partners (i.e. some overlap, but still distinct subsets) will really help these partnerships succeed.

How to embrace this trend:

• Connect with other brands in your area and learn what they’re working on;
• Put together a co-marketing digital campaign;
• Create content for another retailer;
• Create popups within each other’s stores
• Release co-branded products
• Team up on give-back campaigns within your community
• Use social media to reach each other’s audiences
• Look for mutually beneficial ways to build a better customer experience (or meet specific customer needs) together

9. Virtual experiences

Your brand has more to offer than just your products. Every business is made up of experts on a range of topics. 

Many restaurants are offering online cooking classes with starter kits. Bars are creating online mixology classes. Yoga studios are offering virtual sessions. 

Universal Standard is a standout in this category. They’ve partnered with Airbnb to host online readings of their children’s book, “What Would Fashion Look Like If It Included All Of Us,” building an extraordinary connection between the brand and the community they serve.

The trick here is building an online platform for your brand that meets a range of customer needs and empowers them to engage with your products, beliefs, and mission in new ways. 

There are plenty of ways to offer both instruction and kits that let customers learn or take part in something new and hands on.

How to embrace this trend:

• List out the important elements of your brand experience and determine what can thrive online;
• Create engaging digital events that supplement your products;
• Prioritize community and connection between customers as well as with your brand;
• Train your staff with a specific focus on virtual experiences;
• Talk with your customers about the kinds of events that be exciting and valuable to them;
• Consider partnering with a complementary brand to broaden the audience.

Conclusion

As retailers continue to adapt to a new world of commerce, there’s plenty of opportunities to build a thriving brand and business.

• If you don’t have an a website or online store, consider investing in setting that up.
• Even post-COVID, many consumers will expect new fulfillment options such as curbside pickup, local delivery, and contactless payments.
• Having a digital presence alone isn’t enough, the entire experience should be seamless both in-store and online.
• Now is a great time to focus on serving your local community.
• Your store associates can be a great resource to educate and serve your customers through digital consultations and other virtual interactions.
• Consider experimenting with unique and personalized in-store experiences.
• Micro retail locations can also be an effective way to create a memorable experience.
• Local partnerships offer an opportunity to better serve your customers and enter new markets.

While overcoming these unique challenges won’t be easy, we’re entering a wide open frontier with endless possibilities. Things have been rough, but I, for one, am feeling optimistic about the future. 

The post Retail Reimagined: 9 Trends for the Future of Physical Retail appeared first on CXL.

 “Show, don’t tell” is a time-tested rule in writing and filmmaking that helps viewers draw their own conclusions rather than relying on a spoon-fed version created by the author. Yet, when it comes to product demos, many marketers and sales teams fall short in creating demos that convert. 

How do some of the most successful SaaS companies approach their demos? In this article, we’ll look at some of the most important components of running a successful demo and what to consider when creating yours. 

Case study data collection

Despite the common misconception, the goal of a demo isn’t always to make a sale. It can be an incredibly effective way to qualify your prospects and nurture your leads as well.

While thorough feature pages and detailed pricing tables are great components to have on your website, what better way to qualify prospective customers than with video marketing?

Getting to see the demonstration of a tool you’re interested in can answer so many questions instantly—including some you may not have known you had.

To better understand the current SaaS demo trends, I set out to study subscription-based software websites to see how they treated their demos (or lack thereof). The data in this case study is a group of 78 businesses in all kinds and sizes of niches, including email automation, WFH solutions, accountant tools, e-commerce inventory management, and more.

I tracked everything from the call-to-action (CTA), elements used on the page, what style of demo was employed, and more.

The main questions I sought to answer are:

1. How commonly are demos used in the SaaS space?
2. What types of demos are used, and are there correlations between B2B and B2C demo usage?
3. What are the most frequently included supporting pieces to a demo sign up page?
4. Finally, what are some great examples of demo implementations that stand out from the crowd?

Since there are many ways to go about creating an effective demo (and pros and cons to each method), the end goal of all this data is to provide you with objective information and identify potential trends so you can employ a good demo for your business. Ultimately, only you can determine whether a live demo is better than a recorded demo. As with most things in marketing, you can do that by testing different methods. 

Breaking down SaaS demo groupings

Before sharing my findings, I first want to walk through the different demo groupings that I noticed during the research collection as well as unique examples of each. The overarching patterns I noticed were:

1. Live demos
2. Pre-recorded demos
3. Real-use demos

Solution 1: Live demos

A live demo is simply a one-on-one demo with a real person from the company’s sales team. These are scheduled, structured interactions, where the prospective customer can ask any questions to the salesperson directly. The sign up flow is typically very simple, with a CTA in the navbar.

Or hero section of the home page which redirects users to the demo sign up page.

These pages can vary in complexity, but the common element in all of them was some type of sign up form.

This was either self-service and had users schedule a time directly or noted that a salesperson would be reaching out to them soon.

While they varied in length, there are some inputs that were almost always included, which I’ll be sharing later in the data section.

Live demo pros and cons

The advantage of live demos is a high level of one-on-one engagement, but comes at the cost (training, compensation, etc) of having a dedicated sales team and vetting leads.

Solution 2: Pre-recorded demos

Simply, these are walkthroughs that are usually screencast or “floating head” style videos. Similar to a live demo, the presenter shows the possibilities of the product in a normal use-case. Although some had a dedicated page, like Wrike.

During my research, it was more common to embed them on the home or feature pages of the product. A good example of this is Tuple, which isn’t a very marketing-heavy site, that decided to embed the demo right underneath the hero section of the home page.

Pre-recorded demo pros and cons

The advantage to this type of demo is that they’re relatively easy to produce and scale, but it may not fully answer the objections of a prospective customer the same way a live demo would (though there is a way around this I’ll mention later.)

Solution 3: Real-use demos

Real-use demos are highly engaging demos that allow users to play around with the product in a sandbox mode. A good example of this is Webflow, which allows people to experiment with the tool to build a dummy website.

Real-use demo pros and cons

The advantage to these types of demos is that they’re not time-intensive for any personal interactions, but they’re still effective at showing what it’s like to use a product on a daily basis.

The caveat is that if there’s a learning curve to using your product, people might not know where to ask for help or may give up completely. It’s also possible that these demos might have an up-front cost to design, code, and deploy.

Demo data analysis

Let’s dive into the data and trends in this case study to help determine what kind of demo and format might be best for your business:

• 71% of the companies in this sample are B2B companies, the remaining 29% being B2C or a hybrid of B2B/B2C.
• Based on the companies in this sample, 59% of the sites exhibited a demo or demo sign up page.
• The two most-used call-to-action texts were “Request a demo” (30%) and “Get a demo” (26%).
• The most common type of demo is a live demo (70%), then the pre-recorded demo (27%), followed by real-use demos (3%).
• There was no significant difference in live demo usage between B2B or B2C companies, being 70% and 71%, respectively.
• Of the schedulable demos, the most commonly included contact information was an email address (97%), a name (74%), a phone number (65%), the contact person’s job title and company (48%), an optional message field (19%), and niche-specific information (42%). The vast majority of sites (83%) mandated name, email, and phone together be required.
• As for the demo pages themselves, 31% of sites included a form of social proof (companies they’ve worked with or client testimonials). 16% of pages had an outline for client expectations of the one-on-one demo, and 14% of sites quickly summarized the core features and benefits of their product on the sign up page.

Trends & application

Let’s break down the raw data and try to establish some applications for your business.

Interpreting demo usage

As you may have noticed, although more than half of the SaaS sites included some form of demo, there was near-identical usage between how B2B and B2C SaaS companies used live versions. This finding surprised me—as I was expecting at least a soft level trend in live vs recorded vs real-use demos across company types.

Attempting to find a different correlation between demo types and companies, I then narrowed in on businesses that didn’t implement live demos. Since live versions have an inherent cost to them (expenditure of time or management of a sales team), I looked through the lens of company size to explain why they might have chosen recorded demos. 

My logic was that smaller companies wouldn’t be able to justify a sales team and would instead opt for recorded demos. Although there were some outlying data in companies that have teams of 4-10, there wasn’t enough proof to establish a trend. For example, Box is a sizable SaaS company that decided to host a collection of in-depth recorded demos on their website.

There seems to be no hard and fast rule when it comes to what type of demo to use. Based on this data, I think it comes down to a combination of the complexity and cost of the product offered, the average objections of the target audience, and the existing infrastructure in the company to handle more complex demos.

For example, a solo founder who is still in the early stages of product development with a relatively competitive price point might want to focus more time on maturing their product quality and opt for a recorded demo. With the data from this case study, it might be important to consider the best type of demo to use on a case-by-case basis.

Trends in form inputs.

Let’s talk about the trends in the forms for the demo sign ups themselves.

Contact information

Based on the data, the consensus is that name, phone, and email are required together – 83% of forms required all three. A good note here is that most forms also had “Business email” or “Work email” as the placeholder for the input, seemingly to qualify more serious leads and reduce spam submissions.

Nearly half of all forms required the contact’s job title and company. Whether or not this is important to your implementation will come down to who the target customer is for your SaaS.

If your ideal subscriber is part of a large business, it may help to qualify them; but I can’t see the advantages of these fields if you’re trying to engage with solo business owners, for example.

Niche information

42% of sites with a demo form included short questionnaires about niche-specific information. These fields were normally optional. For example, Kinsta, a WordPress hosting service, had options to declare the number of websites that need hosting, their average monthly visits, and more.

This kind of information is obviously valuable to a sales team so they can tailor the product’s features that solve potential issues of companies that size. It seemed that this sort of information was more important to companies whose pricing models scaled based on client use. If that’s something your company does as well, it might be worthwhile to consider.

Implementing supporting elements

So how did these SaaS companies help convince prospective customers that they should try the demo? Well, 35% of businesses didn’t. Instead, they kept their sign up pages simple with only a form and no other supporting elements.

However, if only having a form isn’t getting the quantity and quality of demos you’d like, I recommend seeing if adding these features helps out. Letting your analytics and demo conversion data help guide your decisions, here might be some things to split-test:

• Expectations outline: 16% of sites included a bulleted list that outlined expectations for the live call. This can be a reassurance that the business takes the demo seriously and that it will be an effective use of the client’s time.

More importantly, it’s a great chance to solve the most common objections people might have with a service. For example, check out how TravelPerk uses an outline to show how the demo will solve 4 core issues their customers need help with.

• Social proof: With 44% of sites in this case study including some form of social proof, it’s important to consider for your implementation. Based on this data set, there were only two ways social proof was used:

Testimonials

Client logos

An interesting note is that the quantity of testimonials were used sparingly on the sign up pages (a max of 2, but usually just 1).

• Product features: A concise list of features/benefits was found on 14% of sites in this study. When used to quickly summarize the key benefits, like BetterCloud did, it can be an effective reassurance to the customer that your product could be the right fit.

Alternatively, you could use this space to display average, objective gains users can expect from using the product, like ShowPad. Note that it’s probably important to also tell how this data was collected.

Real-life examples of SaaS demo pages

With a good understanding of common features and styles of demo pages, I wanted to break down a couple of fantastic examples for the two most common types of demo (live and pre-recorded). While real-use demos can be great, they’re far less common (remember, only 3%) and usually just include test data of the existing software suite.

Live Demo Turned Coaching Session: Slite

To make the case of a well-optimized live demo, we have Slite. Slite is a remote work solution with a strategy unlike any other site in this case study. Rather than framing their demo as a demo, they personalize the experience by branding it as a “Remote coaching session.”

The copy in the hero section emphasizes that this is just a 30 minute chat to answer any questions and “show you the ropes.” 

Backed by some social proof in a logo list and a section dedicated to what makes Slite different, they certainly put priority on the benefits the prospective customer will receive.

To further clarify exactly what the attendee will get out of the coaching session, they include an outline of expectations.

A nice touch to enhance the “coaching” approach is to include a group of employees from Slite the person signing up might interact with.

Not many other companies did this, and it really stood out as a way to humanize the company and make anyone signing up more comfortable. Ultimately, if people feel more comfortable to ask questions in the demo, the better they can evaluate if your product is the right solution. This is better for both parties long-term.

Lastly, the sign up form is kept incredibly simple with only two steps. The first question aims to identify the main challenges the user is facing, for a tailored experience during the demo.

The only other input in the form is the user’s email. It’s relatively frictionless, while still gaining essential information for the sales team.

A Great Way to Educate: Hey

Repping for recorded demo inspiration, we have Hey email, created by the founders of Basecamp.

As a solo founder, a recorded demo was the best solution for my company LeadGeek, and Hey’s demo flow played a huge part in the design process for my own. There’s a lot to learn here about good product education in written and video format.

Right from the start, Hey places a huge importance on their demo by making it the primary CTA of the home page.

The demo page is relatively lengthy compared to others in the market, with a heavy weight on benefits of daily product use.

What’s interesting about Hey’s treatment of their demo is that they qualify attendees in the CTA itself.

Their approach is more webinar-like than demo—37 minutes is a somewhat lengthy recorded demo to sit through. People are redirected to Youtube to watch the demo; It’s an interesting decision with one major apparent benefit: comments.

While answering questions in a live demo would be the most thorough way to alleviate objections, answering in comment format is the next best thing. As your demo matures and gains traction, it’s likely that the question one person has will already be asked/answered. This serves as a mini FAQ in addition to a demo, which further saves time.

Building your own demo

As you think about how to implement a demo for your own business, it’s important to remember how open for interpretation this data is. Though there are trends, there’s no purely right or wrong way to handle this process.

Factors that might influence your decision are your company size and resources available to dedicate to a demo, current growth or stagnation, and quality and quantity of your customer base. Only you know your business, but this section is dedicated to helping you find answers in your demo execution.

It’s logical that the first question you should ask is if a demo is even right for your business. Many companies in this case study instead opted for a collection of past webinars in lieu of a demo – does that make more sense for your use case?

If you think a demo is the better solution, should you go live, recorded, or real-use? From my analysis, this decision depends on the product itself. Thinking through its complexity, price, and common customer objections will help you decide. Here are some questions to consider:

To implement a live demo:

• Who will be interacting with prospective customers? Is there a team dedicated to this—and if not, is the benefit in time spent potentially worth it?
• What form fields should I include to reduce friction as much as possible without sacrificing customer quality?
• How will scheduling, communication, and follow up be handled?
• Where does the script/structure of the demo come from?

To implement a recorded demo:

• Is my product simple enough to explain in a video format?
• Can I make this interesting/engaging enough to sit through so I can clearly explain the benefits?
• How can I handle the most common customer objections? (email, Youtube comments, etc)
• Does one long, thorough demo or many short, single-feature explainer videos make more sense?

To implement a real-use demo:

• Is this really the best format to showcase my product?
• How will this be created, coded, and deployed? Is it worth that investment?
• Can I make my product clear enough so that someone who has never used it won’t become discouraged?
• How will I handle support and questions?

Regardless of which demo format you choose, some other quick questions to consider are:

• How visible should I make my demo and what should its call to action be?
• What supporting features can I include? (testimonials, outlines, feature lists, etc)
• What should the strategy be to nurture demo no-shows and other leads?

Conclusion

A quality demo is a fantastic way to qualify customers and really get that long-term fit for both you and them. A well-qualified customer is particularly important in affecting the overall business’s CAC, LTV, and MRR; And since retention rate is paramount to SaaS growth, it’s extremely important to consider the best demo strategy for your business.

Here are some of the key learnings from my findings.

• Slite proved that longer form inputs don’t necessarily qualify leads better, although it’s probably important to include options for name, email, and phone. It’s also okay to stray from the pack and tackle demos from a different perspective.
• Hey showed us that while they keep their content engaging, they rely on their customers to do some digging and learn a little on their own.
• Add supporting features as your analytics data suggests. Though most companies may not have the clout of putting top-tier software businesses in their logo list, do what makes sense. Incorporating social proof with even a testimonial can reassure leads that a normal person benefited from using your product.

Constructing a great product demo takes some self-reflection on what you offer to the market, who your ideal customer is, what your ideal customer wants, and how you can communicate that. And while it may take some time to get right, but in many cases it’s well worth the effort. 

The post Cracking the Product Demo Code: Lessons From 78 SaaS Demos appeared first on CXL.

How do you go from good to great? How do you remain relevant as your competition continues to gain more market share? As the technology and business landscape continues to shift rapidly, companies that embrace innovation will have a clear advantage over those who don’t. 

As with most things in marketing and business, product innovation isn’t something that happens from a few meetings or putting together a polished slide deck. From who you hire to holding your team accountable for certain OKRs, innovation requires buy-in from your entire organization. 

In this article, I’ll share what product innovation is, why it matters, and how to build a company culture where innovation is the standard. 

What is product innovation? 

When you hear the word innovation, what immediately comes to mind? 

Do you think of companies like Amazon and Google? Does product innovation refer to creating entirely new products or improving previous offerings? 

At the most basic level, product innovation is the process of developing and marketing a new or improved product to solve your customer’s problems. 

In The Innovation Delusion: How Our Obsession with the New Has Disrupted the Work That Matters Most, authors Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russel have a more direct take: 

“Innovation, at its core, is change that can be measured because it generates profits.” 

No matter how great your product or service is now, innovation is critical for continuing to serve your customers based on their current needs and desires and avoiding becoming an afterthought. 

The challenges of innovation 

To be innovative, you have to experiment. If you want to have more inventions, you need to do more experiments per week, per month, per year, per decade. It’s that simple. You cannot invent without experimenting, and here’s the other thing about experiments, lots of them fail. If you know it’s gonna work in advance; it is not an experiment.

– Jeff Bezos

Despite most businesses understanding the importance of innovation, it remains challenging to do. According to a McKinsey Global Innovation Survey, “although 84% of executives agree that innovation is important to growth strategy, only 6% are satisfied with innovation performance.”   

In another study, “only one-third of U.K. business leaders said they were innovating successfully enough to generate revenue or measurable growth; only a quarter of boards of directors make innovation a priority, and 40% of leaders reject disruptive ideas because of a fear of failure.”

Many organizations claim innovation is a priority, but their high-level strategy and day-to-day operations say otherwise. For larger organizations especially, getting buy-in for innovation initiatives can be tricky. 

And yet, you can’t expect to create a culture of experimentation if your employees are too afraid to speak up and share their ideas. You can’t build a culture of innovation if failure is treated as something to be ashamed about. 

Innovation, by its very nature, carries risk. That said, in my many years of experience working with companies all over the world, the cost of not innovating comes at a hefty price.

Here are some of my key takeaways on how to build a culture of innovation as well as build products and services your customers love. 

1. Avoid catastrophic failure 

When it comes to innovation, knowing what not to do is just as important as knowing what to get right. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve seen companies make in their quest for innovation is not taking into account the worst-case scenario. 

The upside of innovation can be a game-changer for your business, but not at the risk of damaging your brand permanently. 

As I shared in my talk Test & Learn Community, author Nassim Taleb argues that it’s just as important to guard against catastrophic events (black swans) than it is to make incremental improvements.

Just as buying insurance can never generate ROI, validation experiments will not result in more money directly but does provide a safety net against business catastrophe. 

While there are many examples of product innovation gone wrong, Netflix’s decision to spin off into another company called Qwikster nearly a decade ago continues to be talked about in many business circles today.  

It turns out, two companies, two logins, and two billing accounts were something their customers did not want or need.

As CEO Reed Hastings noted at the time:

It is clear that for many of our members, two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs… This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, no Qwikster.

Another example I’ve discussed in the past, is the redesign Snapchat rolled out a few years ago. 

Here’s what TechCrunch had to say at the time:

Snapchat’s redesign was a disaster. It cratered ad views and revenue and led Snapchat’s user count to actually shrink in March. That’s why CEO Evan Spiegel just announced a big reversal of the redesign’s worst part.

While both Netflix and Snapchat were able to avoid true disaster (at the cost of millions of dollars and lousy PR) for startups and smaller companies, a wrong move could lead to a situation that puts them out of business.

That isn’t to say, innovation is not worth the risk, but avoid experiments that may lead to irreparable harm. 

2. Have a clear goal for innovation in mind

While virtually everyone business can benefit from innovation, innovation for the sake of innovation is a losing strategy. Yes, it’s important to continue to improve and enhance your products and services, but without a clear why, you’re at a significant disadvantage from the start. 

As I wrote previously on CXL about running marketing experiments, getting clear about your resources and goals for your experiments is critical:

Is it feasible? It’s true that experimentation should not be confined to rigid business goals. However, it’s important to consider the budget, resources, and potential metrics that might be affected negatively by a failed test in advance.

The first consideration in feasibility is practicality. How will you accomplish this test? What sort of resources and manpower would you need to execute it on the ground?

I’ve found the 5 Whys framework to be helpful for getting clarity on your customer’s most significant pain points and challenges to determine opportunities for innovation. 

In my course on product innovation, I give the example of how we used this framework at Convoy. 

Why: Experimentation Platform doesn’t provide tools for analysis. 
Why: The Platform doesn’t know what metrics or algorithms are used in an experiment.
Why: Metrics definitions and algorithms are not standardized and are not generic. 
Why: The variety of metrics and algorithms used at Convoy are varied and change often. 
Why: Convoy is a two-sided marketplace with small data. Typical Tests don’t work.

An innovation strategy without a clear goal is not a sustainable and repeatable process and can lead you down a road that costs you both time and money.

3. Put your customers first

Any successful product innovation strategy should always start with your customer. It may be tempting to launch a new product based solely on what your data says, but without talking with your customers, you risk investing in an unnecessary flop. 

I always recommend starting with asking whether or not your customers want your proposed initiative.

The first thing we should always ask before launching a new experimental business initiative is: Does the customer want this?

If the customer isn’t interested in what you’re offering, then it doesn’t matter whether or not your testing program has the budget to roll out a test to 500 stores nationwide; it’s going to be a waste of money.

There are many methods that help in understanding whether a product or service is wanted or not, but for now, we will just focus on two. The first is easy- Talk to your customers. Ask them what changes they would like to see or whether an additional feature would help their buying experience.

While talking with your customers won’t guarantee they like or respond positively to your experiments, it does give you valuable insight that will increase your chances of success. 

As the book Competing Against Luck: The Story of Innovation and Customer Choice puts it:

Most innovative products were conceived, developed, and launched into the market with a clear understanding of how these products would help consumers make the progress they were struggling to achieve.

That work led to our theory of disruptive innovation, which explains the phenomenon by which an innovation transforms an existing market or sector by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability where complication and high cost have become the status quo—eventually completely redefining the industry.

By only guessing about what your customers may or may not want, your innovation strategy is almost certain to fail. 

4. Create a culture of experimentation 

Creating an innovative product once can certainly help you grow your business, but building a repeatable process is what’s going to continue to allow you to remain miles ahead of your competition.  

That starts with building an organization that values and incentives your team to take innovation seriously. Generally speaking, all the most innovative ideas at the world’s smartest companies come from immersed professionals understanding the opportunities in their space and being encouraged to take risks. 

Creating a culture where your employees feel comfortable sharing their ideas (and taking risks) is an essential part of innovation at scale. 

Having clear OKRs and North Star goals can help you and your team stay aligned on the big picture while also allowing the freedom for employees to test or run with their ideas.

Your employees should feel comfortable in running their clearly defined experiments with the knowledge you’ll back them up should it fail.

Yes, hold your team accountable, but at the same time, allowing your employees to own their experiments and support them through the process can rapidly increase company-wide innovation. 

As Sean Ellis author of Hacking Growth shared:

For me, the main thing that creates a culture of experimentation is committing to a testing cadence and sharing results. In the beginning, you may need to be patient to generate results. But I’ve never seen a company run 10+ highly considered tests and not achieve a meaningful improvement. Wins drive buy-in, and buy-in accelerates testing momentum.

So for me, the most important first step is committing to a weekly experiment release schedule. Stick with it for at least a month. Sharing results will drive more company-wide participation. Over time you’ll find that the whole process is pretty addictive. But it requires a commitment and perseverance in the beginning.

Conclusion

There’s no way around it; product innovation is incredibly difficult. That said, because it’s so challenging, companies that can innovate consistently are the ones who will remain the industry leaders for years to come. Here are the major takeaways:

1. Avoid catastrophic failure: Innovation is great (and essential), but not at the risk of making a mistake you can’t recover from. 
2. Successful product innovation starts with having a clear goal (and objective in mind); without having a detailed strategy in place, you’ll struggle to innovate consistently.
3. Innovation starts and ends with your customers. You can make assumptions about what your customers want and need, but without talking with them and understanding their pain points, those assumptions are just a guess. 
4. Product innovation is not a one-off process; to continue to reap the benefits of innovation, it’s critical you build innovation into your organization’s culture. 

The post Product Innovation: How To Build Products Your Customers Love appeared first on CXL.

As a marketer, knowing who to follow and learn from can be incredibly challenging. With a seemingly endless amount of content and marketing experts to sort through, it’s not always easy knowing whether someone has demonstrated the ability to ‘walk the walk.’

Having a large social media following doesn’t necessarily mean you’re a great marketer. And if you Google “top marketers,” and you’ll often find the same lists of the same names, you probably already know.  

Even worse, many of those top lists aren’t inclusive, leaving many objectively great marketers unseen. 

At CXL, we wanted to work to build an authoritative marketers database that wasn’t based on superficial metrics, or simply rehashing the big names of today. 

We wanted to go beyond a one and done list and to create an evergreen resource for marketers to find experts in specific areas of marketing.

For this project we had a few specific goals. 

1. Highlight and showcase the best marketers period—not just the ‘big names’ or those with a large following.

2. Cut through the noise by directly asking our marketing peers who they learn the most from. 

3. Create the go to resource for marketers to reference so they can know exactly who they can connect and learn from for specific marketing advice. 

Today we’re excited to share our Top Marketers Database, and explain our process for how it all came together. 

Who are the top 1% of marketers?

Before we share how we went about putting this list together, we should note that there are some limitations of our process. By design, you may not see some of the house-hold names of marketing that you might expect (and perhaps rightfully deserve to be on the list.) 

At CXL, we’re huge fans of shipping an MVP and working to improve it over time, and that’s exactly what we did with this project. Over time we expect the collection of marketers to continue to grow and we’ll update the list as responses continue to roll in. Additionally, we also plan on building out the ability to sort marketers by their specific area of expertise. 

For an individual to make version 1 of our list, we required that they receive 2+ votes from their peers. Our intention behind this, was to prevent individuals making the cut simply because their friends voted them in.

That of course, means that some qualified individuals may not be listed (yet.)

Our process for finding the best marketers 

To kick off this project, we first started with a list of some 50 marketers who we subjectively believed to be world class: experts well known for their advanced knowledge in SEO, digital psychology, analytics, content, branding, and CRO.

This initial list included CXL contributors, course instructors, and other marketing colleagues we’ve worked with first hand. We did our best to ensure that the initial seed list of marketers was as diverse as possible.

From that list, we then sent out a short email which read as follows:

As we noted in our initial outreach email:

The goal of the project is to help new(er) marketers pay attention to the smartest people, and we’re developing that list by following the trail—asking smart marketers to name other smart marketers, then asking those marketers to name a few more, and so on.

Here’s how it looked in action: 

From the responses, we then collected the names of those mentioned, and tallied how many votes each individual received. Reaching out to just shy of 500 people, we received 343 votes. 

On average, 1 in every 4 people we reached out to ended up filling out the survey, adding more names to the list, allowing us to continue to do outreach based on their responses. 

From the names compiled, we then spent time collecting their social media profiles as well as other information such as their company and or website. In future updates, we hope to list their specific area of expertise as well as title.

We suspect as we continue to do more outreach, that many more of the names listed will move up the rankings and present an accurate picture of who the best marketers are. 

Conclusion

Ultimately, this project started out as a way to scratch our own itch. We wanted an easy way to quickly know who we should be following to keep up to date with what’s working (and not) in marketing. 

There are thousands of incredibly smart marketers and practitioners whose voices aren’t always heard and our goal is to help amplify those who are the best at their craft.

We invite you to check out the first version of our marketers database here. 

The post Who Are the Top 1% 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.

SaaS applications can be deployed in a variety of ways to help grow your business and and build processes at scale. However, even with these tools, identity management, authorization, and user management can still remain a challenge.

In this article we’ll take a look at how you can use Active Directory with your favorite SaaS applications to improve your processes and workflow as well as the pros and cons of different solutions.

In general, onboarding users can be a time-sensitive and manual process that involves using the right administrators across multiple departments to manage the entire process. Additionally, in many organizations, the Microsoft Active Directory (AD) functions as the administrative user directory that grants access to essential IT services, in particular email and file sharing.

Many enterprises have leveraged Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) since Salesforce launched almost two decades ago.

Popular vendors like Adobe, Oracle, and Microsoft have successfully moved their core applications to subscription-based models. 

Other vendors including Box and ServiceNow have completely replaced on-premises solutions with cloud-based solutions, SaaS is now the preferred way companies consume core business software.

What is a SaaS Application Integration?

SaaS data integration is the process of distributing applications to your team or anyone within your company conveniently, securely, without configuration. This process enables you to easily and accurately share access to applications. 

You’re also able to work effectively from that ambiguous cloud that’s the talk of the town, without going through the public domain. The vast majority of SaaS integrations are cloud-based.

How Does Active Directory Integration Work?

The process isn’t as complicated as it sounds. Let me show you how it works:

When a user logs into a web application, a program, or software, the username and password are passed and verified against your existing infrastructure to make sure the user’s credentials are valid. 

Here’s what it looks like, illustrated below:

Of course, without the right credentials, the user will be shut out. Think Rundeck! 

Depending on the provider, the application will usually request a set of fields once the user’s credentials are valid. 

These sets of fields will stem from your Active Directory infrastructure (some providers will only request first name, last name, email, and samaccountname.) 

When the Active Directory infrastructure has successfully returned the set of information about the user, the user’s application account will be created or updated—the goal is to keep all the vital information in-sync. 

Note: Only a handful of applications automatically update Active Directory fields—which typically will prompt the user to log-in. Alternatively, an admin can manually run a synchronization from within the application.

Here are the three most effective ways of integrating Active Directory with your SaaS applications:

Integration #1. Microsoft AD FS

When Windows Server 2008 R2 was launched, Microsoft built off the momentum with the release of Active Directory Federation Services (AD FS) 2.0. 

The goal was to create a system that’s responsible for providing an extensible platform that can handle single sign-on with applications outside of the firewall. 

This new system makes it possible for organizations to leverage AD FS to address the SSO requirement of an AD integration. Sadly, the downside is that it doesn’t address user synchronization, neither does it address user provisioning or de-provisioning.

Since the release of Windows Server 2009 and subsequent launches, there are some updates to protected logins now, including:

i). External Auth Providers as Primary: This allows users to use third-party authentication products as the major factor, instead of revealing password as the first factor. It can claim MFA if the external auth provider requires 2 factors.

ii). Pluggable Risk Assessment Module: It’s now easier for users to build their own plug-in modules, which can help them block specific types of requests during the pre-authentication stage. 

In turn, users can easily use cloud intelligence such as Identity protection to block logins due to risky users or risky transactions.

With these new updates, the user data is in safer hands. However, it’s quite imperative to consider the platform you’re using when considering AD FS as a viable means to address SSO needs.

As a core feature of Windows Server, AD FS was primarily developed as a platform—not an end-to-end solution for authenticating single sign-on needs. Although these platforms can be powerful and flexible, they require signifiant amounts of additional work to develop a complete solution.

Integration #2. Use a Third-Party Vendor Solution

Given the accelerated deployment of SaaS applications, there are many vendors you can leverage to address your enterprise’s Single Sign-On and user management needs. 

Some of the vendors include:

• JumpCloud;
• Okta;
• OneLogin;
• Oracle Identity Management, etc.

JumpCloud is our organization’s favorite vendor solution. The illustration below shows the simple process of AD integration using JumpCloud:

To successfully evaluate these vendors, it’s important to understand their abilities to integrate with Active Directory.

Greg Keller, in this Whiteboard Video Series, shares some thoughts on how the JumpCloud Directory-as-a-Service works. With additional videos found here.

Unlike an application-specific integration strategy, these vendors are designed to provide a single point of integration—especially with your on-premises Active Directory—which can then be used across all of your SaaS applications. 

And quite different from the AD FS option, some vendors also offer a robust and comprehensive solution that is maintained for you. This is aimed at working seamlessly with your existing AD infrastructure but comes at a cost.

Integration #3. Independent Integrations With AD

You can quickly develop a custom integration with Active Directory yourself—when you take advantage of the AD integration tools offered by the most established SaaS applications and platforms.

For example, Google Apps, Salesforce, and Microsoft Online Services all play key roles when you’re considering independent integrations with AD. Surely, they all have their challenges as well, none of them are 100% flawless. 

Google Apps Directory Sync, for example, is one of those independent solutions that provide one-way user migration from Active Directory into a Google Apps account. It gives the user flexibility and the chance to define which user attributes are imported. 

Keep in mind, though, the setup and administration are often separate from what’s obtainable with the Google Apps administration console, which is a can be a deal breaker for admins who want to force-manage the system from a locally installed utility instead. 

Organizations look for additional flexibility can leverage another third-party integration if they want to use SSO. This can result in two separate administration models—as well as what the user intends to use for SSO and user management.

An independent integration with Microsoft Office 365 Directory Synchronization, for example, equally provides one-way pushing of users—from within the Active Directory into Office 365. 

Administrators can seamlessly utilize this tool when they’re looking to both provision and de-provision users in Office 365. which is defined when users are added or removed from Active Directory. 

Just like the Google Apps tool, this process requires a decoupling from the primary administration experience. This can be managed efficiently via the on-premises utility. 

There’s no provision for SSO, so it will result in two separate administration models and user stores.

Salesforce has provided a set of APIs that let users design proprietary solutions, which can push users from AD and enable users to authenticate against AD, at the same time, mostly when accessing Salesforce.com. 

Although at this time, there’s no available tool that can help accomplish either of these tasks. To achieve these integration requirements, organizations need to invest heavily in both development and maintenance systems.

As you can see, the downsides of integrating AD with independent vendors are fairly clear. For one, organizations are expected to install and maintain tools from each vendor which can be both costly and time intensive.

Additionally, when those tools are inaccessible, you’re left to develop its own vendor-based solution. 

Let’s take a look at some active directory use cases.

Active Directory Use Cases (Examples)

1). Reduce the Time Spent Onboarding New Employees

Active Directory (AD) integration with SaaS applications provides a means of minimizing onboarding time. It also simplifies the process; and automates every manual input—making onboarding over 50% more efficient.

A great example of how AD can reduce onboarding time is Nome Public Schools. 

Before integrating its system with Active Directory, Nome Public Schools used to spend roughly 600 hours/year on provisioning, deprovisioning, and password resets. 

Today, the organization uses JumpCloud AD and spends less than 100 hours/year on the same tasks.

Onboarding goes beyond hiring new employees. It’s also about improving employees’ experiences and putting them in position to do their best work. By making it easy for them to use tools they need to be effective and productive you can significantly reduce turn over and build a strong company culture.

In most organizations, it’s the duty of the HR teams to enter the new hire’s personal information into the Human Resource Management System (HRMS), such as ADP or Workday. 

Once that’s done, a service desk ticket is generated to help the system administrator to make a provision for the new employee in Microsoft Active Directory (AD) or any other vendor.

Suppose the HR manager is expected to export the employee’s details in a CSV file from their HRMS application and send them via email to the IT team—that’s a lot of work if done manually.

Working to automate user provisioning can help eliminate daunting and time-consuming onboarding operations like the example above. These integrations also help IT admins free up time to focus on other critical tasks that will move the organization in the right direction.

If your organization uses ADManager Plus, for example, you can automatically provision accounts in AD, Exchange, Office 365, Skype for Business, as well as G Suite. This will ensure that changes effected in the Human Resource Management Systems are reflected across all accounts.

Furthmore, you can take advantage of Connect iPaaS to eliminate the need to manually create and update identities in Active Directory—assuming the new hire record has been created or updated in ADManager Plus (ADP).

When the employee record is created or updated in ADP or Workday it is then synced to AD to create or update the user’s mapping groups. As a result, employee data can be synced instantly, saving hours of valuable time.

More effective onboarding allows you spend less time on admin tasks, and more time educating the new employee, improving the sales process, and ultimately make more money.

2). Efficient Asset Management Upon Onboarding

Passing the employee’s details to the IT department to notify them of the new hire is half the battle. Continued management of those assets often feels like a full time job.

By asset, I’m referring to the tools and creatives the employee needs to fully offer their best services to the organization. Comprehensive employee onboarding is a time-consuming process. It takes a lot of time to get a new hire and fully equip them to work.

Assigning a company email address, training, defining job roles, creating business accounts, resource allocation, and giving them company assets, requires massive amounts of coordination from multiple teams within the company. 

To give you an idea, this process is well-illustrated in 3 steps:

With Connect iPaaS, you can create workflows to automatically notify the teams concerned about the assets and accounts they need to create or allocate—the moment the employee’s identity has been created in Active Directory. 

Another example, consider marketing certification for employees, an ADP will help you manage their assets accordingly.

My favorite example is Topgolf, a company that leveraged RoboMQ AD to catapult its IT integrations from managing just a few thousand employees to 24,000+ worldwide.

Consider services such as ServiceNow, Twilio, JIRA, Twilio, Slack, and other sales enablement tools; that can help act as connectors in Connect iPaaS and seamlessly integrate with AD to securely set up service desk tickets and notifications—thus offering a streamlined process for assigning assets to new hires.

3. Save Time Creating New Accounts in Enterprise Applications

Active Directory integration with your SaaS applications can also help you save time when creating new accounts in enterprise applications. 

As you likely know, your employees’ data changes over time. They might get a raise, change names, or even leave the company. Having a streamlined process to update their account details and permissions can save a ton of time and headaches. Essentially, established organizations that use enterprise-level applications to onboard, nurture, convert new clients can also benefit from Active Directory integration. They can create trusted experiences with customers. 

One of my favorite examples is Ally Financial, an organization that offers auto financing solutions. It capitalized on Okta’s AD solutions to provide a seamless and trusted experience for its 40,000 dealers (with varying data size). “This wouldn’t have been possible if it was done manually,” says Megan Crespi, CTO.

This site also employs AD to manage its onboarding process. Other popular eCommerce brands like Zappos, 3Wishes, and Aliexpress with hundreds of thousands of customers globally manage employee and customer onboarding easily with an AD.

And given both Amazon and eBay have their in-house AD, it’s always worth testing to see if it works for you.

While it’s important to integrate ADP or Workday to effectively create identities in AD, there’s more to consider when it comes to streamlining the employee onboarding process. 

Whether you’re a medical practice that requires a simplified patient management system or a manufacturing firm, it’s become increasingly important to ensure downstream provisioning of Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) into your favorite productivity tools and enterprise-level applications. You can do this by implementing based on the rights and privileges granted to each specific employee.

At the end of the day, it just doesn’t make sense to spend hundreds of hours on tasks that can be easily automated.

In the case of onboarding, every task assigned to the employee needs to be synchronized with the appropriate department, especially for large digital organizations such as Shopify, Bluehost, etc.

While automating processes can take time initially, over time the dividends continue to pay off.

For large organizations that deal with thousands of employees, one simple automation or integration can dramatically improve company productivity and morale.

Conclusion 

There you have it, several real world examples of how integrating your SaaS applications with Active Directory can improve your processes, productivity, and onboarding.

Active Directory can help you:

1.) Reduce the time spent on onboarding new employees.
2.) Help with efficient asset management during onboarding.
3.) Save time creating enterprise accounts.

And much more.

Keep in mind that modern identity management goes beyond connecting Active Directory with cloud applications. Assigning permissions and licenses in cloud applications is a critical step you must take as well. Services like vRealize, Okta, and JumpCloud can help you achieve simple and complex user provisioning in real-time.

The post Integrating Active Directory With Your SaaS Tool Stack appeared first on CXL.

There’s this misconception that businesses must get to a certain level before they’re ready for press. As if they need to be some big-shot executive or Fortune 500 company before anyone in press looks their way. Nope!

As someone who’s been on both sides of the publishing table for over a decade and has had her fair share of features in Business Insider, Lifehacker, and The New York Times, I can tell you that it’s never too early—or too late to get press.

You can get press today. I’ll show you how.

In this article, I’m going to share why press matters to you and your business. I’ll also share how businesses like yours can get press and maximize the potential of press to build trust, drive sales, drum up demand, and of course, skyrocket your authority and credibility—no matter what industry or niche you’re in, and even if it’s just one press feature.

Before we press on, I want to first tell you about this ramen—and how it relates to press.

The hidden benefits of press

This humble family-owned shop where this ramen is served seats no more than nine people at a time. 

You can imagine that in Tokyo ramen shops such as this one are like grains of sand across a desert: they’re everywhere.

How do ramen shops compete when customers can pretty much walk 10 steps in any direction and run into one? Surely, in this saturated market this ramen shop would have a difficult time standing out?

…Well, actually…

Each day, without fail, this ramen shop has queues that form and rapidly expand before it even opens. The line snakes along the street and often needs to spill onto the other side!

How? Rather…WHY? Why are people willing to wait hours for a chance to eat at this ramen shop when they have so many other options around the corner, down the street, etc.

The answer is two words: Michelin Star.

Ohhh, it all makes sense now, doesn’t it? 

For the majority of us foodies and mass consumers of good food, we understand exactly what it means for a restaurant to attain the coveted Michelin Star. Few restaurants, let alone ramen shops, get the distinction of a Michelin Star. It’s a prestigious label that quickly broadcasts to the world that this ramen is among the pantheon of outstanding, attention-worthy foods. 

It tells existing customers that they’ve got great taste.

It tells new and curious customers that this ramen, not those other ones, is worth trying, even in spite of the long queues (which, by the way, beget even longer queues and more demand). 

I call this the Michelin Star Effect, where a signal of quality, like the Michelin Star, dramatically boosts the credibility of your business, and that helps make choosing your business over the competition a no-brainer. 

So…what does this mean for you? 

You’re not a ramen shop (probably), and getting a Michelin Star likely isn’t going to drive people to your digital products and marketing services. But the point is, you can harness the Michelin Star Effect for your own business. This is one example how:

Notice the press—the publication’s logos just below the fold.

What do those logos tell you?

First of all, they tell me this business is newsworthy enough to be featured by many members of the press. In Examine’s case, they claim to have “nutrition information I can trust.” If The New York Times has vetted them for that, then there’s some truth to it, right? (Sure enough, they’re also trusted by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics, which is another major authority in the realm of nutrition information.) 

It’s important to remember that press only cares about interesting stories and vets all of its sources. Not just anyone can be written about. When the gatekeepers of the media, AKA editors, decide to write about a business, it’s because they think they’re worth talking about with the masses. These editors are willing to stake their reputation on them. That in itself is a big ol’ badge of recognition you can share with customers.

When you get published somewhere, you can leverage the publication’s logos and display them in strategic areas of your business to convey credibility. I often recommend that my clients place between 3 to 5 logos at all possible customer touch points, including your key sign-up pages:

Or prospective customer sales emails like this:

Or even on ads to enhance social media marketing efforts, like this company:

When customers are more discerning than ever, logos like these show customers that you’ve already been vetted—a quick signal of trust. 

Think of Michelin Stars or even those Zagat Rated and Trip Advisor decals that adorn a restaurant’s doors. Wouldn’t you be more curious to give that restaurant a try versus one that didn’t have those signals? These logos serve the same purpose. 

Depending on your niche and industry, certain press and features carry a lot more clout than others. Press is strategic. In my own case, where I help other businesses build authority and get press, the sheer number goes a long way in conveying my own credibility:

Notice that press now isn’t just about traffic or exposure—two very common misconceptions about the benefits of press. 

YES, you’ll get traffic.

YES, you’ll get exposure.

But those miss the point. The most valuable benefit of press is a one-two punch combo of elevating the public perception of your brand and boosting your authoritative value on Google. Observe this Tweet from Google’s own John Mueller:

In other words, digital press will only help your SEO efforts and help you rank better on Google search (even for a site with no traffic, according to John).

Oh, and one more thing: There is no “Best by” date. You can leverage the press you get for years and years, long after the initial publication date of those articles. 

No matter what stage of business you’re in, it’s never too early—or too late—to get press. And whether it’s your first or seventh logo, I’m now going to share the exact idea-generating framework I use to come up with client stories and catapult them into the media limelight.

A 3-part framework to generating ideas the media loves

A lot of clients come to me right before they have something to launch, whether they have a new product, feature, book, online course, or life lesson they’re excited for everyone to know. You can get press for all of these things, but the most important thing to consider is:

What’s your story? 

These are the things editors and the press care about. They care less about the fact that you generated $40,034 from a single launch of a $4.99 ebook. 

But if you’d said you did it in two days with the help of your celebrity friend LeBron James and all the proceeds were going to charity to help build homes for all those koalas displaced by forest fires—well, suddenly that is a lot more mouth-watering. 

The media is always, always on the lookout for good stories and ideas—and oftentimes it’s highly predictable what they want. In fact, I broke it down in a 3-part framework that I call Pitch Like a PRO. 

The Pitch Like a PRO framework

Basically, is your idea PRO? Is it…

• Popular?
• Relevant?
• Original?

Sure, when it’s written out like this, the framework doesn’t reveal any sort of media wizardry. But I believe that mastery of media lies in a deep understanding of its simplicity. I’m going to get into very specific details of each and show you how to:

• Find popular ideas before they become saturated;
• Use relevant ideas to piggyback off what’s happening in the news cycle;
• Make virtually any idea original.

Plus, this framework will be useful to you not just for upcoming launches — but also for any idea, any time. 

1. How to find popular ideas… before other people do

There are certain topics that will, for whatever reason, stay top of mind in our society’s collective conscience, such as full-body workouts and a morning routine (and their variants):

Topics like weight loss and dating are popular because people constantly search for and talk about them—for all eternity. And sometimes in a weird “chicken-or-egg” cycle it’s the media that jumpstarts an idea’s popularity. 

But outside the realm of these perennial favorites, there are ways to find out if an idea is popular—or getting there (just before the media sinks their teeth into it).

So how exactly do you systematically check for a topic’s popularity? The easiest place to start is Google.

If you Google your topic and see the other articles that already exist on it, GREAT! Click around and notice details like: 

• How many people are talking about it? (Check the number of comments.) The more people are talking about it, the better.
• How recent are the articles? (Check the publication date.) If it’s recent, it’s top of mind. 
• Have other publications written about it? (News outlets all have a finely tuned radar for finding out what’s popular — and they’ll often “copy” one another.)
• How many times has it been shared? (If a lot of people are sharing, the idea is clearly resonating enough and they feel compelled to tell their friends.)

Essentially, what’s popular will attract more readers. Editors are always scouting for the next big hit. After all, an editor’s metric for popularity (and ultimately success) is: how many eyeballs will it bring to their article and site? 

You can also use Google Insights to check the trends of a topic. In other words, you get to see how many people are searching. Let’s say you were in the health and fitness industry, and you have a unique full-body workout program coming out. You can check the peaks and valleys of search popularity here:

Then you can scroll down and find exactly what queries are getting the most hits on Google and hone in on an idea for the media.

This already gives me several angles. As a simple example, I might explore the idea of pitching “Can full body workouts at home be a good replacement for the gym?”

The goal here is to find an angle on an already ongoing popular conversation and add your fresh take. 

2. How to use relevance to snowball one article into several

Something that’s relevant is newsworthy and timely. Unlike something that is popular (although an idea can be relevant and popular), relevance can fade in and out of obscurity. Let me show you an example of a relevant, newsy headline:

The headline is so bombastic, catchy, and jarring that other publications will follow suit and report on the same thread, or go on the counter-attack:

Regardless of their stance, this conversation is now entrenched in the newscycle, and it’s a conversation that editors want to continue to stoke—at least until the next one. 

So if something is relevant, chances are good that the editor WANTS your idea right then and there. Here’s how Examine, an independent nutrition company, rode relevance into the media limelight, including getting featured in The New York Times.

Early in 2020, the media got bludgeoned with a ton of misinformation about vitamins and their protective effects. Many sleazy marketers preyed on the vulnerability of people at this time to hawk supplements and “cures” with flimsy evidence of their efficacy. So it became relevant to educate the masses.

Examine’s team of researchers put together an evidence-based user guide to help the average person make heads or tails of all the information out there. 

The benefits of this are two-fold: It’s a trusted resource for the user, and a one-stop information shop for journalists, including one at the The New York Times. 

Because of the perfect storm of Examine’s reputation and the media’s need for truth, The New York Times published this piece that further propelled Examine onto other news sources:  

As you can see, one helpful user guide snowballed into several features in the media because it was timely and relevant in the news cycle. But most of all, it was valuable. 

The big insight here: Focus on what’s happening in the world and find a relevant thread in your life or business. In other words, how can you add value to the current conversation? 

3. How to make any idea original

Over the span of a few years, I lived in seven different countries, working remotely and being a quasi-local and tourist at over a dozen destinations, like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, London, Paris, Barcelona, and so on.

Stories of travel are nothing new. Certainly, being a digital nomad at the time has been written about before. But here I am, sharing my experiences of working remotely around the world on Lifehacker: 

…on an entrepreneur site GrowthLab:

And again on Business Insider:

This is the power of having your own story to tell and putting multiple interesting spins on them. There’s always another angle. Another part of the story to unravel. 

Think about all the first-person stories you see:

• “This Is How I Lost 58 Pounds and I Didn’t Even Exercise!”
• “I Started Drinking 10 Cups of Coffee Per Day and Tripled My Income in 6 Months”
• “Why I Give My Corgi Daily Massages”

The key insight here is that, while traveling to different countries and being a digital nomad isn’t anything new, I drew from my own experiences and gave these common topics a unique spin. 

Because I’d been featured in a half dozen other places on the same experience, even The New York Times reached out to me for this story:

These are the types of stories editors are happy to publish. Any time you have an article idea and use your story, it almost guarantees a unique take on the same otherwise well-trodden topic. Most important of all, it’s a story that only you can tell. And yes, you can tie it back to your business.

Here’s an example from a client:

As long as you have an experience with a strong point of view to share, you should tell it—and the media would be happy to have it. 

Conclusion

The media is always looking for stories and businesses like yours. What they look for in a story is fairly predictable. Using the Pitch Like a PRO framework, you can come up with popular, relevant, or original ideas so that your stories become so irresistible that the media cannot help but want to cover you.

Here’s a quick recap with real, example headlines: 

Press is another form of social proof to enhance your SEO, lead generation, and marketing efforts and help elevate your business. 

Whether this is your first or even eighth feature, you can leverage press (and their logos) to generate more press, build more authority, and open up the opportunities that come with greater authority and credibility (like book deals, speaking gigs, etc.)—for years and years to come. 

The post How to Build Authority and Elevate Your Brand with Press appeared first on CXL.

From long sales cycles to trying to stand out from the sea of sameness, B2B companies face an uphill battle from the start. While thousands of B2B organizations struggle, plenty are able to develop long-term success. So what does it take?

I recently surveyed and interviewed over 200+ B2B executives, marketing & sales leaders to find out exactly what challenges they currently face and what they are doing to overcome them.

In this article, I’ll share what I’ve learned and detail the exact steps you should take to put yourself in a position to succeed.

Let’s dive in.

Common B2B marketing challenges

Last September (2020), six months after the 1st lockdown, my co-founder Vladimir Blagojevic and I decided to run market research to figure out what challenges B2B companies face and how they solve them.

Not only were we curious as to how COVID impacted business as usual, we also wanted to know if there were any patterns that would likely remain even after life eventually returned to normal. 

At the time we were planning a workshop for B2B tech startups from the IMEC accelerator (Ghent, Belgium) and had a chance to interview many of the companies that had signed up.

No surprise, during this time, many B2B businesses were struggling to adjust to a world without physical events. 

And while this was a good start, a significant position of these companies were early-stage startups. To have a comprehensive view, we also wanted to discover the challenges faced by more mature B2B companies as well.  To do this we partnered with the RevGenius community to get a better understanding the challenges mature companies faced. 

Through surveying 136 B2B tech companies and interviewing our owncustomers, we identified the main marketing challenges B2B companies face, as follows:

Here were the 5 key takeaways from our research. 

• Canceled events and tradeshows increased the focus on outbound activities. Many respondents stated that it’s hard to get people to respond amidst “the flood of COVID-driven desperate marketing attempts by everybody”. Since COVID started the number of spam emails and LinkedIn messages increased (doubled at least). One of the respondents said they called it a “Desperate marketing attempt—everybody just tries to book a meeting, try to generate sales qualified opportunities and they don’t have results.”
• Sales cycle length increased. Buyers became more critical due to a reduction in reosurces and as a result the entire process started to involve more people ultimately taking longer to close. 
• Content blindness. In addition, a large amount of respondents stated that it’s extremely hard to generate targeted traffic or motivate accounts to show up to their events because of the oversupply of webinars & online content. Their target accounts simply ignored all of this low-quality content’s attempts to grab their attention, because surprise, surprise, everyone was doing it.
• MQL cost significantly increased. Our findings also suggested, marketing-qualified leads didn’t always convert to sales opportunities as expected.
• Companies experience a high churn rate because of bad product adoption. Many customers think about the solution or service as a fancy add-on, but not as a part of operational processes.  

While some of these challenges certainly were likely the direct result of COVID, many of the issues faced occurred before COVID, and will likely continue after.

The next step in our research was talking to customers of our company Fullfunnel.io and identifying the most common mistakes that lead to these challenges and the “ROI taxes” B2B companies pay because of them.

Here is a list of the seven most common B2B marketing mistakes based on our research.

1. One-size-fits all approach, such as sending mass messages with minimal personalization; 
2. Prospecting the decision-makers only;
3. Broad market targeting; 
4. Absence of market positioning and a unique value proposition; 
5. Lack of warm-up programs (reaching outcall to their prospects);
6. Lack of nurturing programs (this is critical because, in every B2B market, most target accounts are not sales-ready);
7. Lack of creativity and effort. 

You can read the detailed overview of every mistake in the research we published at RevGenius magazine. 

Once we had a clear picture of the challenges B2B companies faced, we went to work figuring out how the most successful of thse companies were working to solve them. 

The 80/20 principle is still alive and well 

Recently we decided to narrow down our focus at Fullfunnel.io. 

Instead of providing B2B marketing consulting to a broad B2B market we decided to focus just on 2 segments: B2B tech and service-based companies with long and complex sales cycles. 

Because of COVID, some of  our clients’ projects were stopped or paused, so we needed to optimize our resources and continue to grow the pipeline. In any business, focusing on the few core things that will move the needle is critical, but it’s often challenging to discover what those are. 

After analysing our case studies and CRM, we saw that 73% of total revenue came from these two segments. Our research showed that LTV was much higher compared to other verticals we have worked in the past which made the decision to change our approach a no-brainer. 

This shift required us to change our marketing positioning and unique value proposition, as well as adjust our copy and marketing message, but the initial work ended up being worth it. 

In the first quarter of 2020 we grew our revenue by 50% and were able to double revenue compared to 2019, significantly decreasing the sales cycle length and growing the ACV—all the while the world faced the consuqneces of a pandemic. 

Our next step was defining an ideal customer profile and setting up clear qualification and disqualification criteria.

This process helped us define accounts with the highest revenue potential which we then ran highly perosnalized campaigns to. Customers with the lowest revenue received automated nuturusing sequences that required significantly less effort up front. 

Our example of narrowing down focus and tailoring positioning wasn’t unique.

In 2020 we applied the same approach to two of our customers: idronect (software to manage drone businesses) and Opsfleet (software development company).

Idronect had the challenge of converting free trial users to paid customers, and the sales cycle was long.

As a part of narrowing down the focus, we redefined their targeting, identified the most profitable market segment, and updated product positioning based on the interviews with clients from that segment.

Two months later they secured five new deals each worth five times more than customers they were struggling to close before, and won a new investment round. 

With Opsfleet, the situation was critical as they provide a commodity service (software development) and have signifcant competition.

Here is what their founder Leo Mirsky told us in the early beginning of the collaboration:

Marketing was a mystery to us. We were getting referrals, and our company was slowly growing, but we didn’t feel confident that our pipeline won’t dry up at any moment. We were also positioned as experts in a specific technology, and as time passed, this space became more and more commoditized.

We continued to narrow down the focus and repositioned the company by adjusting their marketing strategy and value proposition. 

Their new narrow positioning was: “Outsourced DevOps teams as a service for growing SaaS startups who use Kubernetes and Terraform platforms”.

Even without launching new lead generation campaigns, we were able to activate “frozen deals” from their pipeline.

As a result, they were able to grow MRR by 50% in 6 months. 

Of course, the 80/20 principle is not limited to strategic choices. It also involves knowing which acitivies you should focus on.

For Fullfunnel.io, there were three key activities that brought the highest ROI for us: LinkedIn demand generation, publishing new detailed case studies, and webinars.

I decided to make LinkedIn demand generation my key weekly pillar activity (check Brian Margolis’s book if you are not familiar with the concept) that included:

• 5 posts per week;
• 5 non-sales touches with ICP;
• Expand my network with 5 buying committee members of target prospects;
• Leave 10 meaningful comments under the posts of the B2B marketing thought leaders that serve my target audience;
• Devote 5 hours to write a new case study.

And as a monthly pillar we setup hosting a 60-90 minute webinar.

Doubling down our efforts on these activities in the second half of 2020 helped us to compensate for the losses in Q3 and exceed our revenue quota in Q4 to hit our target. 

For idronect, we decided to double down on podcasting as we found it to be incredibly effective to set up meetings with target accounts, learn more about their needs, build the relationship and present the product.

For Opsfleet, we doubled down on the newsletter and the content for their Facebook community that generated inbound leads regularly.

Speed matters, the power of marketing sprints 

While narrowing down your focus is crucial, your marketing pace is incredibly critical as well. 

Why did Zoom become the go-to videoconferencing tool during the pandemic? Of course they have a great product and are well funded. But a large part of their success was the speed in which they executed on what their customers needed. 

Zoom was quickly releasing new features (like end-to-end encryption) and simplifying the product for their users. 

They built a marketplace to connect multiple apps with Zoom (calendar integrations, webinars hosting like lu.ma) and started to quickly test the response from different market segments (like educational institutions.)

As a result, Zoom became a house name for video calling while their stocks grew by 545% in 1 year.

Nobody has time to wait 3-4 months to see the results from the marketing campaigns. 

While Zoom is a great example of the power of moving quickly with B2B, long and c complex sales cycles can be tricky to navigate. In our research we wanted to know how B2B companies used marketing sprints to test ideas and ship features quickly. 

A marketing sprint or a “minimal viable campaign” is a simple and quick campaign with a clearly defined goal, scope, and timeline with a clear path to a sale (opportunity). It can be used across both product and marketing. 

With respect to marketing, marketing sprints help you quickly see what works (or what doesn’t) so you can reallocate your resources and double down on the highest ROI activities. 

Here is an example of the three-week marketing sprint we’ve created for one of the customers.

The goal of the sprint was validating the demand in the “IT integrators” vertical in 5 European countries: Belgium, Netherlands, France, Spain and England.

Now let’s apply the marketing sprint planning principles I’ve shared earlier. 

We start with answering the question: how can we validate if there is demand?

We start mapping out a simple campaign.

• Campaign: market research.
• Target accounts for each market: 30
• # of calls/survey submissions: 10
• Clear need: 5 accounts

Our goal is to arrange 10 calls with the those who have buying power for the target accounts. This helps us learn more about their challenges and how they solve them, and see if there might be a potential interest or need in our product. 

If we see that at least 5 accounts shared problems we hellp solve, we prioritize this market and segment, and reallocate our marketing and sales focus on it.

Engagement scoring is critical 

At Sirius Decisions Summit, Tony Jaros, President and Chief Product Offiver at Dirus Decisions at the time, shared that when organizations are aligned across the revenue engine, they see an average of 19% faster revenue growth and 15% higher profitability. 

The engagement score is critical to leads hand-off between marketing and sales. One of the most common challenges we’ve seen is transferring the contacts of people who downloaded the ebook or any gated content to sales.

Sales waste time on follow-ups but it most cases hear the negative reply. The reason is simple: downloading gated content doesn’t mean the buying intent. That’s why it’s critical to set up engagement scoring for leads hands-off and get the agreement of both teams.

When engagement score is defined, it is much easier to reach out at the right moment to your target accounts, instead of sending cold irrelevant messages to people who are not interested in your product or service.

Here is a practical example of the engagement score.

The data can be collected from IP-identification tools like Leadfeeder (we’ll cover it later), LinkedIn and marketing automation like Hubspot or ActiveCampaign.

Use IP-identification to better serve your customers 

IP-identification software can be very effective in helping you know what web pages your target accounts viewed and how much time they spent on your website.

This intent data helps identify what stage of the buying journey your prospect is so that you can personalize your outreach message with the right call to action. Using your own data you can:

• Share educational resources such as case studies or articles for those researching and are at the awareness stage, and ask if that is helpful. Try to establish a relationship, warm up, and learn more about their needs and goals (e.g., why were you searching for this article or product?)
• Share comparison reports, webinars, market research, or case studies for those who are considering alternatives. 
• Suggest which prospects you can reach out to to book an introductory call. Usually, these are the people who visited your product/service page several times and spent some decent time on it.

Here’s an example of an outreach trigger you can set up:

If a company visited your product page several times and spent 30 minutes on your website, it is a good signal they are doing research and might be interested in chatting with you.

Below you can see a practical example how marketing can support sales with the intent data.

In this example, the target account meets your engagement criteria: spent more than 30 minutes and visited your product page multiple times.

It goes without saying, the more you know about each segment of your target audience, the better equipped you are to serve them. 

Conclusion

While there are many challenges B2B companies face, the reality is, the best of the best do whatever it takes to figure out how to both communicate and deliver value to their customers.  

Here are some ways to solve your biggest B2B problems.

1. Invest the time needed to discover your “80/20.” 
2. Speed matters. Do whatever you can to test your assumptions quickly so you can double down on what works. 
3. Take the time to score your engagement. Not all interactions are created equal.
4. Use IP identification to help you better understand the actions and behaviors of potential customers.

The post Common B2B Challenges and How To Solve Them appeared first on CXL.

More than 60% of marketers use 20+ marketing tools on a regular basis according to Airtable. For email marketing alone, more than half of small businesses use two or more tools according to Litmus. And the number of sales and marketing tools each company uses is forecasted to continue to increase rapidly as the number of available tools and the amount of customer data grows.

At the same time, according to Mulesoft, only 28% of tools a company uses are integrated with other tools. More tools, more data, but limited integration—can you spot the issue here?

Before we get to possible solutions, let’s take a step back and look at the biggest martech dilemma that sales and marketing leaders have been grappling with over the last several years. 

Should you use best-of-breed tools or an all-in-one marketing suite?

The major shift: a preference for integrated suites

Up until recently the best-of-breed approach was steadily gaining popularity. Each year, an increasing share of companies picked the proverbial set of kitchen knives over a Swiss army knife. 

The trend has since changed. Not slightly, but dramatically.

The preference for integrated suites doubled from 29% in 2019 to 59% in 2020. Why?

According to Gartner and Scott Brinker the primary driver is the increased need to join data and tools not just between sales and marketing but across the whole company. 

Today’s “suite” is not about marketing. Or, more accurately, it isn’t just about marketing. It’s about providing the backbone for marketing, sales, and customer service. – Scott Brinker

Another key reason is that integrated suites are much easier to keep up with than they were in the past. As more companies build products with an integration first approach, it’s easier for companies to connect all their favorite tools with relative ease. 

Last but not least, large software suites have acknowledged that they’ll never be able to build everything their customers want. So they’ve invested heavily into opening up and building their marketplaces, and app developers have had time to build properly useful integrations. 

Today, there are roughly more than 500 apps on the Hubspot Marketplace, 850 on ActiveCampaign Apps Marketplace and more than 4000 on Salesforce Appexchange. 

It’s no longer about choosing between all-in-one suites and best-of-breed tools. They’ve merged into the same thing. 

The 2015 all-in-one martech suite was a landmass of code that tried to do everything.

The all-in-one martech suite of today is a backbone for the business with an open ecosystem. Use the database as the single source of truth, and pick and choose the tools that work for you whether from the same vendor or somewhere else. 

Let’s take the example of HubSpot itself. HubSpot offers a CMS and email marketing as part of its offering. And yet, two of the top three marketing apps on the platform are WordPress and Mailchimp, popular CMS and email marketing solution, respectively. 

Having recently launched an integration with HubSpot that directly slightly competes with some of the platform’s own functionality I was positively surprised by their “let a thousand blossoms bloom” attitude when we first brought up the idea. 

No single vendor offers a 100% complete marketing solution. –Forrester

For software vendors, the goal used to be that customers buy and use all of your products. In the current marketing landscape, loyal customers who use any part of a software’s functionality, and connect their favorite apps, are almost as valuable.

The main implication for sales and marketing leaders: integrations are more important than ever. 

And even if the argument of suite vs best-of-breed persists philosophically, one thing is certain: integrations are critical for building a product with widespread appeal. 

Nearly half of sales and marketing leaders claim that the tools would be more useful if they could be easily integrated, according to our research. Ease of integration is often the one key thing holding users back from getting the most from their tech stack. 

Research by CDP institute confirms the same findings.

Ease of integration is more important than price.

It is more important than the sophistication of features.

It is even more important than ease of use or available training.  

At the end of the day, your tool can be the best on the market, but if it doesn’t play nicely with other essential tools, you’ll likely have to settle for second best. 

Three options for connecting their sales & marketing data and workflows

According to a recent study the majority of marketers use out-of-the-box integrations from a vendor when they need to connect tools and platforms. About one-third use their own developer resources and about a fifth use third-party tools like Zapier.

In our experience the 35% figure for using own development resources may be notably lower in real life as 20% of the surveyed sample were agencies. While almost all digital agencies have access to their own developers in some shape or form, this is definitely not the case for typical sales and marketing organizations. 

But most companies only have two choices: first-party integrations or specialized third-party integration tools. Let’s take a look.

The inconvenient truth: most first-party integrations are suboptimal (and that’s putting it mildly)

I recently used the first-party integration between a well-known CRM and an almost equally well-known marketing automation tool to automate following up with leads. 

The integration would let me create opportunities in my CRM if a prospect opened or clicked my emails. So far so good. 

However, if they opened or clicked an email again, the integration would create a new (duplicate) contact. Furthermore, there was no way to create segments of all engaged leads or all leads who were sent emails but who hadn’t yet engaged.

Having worked with various sales and marketing integrations for nearly 10 years on both sides, I’ve come to know that first-party integrations are limited by design. Not purposefully made to disappoint, of course, but limited by the way companies operate. 

At best, integrations are approached with the Pareto rule: what’s the 20% of functionality that covers 80% of the use cases. And what gets built is a tool that “ticks boxes” and covers:

• 80% of needs of light users
• 50% of needs of normal users
• 20% of needs of heavy users

Please note I’m not saying that all first-party integrations are useless. Many integrations between major platforms work really well. But the reality is, there’s plenty of room for improvement. 

What to consider when choosing third-party integration tools

I’m not entirely unbiased in my views, but the best way for most companies to get their sales and marketing data to sync up is using purpose-built third-party integrations.

When you take a closer look, you’ll find big differences between the different solutions. They broadly fall into three categories.

1. Universal app connectors like Zapier and Automate.io are great for setting up light connections quickly

I like to call this group of apps “digital duct tape”. Tools like Zapier are a great and quick-to-set-up way to send data from one place to another. Such tools often cover hundreds (if not thousands) of apps, so you can connect pretty much any app you may like. 

However, more complex use cases (e.g. when you’d need to check whether a contact is already receiving other campaigns, or stopping a sequence when someone takes a particular action) can get very complex and pricey very quickly. 

2. Contact data syncing platforms such as PieSync are great for keeping contact data synced bi-directionally

This category of tools keeps contact data up-to-date in all your systems. Such tools are purpose-built for keeping contacts in sync, and that they do better than the alternatives.

If contacts syncing is what you need, great! But alas you’ll be missing out on connecting event data (e.g. someone visiting your website or clicking an email), and so many of the most actionable and useful lead nurturing and ABM use cases across sales and marketing tools won’t be available. 

Like with using “digital duct tape,” you also miss some of the insights of pulling sales and marketing data together e.g. seeing which traffic sources or triggered emails lead to closed sales. 

3. Purpose-built app connectors to deeply connect sales and marketing data and workflows

There’s a new category of tools emerging that give you the benefits and insights of an integrated suite while using best-of-breed tools. Purpose-built app connectors like Outfunnel can connect sales and marketing data deeply and easily. 

And the same is true for other categories as well. What Outfunnel is doing for sales and marketing tools, Highways.io is doing for connecting sales and customer support data. 

Ultimately, as with most things in sales and marketing, you’ll need to experiment and test a variety of options to see what works for you. 

Conclusion 

The number of sales and marketing apps will continue to grow, and so will the importance of connecting your sales and marketing data.

The question is not whether to use best-of-breed tools or a suite. 

Today’s marketing and business leaders in charge of building sales and marketing stacks are tasked with finding the easiest and yet deepest solution to connect your sales and marketing data independent of the tools they’re using. It’s not easy, but there’s plenty of options to optimize your tech stack. 

Having your tools play nice together, is critical for your teams to be aligned and drive consistent revenue and sales. 

The post Marketing Integrations: The Challenge of Getting Your Marketing Tech Stack to Play Nice appeared first on CXL.

While WordPress may be the most well known CMS in the world, Webflow continues to establish itself as a powerful alternative for established and upcoming brands. In this article we’ll take a thorough look at both WordPress and Webflow to help choose the right option for you. 

As is tradition with our other tool comparisons, this is not a dry feature-by-feature comparison of WordPress and Webflow. Both have their benefits and disadvantages depending on your needs and the type of business you run. That said, depending on your resources and team, both make a strong case for becoming your CMS that powers your business. 

WordPress vs Webflow 4 factors to consider

1. Cost 

From a purely cost perspective, WordPress is less expensive than Webflow. With WordPress all you need is a domain and hosting which you can snag for less than $100 a year. Webflow on the other hand, has a variety of pricing options based on your needs, but in general is more expensive, particularly if you’re looking to build out multiple sites.

That said, with WordPress you typically will also need to invest in a premium WordPress theme and invest in various plugins to help make your business run smoothly. The benefit of WebFlow is all your hosting is done by Webflow; there’s no need to search for hosting elsewhere. 

Additionally, because Webflow can be customized without the use of code, you won’t necessarily need to account for a large dev team budget to make the changes you need as is the case with WordPress in many instances. 

2. Plugins

From a sheer numbers standpoint, WordPress also beats out Webflow as it has thousands of plugins and integrations that have been time-tested over the years. Given that they have been around for two decades, they have been able to build relationships with many of the leading plugin and application builders. 

Most developers and applications start building with WordPress in mind. That said, while a younger company compared to WordPress, Webflow has worked hard to partner with applications to ensure your favorite integrations work with them as well. Using tools like Zapier, you can also hack together a variety of integrations that are yet publicly available. 

As founder Haradhan shares:

“[WordPress is free and open-source software, and also every WordPress developer already make some functional themes and plugin which things make our some works effortless.”

For SEO folks who rely heavily on the likes of Yoast, unfortunately Webflow currently does not have an integration with them. That said, Webflow has stated publicly that their sites are out-of-the-box SEO optimized. 

Despite having more plugins available for WordPress, the downside of overreliance on various plugins is that you can open yourself up to security vulnerability and unnecessarily slow down your site. 

As entrepreneur Nat Eliason shared:

“WordPress sites are slow unless you make a very deliberate effort to clean them up. All of the plugins, different tools, messy theme files, they add up, and the code behind a WordPress site quickly gets incredibly bloated.

I saw that the sites I was working on in Webflow loaded FAST, much faster than my site, despite years of tweaks to it, so that was a huge draw.”

3. Support and education

Not only is WordPress the most used CMS in the world, it also has one of the most active and engaged developer communities as well. If you need help you can easily ask questions and troubleshoot in one of their forums. 

While WordPress does offer support, leaning on the community is often your best bet. Additionally, because WordPress is so popular, there are dozens of blogs and YouTube channels dedicated to getting the most out of the platform.

Webflow on the other hand has a dedicated support team that can help you with any issues or challenges you may face. They’ve also invested heavily in Webflow University to help you get up and running quickly. Both communities are open and inviting and if you’re needing specific help, you’re just an email or post away from getting answers. 

Even for non-technical marketers, a few focused hours of learning can help you learn the basics of each platform so you can start tinkering away. 

4. Learning curve 

Generally speaking, it’s relatively easy to get setup with WordPress, but advanced customization does require some additional coding and development knowledge. While Webflow can be used by marketers technical and non-technical alike, it’s especially suited for marketers and designers with some knowledge of coding as well. 

Webflow is so intuitive and easy to use for non-technical marketers. It allows you to seamlessly add, edit, and make changes to content. The flexibility is amazing, you essentially have the creative freedom to create whatever you can imagine because Webflow makes it so simple to do….. You don’t need a developer, Webflow allows you as the marketer to be that developer.

Source

Though Webflow does make it easy to drag drop and build your site visually, the recent release of Guttenberg by WordPress shows they are embracing a more visual approach to design and creating content. Webflow still has more functionality on that front, but WordPress is making strides in making it easier to create without the need for code. 

Designer Emil Villumsen shared his thoughts on both on Quora:

WordPress is strong in its plethora of plugins, basically plug-n-play modules that you don’t need coding skills to empower your website. Custom coding, though, requires a somewhat substantial understanding of web development. Personally I find creating a custom WordPress theme a pain.

Webflow is made for designers who know how to code. This means you got total control of how things look from scratch. For freelance designers who like a visual way of developing, this is great. For more functionality though, you’re at a loss and have to seek out custom libraries as you can’t just install a plugin like on WordPress. So Webflow is great for portfolios, agency websites, restaurants etc; sites with little functionality.

WordPress is more user friendly for non-technical marketers when starting out, the need for code is almost always required for advanced customization. Webflow has a steep learning curve, but the need for code is usually nice to have not a necessity. Webflow is also great for making prototypes quickly which can then be passed on to designers and developers to get it the final mile.  

If you’re a big believer in the future of no-code, learning and getting comfortable with Webflow may be a wise investment in time and resources. However, given WordPress is still the default CMS for many, you can count on continued innovation on the drag and drop features folks have come to love with Webflow. 

A brief history of WordPress

First launched in 2003, WordPress is the leading CMS by which 35% of the entire internet is powered. Global brands such as BBC, Sony, MTV, and the New York Times use WordPress as their go-to platform to host and display their content. Because they have been around for over two decades, they have an incredibly engaged community, and many developers and tools build their applications with WordPress in mind. 

Though originally built as a blogging platform, WordPress has enough features and functionality to power some of the most complex businesses. With plugins such as WooCommerce, it’s incredibly easy to sell products and services online. In addition to a wide variety of plugins, WordPress also has thousands of themes to choose from to help you quickly build and design a site to your liking.  

WordPress is also incredibly customizable, though you might need to tap some developer resources for the final touch.

As Kinsta notes:

WordPress is by far one of the cleanest, fastest ways to write and publish blog posts, and that’s all included right from the start. Some website building tools think about design and apps first, then the blogging interface comes in as an afterthought. That’s not the case with WordPress, so you can create a beautiful ecommerce site and know that the blog is an integral part of the development process.

A brief overview of Webflow 

Launched nearly a decade after WordPress, Webflow continues to grow in popularity due to its focus on visual design and development without the use of code. 

As Mayank Sharma from Toptal shares: 

Before no code design tools came along, designers had to rely on front-end developers to implement everything. Changing a piece of text on a website to a different font size could take days. Even for a small marketing website or a simple landing page, designers would send over the designs, sit back, cross fingers, and pray that it will all come back pixel-perfect. The process was like watching paint dry.” 

Webflow makes it easy to create prototypes and mockups quickly, helping businesses speed up the process of development. While it does have a bit of a learning curve, their Webflow university is incredibly helpful in helping marketers get the most from their platform. While designers and developers can take the functionality of Webflow even further, even non-technical marketers can get comfortable using Webflow very quickly.  

Conclusion 

While WordPress is the most widely used CMS, more and more marketers are turning to Webflow to quickly build their websites and test their ideas. If you’re more design oriented from the start, Webflow ultimately might be the best option. 

If you value the two decades of development of WordPress and the thriving WordPress community to turn to for help, WordPress can be a great choice as well. 

Nat Eliason said it best when reflecting on why he ultimately switched from WordPress to Webflow.

“Here’s who I would recommend switch:

1. People who want to control everything about their site
2. Who have some familiarity with HTML / CSS
3. And who don’t mind having to creatively work around some limitations

If you check those boxes, I’d strongly recommend switching to Webflow. It’s great, and I think you’ll be really happy with the freedom it gives you.

I would not switch if:

1. Working with code scares you
2. You’re a casual blogger
3. You don’t want to spend money (Webflow is more expensive than most WordPress hosting options)”

The post WordPress vs Webflow appeared first on CXL.

After writing and editing nearly 100 blog posts for CXL, this week is my last week as content lead. The previous year has been one of the most rewarding and challenging periods of my career, and I’ve learned so much along the way. 

Here are five lessons I learned from running the CXL blog that not only apply to becoming a better marketer, but also a top-performer in all areas of your life.

1. Yes and yes

Early on in my content marketing journey, I studied the success of entrepreneur and finance ‘guru’ Ramit Sethi. He was creating great content long before “content marketing” became a thing. 

In his material covering how to land your dream job and build a successful business, he shares the powerful concept of “Yes and yes.”

With most marketers looking for the ‘quick hack,’ going just one step further can help you truly become one of the best of the best. 

Should you write content that is SEO optimized and consumable by actual humans? Yes, and yes.

Should you write in-depth and actionable content with an ambitious posting cadence? Yes, and yes.  

Should you focus producing new content and updating old content? Yes, and yes. 

While there are limitations for how much anyone or team can do, we shy away from doing the hard work more often than not. To become one of the best in your field, you have to be willing to do what others will not.  

2. Trust the process

One of the reasons we’ve built such a recognized and trusted brand is through our high-quality content. That didn’t happen by accident. Each week we aimed to publish two long-form articles come rain or shine. 

Some weeks were more stressful than others. But in the end, we did everything we could to stick to the plan.

And the results speak for themselves. 

For nearly a decade, what has worked for CXL has been producing long-long form, actionable content without the fluff. While at times it was tempting to ‘reinvent the wheel,’ our current process ultimately produced consistent results.

That certainly doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try new things and experiment, and of course, there’s a point where you can become too comfortable. 

But we ‘won, by consistently publishing long-form articles tailored to intermediate to advanced marketers looking to continue to improve their careers.

For example, early on we decided we wanted to ramp up our social media presence. Truthfully, it’s been a weakness of CXL for quite some time.

While I personally enjoy social media and think there is a long-term business benefit, the reality is, most of CXL’s success comes directly from search. While it would have been nice to increase our engagement on Twitter, for example, writing another article or updating a few top-performing posts would 99.9% have the better ROI. 

If you find something that works, continue to double down on those efforts. Often the effort you put in now isn’t realized until many months down the road. Stay the course. 

3. Updating content continues to have a massive ROI 

At CXL, we’ve long been proponents of updating old content.

As we wrote several years ago:

We’re often told to make Twinkie content—stuff with a near-infinite shelf life. No expiration means no maintenance. But it also means that fewer people are publishing high-maintenance content (e.g., an article comparing prices and features of SaaS products).

Selected carefully, non-evergreen content is an opportunity to stand out. You invest time and energy to keep a handful of high-maintenance posts up to date—those for which you want to be the authority or those that bring in the most bottom-of-funnel visitors. 

It’s something to keep in mind when you start updating your old content.

Yet, for most content marketers, updating content falls last on the list of their priorities. In addition to keeping our regular posting cadence, we knew we wanted to improve our old content as well. 

We hired the help of SEO consultant Dan Shure to help us prioritize which blog posts would benefit most from refreshing, and some some pretty incredible results. We definitely had to rearrange resources to make this happen, we we’re glad we did.

Depending on your team size and resources, you may not be able to update every piece of content. That’s okay. Set aside time each week to go through even just one or two older posts that could benefit from updating. It really can make all the difference. 

4. Great content marketers curate 

As a generalist content marketer, there were times when the topics we needed to write about were a bit out of my wheelhouse. 

Most content marketers in this situation would simply research as much as they could on Google and then pull some of the ‘best nuggets’ from the top results. Because of CXL’s strong domain ranking, doing that would likely rank fairly well for us for relatively low effort.

But doing that doesn’t produce great content. It makes bland me-too fluff. As a content marketer, your job is to create the best content possible, even if that means relying on others to do so. The vast majority of our content is filled with personally sourced expert quotes and opinions, which our readers can’t find anywhere else.

For example, I have an intermediate knowledge of Google Analytics and needed to write a piece on GA4. So what did I do? I reached out to as many experts as I could for their knowledge and expertise.

The result? 

We currently rank right behind Google themselves, and at one point we were the 1st result. 

Of course, many content marketers already reach out for expert quotes. One way to take this process a step further is something I learned from my former colleague Derek. 

When asking for quotes from experts, grab a great soundbite from one expert and use that in your additional outreach. This process often enhances the quality of responses you’ll get with little extra effort. In many cases, experts will disagree or have an entirely different point of view! That’s great!

While it can be tempting to put as much of your spin into everything you write, sometimes the best thing is to get out of the way and let the experts talk. 

Of course, there will be those topics you can really go in-depth on and write about for days, but in most cases, it’s your job to source the expertise from others who are focused on the topic matter. 

Quality content isn’t about the person writing it. It’s about providing as much value and actionable insight as you can. 

5. Make time for learning and to recharge

Each week, producing two 1,500 word articles is challenging, even when editing some of our amazing guest contributors’ work. Sometimes it can be hard to take a step back to sharpen the saw.

During my time here, we had 2 hours each dedicated to ‘learning hours,’ something I came to really enjoy each week. Some weeks I’d go through our catalog of courses, others I’d spend time watching Youtube videos or even reading a random non-fiction book. 

There’s a limit to how much creativity we have, and making time to rest and recharge is critical. 

You can still publish high-quality work at a high cadence, but without taking a step back from time to time, it will be very difficult to remain at your best. 

Even if you love the topics you’re writing about, it’s important to take a step back, recharge, and think about the big picture. 

Conclusion 

It’s been a great privilege to play a role in the growth of CXL over the last year, and I couldn’t be more grateful and proud of what we’ve accomplished. 

Creating great content isn’t easy, but the rewards and satisfaction are well worth the rollercoaster of wins and losses. 

The post 5 Lessons I Learned As CXL’s Content Lead appeared first on CXL.

Who. What. When. Where. Why. Answer the proverbial “Five W’s” through storytelling, and you’ll build meaningful connections with your audience. Fail to do so, and you’ll likely lose their attention. 

Not every piece of content needs to tell a story. Applying storytelling in the right place, at the right time, in the right way makes all the difference. 

In this guide, you’ll learn how to apply the art of storytelling in your marketing initiatives to engage and grow your audience, when to use it, and when not to.  We’ll also look at businesses that get it right, and why their strategy is paying off. 

What is storytelling in marketing and how does it help you attract and grow your audience?

Storytelling is information sharing through a contextual narrative. It allows you to take a set of facts and ideas and communicate them to your audience in an engaging way. 

If your story resonates, educates, and informs, you’ll likely build deeper connections.

In 2010, researchers at Princeton University set out to study the brain activity of both speakers and listeners under the pretext that communication is a joint activity. Using fMRI to record brain activity, they found that successful communication leads to the speakers’ and listeners’ brains entering a state of temporarily coupling and mirrored activity. The higher the neural coupling, the more successful the communication.  

A great story literally binds us together. It allows us to share and relate to one another’s experiences, meaning, and perspectives. We can persuade others to see things from a different viewpoint and ultimately influence or change behavior. 

Speaking to your audience’s needs, intent, goals, and desires throughout the customer journey drives desired action (e.g., traffic, engagement, conversion, sharing).

Take outdoor clothing company Patagonia, for example. They use storytelling to connect with their audience, as demonstrated above the fold on their home page:

Being a well-known $1 billion company gives them flexibility with their landing page structure. If nobody knew who they were, this vague messaging above the fold wouldn’t work. 

It also demonstrates how important storytelling is to their brand identity and differentiation strategy. They even used this reputation to ask their customers not to buy their jackets in a groundbreaking anti-consumerism ad campaign: 

Of course, they still want consumers to buy their jacket—but only if they need to, and with the intent of wearing it for a long time. They brilliantly communicated their mission statement (i.e. sustainability) while informing and educating their audience about joining the cause and fighting environmental change.

You can see this message in everything they promote, like this short film “We the Power” about young cooperatives leading a clean-energy revolution:

The narrative of next-generation activists fighting the establishment to save the planet, and having a good time in the process, aligns with their value proposition. 

Patagonia has a clear mission, understands its target audience and voice of customer, and uses storytelling to cultivate loyalty and promote change. 

To achieve a similar feat, you must understand what makes a good story and how to tell it. 

Align storytelling with the marketing funnel for a seamless customer journey

A good story influences consumer motivation and behavior. It must align with the marketing funnel stages (awareness, consideration, conversion, retention) as well as the customer journey. 

This is impossible without a deep understanding of your target audience, unique value proposition (UVP), and buyer journey. This article assumes you’ve completed that research and have the necessary data in hand.

That said, collecting data to fuel storytelling must be a consistent effort. Trends, needs, demands, goals, and pain points constantly shift. To deliver personalization and targeted experiences at every touch-point, consistently collect and analyze data, test, and optimize.

Storytelling, like your business, cannot survive in stasis.  

Once you know where your audience is in the customer journey, you can unite an idea with emotion to drive action. 

Whether that’s to:

• Intrigue (awareness);
• Educate (consideration);
• Influence a purchase (conversion);
• Or inspire engagement (retention). 

At each stage, your story should present relatable struggles, goals, or situations, and how your business helps people overcome pain points, achieve success, and emulate an experience. 

1. Awareness—Building intrigue

Focus on shared interests and values. Speak to passions, relatable experiences, common problems, gaps in the market—whatever makes your audience feel connected to the message at a high level. 

Wealthsimple does this expertly in their digital magazine. Take this story about avoiding financial troubles under the pretense “It’ll Work Itself Out”:

“It actually Won’t” is a clever one-two punch. Immediately, the reader understands:

• This is a story about debt woes (a relatable problem, given that consumer debt in America reached a record high in 2020)
• Ignoring them will make it worse (debt denial and financial strain can lead to high levels of depressive symptoms)

80% of Wealthsimple’s clients are under 45. Because the familiar story is told by a peer and not a faceless brand, it works to build authority. 

Many readers see themselves in this story. Living paycheck to paycheck, even with a good job, saddled by debt, and paralyzed by calls from debt collectors. 

The story pulls the reader in and incites a desire to learn more. What does this company have to offer me? Have they solved the author’s problems?

2. Consideration—Educate and inform  

This is where you can share your perspective a bit more. Explain why you built your business and what you’re doing to help solve the problem (or achieve a goal). 

When creating a middle-of-the-funnel experience, practical information wins. Wealthsimple does just this in “The Supreme Retirement Plan: How to Become a Millionaire by Flipping Streetwear”:

They tell a story about watching entrepreneurs line up across the street from their office every Thursday to buy limited items from Supreme (and later flip for profit—upwards of 778% ROI). 

The article acts as:

• A case study on maximizing ROI by flipping Supreme items (from an outsider’s perspective)
• A lesson on how to invest your resale profits 

This works to:

• Engage, as tips on how to earn quick cash and maximize ROI (in this case, using the Supreme flipping strategy) resonates with their target audience
• Teach, specifically how to invest profits to “get rich slow” (as their USP states above the fold on their homepage)

CEO Michael Katchen told Forbes, “How do you get them to save if retirement is not even on their radar?”

Within the article, they use imagery to drive their lesson home:

The conclusion to this story is simple: “Invest your Supreme profits with Wealthsimple and be a millionaire by age 45.” 

3. Conversion—Influence a purchase

Specify how your business helps solve a problem or fulfill an aspiration. Customer stories work well here, as social proof builds trust and credibility—93% of consumers state online reviews impact purchase decisions. 

Customer stories answer questions like:

• Can your product or service actually do what it claims?
• If so, how?
• What makes your business better than the competition?
• Why should I care?

HubSpot’s customer success stories answer these queries well, like in this video testimonial from EZ Texting:

In two minutes we learn:

• What EZ Texting does (voice and text messaging for businesses)
• Their biggest challenge (keeping up with activity volume and prioritization)
• Their primary goals (respond to customers faster, streamline processes, and scale easily on a reasonable budget)
• How HubSpot helped (fast and easy implementation)
• Why HubSpot is better than the competition (more efficient, better collaboration, user friendly)
• The ROI (3x headcount, reps have more time to nurture relationships and sell more)

These pain points and outcomes resonate thanks to the narrative HubSpot shares: 

• We see the employees interacting at work rather than in a neutral space like a studio, which makes it easier to connect and relate
• We learn their backstory, which adds character depth
• It clearly answers the Five W’s linearly (who, what, when, where, why), which makes it easy to follow and engaging
• It shows the product in action, allowing the audience to picture themselves using it
• The stories are told from the heart and do not seem rehearsed, which makes the characters easier to trust and like 

Another strategy is to play on emotions by focusing your testimonial story on impact over features. 

For example, Google Ads’ Success Story: Chuckling Goat showcases homegrown goat farmers that increased sales by 6000% in 4 years with their service. 

Rather than explaining exactly how Google Ads helped, they highlight the outcomes in a ‘rags to riches’ storyline that makes us root for the main characters. 

If it weren’t for their website designer suggesting throwing a small budget towards Google Ads, they may still be running a 1-goat operation (they’ve got 70 now).

4. Retention—Inspire engagement 

Keep your customers engaged with community-based stories. Share experiences that make people feel part of something special and unique. 

We seek connection and attachments. One study notes, “Our reliance on our group members has also exerted a profound influence over our motivation”. Marketers understand this well.

Tell stories that inspire engagement and make people feel like they belong. Patagonia segments their stories by audience preferences, understanding the power of sharing a hobby with like-minded people.

Their Climbing Stories, for example, showcase anecdotal experiences, often told in the first person. They’re full of tips and tricks, practical methodologies, and recommendations. Stories from the mountains, as told by Patagonia’s customers themselves.  

Emotionally, they make the reader feel like they’re part of something bigger. Practically, they inspire new and improved purchases to solve a challenge (e.g. how to pack for alpine climbing). 

Customer stories keep your audience engaged with and excited by your business. It’s your chance to bring your brand to life pre or post-purchase, build meaningful relationships, and maximize reach.

How to tell compelling stories that influence buying decisions

To elevate your storytelling skills, you have to understand the foundational elements of a story:

Plot and conflict 

Identify and establish a protagonist and antagonist. The antagonist presents a conflict and the protagonist fights against this tension.

How this plays out is the plot. 

For example, the team at Patagonia are protagonists building sustainable outerwear to save the planet from those that damage it (the antagonists). Patagonia works to inform and educate about The Conflicts and often presents ways to fight back (the solution). 

This plot and conflict is interlaced in many of its stories—but not all. Sometimes telling a story about letting kids be kids and have fun outdoors is more fitting: 

Here, the conflict is kids staying indoors. The solution is going outside in environmentally-friendly clothing to enjoy the planet they’ll “grow up to protect”. The plot is kids having the time of their lives in mother nature.

When and where to share each story type depends on the marketing funnel stage, as discussed earlier.

Character

Add depth to the protagonist and antagonist. Identifying with characters is what helps the audience connect with your story. It’s why we root for heroes and boo the ‘bad guy’. 

Character depth allows for emotional investment. Focus on the main character to make the story easy to follow and engaging. 

Take animated short “All in a Day’s Work” by Mailchimp presents. The main character is Jason, a software developer working from home. We are led to believe he’s in an office until the camera pans down and shows his bare legs covered only by boxers. We can all relate to only dressing our top halves for Zoom meetings from home.

Suddenly, his mother walks into view to do laundry and tidy the room. The video-call participants see her and Jason is horrified. He signals that he’s in a meeting, to which the mother realizes her mistake and panics:

Awkward moments ensue, and as she tiptoes away, she trips on the lamp cord and causes a commotion. A sock lands on Jason’s face, which seems like the penultimate mishap in a series of unfortunate events.

But wait, there’s more! A garage door opens (he’s in the garage?!) and a car barrels in, knocking down his makeshift coffee station:

The picture of Steve Jobs flies off the wall and lands on his face—his garage success story dream has gone up in flames. What else is there to do but shrug?

Mailchimp’s target audience of entrepreneurial self-starters can deeply relate to this moment. The character has a clear backstory and the plot and conflict mirror identifiable struggles. 

Setting

The setting sets the mood, reveals conflict, influences behavior, and invokes an emotional response.

For “All in a Day’s Work”, the setting masterfully shifts. First, an office building. Next, a home office. Finally, a multipurpose room in the garage.

Mark DiCristina, Head of Brand at Mailchimp Studio, notes the purpose of Mailchimp Presents is to create content “around the experience of growing a business”. 

Often, that experience lends to playing the role of executive director to a team of one. Pretending a home garage is a fancy office suite, therefore, is accessible. 

Theme 

The theme is your story’s purpose. Why are you telling it? If you don’t know, the story likely won’t achieve its purpose.

Patagonia tells stories to increase awareness and spark activism. They know a community-driven approach is the answer because they cannot save the planet alone. “We’re all in this together” rings loudly throughout their stories. 

Your message should be clearly understood. 

Form (or story structure/mode)

You have many options for how you tell your story, such as: 

• Spoken (presentation)
• Written (blog, article, digital magazine, social media post, landing page)
• Audio (podcast, webinar)
• Digital (film, animation, imagery, infographic, video testimonial, video success story) 

Choose your medium and mode depending on the customer journey and funnel stages. How and where you tell your story, and what you include, should match objectives (e.g., thought leadership, conversion, increased traffic, lead generation, etc.).

Take Dove’s Real Beauty Productions “You are more beautiful than you think” campaign. It pulls at your heartstrings by presenting a story of self-doubt: women unable to see their true beauty: 

A sketch artist blindly asks several women to describe themselves, then poses the same question to strangers. The results are astounding. Each woman paints herself poorly compared to the stranger’s perspective. 

Dove puts a mirror up to its target audience and empowers celebration. This video works well at both the awareness and retention stages. If you don’t buy from Dove, their #RealBeauty message may inspire a purchase. If you do buy from Dove, you’ll likely feel proud and reinforced.

Storytelling mistakes to avoid

Understanding every story element helps you craft an engaging and compelling narrative. It also helps you present as self-aware and believable, rather than inauthentic or false. 

To avoid common mistakes, learning what not to do is of equal importance to top storytelling techniques.

Do not: Make it all about you instead of your customer 

Client-centric businesses are 60% more profitable than those that don’t center CX. Why? People want to feel seen and heard. 

51% of customers say their relationship with a brand begins the moment they feel understood. There is a time and a place for self-promotion and telling your own story (e.g. your founding story), but always tie it back to the customer and benefits. 

Do not: Prioritize building connections over answering intent

This goes to aligning your story with the funnel stage. Post-purchase community stories have no place in the consideration phase. Align your stories with the customer journey to satisfy intent and drive action (e.g., click to learn more, sign up for a course, buy a new product).

Do not: Embellish the truth 

In 2015, Volkswagen ran a marketing campaign touting its cars’ low emissions—but it was a lie. They were cheating US emissions tests and got caught red-handed. They lost trust, the CEO resigned, and they reported a €2.52bn pre-tax loss. 

They produced a new commercial in 2019 that oozes “starting over”:

Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Sound of Silence” plays while a montage shows a young man innovating a new car prototype. From sketch to manufacturing to final product, Volkswagen itself is rebirthed in one minute and forty-five seconds.

Whether this works is not the point. Volkswagen lost four years, credibility, and loyal customers because of a storytelling lie. This rebirth could have been avoided. 

Do not: Prioritize storytelling over delivering a great product or service

Stories rooted in fantasy are a dangerous endeavor. Like the stock market, this bubble will burst if they are built on inflated expectations.

Clients that are sold features without seeing the fine print understand this well. The skewed truth (“yes, we can do that for you asap”) vs. reality (“a market-ready product will take another 6 months”) is a mood killer—one that may cost customers and damage your reputation.

If you’re going to craft a story, root it in truth and not fairy tales. 

Conclusion

Storytelling is a powerful tool and art form. Done right, it engages, captivates, builds connection, cultivates community, and generates social proof—helping you grow your audience and sales.

But not every story is created equal. To maximize impact, craft stories that meet your target audience where they are in their journey. Understand who you are, who your audience is, and how to use data and storytelling elements effectively. 

No matter what type of story you’re telling, lead from a place of truth and center the customer experience.

The post How to Use Storytelling in Business to Build Captivated Audiences appeared first on CXL.

When your business, book or podcast needs additional support, sponsorship can make a huge difference. Not only do corporate sponsors offer the capital to help you forge ahead, their backing brings new contacts and exposure to new audiences that can take your project to the next level.

But it’s not as simple as reaching out to a company you want to collaborate with and putting their name on your website in exchange for cash. To work, sponsorship has to deliver a return on investment for the sponsor and value to your fans. In that sense, you need to look at it like selling a product.

In this guide, we’ll show you the steps to take to get sponsorship. You’ll learn how to create a sponsorship strategy and get in contact with prospects. We’ll also show you what to do after deals end to secure long-term partnerships with backers.   

Outline your goals and offer with a sponsorship strategy

Regardless of whether you’re seeking sponsorship for a product, event, book, or podcast, the overarching aim of attracting corporate sponsors remains the same: you need sponsors that engage your audience.

If your audience isn’t interested in a sponsor’s product or service, then putting their name to your offer won’t deliver the ROI they’re looking for, ruining any chance of a long-term partnership. 

Take This Week in Startups, for example. Their podcast is all about discussing the startup news that matters. Among their sponsors, you’ll see names like LinkedIn, Fiverr, and Notion. All companies that This Week in Startups’ audience of entrepreneurs, company founders, and marketers would be interested in.

Put these same names on a sports podcast like Pardon My Take, and they may well fall flat.  

A well-thought-out strategy lays the foundations for your sponsorship efforts in the same way a marketing strategy guides your marketing campaigns. It ensures you’re targeting the right companies with an offer that makes sense for both parties.  

A sponsorship strategy should cover five areas:

1. Assets
2. Audience data
3. Asset valuation
4. Activations
5. Market identification

1. Assets

Your assets are what you can offer to a sponsor to get them in front of your audience.

Your most obvious asset is the product itself. But it pays to think beyond that. Look at every point of contact with your audience as a potential asset, and build an inventory that can be put to sponsors.

This might include things like:

• Website
• Social media banners and content
• Newsletters
• Digital and traditional media advertising
• Naming rights of a building
• Event sponsorship
• Speaking opportunities
• Exhibitor opportunities
• Access to influencers

As well as what you already have, think about the assets you’ll be building with corporate sponsorship funding. 

For example, if you’re publishing a book you might run a book tour that allows sponsors to access physical audiences. Or you might create an event or course related to your product that sponsors can attach their names to.

As you build out your list of assets, do it with your audience in mind. If what you’re producing resonates with consumers, it will appeal to sponsors. 

2. Audience data

Sponsors will have different reasons for backing your project: sales, lead generation, brand awareness, product launches, corporate social responsibility, etc.

In every case, they’re paying for access to your audience.

To demonstrate the potential of your audience, you need to show sponsors exactly who they’ll be reaching. 

Start with demographic data. Detail your audience’s age, gender, income, education, and occupations. This will help sponsors quickly identify if your audience matches their target market.

However, matching demographics alone doesn’t guarantee ROI. Therefore, it’s important to dig deeper to provide information on:

• How your audience interacts with your brand (social media, newsletters, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc.)
• The problems they need to resolve
• What motivates them to engage with your brand, product, service, or content
• Their interests

This gives sponsors a clear idea if what they offer directly appeals to your consumers.

Data on interactions can be found in social analytics dashboards and Google Analytics. 

Show (don’t tell) your prospective sponsors just how far your reach extends by sending them screenshots of your social analytics for related content. You can highlight the embedded media clicks and link clicks to show them how many users will take action on a similar post.

Or provide sponsors with proof that your related landing pages are getting the clicks they hope for. Sponsors will be happy to know that you’re capable of producing converting pages that may house their content.

To uncover audience problems and motivations, call on your brand market research or customer service data. 

Alternatively, ask your audience directly through surveys, phone calls, or face-to-face at events. 

Open-ended questions embedded on your website or in an email are two ways to collect qualitative data that reveals your audience’s pain points. You can easily do this with tools like Hotjar and Typeform.

The more you know about your audience, the better you can customize your offer to appeal to the right kind of sponsors. What’s more, it will help you narrow down who to target or accept. 

3. Asset valuation

Once you’ve identified your assets and audience, you can begin valuing them.  

The best way to do this is based on audience exposure. The more views, listens, or readers the asset has, the higher the premium you’ll be able to charge.

For example, when launching his book, Creativity for Sale, Jason Zook decided to value sponsor by placement:

“As I crunched a few numbers I randomly tried making the last page $3 and wanted to see what I’d end up with at Page #1 if I increased each page’s value by $3. I can’t explain why I chose $3, but I guessed it would end up around $600 on Page #1 (200 * 3?).

“Sure enough, it did. Starting on Page #1 at $600 and decreasing the price per page by $3 ($597, $594, $591, etc) ended up with Page #200 priced at $3. If all the pages got sponsored I’d stand to make $60,000.”

For advertising opportunities, research PPC, print, and traditional media fees based on similar audiences and value the asset accordingly.

For things like events, courses, and products, look at what the competition is charging in their sponsorship packages:

• How does your audience compare? 
• What can you offer that they don’t to make your assets more valuable? 

Whether you’re selling sponsorship per item (e.g., placement in your book or at the start of a podcast) or as a package (e.g., bundled offers with pricing increased based on level of exposure), each price must be backed by the benefits they offer to sponsors.

Railsconf 2021, for example, breaks their offers up into levels. Each one demonstrating value in brand awareness, lead generation, recruitment opportunities, and conference passes:

Packages range from “Bronze” level, which includes six benefits, to “Platinum” level that features all assets. This is a good way to appeal to multiple sponsors as it caters to different budgets and goals. 

4. Activations

Activations are designed to help both your audience and sponsor meet their goals. They work by allowing your sponsor to make an impact with your audience directly, presenting a clear ROI. 

Audience goals x Sponsor goals = Activation

To come up with valuable activations you need to find out what your audience wants. Like gathering audience data, this means asking them:

• What do they like about your business/book/podcast?
• What do they dislike?
• What would they like to see more of? 

PR Week does this in a Twitter poll. If you have up to four options already in mind and your audience is active on Twitter, this is one way to get quantitative feedback that you can share with sponsors.

Next, provide examples of what you can work on with sponsors to engage audiences based on their goals. Or chat to sponsors directly to find out their goals and design specific activations.

For example, if your audience wants to learn more about a particular theme in your book, you could work with your sponsor to create a course that’s hosted on the sponsor’s website. This will mean the sponsor is offering genuine value while increasing brand awareness and lead generation opportunities. 

5. Market identification

When you know your audience and what they like, you’ll have a good idea of the kind of sponsors they’ll be interested in. 

Start your list of target sponsors around these interests. Which brands resonate with your audience and the content you provide?

For example, one of the sponsors for RailsConf is Zendesk. Zendesk maintains a Ruby on Rails API client, making it relevant to the conference as a company and potential employer for Ruby on Rails developers. 

Next, look at any companies or suppliers you already partner with. Are they a potential sponsor?

Lean on your professional networks too. Who are you connected with on LinkedIn or friendly with at networking events that could make a good prospect?

These are good opportunities to generate warm leads.

Finally, check out the competition. What brands are sponsoring other businesses, books, or podcasts? If sponsorship is working between a company and a competitor, there’s every chance it can work for you. 

Getting sponsors onboard

With a strategy in place, you have an offer and target prospects. Now, it’s time to sell your sponsorship potential.

Create a compelling sponsorship proposal

Your sponsor proposal document or webpage is a deal-maker or a deal-breaker. According to Bags to Riches author, Linda Hollander, who’s attracted corporate sponsorship from the likes of Bank of America, IBM, and FedEx, it’s the most crucial part of the sponsorship process.

“The sponsor proposal is the most important, but least-understood, document in the sponsor industry. If you want top-tier sponsors, you need a compelling sponsor proposal. This is basically a business plan—and snapshot of the benefits of your property [assets]. It contains the story of your property, mission statement, sponsor benefits, demographics, marketing plan, goals, media opportunities, advisory board, and the sponsor fees.”

Information around asset benefits, demographics, and fees can be pulled from your sponsorship strategy. These should be backed by social proof to show off your credentials.

RailsConf does this with stats from its 2020 virtual event to give prospects an insight into the size of the audience they can reach.

Web Summit uses partner experiences to act as testimonials from previous sponsors:

Ryan Holiday leans on the success of his Daily Stoic Podcast and its guests to demonstrate value:

Make your proposal easy to digest, using graphics and bullet points wherever possible to draw attention to key information. 

Lead with the overarching benefits of your offer. 

Follow these with audience insights and social proof before laying out your packages or items and detailing what each includes. RailsConf also highlighted purpose-driven benefits to appeal to CSR-minded sponsors.

End your document with a call-to-action and clear contact information.

Informa Tech Automotive Group does this with a contact form and links to the LinkedIn profiles of employees who can help:

If you’re pointing sponsors at your website, consider giving them the ability to sign up directly (as opposed to chatting to a member of your team first).

The Camilita Podcast has made it easy for sponsors by including add to cart and Google Pay buttons on its package pages. 

This is a good tactic as it works as a standalone offer. People visiting the Camilita Shop can learn more about podcast sponsorship and decide to purchase without being sold to.

But for now, let’s concentrate on going after sponsors.

Build a contact pipeline

Before you get into attracting the attention of sponsors, create a contact pipeline spreadsheet to keep everything organized. 

The first part of this should include:

• Company name
• Contact first name and last name
• Contact email address

These are the details you’ll be using to reach out.

Alongside contact details include:

• Meeting
• Submitted proposal
• Outcome

These can be checked off as you progress, depending on the outcome.

Reach out to potential sponsors

Unless you’re already connected to a prospect via LinkedIn, or a supplier or partner, chances are you’re going to need to cold email prospects. 

It’s important when doing this to have realistic expectations. According to Campaign Monitor, an open rate of up to a quarter of all emails sent can be considered successful. 

“A generally accepted percentage for an email campaign success open rate is 15%-25%.”

This is backed by MailChimp research which puts the average email open rate for all industries at 21.33%.

So if from 200 emails, 50 or more people open, you’re doing well.

To achieve this kind of return, it can help to follow the science around subject lines and personalization. 

According to SuperOffice, 33% of recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. Including the recipient’s name in that subject line can increase open rates by 26%.

The latter finding feeds into Woodpecker’s analysis of over 20 million sales emails, which found that the average open rate of personalized emails is 17% versus 7% for emails without personalization.

To add to this, more than 20% of marketers say personalization boosts email engagement. 

The more you’re able to find out about your prospects to add a personal touch, the better your chances of getting them onside. But don’t just take these companies’ words for it. Do your own email testing. 

As Shanelle Mullion points out in her CXL post on email subject lines:

“Think of your email list as a living, breathing thing. It’s always changing. People come, people go, your content direction changes and attracts different people, etc. The email list you had six months ago is not the same email list you have now.

So, you need to be constantly testing subject lines because every insight you gain has a shelf life. What was once your top-performing formula could be useless in a matter of weeks, depending on your growth.” 

With these things in mind, what should your email look like?

First of all, it needs to grab attention:

• Hi [name], I found you through [referral name]
• Hey [name], [mutual connection] recommended I get in touch
• [benefit] for [company] through sponsorship (e.g. Fancy growing your audience through sponsorship?)
• Had an idea for [benefit] (e.g., Had an idea for helping you increase brand awareness)

From there, the body copy needs to be concise and to the point. At this stage, you’re only looking to arrange a phone call or meeting with the prospect.

Here’s an example from The Sponsorship Collective:

Hi Dave,

I noticed on LinkedIn that you are involved in the sponsorship program at Company X, focused on high net worth moms who live in the suburbs.

We did some research and found that around 30% of our attendees match this demographic and thought you would be interested in a conversation.

Are you around on Tuesday at 3:00 pm for a 15-minute discovery call?

Best,

Chris

This example works because it adds a personal element (“I noticed on LinkedIn”), sells a benefit (“30% of our attendees match this demographic”), and offers an invitation (“Are you around on Tuesday”). 

However, as good as your email is, it doesn’t guarantee a response. Remember, less than a quarter of emails get opened—even less get replied to. 

Therefore it’s important to follow up. And you can enjoy success if you do.

According to Woodpecker’s findings, email campaigns of 4-7 emails in a sequence have a reply rate of 27%, compared to 9% for campaigns with 1-3 emails in a sequence. 

In terms of how long to wait before replying, a general rule is two or three days. Close.io’s Steli Efti suggests spacing follow up emails as follows:

Day 1: First follow up (+2)

Day 3: Follow up (+4)

Day 7: Follow up (+7)

Day 14: Follow up (+14)

Day 28: Follow up (+30)

Day 58: Follow up (+30)

… (from there on once a month)

Keep track of email opens, views and clicks by using a CRM so that you know who to follow up with. Your CRM will also let you schedule follow-ups based on a predefined schedule, so you can reach out at the right time.

Like your initial email, keep follow-ups short and sweet. Each correspondence after your first should aim to:

• Add context: Reference your previous email to jog your prospect’s memory (e.g., I wanted to follow up on the email I sent [day/date] about sponsorship opportunities.)
• Deliver value: Each interaction should add another reason to open and respond. For example, with every new email, you could drop in a testimonial to pique interest, share statistics on the potential of your audience, or attach a digital resource. 
• Explain your reasons for emailing: Add a reminder or mention again why you’re emailing (e.g., I think sponsorship could help [company] generate targeted leads. I’d love to have a quick chat to find out if I’m right.)
• Encourage action: If you’re trying to schedule a meeting, add a call-to-action by suggesting a time and date (e.g., Does Monday at 1:30 pm work for you?)

Close the deal 

Whether your meeting is over the phone, video call, or in-person, the objective is the same. You want to hammer home why sponsorship makes sense for the prospect.

Try not to think of this as a sales meeting. Rather, approach it as a partnership opportunity. That said, the meeting should be focused on the prospect. 

Ask questions about what they do and what they need. Then deliver your offer, explaining how it can help them meet their specific goals.

For example, if the prospect is interested in sponsorship to increase brand awareness, focus on the assets that help them do this. For instance, banner ads and a 150-word blurb on your website will give the sponsor good exposure to your users. 

Close by clarifying their interest.

From there, summarize the call via email. Thank them for their time, and attach your proposal doc.

Create a sponsorship agreement

So that you have confirmation in writing, you should send the prospect a sponsorship agreement. 

UpCounsel has a free sponsorship agreement template that includes the following details:

• The sponsor’s name and address
• Your name and address
• Your obligations (the benefits you will provide the sponsor)
• The sponsor’s obligations (the sponsorship fee and payment due date)
• Sponsor trademarks and materials (the materials the sponsor has offered to provide for marketing and promotional purposes)
• Indemnity 
• Limitation of liability
• Term and termination (sponsorship start and end date)

Note: A sponsorship agreement is a legally binding document. Therefore you should consult a lawyer before settling on an agreement.

Deliver a fulfillment report to secure long-term sponsorship

The post-sponsorship fulfillment report is a critical part of the sponsorship agreement. As Kathy Emery, Principal of The Sponsor Placement Company, points out:

“You should not be in this business if you don’t do them. They are as important as the contract or the event itself.”

The idea is to communicate the results of the partnership. More than that, it enables you to justify the sponsor’s investment, build your relationship, and kickstart sponsorship renewal.

It also provides you with insights that can be used to improve future sponsorship agreements. 

For example, if insights reveal that sponsor messaging didn’t reach as many people as expected, you may need to hone your offer to partner with fewer brands and increase exclusivity.

On the flip-side, if a tactic such as including sponsors in five email newsletters generated more click-throughs than expected, you could double down on that offer in future sponsorships in the same niche. 

How to present your fulfillment report

A report should be delivered in a timely fashion, ideally within two weeks of the sponsorship ends, but not later than one month. It should also be concise, divided into four easily digestible parts: 

1. About you

2. Audience demographics

3. Fulfilment

4. Thanks and feedback

1. About you

Include a brief description of your business, book, or podcast, with details of its success. 

If you have testimonials or reviews, add them to give weight to your offer.

2. Audience demographics

Use graphs and charts to visualize audience data on the people that used your business, purchased your book, or listened to your podcast during the term of sponsorship.

Break these down in the same way as your sponsorship strategy:

• Age
• Gender
• Location
• Education level
• Income
• Interests
• Motivations for consuming

This will show sponsors whether or not their brand was positioned in front of their target audience.

3. Fulfillment

Use this section to list out the sponsor’s assets and whether or not you delivered on them. Include:

• An inventory of impressions: Website traffic, ad impressions, social media impressions, newsletter views, print readership, etc. This will demonstrate brand awareness.

• An inventory of metrics: Click-through rates, newsletter subscribers, downloads, social engagement, revenue figures, etc. Highlight areas where you’ve exceeded expectations. Equally, if you fell short on a deliverable, include a notes section to explain why with ideas on how it can be improved.

• Visuals: Photos, videos, and screenshots (e.g., assets, website screengrabs, program ads, event photos, product placement, speakers, action shots of sponsors at events, etc.) Provide a visual representation of benefits to show deliverables wherever possible. 

IGTLA shared their social analytics from the live-streamed event and images that showcase the sponsor’s logo.

4. Thanks and feedback

Use the last page of your report to extend a genuine thank you to the sponsor. Explain how valuable their sponsorship was for your audience and in helping you achieve your objectives. 

Sign off with some overarching ideas on how future sponsorship can be improved and expanded. 

Also, ask for their feedback and any ideas they have. This will help you improve future partnerships (with this sponsor or another), as well as laying the groundwork for renewals.

Conclusion

Successful sponsorship is based on research and value. Take the time to fine tune your sponsorship strategy so that it clearly defines your audience, target market, and benefits you bring to the table.

Focus on assets that meet the prospects’ goals and on prospects that meet your audience goals. 

Once you’ve secured sponsorship, continually test, measure, and tweak to ensure you’re delivering on your offer and communicate results to sponsors. Not every asset will produce the kind of results you want, but understanding what works and what doesn’t will help you improve long-term partnerships and tailor future packages for better ROI.

The post How to Get Sponsorship for Your Business, Book or Podcast appeared first on CXL.

With U.S. News declaring it the number one job in sales and marketing, and a median average salary of around $142,000 in the U.S., it’s no surprise that people are looking at how to become a marketing manager.

Perhaps you want to move up the ranks at your current company, or maybe you’re looking to change careers. Before you invest the time and effort it takes to get into the role, it’s essential to understand the responsibilities it entails.

In this article, you’ll learn what you can expect in the role, how you can demonstrate your worthiness to become a marketing manager (at your current place or in greener pastures), and how to present your case for a promotion.

Everything you need to know about the marketing manager role

Marketing managers can be called various things depending on the company. Some companies refer to individuals carrying out general marketing tasks as marketing managers, while others distinguish the leaders in their marketing departments this way.

Most companies are direct and call the people in these roles marketing managers or marketing directors. Some reverse the subject and call the position director of marketing.

Larger companies usually get specific about which of their channel’s marketing the applicant will be managing. Others get creative.

As you can see, there are many names for marketing managers and many niches for marketing managers. This may seem confusing at first, but knowing a little more about the types of marketing managers will help you apply for the role that suits you best.

The specifics of each role will vary depending on the industry and the company you choose. For example, let’s look at the differences between two types of marketing managers.

A content marketing manager’s role may focus on overseeing the production and execution of content across social media, the company’s website, email, and other channels. 

Here is an example of a content marketing manager’s job duties:

A digital product marketing manager’s role will focus on a tech product, ensuring all channel communications are optimized and aligned with its positioning strategy.

Here is an example of a digital product marketing manager’s job duties:

In general, marketing manager responsibilities boil down to overseeing and implementing marketing campaigns to facilitate growth and retention for the company—in whatever shape or form the company does this.

To help you get the broad scope of what to expect in any in-house marketing manager’s role, we’ve outlined the most typical points in a job description as well as common traits marketing managers share.

What does the day-to-day of a marketing manager look like?

Marketing touches every part of a company. Marketers can be involved in product development to ensure the product aligns with the customers’ needs, in communicating price points, in finding the best angles to keep customers coming back, and so on.

Your daily tasks will vary depending on the size of the company you work for, your industry, etc. The bigger the company, the more specialized your role will be. At a smaller company, you’re more likely to generalize across a variety of marketing tasks.

All marketing managers will carry out a mix of strategic duties across the lifecycle of projects, such as monitoring trends, testing ideas and optimizations, and tracking metrics. As a manager, you’ll also be responsible for allocating budgets for various purposes and liaising with stakeholders and other departments. 

If you’re managing a team, you’ll likely be distributing duties to team members and supporting them in their roles. These days, it’s far more normal for teams to be fully or partially remote, so virtual collaboration (e.g., in meetings or workshopping platforms) may become a regular part of your day.

Typical day-to-day responsibilities might include:

• Creating, managing, and adapting an overall marketing strategy for the brand
• Working with designers, videographers, copywriters, developers, and more, to gather assets for campaigns
• Deciding how much of the marketing budget goes to different tools and services for each campaign
• Conducting market research to ensure campaigns are relevant to your audience
• Staying on top of—and testing—marketing trends and strategies
• Managing marketing assistants or account managers on your team
• Tracking metrics and analyzing the performance of various strategies, channels, and campaigns

Here are some examples of how employers communicate those responsibilities on job boards:

This position clarifies that the role entails running a team and liaising with vendors. So while still heavily strategy-focused, peer-to-peer communication skills will also be vital.

This role is far more product-driven. It also appears to be a new product entering the market, so the ideal candidate will be familiar with implementing solid go-to-market strategies and product launches. The marketing manager for this role will develop a close relationship with the product and become an expert on the benefits specific to various global audiences to stay ahead of the competition.

Understanding the audience is key to any marketing manager role. If you’ve been in marketing, you know this already. But a marketing manager needs to go beyond knowing the demographics profile of the target customer. This is because they are often in charge of decision-making at the top level and need to know more than just who they are, but where they shop, whether they listen to the radio or watch TV more, and what social media channels they prefer. 

To develop and maintain a strategy, they need to understand customer motivations as well as any evolving needs according to market disruptions and competitor movements. 

In short, you need to understand your audience’s demographics and psychographics, or IAO variables (Interests, Attitudes, and Opinions).

Understanding these elements to your audience will help you make high-level decisions. If your competitor swerves their traditional marketing for a more outrageous campaign, do you follow suit? Should you wait and see how the market reacts? Should you get to work on a counter campaign? 

You’ll need to constantly access insights on your consumer and how they interact with your brand, your competitors’ brands, and related markets. In your day-to-day, that will look like tracking metrics for your campaigns while also keeping your ear to the ground in your industry and beyond.

As one Google marketing manager job posting puts it, “Know the user. Know the magic. Connect the two.”

In addition to market research and strategic planning, marketing managers must have a keen eye for both design and copy. You may have a team of people to bring elements of the strategy to fruition, but you’ll be the one accountable for its successes and failures.

Between team management, insights gathering, and campaign planning, you’ll also assess creatives’ direction and quality. You’ll take everything you know about the customer, the market, and the channel into account as you zero in on the optimal way to reach your audience.

What are common traits of marketing managers?

If you want to be successful in your role, pay attention to some of the top qualities or traits of marketing managers to see if this could be the right job for you.

Leaders and hiring managers are looking for marketing managers who are:

• Motivated. Being a marketing manager requires a level of self-starting in order to succeed. If a campaign isn’t working, they need to take initiative to figure out how to turn it around.
• Innovative. Marketing requires a lot of creativity, free thinking, and ambition to try new things. As new industry trends emerge, you should be able to easily understand and decide how you’ll react.
• Good communicators. Whether you’re communicating with clients or with customers online, having good communication skills is a must. Likewise, when you’re trying to convince leaders to try out a new marketing plan, you’ll need to know how to argue your points with data behind you.
• Adaptable. Marketing—especially digital marketing—is constantly disrupted, so you’ll need to be flexible and ready to adapt to new channels and tactics when necessary.
• Leaders. As a marketing director or manager, you’ll likely have a team underneath you. You need to be a good leader and project manager to ensure your team produces content and campaigns smoothly.

Here is an example of how an employer articulates the qualities they’re looking for in a new hire:

Some employers will include the attributes they need on their team, sometimes in a bullet list and others in a narrative-like description. This role makes it clear that big picture thinking and technical, specialized skills are required for the position.

What should you do in your current role to demonstrate marketing manager skills

If you’re a junior marketer in an entry-level position looking to move up in the ranks, it’s a good idea to start developing some hard and soft skills that demonstrate you’re ready for a promotion.

We’ve got a few actionable tips for how you can further your career well before approaching your boss or a hiring manager.

1. Take an online course

One of the earliest things you can do to prepare is to further your education. Your company may have education prerequisites, such as a preference for candidates with a bachelor’s degree or an MBA. If no education requirements are listed, there are many online courses to help you learn specific marketing skills and stand out.

CXL’s Institute offers several online courses, including digital marketing programs. We cover everything from A/B testing, branding, and social media marketing to Google Analytics, SEO, or landing page optimization.

With options like this, it’s easy to expand a specific skill set that you know your company is looking for in their advanced marketing positions.

Some jobs require specific certifications, such as Google Ads certifications. These courses are often free and only take a handful of hours.

Being certified in a specific niche relevant to the role you’re seeking is a great selling point for landing that new job or promotion.

2. Measure your results

One great way to prove that the work you’ve been doing is working is to track and measure all of your marketing initiatives. Show off your analytical skills by putting your results together in a report. Keep that report to share with your boss when you approach them to discuss your promotion.

Measure results from organic social media engagement, lead generation efforts, advertising ROI, email CTR, and other tasks you’ve worked on to help your cause.

You can present these numbers in many creative ways. Charts and graphs show you’re capable of putting together engaging reports and demonstrate your effort to impress your boss.

As we’ll mention later, you’re going to want to have a tangible list of your achievements and accomplishments thus far, so measuring and recording your results is the perfect starting point.

3. Take initiative on projects

Volunteer to head up new projects and marketing efforts that your team is working on. The best experience is hands-on experience. Showing your marketing executives that you’re interested in taking the lead on more tasks is a great way to prepare yourself for a marketing manager career.

If there aren’t any new projects coming up, do some research and pitch your own ideas to head. Prove to your boss and the colleagues you may one day be leading that you are able to see projects through from beginning to end.

4. Improve processes

If you have an idea to help improve or streamline processes for your marketing team or switch up an existing tactic or strategy, speak up. Bring it to your team and make it your baby, tracking key metrics all the way.

For example, research and pitch new project management tools that can help your team work better together. Or, present an emerging marketing tactic that you think would work well for your company, ideally with evidence and data to back it up.

5. Be responsive

Leaders and senior colleagues will notice if you’re quick to respond anytime they approach you. Don’t let your emails or Slack messages pile up. Be open and helpful, proving that you’re reliable and can handle having more on your plate.

6. Take risks

Try out new strategies and take risks that have the potential to reap big rewards. Whether you want to move up in your own company or plan to search for a marketing management position in a different organization, standing out with big moves will be a selling point for why you’re the person for the job.

How to present a case for promotion to your boss

Once you’ve researched the role and prepared yourself for the challenge, you’ll be ready to reach out for that promotion. Here are four steps to help you feel confident throughout the conversation.

1. Understand every aspect of the role

The first step is to make sure you know the full scope of the role you’re hoping to move into. What do marketing managers at your company do? Make sure you’re confident that you have acquired the skills necessary to excel in that role. 

You can always learn some skills on the job, but having a good grasp on most of your new responsibilities will ensure you can hit the ground running and make your boss feel confident in promoting you to that role.

If the job description is published on your company website, take a look to see each of the day-to-day tasks it lists. See if you can speak to someone already in that role, or ask your supervisor what would be expected of a marketing manager.

2. Create a list of your accomplishments

The next step is to put together your case and create a list of reasons why you deserve this promotion. This could include a log of your involvements for the past 6 to 12 months, results you’ve achieved, skills you’ve learned, or anything else you think is pertinent.

Put together a report or presentation that you can share during your discussion with your boss about the promotion. Consider including endorsements or recommendations from peers on your team.

3. Take steps to stand out on your team

Go back to our section about what to do to showcase your marketing manager skills. Each of those ideas will help you to stand out on your team and demonstrate that you’re a go-getter who would excel in a position with more responsibility.

Many companies prefer to promote internally before hiring someone new. Your bosses are going to be looking at the team members who stand out from the crowd to fill these roles. Your job is to make sure that person is you.

4. Make your case for promotion

This is where you make your pitch. Share your report and walk your boss through all of your accomplishments, emphasizing your value to the company and your help in its growth. Remain confident and professional, stating the facts and showcasing why you’re the best choice for this role.

Talk about what your first 60 to 90 days would look like and how you would set yourself up for success as a marketing manager. To feel even more secure in your pitch, practice it beforehand.

Thank your boss for the opportunity and show how excited you are for a chance in this new role. If you’re given a negative result on the spot, stay polite and professional, but ask what you can do to be considered for a promotion in the future.

Conclusion

We wish you the best of luck as you work towards this new role. To prepare yourself for a leadership role in marketing, check out CXL’s online courses. We’re here to help marketing professionals like yourself learn more about the industry so you can land your next big role.

Many employers advertise for marketing management positions on our job board, including CXL. Bookmark it and keep an eye out for your ideal position.

The post How to Become a Marketing Manager appeared first on CXL.

Product leaders often believe it’s cheaper to buy software than build it. But that’s not always the case. You don’t need a large development team or outside capital to build your own software from scratch. 

Whether you decide to build or buy, the technology you adopt must align with your business goals.

In this post, we’re sharing a build vs. buy framework to help you consider the opportunity costs and make an informed decision on whether to buy software off the shelf or build a custom solution.

How to decide when to build versus buy: A decision framework

Gartner forecasts enterprise software spending will total almost $572 billion worldwide by 2022. Companies are investing in enterprise software not just as a platform to run their business on, but the engine that moves it forward.

Whatever option you choose, it must bring real business value. Typically, this value falls into one of three categories:

1. Differentiation: The features you’re looking to build or acquire will help you stand out among your competitors. Nobody else is offering it, but your customer research has identified a need among your existing users.
   
2. Market maturity: Conversely, competitors are investing in a new featureset and thus, they’ve become table stakes. You need to build or buy these features to keep up.
   
3. Market share: You may already be a category leader, and growth requires you to expand into new verticals.

Business requirements trump features. Building or buying software that doesn’t align with your business goals or meaningfully help you stand out can be wasteful.

Here are the key factors you’ll need to consider.

The problem your new software or technology will solve

Investing in acquiring or building new software can help you solve a specific problem; one you’re suffering from internally or a pain-point your customers are looking to overcome.

A common barrier to investing in specific solutions often comes from a lack of core competencies. The skills, technology, or experience to build in-house are lacking.

Therefore, acquiring existing software can provide you with a cookie-cutter solution. It can be less costly and faster to implement a “pre-made” solution.

If nobody else has solved your problem, finding existing solutions may be tricky. This is especially true if you’ve found a better way of solving it than existing products in the market.

The scope of the project

To build a new product or featureset, you must fully understand the scope of the project, resources required, and potential costs before enlisting in-house developers.

Poor project planning can lead to development cycles running over budget or over time. Worse, you may end up with a sub-par product because you simply didn’t have the resources to build what you needed.

To avoid these pitfalls, ensure your project scope includes the following:

1. Clearly defined documentation: Building out user stories and acceptance criteria will help your team understand the value your solution must deliver to users.
   
2. Communication and accountability: Avoid misinterpreting requirements by having regular all-hands meetings. Make sure everybody understands the information that is being communicated. Centralize your communication using project and task management tools.
   
3. Stakeholder engagement: Keep senior decision makers and the boardroom informed and involved during the entire project cycle. Seeking their feedback at each milestone will ensure the project keeps on track.

In-house teams need the right project management systems and processes to ensure the build stays on schedule and within budget.

Resources, costs, and time needed to complete

The costs associated with building or buying software go deeper than resources and price tags. Proprietary software will have more cost considerations, but even existing software has customizable and ala carte options that add up fast.

Say you decide to build software in-house. How many people will be contributing? And for how long? New development projects will shift resources from other initiatives.

No-code/low-code solutions can reduce costs and development cycles, and are forecast to grow to 23% by the end of 2021. But no-code software can come with the added cost of technical debt.

Technical debt happens from unexpected bugs and additional development work that results from using short-term solutions (like templates or open-source code). When going the no-code/low-code route, make sure you account for these risks. Bugs can be difficult to identify unless properly QA tested.

Integrations

When building or acquiring new technology, integrations must go deeper than “connecting with Zapier.” 

Will your new product need to integrate with your existing product? If there’s an issue integrating the software, who will fix it?

Get clear on the integration plan in your project scope and documentation. If you’re building new technology, get clear on how it will work with your existing software (if it needs to). When buying, evaluate the development languages your acquisition is built on to understand how complex the integration process will be.

Ongoing support once the project is wrapped

Product development and maintenance are important, but you’ll also need customer support when you launch your new product, featureset, or conduct a handover.

58% of American consumers will switch to a competitor due to a bad customer experience. If your customers can’t access the support they need, it won’t matter how impressive your solution is.

Do this by developing training for your customer success teams. Launching to a small cohort of users allows you to identify recurring issues or questions. Use these to guide your customer support processes.

When you can expect to see a positive ROI

Time-to-value also has a direct impact on ROI. Will the software be a part of your business’s core offering? Can you realistically expect the ROI to lead to compound growth?

Shifting requirements is a common hurdle to reducing time-to-value. Development teams must complete the project in a reasonable time frame while making sure the end product solves the problem it set out to.

The faster you can deliver a product and drive value (to the business and customers alike), the stronger your upper hand against the competition will be.

Other associated risks

Risks vary based on whether you develop or purchase software. Consider:

• What are the security risks?
• Who is responsible for issues or bugs?
• What happens if the project goes over budget?
• How likely is it that the software development will be delayed?
• What are the risks of working with a particular vendor or platform?

These should all be accounted for in your project scope and development plan.

When to build custom software in-house 

Building custom software makes sense if the problem is difficult to solve, complex, or accessible via your product and development team’s capabilities.

The software is tied to your company’s core competencies 

Look at your most valuable services or core competencies when deciding what software to build.

If your company specializes in email marketing software, building an email deliverability tool in-house would align with your core company competency.

Custom-built accounting software would not.

Specialized competencies can lead to a “snowflake” scenario. The problem you’re looking to solve is so aligned with your software or service that retrofitting an existing software to meet your needs would be too expensive or impractical.

For example, Penske started offering logistics solutions back in the 1980s. Today, they continue to implement proprietary technology and recently launched a truck rental app. 

A truck rental app is a competitive advantage for Penske:

• It simplifies the logistics for customers planning a move
• It drives more awareness for Penske’s locations
• I tprovides a friction-less way to make reservations

You need full control

If your operational processes or software need drastic changes, waiting on a third party can negatively impact time-to-value. Owning the development process gives you complete control over the product roadmap, data, and ongoing support.

For example, WordPress development agency Aktura created a custom client portal, called Content Snare, after feeling frustrated with existing solutions on the market. Their team was spending hours on repetitive administrative and data-entry tasks to collect necessary onboarding documents from clients.

This solution streamlined the process for onboarding new clients and led to higher customer retention rates. Having full control over the product roadmap, they were able to spin off, rebrand, and sell their software to other agencies and web development shops.

Most out-of-the-box software or low-code platforms may struggle to fully integrate with your existing solutions. Developing your own solution will ensure it has full connectivity.

You have excellent project management and support systems in place

Reliable project management systems are critical for successful development cycles. They’ll help you keep your projects on budget and on time, ensuring you stay the course and solve the problem you set out to when starting this journey.

Take into account potential issues like gold plating and scope creep that could delay the process. Ensure enough resources are dedicated to the teams in charge of bringing your software to life.

You can take advantage of economies of scale

The benefits of your software should compound over time. 

For instance, you might build a tool for sales reps that reduces the time it takes to conduct high-impact activities. The more they use your tools, the more deals they’ll close in less time.

If software decreases in value as it ages, even with proper maintenance, it might make sense to pivot to a cheaper, pre-made solution that can fill a temporary need instead.

This starts by building out a new solution. As the software becomes fully built, you’ll need to create a migration plan to transition all users and data onto the new platform with little interruption.

You have outgrown your existing software

This isn’t uncommon for growing businesses. What once worked to scale your business may soon reach a ceiling as your product and growth goals become more aggressive.

Uber moved away from Greenhouse and Zendesk to build their own user support platform. While they shared positive case studies with both companies, eventually they needed a more cost-effective solution that aligned with how users interact with their platform.

When to “buy” and adapt existing software 

If the problem is well defined, common in your industry, and software can solve 70% of it, then you should consider buying, acquiring, and adapting existing software.

Market expansion: The problem you’re solving is outside core competencies

Many companies build software that doesn’t align with their core competencies and waste their investment as a result.

There’s no point in making a large investment to create software that already exists or you won’t fully utilize. If you’re trying to solve a common problem that isn’t specific to your company, it’s likely that the right commercial software is out there waiting for you.

This approach works well if you’re looking to capture existing market share. For example, if you’re a category leader in the CRM space and looking to step into marketing automation, then it’d make sense to acquire an email marketing platform to expand your capabilities.

You have strict time, budget, or internal resources constraints

Predicting when it’s time to move on can be easy as software slowly becomes obsolete. However, surprises happen, and a change may be forced on your due to market conditions or explosive growth.

For instance, the pandemic changed the software needs of companies across the world. You don’t always have the luxury of time. Even with the procurement process, you can still deploy existing software faster than a custom build.

Adobe Experience Platform has witnessed competing companies investing up to three years in developing software and features from their product suite. Many of these companies were still not able to meet the needs of the market.

Software requirements and consumer demands shift fast. Your software must keep pace as it’s being built. Developers must adapt as the project progresses or risk launching an already outdated product.

You have internal resource constraints

You may not have the time, funds, or staff needed to build software from scratch. After the software is built, you’ll still need to dedicate resources to maintaining and supporting the software.

For many companies, this isn’t feasible. Resources that were dedicated to the initial project need to move on to other initiatives. And if the support workload exceeds the capacity of your existing customer success teams, you’ll struggle to keep up with the influx of tickets.

To overcome this hurdle, you’ll need both the technological resources of the software you’re buying and the people that drive its success.

When to acquire a company outright  

There’s a happy medium between using existing software and building a solution from scratch. 

Here’s how to decide if acquiring a software or SaaS company is right for you.

You share core competencies

Take your time to research the company you plan to acquire. Do their core competencies align with yours? If not, you’ll run into the same issues when buying and retrofitting existing software. 

Say you are a leading email marketing software. Acquiring an up-and-coming competitor, who is growing exponentially, is a smart move. 

This competitor has an overlapping audience. Acquiring them as a startup allows your company to capture market share at an attractive price.

You see an existing differentiation 

The company’s software could have significant market share or product differentiation that would be difficult to replicate.

If acquiring the company is cheaper than building the capabilities from scratch, it’s worth pursuing. They’ve already invested the time and resources in developing the solution so you don’t have to.

This is especially true if the company has proprietary technology. If there’s a patent for a cutting-edge AI development, replicating their approach in your solution violates their IP. The workaround? Buy them.

You can tap into network effects or economies of scale

In 2017, Target acquired Shipt, a grocery delivery service. In 2020, it was announced they’ll acquire Deliv:

These acquisitions gave them new technologies, a fresh user base, and the transportation logistics that made them a success.

This proved to be a major competitive advantage in 2020 with the first and second-order effects from the pandemic.  

Owning the software outright and having an in-house team at Target manage it gives them complete control over the product roadmap, data, and support.

You have the potential to acquire key talent and customers

By acquiring a business, you also acquire their employees. It’s a strategic way to hire specific talent or leadership capabilities your company is actively seeking.

For instance, if you want to build out your team’s software developing capabilities, acquiring a company founded by a niche, senior software engineer can help you do that. 

Just as acquiring talent, buying a business gives you their entire customer and user base. In this way, company acquisitions foster growth in all areas.

If you are ranked second in a competitive market, acquiring the third or fourth player can help you grow your customer base and create leverage to become a category leader.

Conclusion

Deciding whether to build or buy comes down to competencies, capabilities, and growth goals. If you have the internal chops to build a featureset that will give you a competitive advantage, then it makes sense to do so.

Aggressive growth goals require a different approach. Here, it can be worthwhile to buy technology or an entire company outright. Use this guide as a checklist to make the right strategic decision.

The post Build vs. Buy: Which is Right for Your Business? appeared first on CXL.

Brand is the perception of your company in the eyes of the world. It’s shorthand for who and what you are. 

Getting branding right gives people a reason to love you, which they’ll reward with loyalty. Getting it wrong, however, can create an impression you may never be able to change.

In this article, you’ll learn what’s required to create a branding campaign that strikes the right chord. We’ll look at the importance of strategy and cover the key ingredients a campaign needs to increase brand awareness. We’ll also give you creative fuel by breaking down how Lemonade has used branding to disrupt the market.

Branding strategy is more than a series of gimmicks

When we start in business one of the first things we’re encouraged to do is nail the branding: come up with a memorable brand name, a good logo, and a striking visual brand identity. These elements are important in making you recognizable. 

If you were to show a group of people the Apple logo, most would associate it with Apple the tech company and not a Red Delicious. The same goes for all of the major tech and consumer companies in the world: Facebook, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Nike, etc. 

If people see your name or logo and instantly know who you are, you’ve done a great job of creating the tangible aspects of your brand. 

But it’s what people feel when they see your brand that matters. 

Reading the company names we just mentioned probably triggered feelings and associations in you. These feelings are called brand associations; the stronger the brand association, the more likely a consumer will buy from you.

As companies, we don’t directly control these feelings. They’re intangible and personal to each individual. But we can indirectly influence them. In fact, everything we do influences how people feel, for better or worse.

This is where a good brand strategy comes in. It’s also why campaigns can’t ever be led by gimmicks. 

“Today’s audiences can smell a gimmick. Sometimes, they uncover the baloney within the first line of your ad content. They are more aware of marketing gimmicks than ever before. And, these potential customers no longer tolerate false promises and astounding claims. Instead, consumers want transparency and honesty from brands.”

– Steve Olenski [via Forbes]

Brand strategy helps influence how people perceive your brand. It maps out where you’re headed and helps you work out what (and what not) to do. It carries you into every campaign knowing the message you need to get across and how to say it. 

“A good definition of brand strategy is the considered intent for the positive role a company wants to play in the lives of the people it serves and the communities around it.”

– Neil Parker, Chief Strategy Officer at Co: Collective [via Branding Mag]

It also gives your brand the robust foundations to handle scrutiny and bounce back if ever you do get things wrong.

For example, when Nike made a shoe featuring the Besty Ross flag to commemorate the July Fourth holiday, it was a gimmick that went wrong. The company was immediately called out on the flag celebrating an era in U.S. history when slavery was legal and commonplace. Nike quickly recalled the product.

The campaign will have left a sour taste that negatively affects how some people view Nike. However, because the company’s brand strategy is rooted in empowering its audience and building community, it was able to apologize and move forward without significant loss.

Had this strategy not been in place, a misjudged shoe could have easily defined mass brand perception.

To generate long-term brand equity and trust, and maintain competitive advantage, every brand campaign should be influenced by a strategy that’s built on four principles:

1. Purpose

Purpose is your reason for existing. It’s the answer to the question at the heart of Simon Sinek’s famous Golden Circle presentation: Why?

“Every single person, every single organization on the planet knows what they do, 100 percent. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiated value proposition or your proprietary process or your USP. But very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do. And by “why” I don’t mean “to make a profit.” That’s a result. It’s always a result. 

By “why,” I mean: What’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist? Why do you get out of bed in the morning? And why should anyone care? As a result, the way we think, we act, the way we communicate is from the outside in, it’s obvious. We go from the clearest thing to the fuzziest thing. But the inspired leaders and the inspired organizations — regardless of their size, regardless of their industry — all think, act and communicate from the inside out.”

Beyond being a successful, profitable business, what drives you? What sets you apart?

Answering these questions will help you define your purpose and separate you from the crowd so that your voice isn’t lost in the noise. It will give you that unique quality for people to attach themselves to and follow along with.

2. Positioning

How do you want people to feel about you? 

Apple positions itself as a brand that builds beautiful, innovative tech for innovative, imaginative, and creative people. 

HubSpot positions itself as a company that builds tools to help businesses attract and engage customers. 

Thrive Market is positioned as a provider of healthy food products for busy, eco-conscious shoppers.

If you’re unsure about where to position yourself, do some competitive analysis to identify gaps in the market and carve out your place.

3. Promise

Your brand promise talks to your employees, investors, partners, and customers. It lets people know what to expect.

McDonald’s brand promise is “to provide Simple Easy Enjoyment to every customer at every visit.” 

Noirbnb promises to “create a safe space for POC to travel and discover new adventures.”

Your promise is the combination of your position, value, and proposition.

Position + Value + Proposition = Promise

It should be relevant to your audience and simply explain how you aim to help or inspire them.

4. Consistency

Consistency is the look, feel, and sound of your brand at every touchpoint. All of your messaging should be cohesive so that it never waters down your brand or confuses your audience.

Why is this important?

Because consistency creates familiarity, which is crucial in onboarding customers. 

71% of consumers say that it is very or somewhat important that they recognize a brand before making a purchase. 

If we couple this with the “rule of seven” which states that it takes an average of seven interactions with your brand before a purchase will take place, it’s clear consumers will favor familiarity over the unknown.

Brand consistency is evident in every successful company.

Take Mailchimp. Its content style guide ensures branding campaigns have the same tone of voice across all marketing channels. 

“Using offbeat humor and a conversational voice, we play with language to bring joy to their work. We prefer the subtle over the noisy, the wry over the farcical. We don’t take ourselves too seriously.

“Whether people know what they need from us or don’t know the first thing about marketing, every word we say informs and encourages. We impart our expertise with clarity, empathy, and wit.”

You can see this in everything from its website:

To its social media:

Regardless of how or where you find Mailchimp online, the company’s branding always delivers a consistent perception of a company that aims to help small businesses “look pro and grow.”

Use your marketing strategy to ensure campaigns never dilute your brand perception. 

Keeping these four principles in mind, let’s look at an example of a company using branding to stand out.

How Lemonade positions itself in a crowded market

Lemonade is an online insurance company offering low-cost renters’ and homeowners’ insurance.

From the name alone, you get a sense that the company is different. Lemonade couldn’t be further away from the likes of Berkshire Hathaway and Allstate Insurance. Those names sound corporate. Lemonade sounds, in the words of its CEO Daniel Schreiber, “juvenile.”

But it works, for a couple of reasons. First, as Bud Hennekes points out in breaking down the brand’s positioning:

“For many, the thought of lemonade brings back memories of a pleasant childhood experience or the refreshing sensation of cooling down after a hot summer day. Contrast that to how one feels when hearing the word ‘insurance.’ There’s quite a difference.”

Second, the company’s whole M.O. is about being contrarian.

“Traditional insurers often equate trustworthiness with financial strength, which they project by erecting monumental buildings that dominate the skyline.

“Skyscrapers weren’t within our budget, but in any event we believed such extravagance sends the wrong signal. People worry their insurer lacks the will to pay, not the means. So we established Lemonade as a Public Benefit Corporation, with a view to signaling something very different.” [via Lemonade]

Lemonade is for people who want a change from the norm:

“Lemonade isn’t simply slapping P2P technology atop existing insurance companies. Insurance has remained fundamentally unchanged for centuries, so an insurance product for today’s consumer required re-architecting every part of the value chain. We created Lemonade as a purpose-built, technology-first, vertically integrated and legacy-free insurance carrier.

“Insurance brands are some of the least loved and least trusted, and we came to understand that the cause is structural: every dollar your insurer pays you is a dollar less for their profits. Their interests, in other words, are profoundly conflicted with yours.

“Brands that make money by delighting their customers deserve to be loved; those that make money by disappointing customers are destined not to be. With Lemonade we’re hoping to deliver an insurance experience that is instantaneous, un-conflicted and downright lovable.” [via Lemonade]

Its name fits with the brand’s lovable intentions. As does its identity.

Rather than opt for stock imagery, Lemonade uses illustrations on its landing pages. These add to the laid-back, non-corporate feel of the brand and complement the fun name.

The tone of voice follows suit, delivering information in a light, conversational tone that carries through its website, blog posts, and social media content marketing.

It all helps towards Lemonade’s image as a transparent company that understands and relates to its audience.  

Also prominent in its branding is the color pink. 

Other than black and grey, pink is the only color Lemonade uses. And it uses it consistently, in its logo, across its website in images, text, and CTAs, and on social media. 

Pink is drastically different from the palettes used by Lemonade’s competitors, helping them stand out. It’s also a color associated with calmness, love, and kindness. These are feelings you wouldn’t typically link to insurance, but they’re perfectly in tune with what Lemonade wants people to feel about its brand. 

Its use of pink also became part of a branding campaign when Deutsche Telekom went to the courts to demand they ditch it, as Daniel Schreiber revealed in a blog post:

“So we decided to fight back, and filed to invalidate DT’s Magenta trademark – calling on anyone who wanted to join us to #FreeThePink. We also bought a bunch of swag from DT and T-Mobile, and Team Lemonade got decked out in “their” pink, emblazoned with their mission statement: “Life Is For Sharing.” Who can argue with that?”

“The response has been amazing: the largest publications in Germany covered the story prominently, as did the media across Europe and the US; several CEOs of companies from a bunch of industries and countries wrote to say Deutsche Telekom threatened them too, and encouraging us to stand firm; and people around the world came out in droves calling to #FreeThePink.”

Had Lemonade not been as consistent and committed to the use of the color, it’s unlikely the campaign would have carried the same weight. 

For a final example of how Lemonade does things differently, take a look at the company’s Instagram feed.

Rather than using the platform to push its own content, the company puts the spotlight on its community, commissioning artists to create stories:

This is closely tied to the company’s Medium account, which promotes its #ConnectedByLemonade campaign.

This gives Lemonade an endless stream of engaging branded content (the color pink is a feature of each commission). It also adds to its perception as a company that cares about its audience. 

There’s no selling going on here, just relationship building.

For existing customers, #ConnectedByLemonade brings them closer to the brand, increasing loyalty and making them more likely to purchase and recommend Lemonade to others. 

For prospective customers, it acts as one more way to stay front of mind. When the time comes to purchase renters’ or homeowners’ insurance, where better to get it from than the cool brand on Instagram that’s passionate about the same things you are?

And if you’re wondering what kind of impact this branding had, three years after launch, Lemonade’s had welcomed over 18 million visitors to its website and sold over 1.2 million policies.

How to create a solid branding campaign

With strategy providing the backbone, a successful brand marketing campaign consists of three key ingredients:

1. Fit

2. Focus

3. Consistency (again)

1. Find the right fit

You need to think about this in two ways:

1. Audience fit

2. Platform and channel fit

Audience fit

Audience fit is much the same as product/market fit. If you already have a deep understanding of who your customers are and how they feel about your product, you’ll have a good idea of who your branding campaign needs to be aimed at. 

But it pays to revisit your target audience demographics. Not so much to go back over buyer persona characteristics like age, location, job, income, and gender (although it’s worth checking if these remain relevant), but to look how your campaign will resonate with them.

Ask yourself:

• What do we have in common with our audience?
• How does our brand fit into their lives?
• What can they expect from us?
• What do we want them to feel about us?  

Answering these questions will give you an understanding of what your common vision is and how you can build relationships with your audience moving forward. 

Let’s look again at Noirbnb’s vision to create a safe space for POC to travel and discover new adventures.

Noirbnb shares a love of travel and the desire for POC to be able to travel safely with its audience.

It fits into their lives by allowing them to book safe places to stay or list their properties for other people to stay. Its branding is heavily focused on showcasing experiences and inspiring people to embark on their own adventures.

This makes travelers of color feel confident in Noirbnb as a company that caters for them in a way that Airbnb perhaps doesn’t.

2. Platform and channel fit

Platforms and channels are terms that are often used interchangeably, but there’s a clear distinction.

“Platforms are the foundation on which you can build your brand presence, such as the web, phone apps, social media, and gadgets.

“Channels serve as a more direct means of communication and include email, advertising, search engines, chatbots, phone, and more.” [via Digital Brand Blueprint]

The overall goal of your branding campaign is the same regardless of where the message is, but how you communicate it differs depending on the platform or channel.

For example, Lemonade’s Instagram artist commissions are perfectly suited to that platform. The Instagram audience is largely creative and receptive to images and videos. 

Had Lemonade decided to approach Twitter in the same way, where the average lifespan of a tweet is 15 minutes, or the professional audience of LinkedIn, content marketing wouldn’t have had the same impact. 

Instead, the company uses Twitter to share news and engage in direct conversations.

The tone of voice and pink theme is consistent, but the approach matches the audience.    

Find out where your audience is. Then work out how they interact with the platform or channel.

This will involve some trial and error, especially early on. So be prepared to experiment and analyze results to get in tune.  

Measure brand awareness metrics and KPIs success by analyzing:

• Coverage
• Share of voice
• Mentions
• Shares
• Traffic
• Links
• Conversations

Also, pay close attention to sentiment to get an understanding of how consumers feel about your brand.

You can measure sentiment via:

• Net Promoter Score (NPS) Questionnaires
• In-app ratings
• Direct feedback (customer interviews)
• Social monitoring (comment velocity and tone, and reaction tone)

2. Focus on things that are important to you and your audience

Your brand is defined by the words you say and the actions you take. And while speaking up on potentially divisive issues isn’t always easy, staying silent isn’t an option.

Kantar research shows that 68% of consumers say they expect brands to be clear about their values and take a stand on them. And doing so earns trust.

Edelman’s Trust Barometer report shows that brands are far more likely to gain trust than lose it when they take action. 

This is rewarded by loyalty, engagement, and advocacy. 

“Loyalty: 75 percent of people with high brand trust say they will buy the brand’s product even if it isn’t the cheapest, it is the only brand of the product they’ll buy, and they will immediately check out a new product from that brand to purchase 

Engagement: 60 percent of people with high brand trust say they’re comfortable sharing personal information with the brand, and they pay attention to the brand’s communications 

Advocacy: 78 percent with high brand trust say they’ll likely share or repost content about the brand, they will recommend the brand to others, and they will defend the brand against criticism.” [via Edelman]

If an issue of social, political, or environmental importance matters to your employees, purpose, and audience, make it a visible part of your branding campaign.

Dropbox did this with its support for the Black Lives Matter movement, sharing an email from CEO Drew Houston with its community:

“…starting today, I’m making an additional pledge to match every donation made by a Dropboxer in June to the Black Lives Matter Foundation, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, and the National Urban League. This is in addition to the company matching program, so it means that your contribution will have triple the impact.”

“For those who can’t give right now, there is still much that can be done by getting involved with your local organizations. Even taking the time to hit pause, look inward, and reflect on your own thoughts and actions can be immensely impactful right now. To help you all find the time and space to do this, we’ll be holding a half day of reflection this Friday, June 5th. Please cancel your meetings after 12pm so that you have the afternoon to do whatever is most valuable to you — volunteering, reading, or taking a moment to process everything that’s happened over these past several weeks. We just ask that you make the best use of the time given your own thoughts and experiences.”

Tommy Hilfiger ran a branding campaign involving a partnership with learning platform, Future Learn to provide free digital learning courses covering topics including LGBTQ+ allyship and community building.

Pernod Ricard launched an #EngageResponsibly campaign with the Association of National Advertisers to fight against hate speech and misinformation on social media.

The campaign aims to give companies a tool to track and report hate speech and earn an “Anti-Hate Certification”. 

In each example, brands have been led by purpose. They’ve also backed words with actions and empowered their communities.

Go back to the question of what do we have in common with our audience?

Look at how to use these shared values for social good.

3. Be consistent

We’ve covered consistency from an identity perspective (i.e visual and tone of voice consistency), but let’s go beyond that.

Consistency should be a feature of everything you do so that people know what to expect from you.

This means three things:

1. Posting regularly on social media

2. Engaging with your audience

3. Never setting and leaving a campaign

1. Posting on social media regularly 

There’s no need to post multiple times a day or even every day if you don’t have the resources or it doesn’t make sense for your brand. Still, your audience should know you’re active.

For example, posting on Facebook six times in one week and following that up with two months of silence runs the risk of your audience perceiving you’re no longer active. Or worse, that you don’t care. It’s much better to post once a week over six weeks. 

2. Engaging with customers

Prioritize customer engagement on every platform and channel linked to your campaign. This is important for brand satisfaction, as 64% of consumers say they want brands to connect with them. 

It’s also crucial to the customer experience, with 78% of customers preferring to engage with brands on multiple channels.   

To make sure you’re meeting customer needs and generating good feeling, consistently engage customers in three ways:

1. Reactively

Responding to customer questions, queries, or feedback. 

You can see this in practice on MailChimp’s Twitter feed.

With reactive customer engagement, it’s important to monitor your mentions and inbox closely.

Sprout Social research shows that 40% of consumers expect brands to respond within the first hour of reaching out on social media, while 79% expect a response in the first 24 hours.

On email, nearly half of all customers (46%) expect a response within four hours. 12% expect a response in 15 minutes or less. 

The quicker you can react, the better.

2. Proactively

This is all about delivering information and support before the customer has to ask. Forbes’ Brie Tascione has an example:

“Consider banking. The moment you open a checking account, a number of questions about your new account may arise. Instead of leaving you to navigate the bank’s website to find the information you need or telling you to call customer service (just to wait on hold), your bank immediately reaches out to share your account information, a link to activate mobile banking and answers to common questions, such as how to set up a direct deposit. You receive one personalized experience containing everything you need.”

This has nothing to do with brand (the name and visual stuff) and everything to do with branding. 

By understanding your customers and delivering a seamless experience, you can create positive brand experiences that carry through to a customer’s friends, family, and followers via word of mouth. 

3. Socially

Social engagement is less about where you engage customers with your digital marketing and more about how.

“Social customer engagement can happen not just on social media platforms, but across other channels such as online forums, customer review websites, crowdsourcing platforms, charity fun runs, roadshows, and trade events.

“Social engagement can be both, a mix of proactive and reactive types of customer engagement, depending on the context. If a customer initiates an engagement first, it’s reactive. When your brand does it first, it’s proactive.” [via RingCentral]

We’ve already seen how Lemonade and Mailchimp use a casual tone of voice and humor to engage their audiences on social media. But there are inspiring examples everywhere.

Like IKEA, which utilizes online chat and augmented reality so that customers can choose furniture without having to visit a store.

Or Netflix, which provides social engagement by using algorithms and audience analytics to recommend shows and movies based on their viewing history. 

Each example shares two things in common:

1. Brands are open to listening to their customers and adapting

2. They provide a valuable reason to come back

3. Never setting and leaving a campaign

A branding campaign is a hands-on effort that needs to be measured, assessed, and tweaked as you go.

Keep a close eye on how your campaign is performing. Make sure it’s striking the right chord with the right people and hitting your targets.

A/B test ad campaigns and marketing campaign materials to see which customers most engage with.

Remember, you can’t directly control what people think about your brand, but your marketing efforts can indirectly influence it.

Consistently analyzing your campaigns will keep things moving in the right direction.

Conclusion 

Jeff Bezos once said that “your brand is what other people say about you when you’re not in the room”.
Think about that when creating your branding campaign. What impression do you want people to have of you? What do you want them to say about you to their friends and family? It’s this that will determine whether your branding and, ultimately, your business is a success.

Start by developing your strategy and build every campaign from that. Stand up for what you believe in and invest heavily in consistency. Be visible so that your customers know what to expect. That familiarity and reliability is what will keep them coming back.

The post How to Create an Effective Branding Campaign That Inspires a Movement appeared first on CXL.

The classic lifespan of successful products is a story in four parts:

1. Introduction
2. Growth
3. Maturity
4. Decline

How this story plays out has a lot to do with the type of product and how it’s improved over time, if at all.

However, the shape of the curve—the length of the arc and the speed of the decline—is also determined by how you market that product at each stage of its life. 

In this article, we’ll look at the different stages of the product lifecycle through the lens of marketing. You’ll learn about the different strategies available and the impact they’ll have on the future of your product.

Before introduction comes development

The textbook four-stage lifecycle graph looks something like this:

These are the four stages of a product we’ll be focusing on. 

However, on a more granular graph, the introduction phase would be preceded by a product development stage. This stage is used to determine the viability of your product and confirm when it should go to market.

Depending on its complexity, new product development can last for years, accruing research, prototyping, and production costs without bringing in revenue.

For this reason, it could be a good idea to get a minimum viable product (MVP) as early as possible to show how your product will work to investors and customers.

“Instead of spending years perfecting our technology, we build a minimum viable product, an early product that is terrible, full of bugs, and crash-your-computer-yes-really stability problems. Then we ship it to customers way before it’s ready. And we charge money for it.” – Eric Ries, The Lean Startup

A well-timed MVP reduces the risk of continually investing only to discover that a product isn’t going to be a success. It also gives you a product to market.

Product lifecycle marketing in the development stage

With an MVP, or a product you’re confident in talking about ahead of launch, you can use the development stage to create a buzz. 

Your marketing strategy should be focused on building brand awareness. You want to tell people that your forthcoming product is solving real problems. To do that, research your target audience and build out customer personas.

CXL founder, Peep Laja, explains the benefits of this in his post on identifying your online target audience: 

If you know….

* Who the people are, you know how to get to them (the blogs they read, the sites they visit, the stuff they search in Google, etc.);

* How they describe the type of services you offer, you can word the copy on your site to match the conversation in their head (very important!);

* How they choose and compare products in your category, you know how to structure and prioritize content on your site;

* What they want, your value proposition can state exactly that and the whole site can be 98% relevant to them;

* What they don’t care about, you can dismiss and cut it from the site;

* How their life is better thanks to your service, you know which end-benefits to communicate. 

Once you know who you’re talking to, you can begin laying the foundations for what’s to come.

An effective way to do this is with a coming soon landing page. Share it across business and personal social media profiles to generate a targeted list of early adopters.

A landing page should include:

• A value proposition
• Product benefits
• Product images
• A single CTA

Here’s an example from App Manager 5.0, which encourages people to sign up to its list for early access perks:

They also include a countdown clock. This adds scarcity, which helps put gentle pressure on users to sign up. 

Where possible, use endorsements from industry influencers or positive reviews from customers who’ve tested your MVP.

Leadpages did this ahead of its Center marketing platform introduction: 

Social proof is a proven way to get people to act. Here’s what GetUplift.co’s Talia Wolf had to say about it when asked by CXL’s Shanelle Mullin:

“By using social proof in the form of testimonials, reviews and trust icons you’re helping customers make a decision, feel confident about their choice, and be a part of something bigger. Planned carefully, you can spark specific emotional triggers that influence customers’ feelings towards their purchase and your business.”

Social proof can also be repurposed on social media to start building trust ahead of your product launch. The more people you can get talking about your product, the more excitement you can generate as you enter the introduction stage.

1. Introduction

If product marketing has begun in the development stage, you may well be able to hit the ground running. But in many cases, the introduction stage is marked by slow-to-moderate sales and little profit.

Therefore, marketing strategies revolve around product price and promotion, with four possible options:

1. Rapid skimming

The rapid skimming strategy involves launching your product at a high price with high promotional costs. The purpose is to recover as much profit per product as possible. 

It works on the assumptions that: 

• A major part of your target market is unaware of the product
• The market is limited
• Customers are happy to pay the high price
• Competition means you need to create brand preference

It works best when:

• Your target market is early adopters and innovators 
• Your short-term goals are to maximize profits and increase product sales quickly

Apple proved this with the introduction of its original iPhone. The product launched with a high price and big promotion to capture a significant chunk of the market, before the likes of Samsung came along to challenge them.

Like Apple, your strategy will require significant marketing investment in content, traditional media, and PR. You’ll need to maximize your presence on multiple channels with educational content and influencer marketing to ramp up the excitement.

2. Slow skimming

Slow skimming also involves launching your product at a high price, but instead with low promotion. The idea is to recover gross profits while keeping marketing costs low.

It works on the assumptions that:

• The market is limited
• Customers are aware of the product
• Customers are happy to pay the high price 
• There is a lack of competition

It’s a strategy used by software providers like SAP and IBM i2, whose systems are vital to companies’ operations. 

You can focus on reaching a small target market via outbound sales teams and strong educational content. This works to promote exclusivity while still selling the benefits.

Growth will come mostly through word-of-mouth. This means social proof and the customer experience are paramount. Customers should feel special at every touch point; from interacting with them on social media, to personalizing emails and creating targeted ads. 

3. Rapid penetration

Rapid penetration consists of introducing a product at a lower price with high promotion. The purpose is to become a market leader and maximize profits.

It works on the assumptions that:

• The market is vast
• Low price is important to buyers
• Competition is strong
• The market needs to be informed and convinced

It’s a strategy often used by smartphone brands like Samsung and Huawei in emerging markets such as India. Devices are priced lower, but media visibility is high. 

If rapid penetration makes sense for your product, focus on convincing customers that it’s the best choice for them. To do this, work on building trust through social proof and leveraging industry influencers. 

Gymshark is a great example of a company that was able to do exactly this. 

“To get the business off the ground, [Ben] Francis recruited a small number of social media stars and laid the foundations for what is now known as the Gymshark ‘athlete’ community. Now, those influencers….are well-known representatives of the brand.

“Over time, other popular influencers…have begun working with the brand and regularly post photos and upload YouTube videos wearing the clothing.” [via Influencer Matchmaker]

Gymshark entered a crowded market dominated by some of the world’s biggest sporting brands. But its clever use of influencers spoke to the right kind of people and helped turn them into a £1 billion company.

4. Slow penetration

Slow penetration takes the “slow and steady wins the race” approach. It involves introducing the product at a low price in the hope that it will encourage acceptance.

It works on the assumptions that:

• The market is vast
• Product awareness is high
• Buyers are price-sensitive
• Competition is low

The long-term goal is to maximize sales or profits. 

Take Netflix. Everyone is familiar with movies and understood what they were getting from the company’s DVD rental product.

In 2007 when they launched their streaming service, it faced no real competition. The company only had to convince people to take a chance. It did that by centering its marketing on convenience and price.

Here’s the Netflix homepage back in 2010, focusing on the benefits of the product:

Back then (as they can now) users could take advantage of a free trial. This is a good marketing tactic to inspire action from people still on the fence.

Those core messages remain fundamental to Netflix’s marketing today: 

If your product is well known and cost is an important buying factor, build your marketing around value for money, with price as a key USP.

2. Growth

The growth stage is where business starts to increase at a rapid pace towards the peak of the arc. You’ll experience a boost in sales and market presence. You’ll also notice marketing turning more towards the competition.

Product lifecycle management goals at this stage are:

• Increasing market share
• Creating brand preference

Strategy expert, Gary Fox, defines growth marketing as:

“An agile and adaptive marketing methodology that focuses on how to get, grow and keep customers.”

Achieving this means taking a deep dive into the data to see how you can stand out from the crowd.

Researching your audience

By the growth phase, you should have enough data on current customers to run qualitative research on their experiences. 

Dig into conversations your customers are having with sales reps and customer service teams to find out:

• What problems they’re facing
• What help they need to solve these problems
• How your product is helping
• What more your product can do
• What customers like and dislike about your product
• Which other tools they use

If your sample size is low, consider using surveys and one-on-one customer interviews to learn as much as possible.

You should also look closely at your website and social analytics. Which marketing channels drive the most traffic? Which social platforms deliver the best engagements?

This will help you establish where to focus your marketing efforts.

Use your data to:

• Develop new features
• Improve the quality of your product
• Create new user personas
• Find out which elements of your product are most valuable to customers

Researching the competition

Look closely at your competitors and ask yourself:

• How does our product compare? 
• What do we do better/differently than them? 
• What makes us stand out?

Use this information to refine your value proposition, identify new markets, and examine how you can exploit weaknesses in the competition. The results can drive your marketing. 

Here are two examples that demonstrate the point:

1. Groove

By getting feedback from its core user base, Groove was able to identify what customers wanted information about. This led to the creation of a blog sharing the pitfalls of growing a SaaS company. Something no one else was doing at the time.

Each blog post was shared with selected influencers, which led to positive reviews and guest blogging opportunities. These helped grow the company’s user base to turn Groove into a $5 million a year business.

“We spent two months doing nothing but research, writing, and talking to content marketers we respected about how they turned their blogs into actual drivers of growth for their business.

“And what we learned changed everything for us.”

– Alex Turnbull, CEO & Founder of Groove.

2. Airbnb

Staying ahead of the competition may require you to explore new markets to increase reach and expand your user base. 

Airbnb was able to do this by introducing a new feature.

When the company learned that its audience also searched Craigslist for accommodation, it created a feature that allowed hosts to copy their listing to Craigslist with one click. 

This gave Airbnb immediate access to a new market of target users and helped it grow its listings from 50,000 to 500,000. 

3. Maturity

The maturity stage is the height of your product’s success. How long this lasts depends on how long you can maintain your market position.

By now, you’ve reached peak market saturation and consumers are aware of the product. This means it is less likely you’re going to be able to differentiate on features and stand out on price. 

Your goal now is to defend market share to continue to maximize profits. 

One way to do this is by running marketing campaigns for each new feature or iteration of the product. 

Going back to Apple, the company is able to maintain market share and extend the maturity stage (prolonging decline in the process) of its iPhone by continually evolving the product.

A bigger and better version is released each year and Apple invests heavily in marketing to promote the benefits. This helps attract new customers while convincing existing ones to upgrade: 

As a result, the growth peak is flatter and interest is consistent, as this Google Trends graph shows:

If your product isn’t consistently upgraded, your marketing should focus primarily on brand equity.

Establishing strong brand identity

When you’re no longer able to differentiate on product features, brand is your most powerful tool for standing out.

At this point in the product lifecycle, your brand is already established. Now you’re looking to become the company that consumers flock to automatically because of its association with quality, trust, reliability, and purpose. 

Brand equity is the reason people choose Coca-Cola over Pepsi and Google over Bing. 

Building it is done by creating solid branding campaigns that develop emotional connections. This requires three steps that are covered in depth in our post on creating an effective branding campaign that inspires a movement.

1. Fit 

Fit is about reaching the right audience on the right platforms and channels.

By this stage, you’ll have a solid grasp of who you’re marketing to. Dig deep into your target audience demographics to establish how your campaigns will resonate.

Next, decide where to take that message and how to communicate it.

For example, Mailchimp uses whimsical imagery and illustration to engage its audience on Instagram:

The approach works well with Instagram’s creative, image receptive audience. 

It wouldn’t perhaps work as well on LinkedIn, where the audience is more professional and business-minded. This is evident in Mailchimp’s LinkedIn approach, which is focused on how the platform helps small businesses and entrepreneurs:

Look closely at how your audience interacts with different platforms and channels. Meet them with content that fits with their interests and behaviors. 

2. Focus

68% of consumers say they expect brands to be clear about their values and take a stand on them. By focusing on what’s important to you and your audience, you can build trust.

Go back to your purpose and mission. Beyond making profits and the best products, why are you doing what you do? What do you care about?

If an issue matters to you, your team, and your customers, speak on it. We’ve seen this happen more often in recent years with brands lending their voice to the Black Lives Matter Movement, gender equality, and climate action: 

Patagonia’s ‘Don’t Buy This Jacket’ campaign ad addressed consumerism and sustainability head-on. Consumers that support your brand message will buy into the product and follow the guidelines you give them (like not buying a new jacket if you already own one).

3. Consistency

Be consistent in everything that you do. From the quality of your product to the service you deliver, brand equity is about being a company customers can rely on.

• Post regularly on social media so that customers know you’re active
• Engage with customers on every platform and channel by answering queries, solving problems, and joining conversations
• Continually monitor campaigns to see how customers engage with your marketing and make improvements to stay relevant

4. Decline

When your product hits the decline stage, sales and profits will take a hit. 

Typically, this is due to a new product that provides a better solution, or a change in consumer lifestyles that means your product is no longer relevant. 

On the development and manufacturing side, you’ll have a decision to make:

1. Continue with the product in its current form
2. Make improvements to prolong the decline phase
3. Drop the product completely

The right option will be determined by where you see the market heading.

Whatever you decide, manage the decline by milking the brand. Milking involves snatching the largest possible revenue and profits from a product in the shortest amount of time. 

But you want to do this while scaling back marketing spend.

Start by analyzing your marketing platforms and channels to see which offer the best ROI. These channels should take priority. Those with the highest customer acquisition costs can be scaled back. 

When you know where to place your focus, your attention should be on attracting sales from ‘laggards’.

Laggards are a group of late-adopter consumers. They tend to avoid change until there’s no real alternative. This passage from the book Head & Heart Management sums them up:

“Think of them as loyalists, and sometimes good environmentalists. They probably started using beloved products when they were young. They have powerful associations. They function just fine. Loyalists know there are things that are faster, supposedly more convenient, possibly healthier.” 

Loyalists with “powerful associations”—these are exactly the kind of people you want as customers. 

The same book also lists laggards’ characteristics:

“…neighbors and friends are main information sources.”

Use these traits to your advantage by marketing with social proof on landing pages and in social media content.

Nature Made does this with an expert’s stamp of approval in social ads:

Had they described the benefits of the product themselves, they’d likely have little impact on customers who are loyal to a different product. Adding USP certification gives them a stamp of approval that even the most loyal of customers can’t argue with. 

Kajabi does it by showing how real users have benefitted from the product:

84% of people trust online reviews. When someone is on the fence, seeing what your product has done for others just like them can make all the difference.

You can also leverage the influence of brand advocates and let them do marketing for you. Getting friends of late adopters to recommend your product is one of the most effective ways to get new customers. That’s because 92% of consumers trust word of mouth.

Often, recommendations will happen organically because a customer loves your product or has an emotional connection to your brand.

If you want customers to proactively recommend your product, you may need to incentivize them. You can do this by rewarding them for spreading the word.

Dosh, for example, gives customers and their friends bonuses for referrals: 

Thread gives customers discounts whenever a friend they’ve referred places an order using their discount code:

In both cases, it’s a win-win. New customers are encouraged to purchase based on a recommendation and an incentive. Existing customers are encouraged to keep referring to earn rewards. 

As a brand, you get to ease the slope of the decline, drawing the last bit of profitability from your product with modest marketing investment and resources. 

Conclusion

Each stage of the product lifecycle will dictate how you market your product and where you position your brand in the marketplace.

Here’s a recap of the key takeaways from each phase: 

• Development: Begin building brand awareness ahead of launch to attract early adopters.
• Introduction: Let marketing be led by your pricing and promotion strategy. If your product is priced high, focus on educating your audience on the benefits. If you want to reach a lot of people quickly, focus on social proof and influencer marketing.
• Growth: Use audience and competitor research to establish brand presence by creating content that your target market wants.
• Maturity: If your product is continually improved, build campaigns around new features and benefits. If not, brand equity is your strongest asset. 
• Decline: Prolong decline by using social proof and brand advocates to attract late adopters.

Look at how your product and brand differ from the rest. How do you stand out and why? If you can find a way to communicate that, you can build trust that will carry your product through each stage of its life.

The post How to Model Your Marketing Against the Product Lifecycle appeared first on CXL.

You work tirelessly to understand your customer, market, and competition so you can differentiate. Voice-of-customer (VoC) research, user research, competitor research, and insights on jobs-to-be-done (JTBD) can inform your marketing strategy. 

Brand tracking is how you measure if those efforts are paying off.

Brand tracking provides both qualitative and quantitative answers to crucial questions:

• How do your customers perceive your brand?
• Are your campaigns driving conversions?
• Do consumers know who you are?
• Does your messaging at each touchpoint match customer intent? 
• Is your brand part of most consumers’ consideration set?
• Have you built perceived value?  

In this article, we’ll share key brand tracking metrics and methods for how to measure and optimize your success. 

Key brand tracking metrics 

Brand tracking measures the changes in your brand perception, and provides some insight into branding investment ROI. But branding spend (and thus tracking) can’t be measured in a vacuum. 

Unlike conversion rate formulas that produce statistically significant results, the ROI of brand awareness is less obvious and quantifiable. But that doesn’t make it any less valuable. 

Qualitative data is a powerful indicator of positive changes in your brand awareness and customer sentiment. To efficiently track brand awareness growth, you need to draw out both quantitative data and qualitative insights.

NPS & CSAT

NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) are both methods of quantifying customer sentiment and satisfaction.

Use NPS to track improvements in customer experience against baselines and competitor data, and to make predictions for future growth (NPS and loyalty are highly correlated):

CSAT asks customers to rate their satisfaction with your brand on a scale from 1 to 5.

Use this to measure customer satisfaction at each touchpoint to identify points of friction and opportunities for improvement.

For example, you could deploy CSAT surveys at various parts of the buyer’s journey (distributed across leads so as not to bombard a single customer with multiple questions). You might find that, on average, your CSAT score is lowest at the handoff point between sales and service.

This would show you exactly where your brand experience needs work.

Brand loyalty

Brand loyalty is a quantitative brand tracking measure that often relies on purchase intent data.

Supplement brand loyalty metrics with qualitative measures such as brand associations and perceived quality, as these can give you insight into why customers intend to repurchase.

For example, if a significant portion of customers intend to repurchase simply because you offer the lowest prices, give less weight to brand loyalty in the final analysis. In this case, you’ve captured customer loyalty, but perhaps not brand loyalty.

Brand usage

Brand usage metrics provide insights such as:

• Frequency of purchase
• How customers purchase (when and where)
• Purchase quantity/amount (how much)
• Share of wallet (percentage of spending in the sector that your brand receives)

Use this data to understand consumer behavior and to develop targeted messaging strategies.

Market share

Market share is a good measure of your brand position relative to your competitors, as it’s a zero-sum game.

Unlike metrics such as brand awareness, which can rise across the board, growth in market share means a decline for competitors.

For example, as some of the largest providers of cloud computing (Microsoft, Google) experience an increase in market share, we all see a significant decline in competitors’ share:

To give context, compare market share changes with objective measures such as changes in total industry spending and company revenue, and strategic changes.

For example, if your market share has declined, but the industry overall has grown, this can be an indicator that your competitors are doing a better job at picking up new market entrants.

Brand momentum in the marketplace

Brand momentum is a brand tracking metric that walks the line between qualitative and quantitative.

It’s possible to create a quantitative metric in order to track progress, but this will be rooted in qualitative measures, meaning it’s a useful metric for internal measurement but not to benchmark against competitors.

Brand momentum can be calculated similarly to physical momentum (mass x velocity):

Brand momentum = brand mass (your company’s size, reputation, and relevance) x brand velocity (speed of growth, agility in keeping up with industry changes).

Take Tesla. They tick all three boxes in the “brand mass” department:

• They have a strong reputation in the market (as evidenced by continuous stock price growth)
• They’re incredibly relevant (there has never been a time where renewable energy was more important)
• They’re a giant in their industry, owning more than 80% market share

Tesla’s not only able to navigate industry changes. It could be argued that they are driving these changes). This is demonstrated by an exponential speed of growth:

Brand awareness and recall

Qualtrics, a leading customer experience management company, breaks brand awareness into three categories:

Brand awareness metrics should also be broken down by segment, to understand which audiences your messaging is resonating with most, and to identify areas for improvement.

Take AirHelp, an air passenger rights advocate. Through a comprehensive brand awareness study, they discovered that their most aware segment was frequent travelers. And, that while brand awareness was increasing for their company, it was also growing for competitors, pointing to industry-wide growth: 

Results such as these can be diving off points for future brand marketing, and can be interpreted in different ways, depending on your brand strategy.

For example, AirHelp might decide that since they already have strong brand awareness with the frequent traveler segment, they’ll focus branding efforts on less aware audiences. Or they might take the opposite approach, and double down on what is working.

Similarly, understanding that awareness is growing across the industry might prompt AirHelp to team up with a similar company (a non-competitor, but a relevant industry leader) to launch a dual campaign. This partnership would leverage both audiences and the rapidly growing awareness of the vertical.

Brand consideration

Brand awareness is a measurement of whether consumers know who you are, but that doesn’t necessarily imply that they’d consider you for purchase.

Brand consideration tells you how often your brand is part of a customer’s initial consideration set, and this metric isn’t always consistent with awareness measurements.

Take BMW. Of luxury car brands, they have the highest brand awareness:

But when it comes to consideration, BMW falls into third behind Jeep and Nissan, with two-thirds the consideration of their top competitor:

The implication is that not all press is good press. 

Brand awareness can be influenced by negative factors such as scandals and product recalls, and while a brand can be well-known, this doesn’t necessarily mean they have a strong reputation.

Brand association tracking helps us to qualify this.

Brand associations 

Brand association studies help you determine how customers feel about your brand.

You can use this brand tracking metric to understand terms and emotions that customers associate with your brand (such as trustworthy, sustainable, and affordable) and use them to further differentiate brand messaging.

Take reBuy, a marketplace for high-quality used electronic goods. By undertaking brand tracking studies in customer associations, reBuy discovered that their primary association was ‘price value’. They also identified a growing trend in associations with ‘sustainability’ in the younger demographic:

Before conducting this brand tracking study, reBuy had no idea that ‘sustainability’ was a brand association, and they certainly weren’t pushing this concept in any brand marketing activities.

This new learning allowed reBuy to reinvent how they were positioning their brand with younger consumers and grow that segment of their audience.

Brand perceived quality

Perceived quality gives you an understanding of the overall opinion and sentiment toward your brand.

Low perceived quality can be the reason for discrepancies between awareness and consideration metrics (such as in the BMW example).

To understand where opportunities for improvement lie in perceived quality, break this metric down into seven sub-measurements:

1. Performance of the product
2. Features offered
3. Frequency of defects/conformity with specifications
4. Reliability of the product
5. Durability of the product
6. Service system competence, efficiency, and convenience
7. Fit and finish of the product

Brand visibility

Brand visibility is a measure of how frequently consumers see your brand through channels such as search, social, and email.

Visibility is an upstream measure and has a positive influence on awareness (the more you’re seen, the more likely you are to be recognized).

Take Zoom. From the moment the world turned to remote work, Zoom’s name was everywhere.

They were in front of 300 million people per day at their peak, and that’s not accounting for other visibility avenues like media coverage and meme culture.

In short, their visibility skyrocketed.

And as a result, they came out on top for growth in brand recognition in 2020:

How to track your brand 

You’ve got three options when it comes to brand tracking studies.

The first is to outsource everything to a third-party research firm. 

This is the most affordable approach as it requires minimal resource investment. You’ll have to sacrifice flexibility, however, as you won’t have the same command over which data gets recorded and analyzed.

The second is to swing the other way and build a custom brand tracking program.

The advantage here is that you have complete control over all aspects:

• What questions are being asked
• How audiences are segmented
• Which brands are included in the study

The downside is that going the DIY route can involve more upfront investment, both in resources as well as building a system for data collection and analysis.

If you take this approach, use a brand tracking tool like Latana to leverage AI-powered insights, and to tackle aspects such as audience segmentation.

Using Latana, mobile banking brand N26 were able to identify highly-segmented groups and establish a baseline for metrics such as brand consideration and associations:

With data in hand, they were able to design hyper-targeted branding campaigns to influence key goals and drive audience growth by 20%.

The best path forward to reap the full benefits of brand tracking is a hybrid model, which is option three. 

You can use a third-party research firm to establish baselines and to handle large-scale consumer panels. And complement this data with ongoing research such as in-app surveys, social media listening, and customer retention metrics.

No matter which method you choose, follow these six steps to effectively track your brand:

1. Establish your goals and baseline metrics

Are you looking to boost your reach and generate leads? Do you plan to rebrand, and subsequently need to know what’s resonating so you can double down? Or are you concerned more with customer retention and cross-sell opportunities?

Having more than one goal is fine, but make sure to note these down and draw clear dividing lines so you can ask appropriate questions and segment answers accordingly.

Take L.L. Bean, an outdoor goods retailer, as an example. Being a 100-year-old brand, L.L. Bean had been experiencing a long period of zero revenue growth. So, they set a goal to break the cycle.

They determined that targeting customer growth in the outdoor family enthusiast segment was the most appropriate goal, tying key metrics to that objective.

This allowed L.L. Bean to segment in-store survey responses, and analyze improvements in customer experience based on designated customer categories:

With clear goals established, determine which metrics to track and establish baseline measures.

You should also establish the scope of your brand tracking measures. 

Advanced brand tracking studies can include inputs from digital advertising efforts, social listening tools, and other operational data. This may be overkill for some brands, so consider starting leaner with a more focused survey—at least to establish your baseline.

Qualtrics provides a good matrix for scaling brand tracking complexity:

Following this model allows brands to start with what matters most, and access tangible insights faster without getting bogged down in technical analysis.

2. Test by target audience and target segments 

Brand tracking research should be designed to help you understand how your brand resonates on the whole, but also by segment.

This is where large-scale market research firms deliver a major benefit: the ability to survey thousands of people, giving you a workable sample size to analyze within each segment.

These findings then inform your brand strategy. You may find, for example, that your messaging is resonating more powerfully with one segment than another, and thus it may be worth investing more resources into that segment.

Or, if the segment that you’re not resonating with is the one you want to grow the most, a marketing strategy that is differentiated by segment may be required. From there, you can track the impacts of subsequent marketing campaigns using your brand track.

This is just how Holvi, a digital banking service for freelancers and small business owners, approached brand building.

Knowing that their current marketing activities were falling flat, they leveraged Latana’s Multilevel Regression and Poststratification (MRP) algorithm to track super-niche audience segments, using customer insights to fuel targeted brand campaigns.

This hyper-segmented brand tracking survey is empowering Holvi to drive brand recall and perception metrics, and better reach key stakeholders within their desired target audience.

3. Choose competitors to test against 

If winning customers from the competition and growing your market share is a key goal, consider which brands you want to test against.

Recall the problem that BMW has. They rank number one for brand awareness in the luxury car segment in the U.S., but fall to third place when customers are surveyed for brand consideration.

Given that consideration and actual sales data are highly correlated in this vertical, it follows that if BMW can influence brand consideration, they can forecast a lift in future sales and possibly market share:

Recall that the best way to understand discrepancies between awareness and consideration results is to dig into qualitative findings such as brand associations.

In this case, BMW should survey and track associations for both their own brand, as well as key competitors, Jeep and Nissan, to understand what customers think about each brand and how this influences purchase decisions.

4. Pick data collection methods

There are several methods to choose from in determining how you’re going to collect brand tracking data:

• Custom consumer panels
• Generic consumer research surveys (not ideal, but you can still leverage some high-level data)
• Online sentiment analysis (such as social listening platforms)
• Survey-based brand trackers 

A survey-based approach will allow you to monitor and track key brand metrics on an ongoing basis. And allow you to analyze trends over time, rather than static increases in quarterly increments (such as in consumer panel studies.)

Sample questions to use in your surveys include:

NPS & CSAT

• NPS – On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to recommend [your company] to a [friend/family member/colleague]?
• CSAT – On a scale from 1 to 5, how would you rate your experience at [your company] today? 

Brand loyalty

• On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to purchase [product] form us again?
• For how long have you been buying [your product]?
• On a scale from 0 to 10, how likely are you to switch to a competing product in the future?

Brand usage

• When was the last time you used [your product]?
• How often do you use [your product]?
• Do you use our products exclusively, or do you switch between brands?
  • Why is that?
• What do you use [your product] for? (for more comprehensive offerings such as software packages)
• When you purchase [X product] how often do you buy [your product]?

Don’t get too complicated with these questions. Customers should be able to answer from top of mind and too much cognitive effort tends to lead to less reliable answers.

Brand awareness

• When you think of [X product or service], what brands come to mind?”
  • If they mention your brand: “What stands out to you about our brand and why?”
  • If they mention another brand: “What stands out to you about [competitor brand] and why?”
• Have you heard of [your brand] before?
• On a scale from 1 to 10, how familiar are you with [your brand]?
• Which of the following brands have you heard of? (list your own + competitors)

When surveying brand awareness and recognition, let customers tell you which brands they’re aware of.

Achieve this by asking open-ended questions such as:

Brand consideration

• How likely are you to purchase from [your brand] next time you go shopping for [X product]?
• If your favorite brand in this category isn’t available, which brands are you likely to consider instead?
• Which of the following brands would you consider purchasing from in the next X months? (List your own + competitors.)

Brand associations

• When you think of [your brand], what feelings/words come to mind?
• On a scale from 0 to 10, how much do you trust [your brand]?
• What did we do to earn your trust?
• What can we do to keep your trust?
• What are some positive associations you have with [X brands]?
• What are some negative associations you have with [X brands]?
• How well does this statement apply to [your brand]? [Your brand] is
  • Trustworthy
  • Reliable 
  • Friendly
  • Fast
  • Convenient
  • Approachable

These should be based on the associations you’re aiming to form as a brand.

Brand perceived quality

• Based on what you know about [your brand], how well does it compare to other [category] brands?
• On a scale from 1 to 5, how would you rate the quality of [your product]?
• On a scale from 1 to 5, how would you rate the reliability of [your product]?
• How valuable is [your brand] to you?
• On a scale from 1 to 5, how likely would you be to switch to an alternative brand if it was cheaper?
• On a scale from 1 to 5, how likely would you be to switch to an alternative brand if it was more convenient to purchase?

Brand visibility 

• When was the last time you saw [your product]?
• How often do you see [your brand] on social media?
• When was the first time you heard of [your brand]?
• In the last month, how often have you heard other people talking about [your brand]?

5. Run your tests and analyze the results

Having collected all required relevant data, analyze the results to identify trends and customer perceptions. Also, compare key brand tracking metrics against the goals you’ve set.

A suitable process for data analysis would be to:

1. Separate data into qualitative and quantitative results
2. Compare quantitative results to goals, benchmarks, and competitors
3. Use qualitative data to explain why you’re ahead of or behind your goals or competitors
4. Analyze qualitative results and perform a gap analysis (i.e. what desired associations are missing from customer reports, and vice versa)
5. Use these findings to inform changes to your brand strategy

Brand tracking’s main objective is to understand changes in brand perception across time.

Rather than viewing results in a vacuum, analyze trends across time to gauge the effectiveness of your branding campaigns.

Take global brand Headspace, a meditation and mindfulness app. By analyzing trends in brand awareness and comparing these to brand marketing efforts across regions, they found their efforts in Germany we’re proving more fruitful than those in France and Spain:

They subsequently diverted more effort to lagging regions, which will help even the playing field.

6. Optimize and repeat 

Brand tracking is best approached holistically, with brand tracking studies undertaken bi-annualy or annually.

Where other forms of marketing tests (such as A/B testing) can be done fairly rapidly, brand tracking studies require much more time to effectively analyze results, trends, and causes.

Short-term changes in brand awareness and perception are common. Mistakes, scandals and bad PR happen, and they can influence results drastically in the short term, as can positive events such as going viral.

However, these changes are not statistically significant.

Think of brand tracking like stock investment. Though short-term changes should be paid attention to, what you should really be interested in is long-term growth or decline.

These macro shifts are what fuel your investment decisions, as well as your brand marketing decisions.

You should still use data from feedback you receive daily (response to marketing initiatives, social media engagement, A/B tests on messaging, etc). But this data should be viewed from a big-picture perspective.

Set your cadence for brand tracking studies (quarterly, bi-annually, or annually) at the outset, and optimize brand marketing strategies at each interval based on progress toward goals.

Conclusion

Brand tracking studies are crucial for gaining an in-depth understanding of how the market views your company.

They give you some insight into whether your brand marketing efforts are paying off, and whether you’re effectively avoiding the sea of sameness.

Use data collected in brand tracking studies to draw insights into customer sentiment and brand performance. Then, leverage your findings to create effective campaigns that improve brand health and drive brand growth.

The post Measuring Market Penetration with Brand Tracking (+ Metrics & Examples) appeared first on CXL.