5 Media Relations Strategies that Help Get Your Brand Story Published

Remember the days when we read the newspaper over a cup of coffee every morning and watched the evening news on TV? We were quite happy to get our news just once a day. That's no longer the case. Now we expect to see eye-witness accounts of events as they are occurring. This appetite for instant visual news has changed the way news is gathered, reported and consumed.

While this is not good news for the media, it has opened many new opportunities for businesses and organizations: brands can become a content resource for the media (earned media), publish their own news, (owned media/brand journalism) and buy space for branded content on news and social sites (paid media).

1. Visual story telling ' studies show that adding visuals to news content increases views by as much as 9x
2. Become a resource for the media ' collaborate with reporters, offer experts, research and visual material to support a story
3. Brand journalism ' think like a publisher and write your own stories
4. Have an intelligent distribution plan ' build a network of influencers who can give your content legs
5. House our content in a social newsroom that has all the tools and features journalists and bloggers need.

Download the full report ' http://www.press-feed.com/whitepaper

Why Video Content Continuity Trumps Virality

In your content marketing plan, are you trying to be the next Flock of Seagulls?

Last March, after the 'Kony 2012' documentary generated 70 million views in one week, the marketing community rushed to add a 'Kony' to their marketing plans. If a viral video could raise awareness of a Ugandan warlord, they reasoned, maybe it could raise awareness of term life insurance, cloud-computing services, or accounting software.

Some marketers talk about 'virality' as part of their game plan, as predictable as magazine circulation or a sample count for an event. What marketers forget is that no one can create a viral video, viral article, or viral image. We can only create quality content that may or may not spread virally.

The 'go-viral' mindset sets marketers up for disappointment. Every minute, 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube, but only an infinitesimally small number of those videos go viral. While YouTube shares tactics that lead to virality (e.g., the role of 'tastemakers' ' a big factor in the 'Kony' video), we never know in advance which video will catch on. For every 'double rainbow' or 'ultimate dog tease' that spreads like wildfire, countless others eke out an existence in the vast YouTube desert.

In content marketing, continuity trumps virality

The long haul is more important than the short spike. Rather than chase the elusive viral video, invest in ongoing content to grow the audience over time. Use less of a campaign mentality and more of a commitment mentality.

I learned this lesson first-hand as a cartoonist. Cartooning is the classic serial medium (epitomized by 50 years of Charles Schultz' 'Peanuts'). Twelve years ago, I started posting a new marketing cartoon every week. Today, my weekly audience is 100,000 marketers. Sure, some individual cartoons are more popular than others, but the power comes from the full collection. More importantly, the value lies in the readers who tune in for every installment. Content marketing is more about the audience than about any individual piece of media.

One of the greatest viral marketing success stories, surprisingly, is Orabrush. It makes a tongue scraper to fight bad breath. Dental hygiene is certainly not the most exciting product category, but its YouTube channel has been seen 48 million times. Orabrush credits its success not to a single viral video, but to an ongoing commitment to quality content, such as the weekly webisode series, 'Diary of a Dirty Tongue.'

The main advice: 'Everyone is on a rampage to figure out how to make their viral video ' to gain a loyal following, create a steady stream of content; it's not enough to be a one-hit wonder.'

For more inspirational advice on content marketing best practices, subscribe to Chief Content Officer Magazine.

Don't Publish Any Web Content Until You've Answered These 5 Questions

Whether it's the wittiest of blog posts, the most convincing of sales pitches, or the most researched of articles, you're doing yourself ' and your business ' a real disservice if you hit the 'publish' button before you take the time to answer these 5 questions about your web content:

1.  Does this specific piece of content build trust?

Building readers' trust is the #1 goal of content marketing.  It doesn't matter how many witty anecdotes you pull out or how many facts and figures you list.  If people don't trust you when they get to the end of the piece, you have failed as a content marketer.

After all, people don't do business with people they don't trust!

2.  How does this specific piece fit into your content marketing strategy?

As important as fresh content is to the search engines, you can't publish things just to publish them.  Even if you've got some really great pieces, they've all got to be working towards something.  If you don't have an overall content marketing strategy in mind, you'll never accomplish as much as you could ' or should.

So, how do you know if this specific blog post/article/newsletter/video fits in with your strategy?

Take an honest look at it, and determine if it's relevant to your target audience's needs and wants.  Also, figure out if it's chock full of timely information that your audience can put to good use right now.  And, be sure it makes you look like a creative genius.  After all, every good content marketing strategy needs to focus on building up your reputation, too!

3.  Is it a 'have to' or a 'want to'?

Yes, content marketing is a must for anyone who wants to succeed on the web, so you've got to find time for it in your schedule.

However, that doesn't mean it can come across LOOKING like it was forced into your schedule.

Even if publishing a new blog post is the last thing on earth you have time for before your big business meeting, you can't give your readers that impression.  If you hate your content, your readers will hate it, too!

Instead, you have to approach each piece of web content as a 'want to' ' meaning that you want to share information with your readers, because you're genuinely passionate about the topic.  If you can't do that, your content marketing strategy will never be a success.

After all, if you're not passionate about what you're writing about, how can you expect your readers to be passionate enough to visit your website, sign up for your email list, buy your product, or do anything else that you want them to do?

4.  Are you putting your very best foot forward?

Even if you have published hundreds of articles or thousands of blog posts before, someone is always seeing you for the first time.  That 1,001st blog post you 'cranked out' could be the very first one a potential client reads.

After all, you only get one chance to make a good first impression.  If there's ANY chance your piece of content is just OK, don't publish it.  Instead, do whatever it takes to make it perfect.  Once it hits the web, there are no do-overs.

Re-thinking that whole 'cranking out' strategy yet?

5.  Do I know how to leverage this?

Contrary to popular belief, your work isn't done when you hit 'publish'.  Instead, you need to generate as much exposure as possible for every piece of web content.  That means posting it to your RSS feed, letting your social media followers know about it, telling your email list about it, publishing it on niche-specific bookmarking sites (not the giant ones like Digg, where you just get lost in the shuffle ' ones like Biz Sugar, that cater to your specific target audience.)

Once you come up with an 'exposure routine' for every piece of content, the hard part is done.  Physically carrying out the routine only takes a matter of minutes!

This article is an original contribution by Nicole Beckett.

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B2C Content Marketing ' Part 4: Creating a Variety of Content

One size definitely doesn't fit all when it comes to content marketing. Different people need different content, for many reasons' perhaps they are varying stages of the buying cycle, or they learn better from visual stimuli than from its textual counterpart. Either way, content marketers know they need to be providing a wide variety of content.

So how can you achieve this? Well, it's all about thinking creatively; finding new ways to present your content, instead of always opting for your go-to medium.

Infographics

Thanks to stephenslighthouse.com for the image

If your company has just undertaken a big batch of market research, what would you usually do with the results? Stick them in a report or a whitepaper? Ditch it. Surprise your audience by creating an infographic.

Infographics are a great way of presenting information, as they can catch people's eyes and still convey valuable content. For example, check out this cool infographic on' well, infographics! It explains quickly and concisely what these are, in a visually stimulating way. Wouldn't you rather look at this than read through a page of words explaining what the medium entails?

Podcasts

If you're contemplating creating a series of guides for your existing and prospective consumers ' be it about constructing flat-pack furniture or cooking the perfect Christmas dinner ' don't just opt for the usual downloadable PDF. Instead, create a series of podcasts and publish them on your website.

Not everyone has the time or inclination needed to read a 10-page document, but if you offer an audio file, they can have it on in the background ' or listen to it whilst doing said activity. This could help you reach a new audience and although you can complement these with transcripts (some people like having words for reference), opting for podcasts could help you break into a market you never thought you could reach.

Case studies

You've just had a glowing review publishing on your website. You know everyone who visits your website will see it, but what about those prospective consumers who are still at the research phase of the buying process? Those at the research stage of the buying processes have usually shortlisted a few suppliers of whatever it is they're after. They've got one foot in the door, but it's up to you to convince them to take the full step.

Rack your brains. Do you have any particularly happy customers? Any who have just left a glowing review on your site, or sent you over a testimonial? Turn this positive feedback into a solid case study; proving your worth via a real-life situation. You can boast about your product until you're blue in the face, but unless your prospective consumers know it really works, they could remain unconvinced.

Storytelling: Applying Art To Video Marketing

Do you study the craft? No, I don't mean witchcraft. Though sometimes creating an idea can seem just as mysterious as conjuring a spell.

I mean the craft of storytelling.

When we sell an idea, like a product, or show others how to apply a principle through a training course, we resort to telling a story. Some stories are whiz-bang, like a movie with poor dialogue but brilliant special effects.

Other stories are more focused on character development, witty patter and cleverly-devised situations, but not so much on the explosions.

What they all have in common is a craft.

Tell Your Story With Online Video

There are several ways to devise a story for online video. Most focus on one person who must overcome an obstacle. Other stories take an ensemble approach where each character is equally important, but the rest is the same; they must meet a challenge of some kind.

In video marketing (and online training), your primary goal is to help a customer solve a problem, so it's best to design your story arc in a Three-Act Structure. That is the technique used in books, movies, theater, and the best advertising. It involves a setup, a confrontation, and a resolution.

• The Setup is where you lay out the challenge. Somebody, your customer for example, has a problem. Illustrating this problem is essential to your business' value proposition. Instead of talking about your company, simply discuss the problem you help solve, and make it the villain in your story.
• The Confrontation is where your main character meets the problem. In a movie, this is where the senator is kidnapped, the factory is blown up, the fort is attacked, or the boyfriend moves out. In your business situation, it need not be so tragic! But this is where the story really begins to take shape.
• The Resolution is where the rubber meets the road. A solution appears, and our hero applies the solution he has discovered to the problem. This is when the enemy's weakness is revealed (the Achilles Heel, the dragon's belly, the chink in the armor), and the battle can be won.

There's More Than One Technique

Another storytelling technique is called the 5-Act Dramatic Structure, most often associated with William Shakespeare. Video storytelling can get even more in-depth using the five elements, which I really like. They are the Exposition, the Rising Action, the Climax, the Falling Action, and the Dénoument, (or 'unraveling'). In a nutshell:

• The Exposition is where the main characters and issues are revealed, a little bit like the setup and confrontation rolled into one. Think about your video starting with something like 'Sherry's computer kept crashing every time she tried to update reports''
• The Rising Action is a continuance of the confrontation, but basically once the characters and conflicts are known, they escalate. 'Sherry called IT, but they were stymied as well, no matter what they tried''
• The Climax is where the solution is discovered. Most believe the climax of a story is where the hero defeats the foe, but really it is when he discovers how to win, and decides to take that course of action. Think of it the climax as when Rocky Balboa first steps into the ring with Ivan Drago, not when he finally wins the fight. Or, when 'Sherry finally took it upon herself to try a software evaluation tool from''
• The Falling Action is where the solution is being applied, the final battle is engaged, and usually things begin to get very dire. This is the dark before the dawn. 'The quarterly meeting was in two days, and she needed approval from IT before they would install it''
• The Dénoument is like the resolution above, where the final outcome is achieved. This is where the hero clears his name, the villain is in handcuffs, and everybody can now go on living 'happily ever after'. 'Sherry's reports were ready just in time, and were now easier to update than ever.'

Something like that can really make an impact on a customer, and on students as well. Online video should tell a story, but should also go beyond that by applying a solid writer's technique. The craft of writing isn't just another task to master, it is a critical tool to creating highly effective material for your online marketing and training videos and presentations.

Why not try a solution for online presentations yourself? We've come to the part where you try KnowledgeVision for two weeks. Who knows? It might help you vanquish the foe you discovered during this story's setup.

Originally posted on The KnowledgeVision Fresh Ideas Blog.

This article is an original contribution by Tom Bishop.

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Optimizing Your Landing Pages for Increased Success

Your landing page is critical when it comes to your business's success. It is important that your landing page has the most up-to-date and appropriate information possible. You should look at it and assess its effectiveness and improve content periodically.

Using content sparingly on your landing page

It is not a good idea to make your landing page too content heavy because it may overwhelm (or even intimidate) your visitors. You should try to make your paragraphs short and make sure that the language that you use is clear and concise and gets right to the point of telling your visitors about your business as well as communicating what you can do for them.

The advantage of putting your form on your landing page

The landing page is an extremely important element when it comes to attracting online traffic. Your landing page should contain and accurate description of what you do and what you represent. It should also contain a call-to-action, in which you need to tell your visitors exactly what you want them to do. Landing pages often contain forms that you want your visitors to complete. You may have a better chance of getting your visitors to complete your form if you put it on the landing page itself as opposed to providing a link on your landing page that leads to the form.

Making your form as simple as possible

The simpler you make your form, the better your chances will be of getting your visitors to complete it. As you are looking at your form and considering how you might be able to reduce the number of fields that you have, you need to identify which information must stay (name, Email address, and/or phone number) in your form and which information can be eliminated. You need to make sure that whichever data you sacrifice is not going to cause you to lose out on people who could have very well ended up becoming your loyal customers eventually. Of course, the positive results that you will gain are that your visitors will view you in a positive light because you have not annoyed them with a long, tedious form to complete.

Clear and concise headlines

Your headlines are going to be the part of your writing that will either attract the attention of your readers or not. The headline, of course, is the first thing that your visitor is going to read. It is critical that you make it abundantly clear what your business is all about and your headline must include some message about how you plan to help your visitors to solve their problems. If your headlines are not well written, your customers will leave your website and most likely won't be inclined to return.

Perfect grammar

When content contains grammatical errors, spelling errors, awkward language, etc, it says a great deal about the writer (or the business owner). It says that the person doesn't pay attention to details and that they are careless and don't care about the quality of the work that they produce. That is not the image that you want to portray to your existing clients and perspective clients.

Building trust

Trust is a critical element when it comes to your business and one of the places where trust comes into play in a big way is on the landing page. Some of the ways in which you can build trust are with testimonials, security and trust certification, seals of approval, etc. The more your visitors trust you, the more inclined they will be to eventually buy from you. It is a simple fact.

Conclusion

As was discussed earlier, remember that it is important to periodically examine your landing page and continue to ask yourself if it is still working as well for your business as it did when you first created it. If the answer is truly 'yes,' you are in good shape. However, if the answer is 'no,' you need to revisit what you have and try to come up with ways to really make it buzz again.

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Get Naked with Your Salespeople [SLIDESHARE]

Using CRM you can empower your sales team for greater revenue generation opportunities and a more efficient sales pipeline.

Let it all hang out

CRM provides much more than just a way of storing contact details.

'One of the key elements of any CRM plan is integration, the unification of all your company's data sources to create a single, holistic view of each customer.' ' DestinationCRM.com

You can use Customer Relationship Management software to:

• Create a central, authoritative repository of information so everyone is on the same page
• Increase accountability - Who is doing what? When? Why?
• Get a 360 degree view - Shared customer records create a 360 degree view of each client and contact allowing a better quality of customised service to be offered
• Integrate different departments ' With a harmonised system, everyone from finance to sales can see each customers journey at a glance, making the processes of lead management and customer care smoother and simpler.

Why get naked?

Going naked ' that is, shedding opaque processes to move to a more transparent CRM system ' could be the shrewdest business move you make.

What do you get for your nakedness?

• Quick access to accurate data allowing for faster business decisions
• Better auditing and analysis to see what is and is not working
• Granular sales forecast analysis for improved financial planning

'Business processes that were driven by departmental efficiencies will evolve to serve company-wide needs instead.' ' Gautam Parasnis, IBM BCS.

Lose the clothes or lose the business

'Information silos are more than just inefficient, they hinder a company's ability to serve customers and succeed with its strategy. Without a unified view of the customer, marketing, sales and service/support departments will all be working in the dark, chasing goals that don't fulfil the organization's broader ones.' DestinationCRM.com

Download the free How to avoid CRM backlash eGuide from Workbooks to get your journey to CRM nudity underway.

3 Ways to Battle Turnover in High Performance Environments

 High performance environments are stressful workplaces, to say the least. When results are king, mediocrity is disdained and failure intolerable. Some employees burn out in the struggle to consistently meet the high expectations typical of these environments. Meanwhile, the individuals who thrive in these environments have intense ambition'and are always on the lookout for greener pastures.

How, then, can high-performing employers reduce turnover, and better retain employees?

The problem may be in the reactive approach companies take when addressing retention. Why not address retention proactively, as a strategic issue? As I see it, there are three things any organization can do to proactively combat turnover.

1. Hire Retainable Employees

The pressure's on from day one in a high performance environment. While some thrive under pressure, others will falter. By only hiring people who are likely to excel in your organization, you can reduce the chances of this type of casualty.

Work with your managers and top performers to identify what backgrounds, skills or personality characteristics your retainable employees have in common. Then, use this insight to guide your sourcing and screening.

2. Don't Just Fill Roles ' Plan Careers

It's easy to focus on the near-term when managing people in a high performance environment. You bring in 'A Players' with the expectation that they'll succeed in the role for which you've hired them'and unrealistically assume they will stay in that role forever. You need to think bigger.

Career-pathing doesn't have to be a formal program. The key is to guide your employees in mapping out how they can attain their career goals within your company. Even a rough or incomplete plan is better than no plan at all. Simply having conversations around an employee's goals shows you care about the employee's future, which in turn breeds loyalty.

3. Make Retention Personal

Every employee is motivated by different things, and retention strategies thus need to be tailored down to the individual level. Successful organizations don't view retention initiatives as 'one size fits all.' Instead, they're making retention strategies personal. How? By simply asking, 'What motivates you?'

You may be surprised to find that monetary incentives are low on the list of responses you get. These days, 'A Players' are more concerned with challenging work, personal and professional growth opportunities, work/life balance, and workplace flexibility.

If money's the only thing you're offering employees, don't be surprised if they look elsewhere for what really matters to them.

This article is an original contribution by Kyle Lagunas.

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What Can Customer Experience Leaders Learn From the CIA?

In his book, The Art of Intelligence, ex-CIA operative Henry Crumpton who also spent a year with the FBI, contrasted the cultures of the two organizations as he experienced them in 1999 as follows;

1. The FBI valued oral reports much more than written ones. The CIA prized written reports that could be used for analysis.
   • Customer experience leaders benefit from both oral and written reports as a means of communication to all relevant functions and touch-point areas.
2. The FBI did not have information systems that were accessible by different field offices. The CIA used high-speed information systems with huge data management and analysis and upgraded these systems constantly.
   • Customer experience leaders should engage in constant monitoring and have access to real time systems of data capture and dissemination.
3. Another difference was the importance of reliable sources and the attitude toward them. Both placed a premium on good sources, but the FBI did not pursue them beyond a current investigation. CIA officers routinely compared notes and lessons learned (although specific sources were not revealed).
   • Customer experience leaders need reliable sources of information and an ability to learn from successes and mistakes.
4. The FBI collected evidence for its own use, to prosecute a criminal. As a result the FBI lacked a customer service culture. The CIA collected intelligence for others and therefore had to focus on their customer's needs.
   • Customer experience leaders themselves should be customer centric in their behaviors in relation to all stakeholders to have credibility within their organization.
5. The FBI field offices acted as their own centers of authority. The CIA station had an incentive to report intelligence to CIA headquarters, because the users of intelligence were there and beyond, including the White House.
   • Customer experience leaders should disseminate relevant customer insights as widely as possible to influence the customer centricity of the entire organization.
6. The FBI had both carrots and sticks when dealing with Congress and consequently had strong political influence and was well-connected. The CIA had minimal leverage on Congress.
   • Customer experience leaders must be well-connected and wield influence with the senior executive team and the Board to enable them to effectively link customer experience with corporate vision, mission and strategy. They need to be able to call in influential 'heavy-weights' to support their strategies.
7. FBI investigations were retrospective, tied to past or ongoing investigations. The CIA was attempting to identify future threats.
   • Customer experience leaders need to be future focused as a foundation for improving the current situation.
8. The CIA had a global perspective and the FBI an America centric focus.
   • Customer experience leaders should have peripheral vision that takes in the current and future impact of wider external forces that will affect future customer experience.

No doubt things have changed in both organizations since 1999 and they did have well defined different missions, but leaving the specifics aside, which organizational culture is yours most like? How is your customer experience being impacted?

Do You Really Have the Authority?

How often do you begin listening to someone and then stop paying attention because you don't believe what they're saying? It happens all the time, both at work and the pub.

It's no different when brands start creating content.

In order to gain the respect and trust of its audience, a brand has to establish authority in its field. The media landscape is cluttered with loads of similar content, so in order to stand out a brand needs to prove itself as the source of truth.

Some brands already have this authority'they've been reliable sources in their fields for a long time. Think of Dymocks advising customers on books or P&O Cruises telling stories about travel. It's believable.

Others can establish authority by buying it, earning it through sponsorship, or borrowing it. I recently spoke at a conference on this topic and referred to content marketing brands Johnson & Johnson, Red Bull and Amex.

J&J bought its authority when it purchased Baby Center in 2001. But it didn't stop there. As Tina Sharkey, who used to run BabyCenter, says, it gained the trust of mums by being 'remarkably right'. Using information from medical experts and a panel of mums, J&J became the national authority on parenting.

Red Bull earned its authority by sponsoring adrenalin-pumping sports. For years it ploughed money into extreme sports and eventually reached a point where people would listen when Red Bull talked snowboarding or base-jumping. Only then could it begin to create events and build their media empire.

Amex borrowed its authority by leveraging trusted voices in small business media on its site OPEN Forum. While confident in its financial products, Amex had to borrow authority in marketing and HR to gain traction. It did so through Tumblr, republishing trusted authorities like Fast Company and Mashable.

So what's the lesson? You have to prove yourself and gain the respect of your audience to establish authority in your field. It takes time, but it's vital to a brand's success.

Published by Fergus Stoddart, Commercial Director at strategic content agency Edge. 

This article is an original contribution by Edge.

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Recipe to Create a Responsive Web Design

Before I start with the recipe, you should know what is a responsive web design? Responsive web design (RWD) has created a buzz around the tech world- it is an approach that enables optimal viewing of websites across smartphones and tablets.

The increasing use of Smartphones has brought a great revolution in designing industry. Now websites are no longer restricted to large and traditional canvas of desktop systems, they can be viewed on small screened devices. The biggest challenge for a designer is to ensure that a website appears good both on small and big screen devices. Now what are the ingredients that make a design responsive?

RWD is a blend of different features that allows a website to adapt the environment of the device; this mix is made up of CSS3, media queries, fluid grids, flexible images and videos.

Fluid Grid
Fluid and flexible grids are popular since the beginning of web, but they gained immense popularity with time as they help in creating responsive website. Fluid Grid controls the large and small styling proportionately to provide the best experience for each and every device.

Media Queries
Media queries provide different styles to make a website look good on small screens as well. It controls the way, a style is applied via screen width, orientation, and other properties. Media queries let the web pages use different CSS style rules according to the characteristics of the device and make a page look same on every device.

Multiple media queries can be combined together into a single style sheet. For instance, if you want to set a style to a certain range, drop min-width and max-width media queries together.

Flexible Screen Resolution
Another important point while designing a responsive web page is to make flexible screen resolution that can fit into different screen sizes. A responsive screen resolution is able to cope up with variations in sizes, functionality and color of new devices that are developed every day.

Adjustable Images
Just like screen resolution, a designer has to work really hard with images. There are many techniques that help a designer to make responsive layouts and handle different images at different screen resolutions.

Made with the ingredients? Now here are some tips that I have learned

' Hide irrelevant content, they create a mess on small screen
' Create collapsible block of your content
' Big buttons are easy to click so enlarge your buttons.
' Use minimum width instead of maximum width
' EM units are useful then PX units

A website that re-sizes itself for desktop system and gadgets simultaneously can never die. So if you want to add more life to your website, play with the ingredients, pepper it with innovation and serve with a cherry of creativity on top. Did you like the recipe of our agency experts? Don't forget to let your chef know about the results.

This article is an original contribution by Zain Devraj.

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6 Tips for Balancing Work, Family and Further Study

The decision to resume studies in order to advance your career can come with many doubts. Concerns about balancing work, family and study time can make people delay taking on coursework that would lead to better jobs and a brighter future for their families. Finding ways to balance these important aspects of your life can require a bit of creativity and resolve.

Online study offers the advantage of eliminating travel time to universities and institutions, so that you can spend more time at home with family. It also eliminates the costs of travel.

1. Plan Your Day

Make a schedule that allows for adequate time for work life, family life and study life each day. This will allow you to plan your days to reduce stress.

2. Using Time Wisely

One of the biggest challenges for those trying to further their studies while dealing with family and work responsibilities is time management. The most effective ways to manage your precious time is to limit distractions by setting aside 'private time' for study, eliminating distractions like phone calls, emails and knocks on the door. You can then schedule some 'family time' to focus on the needs of spouses and children.

3. Delegate Other Tasks

You can delegate many home tasks to other family members or hire outside help for maintenance tasks and other chores. This can help you to free up time to concentrate on studies.

4. Set a Time Schedule For Tasks

When balancing work, family and study chores, you should set a time frame for tasks and try to stick to it as closely as possible. Of course, things never run smoothly, so try to be flexible on what you can reasonably accomplish on your schedule. While working, remain focused and in the moment instead of worrying about others tasks that need to be done. This will help to reduce stress and make you more productive in the task at hand.

5. Nourish Your Brain and Body

Ensure that you eat well to keep your body and brain functioning optimally. Good nutrition helps you to think more effectively and work more efficiently. Avoid high-carbohydrate snacks that cause blood sugar crashes in favor of high protein foods that provide maximum nutrition and slower release into the bloodstream.

6. Take Frequent Breaks

Frequent breaks will help to refresh you, as well as catch up on family activities. A good way to use break time is to invite your spouse or kids to exercise with you. These brief activities can help to refresh your mind and energize you for further study. Go for a brisk toss a ball or lift some weights. The movement of muscles and increase in blood flow throughout your body will help to return to your studies.

This article is courtesy of the team at The Engineering Institute of Technology, online education providers and specialists in plc courses and other engineering qualifications.

This article is an original contribution by Aaron Edwards.

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Put the Person Back in Content Marketing Personas: 10 Easy Steps

OK. A quick show of hands. Who uses the word 'persona' regularly during conversations or presentations?

You can't see it from where you're sitting, but my hand is up. And I'm wincing a little.

Leave it to us word mashers on the marketing mountaintop to take out all of the innate humanness of people by labeling them as personas, and then gang-tackling those personas with a litany of adjectives, adverbs, and reported job duties ' all to illustrate that we really understand our customers' true needs.

Fret not. We're going to put the 'person' back in persona by walking through some really practical ways to understand exactly what your customer wants to consume.

I offer you a method we use at Left Brain that's been very successful: listening posts.

Getting started with listening posts

First, pull your company's past purchaser data to compile initial assumptions about the titles and the topics you believe will be of interest in a given campaign. Keep in mind, you'll be tracking online conversations for each of these topics, so try to limit your list to about five key topics you want to follow ' or you'll quickly feel overwhelmed by the task.

Now let's go about the painstaking process of proving or disproving your theories by setting up 'listening posts' and testing what you learn.

Capture

Step 1. Give your research its own email address. To begin every discovery process, you need a system for collecting and reviewing data. I try to use a single inbox for key roles, topics, or relevant discussions to keep them out of my existing work flow. Doing this also gives me a place to consume when ready. I'd suggest using Gmail to create a segregated inbox because it will be easier to integrate into the other steps. Something like @gmail.com to sign up for e-news and LinkedIn alerts will keep you focused.

Step 2. Use an online news reader to automate the news-gathering process. A multitude of free and not-so-free news readers is available, but I'll call out Google Reader here. After logging into Google using your new email address, you are automatically logged into Google Reader. Here you can pre-select existing topics, create your own using simple or advanced search logic, import RSS feeds, or bring in any Google Alerts as newsfeeds ' all on a single online dashboard. Trust me, this will become your knowledge hub, if it isn't already.

Step 3. Set up a Readability account to quickly push information you discover in your online news reader that appears relevant into the 'read-later' bin. You can also send the most relevant e-newsletter content directly to Readability when you're done gathering.

Filter

Step 4. Set up Google Alerts that align with topics and audiences. This step will be less of an email deluge if you create alerts as RSS newsfeeds. Check this out:

Create news alerts and deliver them to Google Reader.

Subscribe to a topic of interest to track.

Create a news dashboard with key topics.

Step 5. Look for LinkedIn Groups that include discussions about your topic. Where appropriate, I have participated in discussions. If it's likely to be intrusive, I've watched discussions unfold, gleaning key insights about participants and what is working ' or what's frustrating the heck out of them. This is an example of hanging out with humans online to bring the sexy back to your supposition. If you're a member of a topical LinkedIn Group, be sure to sign up for its email alerts 'and always forward them to your topic-specific Gmail account.

Listen

Step 6. Monitor social traffic on the topics of interest. If you're lucky, you have Radian6 and a team of social media users who alert you to key conversations and places to engage on Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Facebook and other communities. If you're like the rest of us, however, you 'MacGyver' everything together with tools like TweetDeck, HootSuite, your news reader, and your topic-specific email account for anything else you've missed. Sounds messy, but with a process in place you'll find it's very doable.

Step 7. Engage with people online in the social streams or communities relevant to the subject matter. Pay close attention to influential bloggers in the area you are researching. Mine the comments sections to see who is seeking additional insights or offering their own. As you begin to understand the subject matter, this can also be a venue to ask questions or share knowledge. If you do decide to share, speak as a curious being with a level of interest or expertise ' not a brand megaphone.

Assess

Step 8. Set a time to review information collected ' and stick to it. For example, you may decide to start your day with a 30-minute scan of any information gathered overnight ' flagging seemingly relevant news using your Readability app. Do a similar sweep at the end of the day to flag new items online and in your topic-specific inbox. Use Readability to narrow the best of the bunch to review in depth after the research phase ends.

Step 9. Look for patterns, odd ducks and hot data points or quotes. After amassing this content and combing through it, you'll start to see similarities emerge ' as well as a few eyebrow-raisers or quotes that set the tone for your work. I often bring these forward to my team to breathe a little life into my findings.

Step 10. Confirm your insights or assumptions with people in your desired audience. Again, these are people. Treat them that way. At my company, this is where we validate our secondary research and theories, or adjust them based on one-to-one interviews with the people we know or want to know in our ideal prospect segments. I've been pleasantly surprised at how willing people are to spend five minutes on the phone, a Skype call, a GoogleHangout, or a brief email swap to add some flesh and bone to my analysis or take shots at my initial findings. I've also been shocked at how many people want to clear up misconceptions so they don't receive the same tired, cliché-ridden communications claiming to know how they feel and what they need.

Using these steps, you can set up a system that delivers the right information to you in real time rather than spending countless hours chasing down hunches. Spend more time publishing great content, and less time batting at the ever-elusive piñata.

For more great insight on content marketing tactics that will help you engage your target audience, subscribe to Chief Content Officer magazine.

Cover image via Bigstock Photo

Are You Curating or Hijacking the Content You Share?

Social media networking is all about balance. Ideally, you want to be spending 80% of your time having conversations and sharing other people's content, and the other 20% of the time sharing your own content and promoting your business.

Content curation is the formal term for sharing other people's content. It's a content marketing strategy that helps:

• Solidify your credibility as a trusted resource in your topic area (your readers will think, 'Sally always finds the best information!')
• Keeps you active on social media without having to always create your own content (imagine calling a prospective client and hearing, 'Sure, I know you, you're always popping up on my screen,')
• Cultivate relationships with the industry experts whose content you're sharing (even if someone responds with a simple 'thank you for sharing,' that could be the start of something. As a bonus, the rest of their network will see that message and may just check you out as well)

As more people realize these benefits and are using content curation (either manually or through software applications created for the purpose), I see some habits that could be unintentionally creating rifts instead of relationships and turning off your readers.

Let's call it content hijacking, and look at how you may be doing it on your blog or on social media.

Hijacking content on your blog

It's a legitimate and effective blogging strategy to use someone else's content as the jumping off point for your own article (as I've tried to do in my recent posts about content curation and Twitter).

What I don't enjoy is when I click on a link and find just a teaser ' a summary and/or quote of the original content, so now I have to jump through an additional hoop to get to the content promised by the headline.

If you're not planning to add to the content, stick with content curation via Twitter and other social media sites. Just be sure not to hijack there, either.

Hijacking content on Twitter

I know that 140 characters isn't a lot of room. I know that you're not intentionally plagiarizing. Yet when you post an enticing headline that leads to someone else's content, without giving proper credit, you're performing a bait and switch that could leave a bad impression on your network.

Content curation tips that will enhance your relationships and credibility

1. Read the entire piece of content before you share. Even if you've read the person's work before, or it was recommended by someone you trust, make sure it's something you truly want to endorse.
2. Use the author's Twitter name. If you've discovered the content on the web (versus through social media), look for a link to the author's Twitter account. Look to see if he or she has tweeted a link to the content, and RT (forward) that to your network.
3. Make room for the credits. If someone else has hijacked content and you want to give credit, go ahead and add the author's Twitter name when you RT the post. To make room, you can delete the hashtags or replace the headline with a shorter description. Note (and I just learned this myself): If you need to revise the tweet in order to add the credit, use MT instead of RT. MT stands for 'modified tweet').
4. Acknowledge the source. For extra credits, let your network know where you heard about the content, by adding 'via @name.'
5. Always share links right from Twitter or HootSuite so that you can add the attribution and control what people will see. Beware: if you check a box to 'Share with Twitter' from LinkedIn or Facebook, or if you have your account set up to do that automatically, your Twitter followers will just see the headline and link and it will look like a hijacking.
6. Follow your content stars more closely. Create a Twitter list in HootSuite so that you can quickly and easily discover new content from your favourite experts and share it with your network ' with full attribution, of course!

6 Market Research Fears That Need to Go the Way of the Hostess Twinkie

With all the new research tools being developed these days, researchers have a lot to fear. But these fears really need to go the way of the Twinkie, to sweet and tasty death.

1. Fear of Google surveys. Google surveys are simply a tool, and a tool is not research. For results from a Google survey to make sense, they need to be accompanied by a qualified researcher who understands what the appropriate sampling frame is, and how to best interpret the results so as to not exceed the level of validity offered by the tool. A tool without a qualified researcher is a prescription for failure.
2. Fear of DIY surveys. Similarly, researchers have nothing to fear in other DIY tools, regardless of how much more flexibility they offer beyond the simple Google tool. A DIY study can have no more validity than the person who designs and administers the research. Poor sampling, poor design, poor analysis, and poor interpretation are all that will result from a DIY study that does not include a competent researcher. CEOs, brand managers, and marketing managers need validity and reliability not random chunks of data.
3. Fear of new research methodologies. As social media research becomes a generally recognized methodology, and gamification starts to become more recognizable, some researchers are hunkering down into their faithful and familiar methodologies. New is unknown. New is risky. New must be feared. Well, new must be feared if you are prepared to watch your business slowly whittle down as other research companies step in to offer those new options. Don't be fearful. Get in on the action. Learn the new and how it can make your existing offering even better. There's much good to be found in the new.
4. Fear of losing norms. By trying a new methodology, any study on a tracking or templated design is bound to lose all normative data. How terrible. How terrible that you've decided to maintain old, less valid, and less useful methodology than create new norms. Be prepared to fear the day when your results cease to make sense because they have lost all validity in the new world.
5. Fear of saying no to a client. 60 minute surveys, 30 items grids, 10 point scales, and more. We consistently hate on these things and yet those surveys get programmed, their response rates drop, and we complain about their data quality. Don't be scared of your clients. Demand quality on their behalf. Create a reputation of quality not complacency.
6. Fear of statistics. I'm really tired of researchers, whether qualitative or quantitative, joke about being scared of numbers and statistics. There's nothing to be proud of there. Actually, there's a whole lot to be ashamed of. Researchers are supposed to know a lot about statistics so that we can be smart about how we use them, when we use them, how to interpret them, and when to abandon them. Stop being fearful and start being qualified researchers.

4 Elements Every Landing Page Needs

Online marketing means more than attracting visitors to your website. In addition to developing a steady stream of web traffic, you need to help your prospects take action on your lead generation forms, promotional sign-ups, and ebook downloads. Effective landing pages are essential for facilitating these goals.

Two items to keep in mind when developing your landing page strategy:

• First, your landing pages need to be clean, minimalistic, and to the point.
• Second, your landing pages need to focus on your sales, transaction, or other conversion-driven objectives.

Effective landing pages improve conversions, promote user engagement, and build strong connections with prospects. Accomplish these goals by incorporating the following five elements into your strategy.

1. Visual Feng-Shui

Landing page designs should be conversion driven. Whether you're collecting prospect leads or encouraging people to sign up for a free trial, you need visual cues that direct visitors towards the goals that you've set. Every element on your landing page needs to lead to one place. The visitors eye should naturally flow towards the form. Keep your pages streamlined, harmonious, calm, and balanced. Design clutter will only detract from your conversion goals.

2. Human Interest

For many of your prospects, landing pages function as introductory handshakes. In a matter of seconds, website visitors will form an opinion about your brand and decide if they should trust you or not.

Remember that your audience includes people who are very different from the marketers, engineers, or industry experts who surround you all day, every day. Show that you care about your web visitors, and make it known that your brand is committed to solving their problems. Keep the jargon to a minimum, and talk to your prospects with a conversational tone. Position your brand as personable, warm, and friendly.

3. A Value Proposition

Why should prospects do business with you? Are you saving them money? Are you helping them accomplish more in less time? Does your brand provide an essential service that can make your prospects' lives easier? Can you quantify how you've been able to affect the sales or savings of your existing customers?

The best landing pages present answers to these questions as key selling points. They provide inherent value to the visitor. Don't assume that people will immediately understand why working with your brand is important. Your landing pages need to clearly explain why your brands' products or services add value.

4. A Quantifiable Goal

Every landing page needs to promote objectives that you can measure. How are you assessing your marketing campaign's effectiveness? By the number of leads that you've generated? By the boost in sales that you've experienced? No matter what, make sure that you can isolate one or several dependent variables that describe the success of your campaign. Optimize your landing pages around these goals. If you can measure it, you can improve it.

Final Thoughts: Test and Re-Test

Landing pages are excellent candidates for A/B testing, so feel free to experiment with page elements so that you can keep learning. Try changing some of your headlines, copy, colors, CTA's or images to gauge the relative effect on performance. Continuously learn from your findings so that you can keep building the best landing pages for your marketing goals and brand.

Appointment Setting Tips ' Let Prospects Know You Are Ready

Problems can still happen even when your appointment setting strategy proves to be successful. In fact, even too much success is its own challenge. When your SCM software services are a hit, it is likely more than one prospect will come to you for help. Take that scene from Robots where the main character ends up having a long line in front of his pad after everyone hears about how he fixes bots. You also have the more real-life example of waiting in line to see a doctor.

Putting A Control On Your Appointment Setting

You might think that generating business leads can be a far cry from a retail store with a long line. But guess what, so long as that process does any of the following, they have a lot in common:

• You are currently serving clients while attracting new ones ' Your resources are currently being pooled to serve the client that is right in front of you. You cannot have those same resources serving the next person in line. You have to focus everything on present implementation projects. Putting customers first should also mean you should know which one to prioritize. Do not try to please everyone all at once or you will not get anything done.

• Other customers have to wait ' This is not always a bad thing. It only means your appointment setting process should consider the timeframe for current projects while scheduling client meetings. Again, with resources being focused on those projects, you cannot serve anyone else until it is done. That is why work is at an all-time high. You need to generate, qualify, and close. After that, everything must be done to help the prospect with their SCM issues. Naturally, you just cannot stop and risk losing productivity.

• Activity is high ' Speaking of which, you cannot keep customers waiting for long. That is why all your activities must be for the sake of getting them what they need and then moving on to the next prospect. Your appointment setting services are your ticket to a highly active and highly productive business. Furthermore, working nonstop is not always healthy. Everyone needs a break which leads to a stronger need to let prospects know when you are next available.

So as you can see, so long as you are highly active in terms of attracting and serving clients, you are not that much different from either a doctor or a retailer. A system needs to be in place to make sure your firm's software resources are not stretched too thin. That is why appointment setting needs act as a control. It takes in mind your current projects and also makes indirect deadlines for them because you still need to serve other clients (that or you need time to blow off some steam).

Without that control, you will have difficulty giving service to anyone. Customers get frustrated with delays. This eventually leads a decline because only fewer and fewer prospects come in. Obviously you would not want that happening so do not ignore the rest of your SCM software leads. Let them know when you are ready!

Big Content Marketing Plays From Coke, Pepsi and Red Bull

For years, soft drink brands have helped set the pace for marketers across the globe. The reasons why shouldn't surprise you. Today's leading soft drink brands dominate the universal beverage market.

To help build loyalty, globally known brands like Coke, Pepsi, and Red Bull are keeping pace with content marketing tactics. If you are a regular Content Marketing Institute reader, you've probably noticed we've kept a close eye on Coca-Cola's Content 2020 manifesto ' a strategy that's earned the brand praise from marketers across the web.

With this week's unveiling of Coca-Cola Journey, we thought now might be a good time to take a look at how today's soft drink market leaders put their own spin on content marketing.

The undisputed global king: Coca-Cola

The marketing team for Sprite famously claimed, 'Image is nothing. Thirst is everything.' That ironic tagline wasn't Coca-Cola's first contribution to contemporary branding ' and it won't be the last.

On Monday, November 12, Coke launched its most recent foray into the battle of the beverages. Coca-Cola Journey is a reimagined version of an old website ' a storytelling machine in online publication format. The new publication features company-specific content across nine categories, including all beverage brands owned by the Coca-Cola Company (like Sprite).

According to the New York Times:

'Four full-time employees are devoted to the corporate Web site, [Ashley] Brown [Coke's Director for Digital Communications and Social Media] said. And content is also being created by 40 freelance writers and photographers, as well as 'people throughout the Coke system, in marketing and public relations.''

Prior to launching Journey, Coke outlined a new global direction for its brand strategy, meant to focus on creating content that tells the company's story. Coca-Cola Content 2020 is an ambitious new campaign, and Journey represents the brand's strong first step into becoming a true digital content machine.

(Check out Robert Rose's interview with Coca-Cola's Jonathan Mildenhall, the architect of Content 2020.)

Coca-Cola's content: What works

The Coca-Cola Company has a deeply entrenched brand. For years, the company's strategists and marketers have done incredible work defining and representing the brand across the entire enterprise, and Journey benefits from that work.

From related content recommendations to highlighting top performing articles, Coke has laid the framework for a successful brand-centric online publication. The site is a home both for the Coca-Cola story and the channels that tell that story, featuring quick links to the company's branded blogs and other social media pages.

What to expect on the horizon

While the website debuted with tons of great content, it's unclear if Journey will have fresh content on the website daily. A big question we hope to see answered before 2013 is whether or not Coke can keep content updated frequently enough to build and maintain an engaged audience.

While the brand journalism approach rings true, it would be nice to see additional engagement elements. Social shares are one thing ' but content becomes truly impactful when it asks the reader what he or she can add to the conversation.

Backed by a seasoned marketing team and a strong vision, Journey will likely see its fair share of growing pains. Fortunately, Coca-Cola seems to have the resources and the determination to keep the site evolving as it tests what components work best for its audience.

What we can learn

We've said it before and we'll say it again: Storytelling is the thread that ties your content together. Coca-Cola has a narrative so rich and extensive that it couldn't possibly capture everything. Old or new, your brand has a narrative thread, too. Consider having a shorter history to be an opportunity to define your own story.

The perennial challenger to the throne: Pepsi

Pepsi has enlisted the likes of Michael Jackson, Ray Charles, and Britney Spears to support its brand ' pop icons who have helped solidify the brand's focus on achieving cultural relevance. Centered on social media, the soft drink brand's content play continues on that same ultra-timely path.

Launched earlier this year, Pepsi Pulse is very much a curation engine that relies on user-generated content (like tweets) and articles from other publications for its fuel. It follows a long brand tradition of pop culture relevance, appealing to its massive audience through timely content ' the 'now' factor infused into Pulse's purpose.

On a given day, the site features the top piece of content. Visitors can even search different dates to find out what piece of pop culture got the most buzz that day. Users can even stream featured live events and watch real-time reactions to them, all from the same screen.

What's most intriguing about Pulse is the back-end scoring system for how articles make the cut. It uses data pulled from fans on Pepsi's social media channels to pull in the content that fans and followers discuss and share most often. The result is an extremely accurate dashboard that's sure to catch its audience's eye.

Pepsi's content: What works

Pulse is very eye-catching and works well to get the audience involved in the conversation ' much better than we've seen with Coke's Journey. While much of the content is brand-agnostic, the dashboard itself is sprinkled with pictures, sounds, and videos focused on reinforcing the brand.

Based on the algorithm for featuring content, it doesn't appear to require a huge staff to run. Much of the promotional content that enters into the mix seems par for the course for Pepsi, solidifying Pulse as a channel that runs almost entirely on recycled content.

What to expect on the horizon

Yes, the site is eye-catching ' almost too eye-catching. There's so much going on and so many colors that it's sometimes difficult to focus on a single piece of content. For example, the spotlighted tweets on the page revolve so quickly that it's hard to read them before they're replaced.

While the site features plenty of great content, concrete calls-to-action are conspicuously missing. It's hard to know how you're meant to interact with the site, even after pulling up the 'about' content.

As Pulse is still labeled 'beta,' you can expect Pepsi to make updates to site usability and presentation. Hopefully, the brand will also work on developing a clearer purpose for visitors.

What we can learn

Today's content is all about what's happening right now. While timeliness is part of Pepsi's brand, it's also a universal truth for content marketers everywhere. Create or curate content in as close to real-time as possible and you'll gain ground on the competition.

The upstart with street cred: Red Bull

Ranked #8 in 2011's top soft drinks worldwide, it's no surprise that Red Bull has earned a formidable share of the market. As an energy drink, its sales surpass any contenders the Coca-Cola Company or PepsiCo have launched in the last few decades.

Red Bull didn't take long to find an edgier niche than the competition for its brand. Between extreme sports and alternative music, the energy drink brand found its wings in alternative lifestyle content, snagging market share that Pepsi's pop focus leaves in its wake. The content finds a home on the brand's website, providing fodder for social media channels and driving a powerful branding mechanism.

Sometimes, it takes a fresh face to jump on new marketing strategies early. Red Bull did just that with content marketing. In fact, many consider Red Bull the gold standard of content marketing. Of course, owning the gold standard means you have to put a little gold on the table.

Following the recent Red Bull-sponsored space-dive, Brian Morrissey of Digiday couldn't have put it more perfectly: 'The Austrian energy drink brand cemented itself as the Coke of the shareable content era, willing to spend freely to produce content so good that it is indistinguishable from non-marketing content. Red Bull truly is a media company that happens to sell soft drinks.'

Red Bull's content: What works

Pretty much everything. The company creates written content, sponsors events large and small, develops videos, takes shareable photos ' and does it all with the same level of passion with which its audience consumes that content. In addition, the brand's website is well organized, with a clear theme and plenty of exclusive articles and videos.

What to expect on the horizon

Like Coke, Red Bull doesn't seem to put much stock in creating content that encourages interaction on the website itself. A renewed focus on this strategy could help create an even more visceral connection between Red Bull and its followers by empowering audience members with a voice.

With a strong content core that mirrors the brand, all Red Bull needs for the future is the will to evolve with the shifting dynamic of alternative lifestyles.

What we can learn

I think a more accurate question is: 'What can we re-learn here?' Harken back to that old adage, 'You have to spend money to make money.'

We aren't all lucky enough to have Red Bull's budget. But we do have the ability to put serious resources into a content plan. After all, you can only toe the water so long before you have to dive in headfirst.

'Drink' on this

With so much at stake in the race for beverage supremacy and consumer mindshare, it's' well, refreshing, to see these leaders forging innovative content marketing pathways ' which may encourage other big brands to follow suit. While there is still room for these programs to evolve and expand, these encouraging starts will certainly leave consumers thirsting for more.

Get more insider information on Coca-Cola's content marketing efforts from Jonathan Mildenhall's keynote presentation at Content Marketing World 2013.

Cover image via Bigstock Photo.

Marketing Can Improve Lead Quality by Owning Qualification

Marketing and Sales have long been at odds over whether it's better to generate a large volume of leads or if it's better to generate fewer, higher quality leads. Anyone involved in Sales or Marketing today, however, knows that the volume game is over. But the question still lingers: How do you get Marketing to deliver the high quality leads that Sales wants and expects?

While there are several ways to improve the quality of Marketing leads, I think one of the best solutions is to have Marketing manage the telephone lead qualification process. Here's why.

Marketing Doesn't Have Near-Term Quotas to Close Deals

The reality of Sales departments is that salespeople live quarter to quarter, and they have to hit a quota each quarter in order to stay in the good graces of their department. While this is a great incentive for keeping your sales team motivated to bring in revenue, that same incentive be counterproductive in the lead qualification process. Because of this, I think that Marketing is better suited for lead qualification.

Firstly, Marketing isn't worried about hitting near-term closed deal quotas. This allows the marketer to engage a prospect in a more open and honest conversation about their needs, purchase timeframe, budget and other factors that comprise typical qualification criteria. Beyond that, Marketing departments need to become more responsible for the quality of leads that they send to Sales. By asking Marketing to manage the qualification process, they're intimately tied to the quality of lead they're asking Sales to close.

In order to make this work, however, Marketing departments need to be methodical about who they hire, how they compensate and how the lead qualification process is managed'and improved. Here are four tips for managing this process.

1. Hire at the Junior Level

In any role, hiring the right person is critical. For the role of lead qualifier, you want someone energetic, competitive and willing to a lot of spend time on the phone. And you want them to junior enough to grow into a different Sales or Marketing role. Beyond that, you want someone that can really drive a phone conversation and has the inquisitive nature to to dig beneath the surface to uncover information from the prospect.

2. Compensate with a Sales-like Pay Structure

The biggest driver in increasing the quality of Marketing leads is to tie compensation to the sale. The easiest way to do that is to start them off at a base salary and offer a commission based on the total revenue of closed deals. You can also add incentives for qualification accuracy such as an additional bonus for a great Sales-accepted lead metric.

3. Decide How to Route Leads

The natural lead category breakdown is to create three buckets of leads: qualified leads, disqualified leads and leads that need to be nurtured. All of these are fairly self-explanatory but the last one is worth elaborating on. The real opportunity for shifting this role to Marketing is that you can dedicate someone to nurturing leads with a human touch. As such, there should be an intense focus on the nurturing aspect of lead qualification.

4. Improve Sales and Marketing Alignment

While this is a long-standing issue in companies across the globe, it's a necessary area of focus for making this model work. You need Sales and Marketing to have regular meetings about lead qualification criteria to have Sales understand why Marketing is disqualifying certain leads (and to double-check that they're not disqualifying a few hidden gems). The best way to manage this process is to have Marketing and Sales meet frequently. Start off having weekly meetings, then move to once a month afterwards.

While this is not an exhaustive list of what needs to happen, I think these are the key areas of focus. If you follow these steps, you can create a Marketing team that both drives more sales and is more accountable and better able to see its contribution to revenue.

Top 7 Tips on How to Become Successful at Telemarketing

For many of us in the field, telemarketing can be a very tricky, unforgiving business. You must appeal to your prospected customers, who most likely have not heard of your company before. You have to go through all the process of cold calling prospects, qualifying them and weeding out those who are not interested, which takes a lot of time and money.

But the good thing is that, if you have the skills, talent, and if you really put on the time and due-diligence, telemarketing can also be highly lucrative and very rewarding to your business.

Here are seven secrets on how to become highly effective at telemarketing:

1. Enjoy speaking to people

Telemarketing involves many hours talking with clients. This is the number one trait every telemarketer must have (willing to develop) to become successful in telemarketing. You must enjoy speaking with people. A telemarketer who does not like people should consider switching to other job.

2. Be confident

You believe in your product and what your company can offer. You should show complete confidence when talking with potential customers. Confidence is a key to exuding credibility in your consumer lead generation and telemarketing campaigns.

3. Embrace objections

The best telemarketers embrace objections and use them to achieve their goals. Anticipate common objections and find the best ways to overcome them.

4. Visualize

The trick is positive visualization. Place yourself in the picture talking with a prospect before picking up the phone. This is a great aid to gain more confidence and channel positive vibes and visions to your actual b2b telemarketing.

5. Predict a close without being arrogant

It doesn't hurt to assume the sale. The first 20 seconds of the call is the most crucial part to make an impression. Act like the potential customer to is going to buy when you are done talking. Place yourself there mentally. It helps big time.

6. Offer incentive to your telemarketing staff

Encourage your team to make as many sales as they are able. Offer them something (a gift certificate, money or anything) to keep them motivated on their task. Give incentives to the top performers. Be sure to appreciate their work and what they have achieved as a team or as individual. Let them know that you value their work.

7. Keep learning and getting better

The last but absolutely not the least key to your telemarketing success is the willingness to keep learning. There's a lot to learn. We've been in business for many years and we are still learning new ways to reach out to our targeted customers. Your commitment to keep learning and getting better every day has definitely served us well.

This article is an original contribution by Jobette Escobanas.

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Software Leads ' Path To The Business Gods?

It is becoming increasingly common among software marketers to treat their software leads as if they were gods. The best example would be the rising movement among marketers to place focus solely on the customer. Marketing materials center on their experience and use lead generation tools so as to learn (and satisfy) more needs.

But Are Software Leads Truly Divine?

The approach almost sounds too good, too ideal, to be true right? Well, yes.

There is a strong difference between valuing your customer and treating them as if they were omnipotent. No matter how many large or famous businesses you have on among your sales leads, they are anything but that.

• They would have no real needs ' If they were so divine, you would have little to offer them. They would come to you more out of a mere whim and less out of a dire need. The latter is what you should look for in your software leads, not the former. Otherwise, how can you possibly be of service to those who supposedly have all the power to serve themselves?

• They are not all so kind ' Even across both mythology and popular fiction, not all gods are good. You have gods of death, mischief, war etc. In fact, even the so-called 'good' gods are prone to make questionable demands. If you insist on glorifying your software leads to that level, you should at least know that they are no different. They are not immune to making costly mistakes and even very bad practices.

• They are not immortal ' The business leaders and decision makers you are meeting will not always be there. Sure, presuming the possibility of their death is drastic, absurd, and frankly not very nice. However, nobody said that was the only thing that can knock them off your list of ERP software leads. Positions change. Some get promoted, others move on elsewhere. As the saying goes, 'All good things must come to an end.'

• They do not have complete dominion ' Whether you are targeting those all the way at the top or somewhere around the middle, note that not all decision makers have complete control. Reasons range from it not being their responsibility to insisting that they have greater concerns. Do not fool yourself in thinking that one decision maker's viewpoint is all you need!

Clearly, with all those limitations, your software leads are not paths that will let you meet with deities. They are still people. These people might be brilliant, prestigious, and wealthy. But in the end, they have problems too and your industry would not be around if they did not.

Ironically, that is exactly what it means to focus on customer experience. You are not just out to make money. You are out to make great contributions to the business success of others. To do that, you need to focus on their human side. This is the side vulnerable to obstacles and creates needs for your support. Get your lead generation services to adopt this perspective today!

How to Utterly Fail at Lead Generation

Any marketer with a solid idea in mind and with the know-how on how to put that plan into action will be able to execute an effective lead generation campaign. On the opposite end, a marketer that has no idea on what he/she is doing and doesn't even know where to begin will utterly fail at lead generation.

When it comes to doing marketing, we want to succeed at what we are doing. Failure would, of course, cost the company we are working for a lot more than we think it will. Many missed opportunities simply translate to a lot of missed sales. And well, missed sales means that you have missed to get yourself an increase in your revenue.

In running a lead generation campaign, we want to know all the right steps so that we don't get anything done wrong. However, this post isn't going to teach you about how to succeed at generating leads, rather it's going to teach you about how you can fail at it so you can avoid making mistakes when running your campaign.

Are you ready to learn how to fail? Let's get it on then!

Make sure to call every company you can.

When it comes to lead generation, B2B telemarketing is one of the most widely used approaches. So if you want to fail at performing lead generation, it is recommended that you call every single company you can. It doesn't matter what industry you're from, just keep calling whoever you can reach!

Your company has a target industry that you should be marketing your products and services to. Focusing your attempts on your target industry will maximize your chances of generating good leads. But that doesn't really matter when you want to fail at generating leads now, does it?

DNC list'? What DNC list?

As stated in the previous point, telemarketing is often used when it comes to lead generation. So if you're making use of the phone to get leads, you of course know of the existence of the DNC (Do Not Call) list. This list contains records of companies that do not want to receive calls from telemarketers. Making sure to follow this list is how you can make sure to stay out of trouble.

Well that's not a problem if you want to run your company into legal issues. Simply say to yourself 'what DNC list?', acting as if you have never even heard about the existence of companies who do not want you to call them.

Ignore interested prospects.

When you have a prospect that you have contacted and seems interested in your company, you would normally follow-up with them at a later time to see if they can become a lead or not. As such, generating business to business leads is all about making sure to follow-up with your interested prospects.

But since we want to fail here, we should instead do the opposite of giving those interested in what we do our attention; we shall ignore them! An interested prospect will most likely become a lead for your company, but you should not care about their level of interest or pay attention to them if you want your campaign to hit rock bottom.

So, what do you think about our tips on how to utterly fail your lead generation campaign? Do you think you can be a better failure? If you can, share your thoughts with us on what you think kills a lead generation campaign!

Online Reputation Management: Defending Your Company from Google Defamation

Have you ever conducted a Google search for your own name? For most of us, the answer to that question is affirmative. Call it curiosity, or call it a matter of ego, but we all want to know what kind of information is out there about us and what people are saying about us on the Web.

It's not just our own names, either'it's also our brands. When you own a business, you pour an awful lot of time and energy into it; it becomes your baby. You care about what people say and don't want anyone to badmouth it.

This is not a matter of vanity. Actually, it is an extremely important aspect of B2B marketing in the 'Age of Google'. What a search engine reveals about your company matters immensely. In fact, it could prove utterly make-or-break.

Why Online Reputation Matters

Why does it matter so much? Simply put, consumers are turning more and more to the Internet as a way of informing and validating their purchasing decisions. They consult online reviews before committing to spend money on any products or services'and they keep their eyes open for any potential online complaints or negative BBB listingsl.

If an online search turns up only positive information about your brand, that is great news. Sadly, not all business owners can say that all of their brand's related content is positive. Negative reviews and unwanted listings can come from any number of sources'real consumers, business rivals, and frustrated employees'and their veracity matters very little. If your brand name is associated with negative online listings, you can bet that it will lead to decreased sales, lost customers, and overall embarrassment.

That's why so many companies are investing in the practice known as online reputation management'an endeavor that essentially entails seeking to control the first ten Google search listings for a given brand.

Why The First Ten?

Why do reputation management campaigns typically center on the first page of Google search results'the first ten listings, and no more? Consider that it would be impossible to prevent people from posting negative reviews about a company; consider also, that it is impossible to have existing listings removed. The best approach is to control the damage by managing your brand's online reputation as effectively as possible.

Studies have shown that the best way to do this is by focusing on that first page of Google. Most online search engine users'90%, in fact'never click beyond that initial page of results. As such, a negative listing on Google page 1 is a very big deal. However, a negative listing on, say page 3 is a virtual non-issue because so few people will ever see.

If you want to control the way your business is presented on the Internet, then the answer is simple enough: Control the first ten Google listings. Of course, this is easier said than done, but there are a few tried-and-true techniques that any company can use to their advantage.

Controlling Google Page 1

It all begins with monitoring. Regularly Googling your brand is a good way to stay up-to-date on what people are saying about it. Setting up Google alerts can also prove helpful.

From there, work on building up your online assets. Think about it this way: your goal is to control the first page, which means controlling at least ten online assets. The trick is finding ten online assets that you can use to populate the first page.

Start with exact-match domain names. These might include YourBrand.com, .org, and .net. These exact-match listings will yield the best results in terms of search engine rankings. Additionally, seek out social media accounts'again, registering for account names that match your company identity.

Remember that some social networks are better than others, in terms of ranking well on Google. Facebook and Twitter are both beneficial, but the best social media platform for obtaining Google ranking success is, believe it or not, LinkedIn. Another good one is WordPress, a much higher-ranking platform than Tumblr or Blogger.

These assets can ultimately be used to form a sort of defensive wall, insulating you from online attack and negative reviews. For this strategy to work however, content creation is key. It's important to regularly develop content that will populate these online assets, thus keeping them highly ranked within Google.

To control the first ten Google search listings concerning your brand, is to control your company's very online reputation'which means that, in the Age of Google, these tactics simply cannot be neglected if you wish for your business to succeed.

The Past, Present, and Future of Brochure Marketing

If you were asked which traditional marketing tool is still present and strong nowadays, what would be the first thing that will come in your mind? You might start off with flyers, business cards, posters, but how about brochures? These creative prints presented in various folding have been around for years and is worth the recognition when it comes to top advertising tools.

Maybe right now you're thinking if you should really spend your time learning on why brochures are a boom in the marketing world. But if you'll just look around you, you're sure to find one being kept in your place. So why is it like that? To fully understand the power that brochures have in marketing, let's take a quick trip on its past, present, and future.

How It All Started

Let's take a step back and look at the history of printing just to get a glimpse on where brochures entered the scene.

In 1450, Johannes Gutenberg started his printing press which can be the mark of the commercial printing done nowadays. However, the Ancient Chinese already started using inks on wooden blocks as a form of printing even before Gutenberg had his machine. From thereon, businesses found their way of communicating with a larger target market. You can say that at this point, brochures have been born as a part of the printed advertisements ' but maybe without the decorative folding yet.

Where It Is Now

With the role being played by brochures aside from promotions, people have become more attached to it. You can always find one on every store and even institutions since these are also used for educational purposes.

If that's not enough, some research made shows that 75% of people who notice brochures think that these are useful for information resource. Also, 63% of the respondents agree that these prints help them learn about the activities of a certain area when the tools are displayed on stands. Now, these figures definitely say something on how brochures are being perceived by consumers at present.

What Will Happen Next

Even when there are various forms of advertising being done, you cannot immediately say that brochure marketing would disappear just like that. As you've noticed, it's somehow strong in attracting the attention of the people, plus it also provides the right information and educates them.

It's not just all about marketing at this point. The effect that brochures leave on people does not only include their choice for purchasing but even the idea of learning something new.

So now that you've gotten a clear picture on what awaits brochure marketing, you might already be convinced that this strategy is worth the investment. Just remember the factors that would make the prints work best for you. These are design, printing, and distribution. Learn how to properly mix these parts and you can get the most out of your brochures for sure.

This article is an original contribution by Roxanne Reyes.

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4 Things Your Ecommerce Business Needs To Survive Cyber Monday

Ecommerce Cyber Monday Preparation

Cyber Monday is only a few days away and making sure your business is ready for it is essential to success. Shoppers will spend an estimated $1.25 billion this year on Cyber Monday and as a good business owner you want to get as much of that business as you can handle. So here are 4 essential last minute tips to make sure the day goes smoothly and you make a lot of money.

1. Final Social Push: You have probably been running ads, writing content and running as much PPC advertising possible this month. Now it is time to utilize your social media outlets and reach out to your followers one last time. Let them know what you are planning to offer and how they can get the deal. Reward your social followers with an additional discount if they share your deals via Facebook or Twitter. As they claim your offers give them the chance to brag about your business and the great deal that they got.

2. Check you Sever and Host: So this may not be as fun or exciting as doing a last minute social advertising push but it is equally as important. Your site should be experiencing a lot of traffic and you want to make sure your system is prepared to handle it. With a bullet proof setup you will be able to stick to the sales and not worry about the technical aspects of the day. DO NOT overlook the importance of being technically ready for this huge shopping holiday.

3. Customer Service: Ensure that your customer service team is ready and you have extra staff. You do not want to loose sales because you cannot get back to your customers fast enough. Prep your team for the day and reward them afterwards for a job well done.

4. Build anticipation: Anticipation is priceless and building it with your customers is a great way to have a big sale. You want them checking our site often to see when the deals go live! See how Dell is building anticipation about their Cyber Monday deals here.

These last minute preparations are going to set you business apart from your competition and ensure you have as successful of a holiday as possible. Do you have tips you want to share? Please let us know with a comment.

This article is an original contribution by Brian Jensen.

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