How to Help Your Customers Help You by Sharing Their Stories

Every company has customer stories that could be fabulous marketing tools; but not every company uses them effectively in its content marketing program. The case study is the gold standard and something most marketers are familiar with. But customer stories can be just as much of a content gold mine.

Deana Goldasich, CEO of Well Planned Web, explained how during her Content Marketing World session, 'Customer Stories: How to Unlock an Abundance of New Content.'

Imagine you've just run into your best customer and your best prospect. And you know your customer would have a great story to tell your prospect, who you know is a perfect fit for your product or service.

How could you get your customer to tell his or her story to the prospect?

Here's how: Introduce them to each other, then shut up and get out of the way. That's how you would do it in real life, and that's how to do it with your online content marketing, as well.

Whether your business is B2B or B2C, large or small, the fact is that your customers can tell your story better than you ever will.

Why is that?

• Customers are really telling their own story: Your company is part of that story almost by accident.
• Stories that customers tell are not sales-y: No matter how much a company tries to remove the sales speak from marketing materials and stories, a little bit almost always trickles through.
• There is a very small overlap between what a company wants to tell its customers and prospects and what those customers and prospects actually want to hear: Customers are more likely to talk about what other customers and prospects really want to know.

Customers have stories to tell, and case studies are a great way to share them. But what if there was a way to turn one customer interview into more than just one case study? Here's one great example: a single customer interview netted more than 38 pieces of content:

• 1 internal customer email
• 2 white papers
• 2 infographics
• 3 case studies
• 9 blog posts
• 10+ external drip emails
• 11 testimonial quotes

To content marketers and content creators, this is a dream come true. Here is how Deana and her team helped generate this much content from just one interview.

The interview lasted about an hour-and-a-half, and the interviewer did not go into it planning to come out with 38 pieces of content. She went into it expecting to get one piece of content: a case study. The rest of the content was inspired by the case study and the interview. The ideas for the additional content only came about after she reviewed the information gleaned from the interview, wrote the case study, and understood the nature of all the content the team had acquired.

These 38+ pieces of content are not simply repackaged pieces of the case study, either. These are unique ideas and pieces of content gleaned from talking to this one customer.

But before you mine all of this content, you have to get the story from your customer. Here's how:

Before the interview:

• Identify the best person to talk to on the customer side. Talk to the sales team, customer service reps, or social media managers ' these are the people who know your customers' stories and know who would be best to talk to in your customers' organization.
• Find someone else to conduct the interview ' not one of the frontline people who helped you identify who to speak to: Look for content producers or managers, facilitators, storytellers, or outside agencies. Here you want to find someone who is very good at listening and making others feel comfortable in a conversation, even if this person isn't the one who will be creating any of the content.
• Think like a reporter and be ready to ask about who, what, why, when, where, and how: This means the interviewer should conduct a live interview (via telephone is OK), and not use email or an online form to gather this information. This has to be a two-way, synchronous conversation.
• Be prepared and focused: To do this, it helps to write out your questions in advance:
  • Have open-ended questions that prompt descriptive responses, such as: 'Tell me about the challenges you face in your role here.'
  • Also have focused questions designed to elicit short, specific types of answers, such as, 'Why did you need the services of X company?'
• Plan for the interview to take at least one hour: Getting to the heart of a story can take some time.

During the interview:

• Record the interview: You can take minimal notes during the interview, but you want it to feel like a conversation not an interrogation. Some people use two methods to record interviews to ensure success. You may not be able to remember all of the conversation afterwards, so this is a critical step.
• Set the stage: Let the customer know what to expect and that you are here to listen to his story.
• Keep it comfortable. The best way to have a conversation is when both the interviewer and the interviewee feel comfortable. It's OK to start with some small talk.
• Be ready to take detours: Write out questions in advance ' especially questions about specific pieces of information you need from the interview. But remember that it's OK to go off your script of prepared questions if the customer's responses move the conversation in a really strong direction 'sometimes these tangents are where you get your best stories. Yes, there may also be times when you have to gently refocus your interviewee to keep her on track, but that's what your list of questions is for.
• Dealing with difficult interviewees:
  • Shy and quiet: Bring your energy to the table and make it a brag-safe environment. Help the subject see his story.
  • Outgoing and talkative: Meet her energy level and let her talk. Help keep her focused with your specific questions.
• Dealing with interviewees who are hesitant to share specifics. Customers are often hesitant to share sales numbers or specific results. Get creative with this. Ask about using percentages or other ways to share the relevant information without revealing proprietary information.

After the interview:

• Transcribe your recordings: This is best done by the person who conducted the interview ' as he is listening, he can relive the interview and hear the tone, the inflections, the drama and use it to refresh his memory of the discussion. Highlight relevant things you hear, such as results, challenges, or quotes you'll want to use.
• Create a content database: Capture all of the information in a database, such as Excel or Box.net or another collaborative tool. Log every bit of content you can: quotes, anecdotes, stories, pieces to use for a case study, ideas for blog posts or infographics, etc. Tag them to make it easier for anyone on the team to find, now and in the future.
• Use this content for your editorial calendar: The content database can help you fill out your calendar with ideas for emails, blog posts, articles, white papers, etc.
• Write the content and watch your customer ' and the story ' shine!

Businesses of all shapes and sizes can benefit from customer stories. When it comes to telling a customer's story for your business, it's not about how creative or amazing you can be. It's about how well you can help that customer tell his or her own amazing story.

What are your experiences with telling customer stories and making the most of the content you get from interviews?

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

5 Tips For Creating Effective Digital Marketing for Insurance Agents

Despite the fact that insurance is such a vital part of every business, digital marketing for insurance agents is minimal at best. For many agents, digital marketing is something they'd like to do but don't have time. Or they have a digital marketing plan that involves tweeting one insurance-related news article a week and updating their LinkedIn profile twice a year. Other agents look to these examples and claim them as evidence that digital marketing isn't a viable option for insurance agents.

Digital marketing techniques like content and social media marketing are ideal fits for insurance agents. And there's a simple formula you can use to start your digital marketing strategy.

Invite Questions

Insurance is something most business owners know very little about. It's something a lot of the general public see as a closed shop. They see it as a secretive and untrustworthy industry that looks after itself first. A great way to break through that stereotype is to invite people to ask questions about insurance.

You can do this through social media, through blogs or on your website. Insurance is something everyone has a question about, and as an insurance expert, you're the one they want to ask.

Answer Them for Free

So much of marketing for insurance is about building trust. The simple invitation to ask a question won't build that trust on it's own. People may misinterpret it as an invitation to a paid consultation.

There's no better way to build trust than to answer insurance questions without asking for anything in return. People love to get things for free and, if they find your answers helpful, that's a great endorsement of your abilities.

Offer Advice Without Being Asked

Of course you don't need to be asked a question to offer advice. People research insurance online all the time. They look up policies and jargon or just seek advice. If you have informative blogs, whitepapers and other resources on your website, you can capture some of that research traffic.

The target here is to make people want to work with your agency. If you help a business owner with their research, they're likely to come back in a professional capacity.

Be Proactive

Digital marketing for insurance agents isn't just about creating content and hoping you get found. You need to be proactive too. Social media is vital in this. Your target market is active on Twitter and LinkedIn so you should be too. Remember, these people want to hear what you have to say; you just need to put it in front of them.

As a starting point you need to be sharing all of your content across your social channels. You should get involved with insurance groups on LinkedIn, get involved in insurance conversation on Twitter and make sure your agency name is at the center of that activity.

Don't Ignore it

For a lot of insurance agents, and other small businesses, marketing is something they do when all their work is done. It's often an afterthought for people who've spent their day dealing with clients and providers, and just don't have the time. Consistency is vital in digital marketing. The odd post here or there won't cut it. You need to create new blog content and engage with social media more than once a week, every single week.

If you're not ready to do this, don't start. Either engage with a digital marketing company who can help you, or prepare a strategy and start once you're ready. Once you start, you need to keep the activity consistent. Old, or rarely updated, social media accounts or blogs can do as much damage as good.

The basics of digital marketing for insurance companies are simple. Create useful content, engage with your target market and offer to help. After that, the biggest challenge is staying on top of it.

 Get a FREE Insurance Marketing & Website Evaluation!

DIY? No Can Do: More Companies Turn to Software for Help with PPC

There was a time when being a PPC manager necessarily entailed being an Excel ninja as well. Not a fan of spreadsheets? Then step away from the PPC account, my friend!

In 2001, however, a tipping point occurred ' the majority of companies no longer managed their PPC accounts using Excel. And the trend continues in that direction. According to SEMPO's recent State of Search report, the number of companies who manage their PPC campaigns DIY-style using free tools like those provided by search engines, Excel, or 'a simple database' fell from nearly half (49%) in 2001 to just 38% in 2012. That's a big drop! And a much bigger drop than the change from 2010 to 2011 (53% to 49%).

Here's the survey data from SEMPO (the exact question was 'Do you or your primary search engine marketing service provider use a special technology solution with features such as 'bid management', 'campaign management', 'portfolio management' and 'dynamic optimization' for paid search campaigns?'):

As you can see, there's been a big rise in the number of companies that use a proprietary in-house solution (17% this year compared to just 4% last year) as well as those that license a third-party tool to use in-house, up to 22% in 2012 from 12% in 2011. A full 62% (almost 2 in 3) of companies now use some kind of software to help them manage PPC, whether it's a proprietary or third-party solution and whether they manage it in-house or use an SEM service provider.

Why Are More Businesses Investing in PPC Software?

The SEMPO report doesn't delve into why this shift is happening, but here are some possible explanations for the shift:

• AdWords is getting more complicated ' AdWords is constantly launching new features (such as Shared Budgets) or changing the way existing features work (take the ad rotation setting changes from a few months back). Some advertisers may feel they can't keep up and are falling behind.
• People are advertising on multiple platforms ' Almost all companies using PPC advertising (97% of them!) run campaigns on Google AdWords, but more than half use Bing/Yahoo (65%)  and Facebook advertising (56%) as well.
• The PPC software industry is coming into its own ' Search marketing is still a young industry. The available solutions are improving by leaps and bounds, and advertisers are beginning to realize that it's a smart investment that delivers ROI ' and/or PPC vendors are getting better at convincing advertisers that software is worth the investment! There are also more and better solutions targeting small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), as opposed to just enterprise-level big spenders.
• Marketing departments are increasingly feeling the pinch ' With the economy still not fully recovered, it may be that fewer marketers are being held responsible for a larger number of roles. If, for example, a single search marketer is handling both SEO and PPC, they may need advanced tools that offer automation to get more done in less time.

Have You Made the Switch to a Paid Solution?

Are you one of those companies that has made the switch to a third-party or proprietary in-house solution for PPC management? Or are you still working your magic with AdWords Editor and Excel?

How To Master YouTube Marketing [Video + Slides]

Last month's Social Media Meetup was 'How To Master Online Video Marketing' with SEO expert and blogger Phil Nottingham.

Video is of course very topical, well in fairness it's been topical for years now. I personally feel that more and more companies are starting to use video as an essential part of their online strategy, not just a nice little add-on.

Phil's Approach to video

I like the fact that Phil challenges his clients about why they want to do video. For instance, is it better to do a blog post or a video? One rule of thumb is that video is the appropriate form of content when it would lose something if it were just text and image.

Work out the following in this order:

1. What you want to achieve with your content?
2. What is the story and the hook?
3. Who's your audience?
4. What is the appropriate form? (This will be clearer at this stage.)
5. What are the technical implementations?

Once you've answered those questions, you can decide on the other details, such as pre-outreach, outreach, and content creation.

Technical video information

Here are a few technical tips to bear in mind when creating and uploading videos:

• Always export your videos at full HD (1920 x 1080), YouTube ranks HD videos higher than the rest. Any major editing software can export in HD resolution, even if the video wasn't originally shot in High Definition.
• Export just under 5000kbps.
• Include keywords in the filename , title, description, and tags as per traditional SEO.
• Include a closed caption (transcript) file and don't rely on the native YouTube closed caption, especially if your video contains music or noise. Always upload your own, as this is the narrative of what's going on in the video.
• Include a 'no follow' link to your video, to increase traffic to your main domain as well as to your YouTube profile.

Other practical YouTube tips

• Consolidate your channels: having several YouTube channels isn't bad practice per se, but it won't help you with SEO. It's much harder to see progress if you have your content spread on different platforms. However, if this is your case, feel free to link them to each other.
• Associated website: YouTube has recently rolled out a new featured that lets you link your YouTube channel to your own website. This will allow Google to pass traffic to your website via YouTube more easily. This feature is currently available only to partners who enable ads.
• Audience Engagement: regularly check the analytics page on your YouTube account to see your audience retention for your videos. This is an indication, for you and for Google, on how well your videos are doing and at what point your viewers engage the most/the least.
• 'As seen on'' attribution: this feature is very useful if you work in a business. This is a link that leads you to a curated page on YouTube with a list of videos that are related to yours. These videos are not necessarily YOUR videos, and they provide supporting content and context for your viewers.
• YouTube 3D: even though the 3D videos on YouTube aren't really high quality, millions of people watch these videos. It's worth having a few of these videos to drive traffic as well.
• Pre-roll ads: pre-roll ads are relatively cheap and it drives a lot of traffic to that specific video. As the viewer's count increases, people who stumble across your page will see the number of viewers and it will encourage more organic subscribers. Invest in the YouTube ads systems, whereas they're pre-roll ones or homepage takeovers.

Here is the video of Phil speaking and below you'll find his presentation slides as well.

Many thanks to Bernardo Donkor for helping with this post, Bernardo is a blogger at TechLume.

Your Marketing Results Are Not In Your Control

Two weeks ago GoDaddy's outage knocked numerous sites offline for an extended period of time.

On the same day, this site (B2B Digital Marketing, in case you are reading this elsewhere) received more search traffic than ever before.

Google search traffic was up 20% over the previous one-day high and was nearly 40% higher than the average from the prior three weeks.

The increase wasn't because of great search engine optimization. It wasn't because of great content. It was because other good (or better, according to Google) sites were simply not available, offline because of the GoDaddy outage. Traffic that would normally have gone elsewhere ended up here.

The B2B Marketing Implication

As a marketer, you have objectives that may range from sales to leads to unaided awareness. However, a significant portion of your success is beyond your control.

The moves your competitors make, the regulatory changes that impact your industry or the overall economy can multiply your results or sour your best laid plans.

The question is not necessarily what your plan is, the question is what will your plan be and will you be able to move as quickly as your competitors and your marketplace?

Agility in B2B Marketing

Today, more than ever, B2B marketing needs to be well planned and flexible. Chances are your industry is going through more upheaval today than it has in decades.

• If you are in recruiting, lightweight solutions like HiringThing are bringing new low-cost options into the market.
• If you are in IT services, SaaS or Managed Services like ZenDesk are not just challenging your solutions but also rewriting your revenue models.
• If you are RIM, just 2 years ago you were still the smartphone market leader and this week you were begging developers to wait for your BlackBerry 10 introduction rather than give up on you (and your 9% market share) completely.

Like in these examples, many of the most important changes and the biggest opportunities you face will stem from changes that are beyond your control.

Are you ready to respond to these threats and opportunities as they come up? Does your strategy and infrastructure position you to respond to changes as they happen?

Your Turn

Today, are businesses better served by executing a well thought out plan or developing a business and marketing infrastructure that is nimble enough to respond throughout the year to the changes around them?

Share your perspective in the comments below or with me on Twitter (@wittlake).

Photo Credit: by Marcus74id on FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Eight Ways to Rock at Your Job (or Get a Better One)

You're smart, hard-working, and loyal as a dog. So why hasn't your career taken off the way you had hoped?

Quite possibly, it's because while those qualities are appreciated by upper management, they aren't enough to set you apart. Here are eight tips that may help.

Note that if you are already at the top of your game, this guidance will seem old hat (though you may want to share this with younger colleagues). If you're struggling just a bit, it may help. And if you are just starting out or early in your professional career, it is vital.

Be Passionate

Care about your company and industry and show it in your work and speech. There is no such thing as a 'boring product' or service only bored employees.

I gave a presentation a while back to staff at a company that made rubber gaskets. One of the attendees asked how he was supposed to get excited about rubber gaskets. I asked where the company's gaskets were used. 'Oh, different applications in high-performance motors, like generators, pumps, NASCAR engines'' NASCAR engines??!! How can you not be passionate about that? The rubber gaskets may be only a small part of the equation, but races couldn't be won without them.

Have Ideas

The best ideas are good ones, of course, but even interesting ideas that don't ultimately make it into production are important and show that you have, well, passion for the business. New products typically account for as much as 25% of revenue and an even higher percentage of profit.

New ideas, whether for new products or services, enhancements to existing offerings, or just better ways of doing something, are the lifeblood of future success. Particularly when it comes to new products, only a small percentage of new ideas actually make it into production'but all new ideas have value.

Present Alternatives

Never ask your boss / co-worker / colleague what they think of a specific color, font, tagline, headline, product concept or anything else'instead, present alternatives (at least two, preferably three, no more than five). People prefer to choose between different options rather than just a give a thumbs-up or down to an idea in isolation.

Be Bilingual

Obviously, being linguistically bilingual (e.g. able to speak/write/read Spanish and English, or Chinese and English, etc.) is valuable in many business contexts. But it's also helpful career-wise to be departmentally bilingual. For example, I got one of my first promotions based on being able to 'translate' engineering jargon into language that a marketing team could understand.

And no matter what function you work in, it's crucial to be able to translate your department's internal jargon into business language. For example, in social media marketing, measures such as Facebook likes, LinkedIn followers and retweets on Twitter are meaningful'but your CEO and CFO couldn't care less about these metrics. However, being able to say that social media produces sales leads at x% lower cost than other sources and furthermore that these leads have a y% higher close rate will get C-level attention.

Be Social

Most people in marketing today will interpret this suggestion as applying to social networking, and there's no question that it's important for marketing, SEO and PR professionals to be active (in a professional manner) on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn at a minimum. And having an active presence on sites like YouTube, Pinterest and Google+ doesn't hurt.

But don't neglect the most literal meaning of this recommendation either. Working through lunch can be interpreted as a sign of your dedication'or give the impression that you don't care to interact with co-workers. If you're on a tight deadline, go ahead and spend your lunch time hunched over a keyboard, but if not (and presuming it's an option), spend that time getting to know those you work with better, and letting them get to know you. 'Office politics' isn't a nasty term, it's a fact of life.

Never Stop Learning

For most of human history, odds were that you would end up doing whatever it was your parents did (in most cases, farming), and in pretty much the same way.

In The Logic of Life, author Tim Harford quantifies the acceleration of technological change as it relates to population growth. 'The'Homo erectus population in 300,000 B.C. would have been coming up with on (brilliant, life-changing) idea every thousand years. By 1800, the dawn of the Industrial Revolution'the innovation rate would have risen to one stunning idea every year. By 1930 it would have been one world-changing idea every six months'we should now be producing this kind of idea every two months.'

The development of the Internet wiped out a wide swath jobs but created many new ones (webmasters didn't exist twenty years ago; social media consultants have been around for less than five), and changed the way almost all other jobs are performed (including farming).

For the most part, the college textbooks on my bookshelf are now more of historical interest than practical use. My daughter, for the most part, won't even use printed textbooks.

Staying ahead of the curve is tough, but essential. As columnist Thomas Friedman recently noted, 'if you want a decent job that will lead to a decent life today you have to work harder, regularly reinvent yourself, obtain at least some form of postsecondary education, make sure that you're engaged in lifelong learning and play by the rules.'

The Blurry B2B Buying Process | New B2B Buyer #2

This is the second blog post in a series that discusses the new breed of B2B buyer that has evolved in adaptation to the Internet and explores new rules of engagement that mirror those behaviors to maximize B2B sales and marketing effectiveness. The first post in this series described the behavioral traits that differentiate the new species of B2B buyer from its pre-millennium ancestor and explained how to align with the new B2B buyer's expectations of independence and instant online gratification through extensive content publishing and efficient self-service. This second post describes how the Internet has blurred the B2B buying process and suggests ways to adapt B2B sales and marketing processes to increase engagement and influence.

The New Elusive B2B Buyer

In the pre-millennium B2B buying process, the salesperson was the gatekeeper of information. That meant that the pre-millennium B2B buyer had to engage with the salesperson early on and stay engaged throughout every stage of the B2B buying process. A prospect might go dark or a sale might be lost, but a purchase could not move forward without engaging with the salesperson. Not so today. Unfortunately for the B2B salesperson, the new B2B buying process tips the information imbalance in the prospect's favor. The new breed of B2B buyer can find your product or service, learn about it, evaluate it, see what others think about it, and in many cases try it and buy it, all without engaging with a salesperson.

The new breed of B2B buyer is independent and elusive,
blurring in and out of focus and engaging directly with sales
only when there is clear value to be gained, not just to get information.

The new elusive B2B buyer spends more time going solo throughout the B2B buying process, blurring in and out of focus and engaging directly with sales only when there is clear value to be gained, not just to get information. This is made doubly complex by the fact that the 'B2B buyer' is usually more than one person. Where before the salesperson could corral all the influencers and decision makers into a meeting and orchestrate a linear sales cycle from beginning to end, today's B2B buying process is organic and diffuse with different stakeholders visiting your website ad hoc, checking your knowledgebase and support forums, calling your sales team for a quick question and then going dark, filing a support ticket on a trial account, discussing your product and company in social forums, and making internal decisions by email with no need to call a face-to-face meeting.

New B2B Buyer Rule of Engagement #3 ' Measure, Model and Move

The bad news is that the Internet has made the new B2B buyer more elusive and the new B2B buying process harder to define and control. But, the good news is that the Internet has made the new B2B buying process more transparent. What? Wait a minute. Say that again.

While the new breed of B2B buyer appears more elusive to the B2B salesperson, this is not the case for the B2B marketer. Web browsers have cookies, hyperlinks have tracking codes, and every online interaction is overlaid with meta-data that indicates buyer intent. It's a trade-off for everyone involved. The new B2B marketer must adapt to the new B2B buyer by developing better measures and models that move the new B2B buyer through the B2B buying process and compensate for the B2B salesperson's loss of control over the flow of information.

The Marketing Automation Mandate

Marketing automation is one of the fastest growing SaaS categories. However, it isn't because this technology is somehow cutting-edge (no offense to my SaaS colleagues in marketing automation). It's core function is to measure, model and move the B2B buyer through the B2B buying process by tracking online activities and transforming that data into knowledge that is acted upon through automation. The underlying technology is not new and the applications could have been built ten years ago. But, they wouldn't have been as valuable ten years ago.

Marketing automation is taking off because the behavioral traits of the new species of B2B buyer have created both the ability and the need to measure, model and move the B2B buying process through automation. And, the winners in the marketing automation category will be those SaaS companies that leverage SaaS Do #6 Reach Across the Firewall to create a seamless B2B buying process that fully integrates the elusive, external behavior of the new breed of B2B buyer with the internal processes of the new breed of B2B sales and marketing organizations. Marketing automation has gone from nice-to-have to must-have, because it creates real competitive advantage.

New B2B Buying Process Tech Tip

The New Marketing Math

The pre-millennium B2B buying process was a structured sequence of activities jointly managed and negotiated by the B2B buyer and B2B salesperson. And, pre-millennium measures and models reflected that structure. Most every B2B sales and marketing professional is familiar with the sales funnel where the B2B buyer is envisioned as being qualified and converted by the B2B salesperson at each successive stage of the B2B buying process. It is a very deterministic model that assumes a source of the incoming lead and a linear progression from one stage of the B2B buying process to the next until the deal is won or lost. Virtually every salesforce automation package now supports this model.

In the pre-millenium sales funnel model, marketing campaign success or failure is determined by lead volume, cost, conversion and ROI metrics attributed to each lead source. For example, if a successful trade show that cost $20,000 to attend generated 100 leads of which 5 closed for a total of $100,000 in new revenue, then the metrics for the show would be as follows: $200 cost per lead, 5% conversion, and an ROI of 5:1. However, this model assumes that the trade show was the ultimate source of the lead and the post-show B2B buying process consisted of the B2B salesperson skillfully escorting the B2B buyer through the sales funnel to close.

Pre-millennium B2B marketing professionals would create detailed spreadsheets of all their campaigns and rate them according to these metrics. Marketing budgets and allocations would be determined by this analysis. Well, you can throw all that out the window if your prospect is the new breed of B2B buyer, because this prospect's B2B buying process is anything but linear, deterministic and under the B2B salesperson's control. And, I defy you to identify anything resembling a lead source or a clean hand-off from marketing to sales.

The Fuzzy Funnel ' Correlation vs. Causation

What you can measure in the new B2B buying process, particularly if you have a strong marketing automation system in place, is a long string of buyer attributes, activities and metrics that characterize the new B2B buyer's random walk to purchase. You will find concentrated bursts of buyer activity, such as quickly browsing half your website, combined with unknown gaps and unexplainable delays. And, you will have a gut feeling that some sequences of buyer activities are more important than others, e.g., making a detailed review of pricing and registering for a free trial vs. checking out the most recent press release and bouncing.

The new marketing math reflects the diffuse and random nature of the new B2B buying process. Movement through the fuzzy funnel comes in fits and starts, forward and backward with different B2B buyer decision makers moving fluidly in and out. True forward progress through the fuzzy funnel is indicated by positive metrics that are highly correlated to winning a deal, e.g., qualified buyer attributes, trial registration, trial usage, lead score, price estimation, formal sales proposal, etc.

The first goal of the new marketing math is to create a statistical model of the fuzzy funnel comprised of metrics that indicate progress through the fuzzy funnel at each stage of the B2B buying process. The second goal then is to use that model to focus marketing creativity and spend on those campaigns that drive activity that correlates strongly to them. Marketing campaigns like a trade show are not modeled as a lead source causing entry into a structured sales funnel managed by a B2B salesperson, but as a driver of buyer activity that correlates to progress through the fuzzy funnel. For example, if free trial is a critical step in the new B2B buyer's evaluation of your product that correlates strongly to won deals, and 80% of the people who view your weekly webinar sign up for a free trial, then you darn sure want to get more people to watch that webinar. Instead of a deterministic, marketing campaign ROI predicated on the old lead source model, the relevant measure of marketing campaign success in the new marketing math is the correlation between campaign-specific buyer activity and progress through the fuzzy funnel.

The New Impulsive B2B Buyer

The new breed of B2B buyer is more agile than its pre-millennium ancestor. Cheap and easy access to online information about products and services enables flexibility in the new B2B buying process the same way the elimination of setup costs enable flexibility in manufacturing. When the up-front cost of purchase-related information was high, the pre-millennium B2B buyer was forced to orchestrate a rigid, deterministic B2B buying process that ensured the investment required to execute the process itself was not wasted and produced a positive result, i.e., a considered purchase with high ROI. Purchase decisions were made up front'only the vendor was unknown, budgets were established before the buying process began, requirements were collected and communicated, vendors were evaluated in tandem, and a clean vendor selection was made.

The new breed of B2B buyer does not face this constraint. Today, window shopping is cheap. In the case of most SaaS and cloud applications, the entire B2B buying process is cheap: trial is free and purchase amounts to a monthly subscription that can be canceled at any time. Instead of orchestrating a structured B2B buying process with a certain outcome, the new B2B buyer can start, stop, start again, turn around, go slow, go fast, whatever. The new B2B buying process carries no internal momentum. Purchases are motivated by near term organizational priorities and the relative urgency to solve a pressing business problem, which can turn on a dime.

Online marketers lament the waning effectiveness of email. Some even claim that email marketing is dead and spam killed it. Email may be waning for marketing communications, but it is central to the internal communications of the new impulsive B2B buyer and acts as a powerful catalyst in the new B2B buying process. The new impulsive B2B buyer can research your product online, coordinate an email conversation among all decision makers, get a basic consensus without a single meeting, and then stop dead because something else came up. Then, six months later the VP of Such-and-Such decides: 'This needs to get done yesterday!' And shoots off an email that reignites the urgency around the purchase. Next thing you know, a previously dead or unknown deal is suddenly very hot, and a purchase is made almost on first contact. Or, at least first contact to the unprepared who are not measuring, modeling and moving the new B2B buying process throughout its lifecycle.

New B2B Buyer Rule of Engagement #4 ' Lifecycle Marketing

This new rule of engagement is a natural consequence of the three earlier rules. If you are publishing valuable online content deep and wide according to Rule of Engagement #1 and measuring, modeling and moving the prospect through the new B2B buying process with that content according to Rule of Engagement #3, then you should use your measures and models to align your valuable content with the B2B buying process to optimize its impact and encourage the new B2B buyer's natural impulses. Map your content to the buyer's needs at each stage of the B2B buying process and stay engaged throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Hit-and-run marketing cannot recover the control over the B2B buying process that was consciously surrendered to the new B2B buyer by enabling efficient self-service, Rule of Engagement #2.

If your prospect is actively engaged in a B2B buying process, then lifecycle marketing simply amounts to serving up the right information at the right time to keep things moving along quickly and efficiently, e.g., how to get up and running on a free trial after sign-up or where to see a video case study for a similar customer. But, if your prospect gets distracted by other priorities and stuck in the middle of the B2B buying process or worse isn't even aware there is a need or a solution in the first place, then lifecycle marketing is about breaking the status quo and creating a sense of urgency. Unlike its rigid pre-millennium ancestor, the new impulsive B2B buyer is open, flexible and in a hurry. A compelling new idea can shift priorities and drive reallocation of budget away from lesser concerns and toward your solution.

At a minimum, marketing engagement throughout the entire customer lifecycle from latent pain to repurchase ensures you are there to capitalize on it when the new impulsive B2B buyer switches gears. At a maximum, you have the potential to nurture that impulsiveness to accelerate purchase. Inbound marketing or simply getting found by a prospect is not enough. Once you are found, you must engage with that prospect frequently and consistently throughout the entire customer lifecycle, because if you don't, your competitors will, and what is easily found can be just as easily lost.

New B2B Buying Process Tech Tip

Lead Scoring and Beyond

Great Joel. You tell me that the new B2B Buyer Rules of Engagement say I must not only map my content to the new B2B buying process, but I must also serve it up at the right time to the right buyer persona to move the new B2B buyer along on the random walk to purchase. But, you don't tell me how!! Well, I'm not going to tell you exactly how, because I don't think anyone in the B2B marketing community, SaaS, cloud or otherwise has this down to a science. If your marketing automation vendor tells you they do, then they are lying. But, I can tell you how to think about it.

Most B2B marketing automation tools today offer some version of lead scoring. The basic idea behind most lead scoring methodologies is to measure B2B buyer attributes and activities, such as prospect industry, free trial registration, visited the pricing page, watched a video, downloaded a white paper, etc. Then, you assign some value to each one of these things to tally up a lead score, e.g., 35 for the free trial, 5 for the right industry, etc and you set a threshold at which a lead becomes qualified and ready for follow up by a sales rep.

This is all well and good, but how do you decide on the value of a specific buyer activity, especially if you have no history to work with? Here is the answer. You first have to decide what you are trying to predict. For lead scoring you might choose to predict the probability that the deal will close. Or, you might choose to predict a more intermediate metric along the fuzzy funnel like the probability that a sales rep will deem the lead qualified. Either way, you are using the new marketing math where your lead score measures some degree of progress through the fuzzy funnel.

Once you know what you want to predict, the output variable, you must then select the best predictors of that outcome, the input variables, and assign a higher value to those inputs that you believe have the most influence, or in terms of our fuzzy funnel terminology, the highest correlation to the outcome. You also want to avoid choosing inputs with lots of overlap to avoid double counting the same basic behavior, e.g., pricing page views and shopping cart abandonment occurring on the same website visit.

How you go about creating your lead scoring algorithm is as much art as science, particularly today because the tools do not give you much help. If you have no historical data, you just need to guess, watch and guess again. If you have lots of historical data, then you can go so far as to create a true statistical model of the fuzzy funnel. For example, a sound statistical approach to lead scoring would be to run a logistic regression to determine the most relevant buyer activities for predicting a qualified lead or won deal and the exact relative weights of each predictor. Frankly, with sufficient historical data to work with a decent marketing automation tool ought to be able to do this for you.

Qualified lead is just one B2B buying process metric you might want to predict. What about won deal? What about deal size? What about upsell potential? What about cancellation? While most marketing automation tools today lock into a rather lead-centric view of the B2B buying process with the main goal being a clean hand-off of marketing leads to sales, the general idea of the fuzzy funnel has no such limitations. With sufficient historical data, any relevant metric that represents progress through the fuzzy funnel at any point within the entire lifecycle of the B2B buying process can be estimated using its most highly correlated buyer activities as predictors. Those buyer activities then become the focal points of marketing investment to create campaigns that nudge the new elusive, impulsive B2B buyer through the blurry B2B buying process.

Landing Pages are Experiences, Not Just Communications

Possibly one of the most challenging transformations underway in marketing is a fundamental shift in what the marketer delivers to prospects and customers. Up until recently, the marketer has been responsible for delivering communications. It's been a job that largely revolved around the verb 'say.' Here's what we say to our audience to inform them, compel them, and stir their imagination.

There was often physical and temporal distance between those communications vehicles delivered by the marketer and the actual customer experience, which transpired somewhere further down the road.

But digital has disrupted the ability to cleanly separate communications from experiences. As soon as someone starts interacting with your web site ' or your landing pages ' on a laptop, a smartphone, or a tablet, they are now having an experience with you. It's not just what your web and mobile pages say, it's how they behave. Are they a pleasure to interact with, or are they frustrating in their user experience? Do they feel like a service powered by modern technology, provided by an organization that has embraced the future for the betterment of their customers, or do they feel dated, underpowered, and out of touch?

Those impressions ' especially at the crucial touchpoints when a prospect is first getting to know you ' define your brand in the eyes of your audience.

It's no longer enough to just 'say' the right thing. Marketers must now do the right right thing by incorporating those messages into a more complete experience.

Landing pages are an excellent example of this shift from say to do. Old-style landing pages that would merely communicate a few bullet points and expect the visitor to then take the next action in the context of a generic experience seem older and more tired than ever. New-style landing pages, that are designed as experiences from conception through execution ' providing interaction, personalization, deeper content beyond a single page, application-like features, and a more continuous flow from step to step ' seem light years ahead in comparison.

These new-style landing pages are the first part of the customer experience journey. If you can do, not just say, you can wield them as a powerful marketing tactic to delight your audience and build your brand from the first click onward.

The Truth Behind Technical Writing: 6 Secrets High-Dollar Technical Writers Don't Tell You

Have you been searching for a technical writer to help you reorganize and repackage complex information? Are you having a tough time putting complicated information into words your customers can understand? Need to facilitate better communications between your business and other professionals? That's where technical writers come in. There are all sorts of freelance technical writers ready to help you make your technical information easier to manage.

Technical writers have a few aces up their sleeve that they won't tell clients about. There's a certain 'mystery' to technical writers and what they actually do, and having a better understanding of what you need and what qualifications your content deserves will help you make a more informed decision when hiring a technical writer. Technical writers are valuable assets, but one size certainly doesn't fit all when it comes to finding the right person.

Here are six little-known facts about the Technical Writing profession'facts you need to know to make the most out of your time with a technical writer.

Technical Writing Is More Common Than You Think!!

It's a common misconception that 'technical writing' is reserved for mathematics, computers, and advanced sciences. Technical writing includes everything from advanced reports and studies in computational and scientific fields, educational manuals, environmental science reports, and even further into things like instruction manuals, customer help resources, and business reports. Not all technical writing is about technology'recipes are one example of non-technical technical writing.

If you need someone that can parse complex information into words that non-technical individuals can understand, you need a technical writer. A classic example of common technical writings would be the 'Dummies' book series, like 'Microsoft Word for Dummies,' or 'Cooking for Dummies.' Technical writing explains what makes sense to some of us, to the rest of us. Nothing terribly complex about that, is there?

Technical Writers Bridge the Gap between SME's and Everyone Else

No writer can produce written material in a vacuum, and this especially applies to technical writers. When technical writers are researching and assembling information, they refer to Subject Matter Experts (SME's) in the field for vital details and critical information. SME's have information that people need to know, and technical writers specialize in organizing their material, anticipating that need for detailed information, and reaching out to experts ahead of time.

The ability to cross that chasm and bring highly trained experts together with laymen consumers and clients is why technical writers are so incredibly valuable in today's society. As our world becomes more complex, we need people that not only understand it, but can help others understand it as well. Not only do technical writers work with SME's, they can also become an SME in their field. If your business and your content marketing hinges on your own good reputation and extensive knowledge, becoming an SME is great for social media marketing.

Technical Writers Capitalize On Being Thorough

In order to help non-technical people understand technical concepts, technical writers have to be organized. I'm not talking having separate slots for ingoing mail and outgoing mail on their desk, either. Technical writers have to handle complex information and figure out how to present it logically, in ways that make sense and can be easily followed.

Advanced science is about as clear as mud to most people. A good technical writer could walk an untrained layperson through not only the technical properties and findings of advanced scientific findings, but they can also explain the significance and meaning that these results have on the field, and on the reader. Being organized enough to identify and catalog each step and each individual finding is an absolute necessity.

Technical Writers Understand their Audience

This holds true for all kinds of writers, but especially technical writers. When documenting an assignment, technical writers have to consider the level of understanding their readers will have for the materials they're reading.

If a technical writer is producing scientific materials for a scientific community, they might use advanced jargon and technical language with the presumption that their audience will naturally understand it. If a technical writer is producing the same scientific materials for consumers or non-technical individuals, they might tone the writing down and use more familiar, non-technical terminology, or they might provide a wealth of footnotes and a thorough glossary of terms and their definitions.

Docsymmetry's 'Audience Analysis the Easy Way' breaks the technical writing audience analysis process down into easily understood concepts, and is definitely worth taking a look at.

There Are Different Kinds of Technical Writers

The ability to relate to different audiences is why not all technical writers are created equal. Some may specialize in parsing information for nontechnical audiences. Others may specialize in advanced documentation and composition. Knowing the distinction can help save you time, money, and headaches when choosing a technical writer that suits your needs.

What's more, some technical writers don't even write! Many technical writers act as editors, reviewing material produced by actual professionals and helping them organize and clarify their writings. Other technical writers specialize in content generation, where they are the primary author and researcher.

Good Technical Writers Use Content Marketing Techniques

Last but not least, technical writers understand the value of text formatting, spacing, and emphasis. Good technical writers can divide their writings into more easily-understood blocks of material by using emphasized lines, subheadings, visual layout cues and other tricks content marketers use. Technical writers know they have the same tools and skills content marketers do, and some jokingly move over to 'the dark side' for extra work.

Technical writers understand the value of making online content easier to read'partly because it makes sense and helps outline logical thought progressions, and also because it's their job!

These facts aren't necessarily something technical writers hide from their clients. They're just a part of the job, and more often than not, technical writers take these points for granted. Technical writers are valuable assets for B2B copywriters and SEO content marketers because they can produce highly valuable, highly accessible content that can do everything. Good technical content can boost search engine results, give your business an authoritative edge over the competition, answer customer questions, and provide valuable knowledge for anyone looking for it.

If you're in need of a technical content writing service, hire someone that actually cares about your company and your needs first and foremost!!

Build a Content Marketing Calendar, Customers Will Come

There's someone I'd like you to meet! My biggest frenemy in the world: Procrastination. Oh wait, you two have already met? Of course you have, procrastination gets around, am I right? And, when it comes to content marketing, getting involved with procrastination is an intense whirlwind relationship full of stress, guilt and shame. Meanwhile, customers are eagerly awaiting our educational emails, super sales, bangin' blog posts and shareable social updates. So how can we retain and gain new customers, yet kick that no-good procrastination to the curb? Meet a much better catch: The content marketing calendar.

We know producing quality content is at the core of keeping our customers engaged, buying, liking, talking and subscribing. But oh, how do we find the time! It's pretty simple if/and when you create a calendar. Organization is power! Build a content marketing calendar and customers will come.

Here's how:

Make decisions
First, decide what type of content you're going to wow your customers with. Will you  create promotional emails, newsletters, videos, blog posts, Twitter and/or Facebook updates? Write down every type of 'content' you want or need to produce, plus how often you'll publish or send it. This will give you a better understanding of how and when you want to communicate with your audience.

Get cookin'
Determining content type is fine and dandy, but cooking up content topics may cause a slip up with procrastination. Set up weekly, monthly or quarterly editorial brainstorm sessions, whether it's with yourself or members of your team, and get creative! Do some pre-brainstorm research, create charts, doodle, scope out competitors, feed off each other's ideas and stir up enough content ideas that'll hold you over until next time. No one wants to eat a half-cooked cake (or read a frantically whipped up blog post), so don't leave your brainstorm session until your content calendar is bursting with juicy ideas.

At VerticalResponse, we have quarterly brainstorm sessions for our marketing blog, weekly sessions for the VR Buzz newsletter, and daily ones for our social posts. The longer the content takes to produce (blog post vs. tweet), the earlier you should plan ahead. Once you have your ideas, place them into a content calendar so you don't forget them.

Shoot: (and set a) goal!
Once you've decided on desired content types and ideas, give yourself frequency goals: I will update Twitter twice a day, I will send an email newsletter twice a month, I will write a blog post three times a month, etc. Once you've determined your content and frequency goals, it's time to get crafty and put them into play!

Pick a tool, any tool
Simply put, use whatever's easiest. At VR, we rely heavily on Google Calendars and Google Docs. A simple Excel sheet or Word doc, even your email calendar (Outlook or iCal) will easily suffice, as well. We've also recently discovered a handy project management tool called Basecamp that allows you to create projects, to-do lists and assign them to people. Anything that's been assigned with a deadline automatically shows up in a calendar ' snazzy.

Be a mastermind
Create one mega master calendar featuring all of your content: email campaigns, blog posts, social posts, etc. Once everything's laid out, analyze. Are any of your emails overlapping? Are you sending too much/too little? Is it possible for you to produce this much content? These are questions that'll instantly be answered with a master calendar in place. The Content Marketing Institute also suggests to keep the following in mind:

• Track key dates such as events, holidays or other things that may impact which content you want to share and when. If you have an international audience, include holidays in the various countries you serve as well.

• Include a brief overview of all of the content that is planned by content type.

• Looking at all of your key dates and planned topics can give you ideas for topics and help you think about how you can re-purpose content in multiple sources. For instance, if you have a new guide or case study planned, you can plan one or a series of blog posts around that. Or, if you have an event, you can plan to develop an eBook based on the top 30 takeaways from the event. Seeing the calendar at a glance helps these connections jump out more easily ' and helps you remember which dates to avoid.

Once you've created a master plan, create mini-calendars per platform ' blog, email, social, etc. At VR, we keep track of blog posts and email campaigns in the same Google Calendar; however, we manage and schedule our social posts elsewhere (VR Social hint, hint).

Here's an example of our master calendar (Google Calendar) including emails, blog posts and even 'splash pages' we feature on our website:

Here's an example of the VR Buzz newsletter calendar in Google Docs (as featured above with Ryan Gosling) broken up by quarter, week and audience:

Make deadlines for deadlines
When I worked in advertising, I had to manage and keep track of hundreds of clients and their deadlines. Do you think I ever gave my clients their real deadline? No way José. As much as we love to think people will stick to deadlines, they simply don't. This is why you need to give others (and yourself!) deadlines for your deadlines. Marking faux deadlines on your content calendars will also keep things perfectly in check' It'll be our little secret.

Gain an entourage
Just because you created a content calendar doesn't mean you have to manage it. Is someone in your company super-organized, has great attention to detail (and is a little bit bossy? ' hmm, no wonder my director chose me to manage our blog!) Perfect. Put them in charge of managing your content calendars and deadlines, even if it means they'll be after you. Also know that you don't need to produce content all by yourself. Recruit a team of writers, or even consider a freelancer. Knowing you have an entourage of content creators will also justify the importance of maintaining a content calendar and adhering to it ' more people to count/rely on!

Stick to it
Remember when we set goals? Here's where we stick to them! Producing content may seem daunting, but think of all that revenue, exciting engagement and possible new prospects you'll gain once that content is out there! Keeping your goals will be much easier and way more rewarding especially with a concise and organized content calendar. And remember, stay strong ' procrastination doesn't even deserve you.

Have content marketing calendar tips and tactics of your own? Spill it!

• Also, check out our CEO, Janine Popick, as she shows you how to plot out social media and email updates on a calendar for an event: 4 Quick Ways to Make the Most out of Email & Social.

Colleen Corkery is a Lifecycle Marketing Coordinator at VerticalResponse. Connect with her on Twitter at @youcollme.

How to Conquer 3 of Your Most Limiting Career Fears

Whether you're looking to start your own business, are a recent college grad looking to embark on a more traditional career path, or are un(der)-employed and looking for a fresh start, we all face the same obstacles. Three of them, in fact ' and they hold us back from finding the job of our dreams, embarking on the career that will finally fulfill us or working towards creating the startup we've always wished for.

Obstacle #1: Fear of Failure

The vast majority of us (especially women) consistently and unequivocally grew up trying not to fail. In class, on the field and in relationships, we heard one message loud and clear: failure is bad. You avoided an F on an exam like it was the black plague, only tried out for the sports teams you thought you had a relatively good chance of making, and have likely ' at one point or another ' compromised yourself in the context of a relationship just to avoid failure.

However, failure is a necessary step on the path to success. It allows you to push past your comfort zone and find the true limits of your success without regard to what you think those limits may be. As Michael Jordan once said, 'I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.'

In careers, our fear of failure is present when we don't apply for a job because we're not sure we're qualified (that's why there are applications, you're not supposed to know) or when we put our brilliant startup idea on the back burner because it may not work out (most don't, that's part of the process).

To get over this fear, ask yourself one thing: 'What's the worst that can happen?' Moreover, you need to write down all of the ways you could possibly fail and what exactly that would look like. Every. Single. One. You may think that writing it all down and thinking it all through is a defeatist way of embarking on a career, but it's quite the opposite. In addressing all of your fears, you will realize that even if every single one of them comes true, it wouldn't be that bad. The fear of failing will not only become more manageable, but also likely become less palpable than your fear of regret. From here, you'll be well on your way to the job of your dreams.

Obstacle #2: Pursuit of Perfection

In working so diligently not to fail, many of us have become obsessed with perfection. When I was first launching TheBeautyBean.com, I was intent on it being perfect. I remember meeting Lewis Howes at a sports networking event prior to launch and he said something like, 'What are you waiting for? Done is better than good.' I resisted, sure that I knew best and that perfect was precisely what I was going to launch with.

Three years later I can say two things: first, Lewis was completely right (sorry about that!) and second, nothing is ever perfect. When we let go of the idea of perfection and embrace the mantra, 'progress, not perfection,' we are able to take chances, knowing that a step forward is better than waiting around.

Perfect doesn't exist. It never will. And while you're sitting around waiting for it, someone else is making progress. Don't worry too much about figuring out exactly what you want to do with your life right now. It will change. Often! Instead, take a step in the right direction.

Obstacle #3: Fear of Quitting

'No one likes a quitter' ' or so they say. Well, they are wrong. Quitting is actually great, if you do it correctly. As Seth Godin has said, 'You should quit if the project you're working on has a Dip that isn't worth the reward at the end.' If that's the case, it's to your best advantage to quit often and quit fast.

One of the most limiting lessons that many of us have internalized is this idea that once we've already put a lot of work into something, we should see it through to the end. However, if you know something is going to fail (which isn't a bad thing) or if you just aren't enjoying it anymore, then the work you've already put in is a sunk cost. It's done; it's time you're never getting back. Accept this and move on, because the more time you continue to put in to pursuing something that won't come to fruition ' either due to your lack of passion or possibility ' the more time you're wasting.

Remember: failure is essential, perfection is overrated, quitting is smart.

Alexis Wolfer is working to empower women and promote confidence through beauty as the founder and editor-in-chief of TheBeautyBean.com, a television host/on-air expert, and a Real Beauty activist.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world's most promising young entrepreneurs. In partnership with Citi, the YEC recently launched #StartupLab, a free virtual mentorship program that helps millions of entrepreneurs start and grow businesses via live video chats, an expert content library and email lessons.

photo by: The U.S. Army

Top 10 Mind Mapping Productivity Tips for Content Marketing Success

Mind mapping is a content marketing productivity tool that involves both an approach and a specific category of software.

Mind mapping adds a visual dimension to words and ideas, helping content marketers handle today's challenges of complexity, increased responsibilities, and information overload.

A recent study by Innovation Trend's Chuck Frey, for example, revealed that not only did mind mapping immediately and significantly enhance most user's productivity, the more they used mind mapping, the more productive they became.

Key mind mapping features

Regardless of the software you choose, mind mapping key features allow you to visually display information in ways that make it easy for you to gain a fresh perspective, sparking new ideas, encouraging collaboration, and breaking complex projects into manageable tasks. Mind mapping permits you to:

• View as much, or as little, information as desired: You can collapse a mind map to just display the main topics, or expand the map and zoom in to reveal subtopics containing more details. A plus sign (+) next to a topic indicates the presence of subtopics. Clicking a minus sign (-) collapses a topic or subtopic.
• Export your work: After organizing your content ideas for an article, mind map, or white paper, you export it to other software programs for editing, formatting, and sharing. These include word processors, spreadsheets, presentation programs, and project management programs.

What can you do with mind maps?

Here are some of the types of content marketing tasks that mind maps can help you efficiently execute on a day-to-day basis:

• Analyzing and tracking your competition
• Creating buyer personas
• Planning editorial calendars
• Delegating editorial responsibilities
• Brainstorming article and blog post topics
• Organizing complex projects (eBooks, reports, white papers, etc.)

Mind mapping best practices

Unfortunately, many mind mapping users fail to take advantage of the full capabilities built into their software. The following best practices, however, can take your mind mapping to the next level.

With few exceptions, you can use the majority of these tips with most of the mind mapping software programs on the market.

1. Start with a sketch. Before starting to work on your computer, create a hand-drawn sketch showing the major topics you want to address in your map.
2. Use templates to save time. It's always tough to start a new mind mapping project when you are staring at a blank screen. Instead, start by developing templates for the types of projects you will likely be creating over and over again ' like articles, blog posts, editorial calendars, personas, press releases, presentations, speeches, webinars, or white papers. This gives you a structure, or head start, to begin your work. Templates also foster consistency across all your content efforts.
3. Brand your maps. Customize your mind maps using consistent backgrounds, borders, typefaces, line, fill, and typeface colors that are used throughout your firm's corporate identity. You can also brand your maps by choosing different borders and by adding map titles, copyright information, or your firm's name to the headers and footers of your map.

1. Use Notes to reduce clutter. Avoid including too much detail in topics and subtopics by limiting them to just key words and phrases. To help you, you can use the Notes feature available in most mind mapping tools to add the more detailed information you'll need in sentences, paragraphs, and lists. A small icon in your mind map will indicate the presence of a Note associated with a topic, and clicking the icon or running the mouse pointer over the icon reveals the Notes text. (The text will appear in the proper location when you export your map to Microsoft Word, or another software program.)
2. Add comments for reminders. The Comments feature is similar to Notes. Use it to add reminders, prompts, or warnings to topics without adding clutter. Comments are especially important when sharing maps with others.
3. Take advantage of keyboard shortcuts. Use keyboard shortcuts to navigate from topic to topic, show/hide subtopics, add new topics, add links, or edit and format text. Keyboard shortcuts eliminate the need to remove your hands from the keyboard to open menus and select commands or options. Though there might be a slight learning curve while getting used to your keyboard shortcuts, it should soon become second nature to you. (And if you want to create some customized shortcuts for your favorite tasks, consider using a tool like Alfred.)
4. Explore View options. In addition to collapsing and expanding topics, the better mind mapping software programs allow you to temporarily display one topic at a time, along with the subtopics associated with it. This reduces distraction and focuses your attention on a particular topic or task by displaying it at a larger size.

1. Make it visual! Most mind mapping programs include icons and simple graphics that you can insert to emphasize importance, delegate responsibilities, and display progress. You can also use boundaries and relationships to topics. Powerful mind mapping software programs, like MindManager 12 for Windows, allow you to add start dates and due dates to topics, to help organize your thought process and strategic planning.

1. Filter your maps. Filtering permits many mind mapping programs to offer scheduling and project management capabilities. You can filter on the basis of keywords, dates, or icons. For example, you can hide all completed projects, or just display overdue projects, projects with upcoming deadlines, or only projects assigned to specific individuals.
2. Take your mind maps with you. Mind mapping isn't just for the desktop: Mobile versions of most mind mapping programs allow you to start projects and update them using your smartphones, iPads, and Android devices.

Sharing & collaborating ' Mind mapping trends

Mind maps are intended to be shared. You can export mind maps as static documents or, in some cases, as interactive PDFs. Reader programs are generally available to allow you to share your mind maps with those not currently using a mind mapping program.

More and more mind mapping programs are intended to be stored online, using proprietary cloud-based services, like Mindjet Connect or independent services such as Dropbox.

These services permit you to determine who has access to your stored maps and who can update them. You can also sync maps, so that the latest version of your project-planning templates or content marketing editorial calendar will always be available to your co-workers and clients.

Many mind mapping software programs permit you to track changes made by individual participants, and some even permit others to contribute to or update mind maps in real time. This allows remote participants in an online planning session to help you brainstorm new ideas. New topics and ideas are color-coded and tagged with the name, date, and time of the updates.

Getting started with mind mapping

Most mind mapping programs offer 'try before you buy' options, allowing you to download and use a full-featured program for up to a month. (After that, you can read the maps you've created, though you wouldn't be able to export or modify them.)

Many mind mapping software publishers, such as Mindjet, offer unlimited free versions of their software programs for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

Some powerful mind mapping programs, such as Mindo and iThoughts HD, are available for iPads for purchase at a fraction of the cost of equivalent desktop programs. These can create and export maps in formats that can be read by programs from other software publishers.

If you're not already a mind mapping user, getting started has never been easier.

Do you use mind maps?

If you're currently a mind map user, share some of your experiences. Tell us how you use mind maps, the programs you use, and the lessons you've learned. Let us know if you have any advice, shortcuts, or content marketing productivity tips you'd like to share with newcomers to mind mapping.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Performance Pitfalls, Part II: When Managers Don't Want to Know the Details

It's not enough to announce to your staff, 'Just get it done!'

Because either they will or they won't.

If a manager doesn't communicate specifically enough, with a real understanding of how the job gets done in the real world, then it's unlikely that the job will get done. And when the manager wonders why not, the staff will honestly say that they either weren't told or didn't understand what was wanted.

If the staff does understand what's being asked of them, the job may get done, but not necessarily in the way that the demanding, big-picture-no-details manager meant or wanted.

Consider the following two actual situations:

1. 'Just Make the Numbers'Too much pressure to meet certain sales figures means that a nervous rep holds back sales leads from Friday's processing because she's nervous that she won't get enough leads next week.

   Net result: The rep appears to make her numbers week after week and her reported average remains beautifully consistent, but up to 15% of her customers are fulfilled late, start their program late, and are ultimately less satisfied and less likely to renew than customers who were processed and started on time. Because the business pays commissions on all the rep's sales, it never recoups the marketing investment on the 15%. Not to mention that some of those dissatisfied customers may be sharing their unhappiness with other potential customers.

   Is this really the result the manager wanted?

2. 'Just Figure Out How to Work Together On It'An office assistant is temporarily assigned to another department's project as part of a budget rationalization. The supervisor of the project doesn't actually want this assistant on his project, based on his prior negative experience of her work. The senior executive thinks it's obvious that human hours are effectively fungible units, so she doesn't bother to attend the planning meeting that is supposed to orchestrate a smooth staff transfer between the two departments involved.

   Net result: The needy project suffers extra errors and slowdowns. The staff members in both units are upset and resentful, which affects all their other work negatively as well. Interdepartmental information flows are also affected in other tangentially related parts of the organization.

   Is this really the result the senior executive expected?

Unintended Consequences Out in the World

In this past Sunday's New York Times' 'The Haggler' column (which I love, and if you care about service you should be reading it, too), writer David Segal described a terrible practice that has been in force at Staples, the office products giant. Segal's emphasis was on the horrible experience for the affected customers, but I was struck by how employees were driven to commit ridiculous, counterproductive behaviors because of structural fiats.

Floor associates in the Staples stores who could not 'get the job done,' which, in this case, meant selling an average of $200 worth of add-on products with every computer purchased, were encouraged by their local management to 'walk the customer' ' that is, to act as if the desired computer was not in stock and let the customer leave the store disappointed or even aggrieved so as not to negatively affect their incentive goals.

So What Do You Mean?

If you're a manager who's working in an organization where 'just get it done' is the operative phrase, and you yourself haven't taken any action to help or change the situation, then there isn't much hope that it will change ' you're just waiting to be lucky. If your staff knew how to do it the way you want it done, and how to get the results you intend, they'd already be doing it.

Are there practices in your organization that force employees to 'just get it done' in ways that create unnecessarily negative unintended consequences?

How to Fake a Two Directional Bar Chart in Excel

Excel has lots of charting options. Line charts, bar charts, scatter plots, pie charts and oh, so much more. But it doesn't have this chart.

This is a nice chart for showing two values for many different variables. It's easy to read with the labels listed vertically and it fills a page nicely without being overwhelming.

Here are the tricks of the trade. You can see everything that I've done in the image here so it's easy to follow along.

First, put together the three columns of data ' the labels, the first score, the second score. Second, copy out the equation that you see in the Excel menu bar

=REPT('g',D5*2)

REPT: Excel will repeat a value a certain number of times

'g': The value Excel is going to repeat. Notice that the font I'm using in that particular cell is webdings. You might have to use a different font to generate the same result but you're looking for any character that is a really wide fat box.

D5*2: This is how many times Excel is going to repeat the value. In the case of the highlighted cell, Excel is going to duplicate the g value 4.4 times 2. If you find your bar is too long, instead of multiplying by 2, trying dividing by 2.

To remind your reader of what's going on, colour in green the column that reflects the good thing and colour in red the column that reflects the bad thing. Well, now that I look at it, perhaps the yum column ought to be in green!

At this point, you can either copy paste the cells directly into powerpoint or word, or create a screencapped image and paste it anywhere. Enjoy!

7 Ways to Organize Your Content for Curation

Organizing your content is a powerful way to surface up older content to give it a greater shelf life and help your audience discover more relevant materials. Whether you are curating or creating content as a part of your content strategy, the organization of content plays a powerful role in adding context and making content evergreen.

Why organization is important

As more marketers publish more content, organization plays a greater role. Let's say you curate 10 pieces of content a day. In a year, you may easily publish more than 3,000 pieces of content. Now that you have such a large volume of content, you can surface up that content to your readers in interesting ways, through intelligent organization.

Let's take a look at a few outstanding ways that marketers are organizing their content online, with real world examples of what it looks like.

1. Tagging

Tags are a common way to create a simple, non-hierarchical taxonomy of your content. Tags are simply keywords and phrases that are associated with each piece of content. For a single piece of content, they let the audience quickly understand the important concepts captured in the content. In aggregate, they provide a powerful way to spot recent trends by viewing the most popular tags.

Below is an example of a tag cloud from MarketComPR's blog that shows that Marketcom and communications are the two most popular topics on the site in the past week. The audience can then quickly click on a tag to drill down and discover more content associated with that tag:

2. Grouping

Grouping your related content together serves two purposes: First, it helps reduce screen clutter by bringing together similar content. Secondly, grouping helps allows readers to quickly other perspectives about the same issue.

One example of well-organized content that leverages grouping is on Google News. For example, in the image below we can see how Bain Capital is portrayed by Fox News, Huffington Post, and other publications all in a single view.

3. Recommendations

A great way to get people to consume additional content is to offer recommendations based on their previous content consumption patterns. Companies like Netflix and Amazon employ sophisticated collaborative filtering algorithms that deliver personalized recommendations to every user.

In the screenshot below, Netflix recommends that I may like 'King of the Hill' based on my interest in several 'Futurama' movies.

As a marketer, there are two approaches you can take to provide similar recommendations. The first is to use readily available marketing products, such as Curata (disclosure: Curata is my company's product) or plug-ins like AdKnowledge that can analyze thousands of documents on your blog or that you have curated or written in the past, and use an algorithm to offer recommendations.

A simpler (but less reliable) approach that you can use if you only have a limited number of content offierings is to monitor content consumption patterns and hard code your recommendations. For example, when you download an eBook from my company's site, based on our analysis of consumption patterns, you then are presented with the following suggestions to encourage further engagement:

4. Facets

Another technique to better organize content that is commonly employed on eCommerce sites is to provide a faceted navigation that lets readers quickly drill down to just the content in which they are interested.

In the screenshot above, found on newegg.com, you can drill into Electronics > TVs > LCD and continue to drill down by size, price, manufacturer, and so forth.

Similarly, you can use this technique on your own content repository. For example, Verne Global, a customer of ours that curates content on data centers, provides a drill down of organizations found in the news, as seen below. Simply clicking into one of these names leads you to more content about that organization.

5. Trend histograms

Google Trends displays trend histograms with illustrates the search volume and news reference volume of existing content over time.

In addition, it has special algorithms that highlight salient stories that pertain to specific topics. For example, the search volume for 'Obama' is shown below, with letters that represent key events, such as his election in 2008.

Highlighting trends through histograms is an easy way to capture a growing phenomenon within the content you have published. It also surfaces up older content, helping readers to quickly rediscover your evergreen material.

6. Topic pages

Topic pages are emerging as an easy way to organize your content by the topics that you have written about. Earlier last month, ReadWriteWeb called Topic Pages the 'next big thing'.

Sites like Quora, Pinterest, and the New York Times are built on topic pages, to name just a few examples. With topic pages, readers can quickly view all the content pertaining to a specific topic on a single page. In addition, topic pages are great for long-tail search engine optimization.

As a quick example, the Western Massachusetts Economic Development Council offers topic pages on its curated site, so visitors can quickly view content on any business leader and read their biographies.

7. Topic maps

A fun way to visually organize your content is through topic maps. In the screenshot from Silobreaker below, you can see how content is organized around the topic of fuels cells, which allows viewers to quickly navigate to related concepts and content.

Though there are not many marketing use cases of topic maps, they are a fun way to keep your audience engaged with your content.

The bottom line

As content marketing ' and content curation ' continues to grow, marketers will be publishing more and more content on behalf of their organizations.

Content curation is a three-part process of finding relevant content, organizing it, and sharing it to a broader audience. Often, most of the emphasis is placed on finding or sharing interesting content, and the organization aspect gets neglected.

However, when done correctly, smart organization strategies can help you get more mileage out of your content, and help you engage and inform your audience more successfully.

Want more content marketing inspiration? Download our ultimate eBook with 100 content marketing examples.

Asset Based Lending Facilitates Small Business Growth

Is Asset Based Lending for you? If you own a small business that needs access to working capital and you:

• Have been unable to obtain financing from a traditional bank;
• Have little or no credit history;
• Need financing more quickly than a traditional bank can provide;
• Have exceeded the credit limit set by your bank;
• Have customers who are paying beyond terms.

Then asset based lending is a great option for you. Traditional banks are no longer the only choice for business owners because asset based lenders offer flexible, customized lending packages to qualifying small businesses.

The Basics

Typically, asset based lenders (or factors) purchase a company's accounts receivables at a discount, providing the business owner with the financing they need. The assets referred to in the term 'asset based lending' could be any asset, but more commonly the term refers to those assets not typically utilized in traditional loans. This could be commercial accounts receivables, inventory, purchase orders, or any combination of these and other like assets. Most often, funds are received in the form of a line of credit collateralized by these assets, with the total being equal to a percentage of the assets being collateralized. The interest rates are generally higher because the lender is assuming a higher level of risk than a traditional bank, but interest is only paid on funds drawn. For many businesses, the increase in interest rate is worth it for quick and flexible availability of funds. These types of loans are becoming quite common and are available from various sources, including Triton Financial Solutions.

How It Helps

Asset based lending can help a small business grow in many ways. Unfortunately, a business can be hindered before ever getting started because it cannot afford growth opportunities when they occur. For example, if a new business were to get a larger order than is typical, one of two things can happen. It could fill the order, reap the profits, reinvest these profits into the business, and continue to take larger and larger orders. The opposite of this scenario would be that they have to turn down the order due to the lack of funds needed to order the necessary inventory, materials, etc. In this scenario, the vicious cycle continues and growth is continually stunted. However, with an asset based loan, the business owner would have access to funds from the line of credit and easily be able to fill the order and thus live out the first scenario.

Another possibility is that a small business is presented with the opportunity to buy out another existing business and absorb it into itself, thus growing by taking in the other business's customers. Without the available cash flow, this may not be possible. However, the ability to draw on an asset based line of credit could allow for the buyout and facilitate the growth of the business.

Other Uses

Of course, these funds can be used for many other reasons. They are frequently used as an advance on receivables or sales (collateralized by commercial receivables and/or inventory) to handle day-to-day finances. They can also bridge any cash flow gaps due to seasonal market changes or a period of high growth with less cash reserves on hand. In today's market, traditional loans are simply not an option for many small business owners for various reasons. Asset based lending offers a practical alternative to help support growth when needed.

3 Carmakers Embracing Brand Stories

My first car was a gray 1987 Honda Accord LXi hatchback. Well, it was actually a two-toned gray, since I never bothered to get the replacement panels painted after a fender bender (primer gray was close enough).

I bought the car using the money I earned scooping ice cream and washing dishes at Brigham's restaurant the two years before. It was a stick shift, and since I didn't know how to drive a stick yet, my mom had to test-drive it as I sat in the passenger seat. I remember that test-drive vividly. Supposedly it had great gas mileage and shifted like butter. I didn't pay much attention. I was on cloud nine because I knew this would be my car, and I was dreaming of the possibilities.

I owned it for three great years, and boy, I could tell you some stories. Eventually the car broke down one too many times, and it wasn't worth it to fix. My mom took a picture of the car as it was driven away on a flatbed. I still have that picture somewhere.

Our lives are filled with material things often sold to us by faceless corporations with which we share no real emotional relationship. Many of these products are mundane and simply serve a need. Paper towels, milk, breath mints'it's hard to create strong bonds between brand and consumer. But consumers have a connection to their cars that they have with few other products.

Our cars define a certain time in our lives. They transport us to family vacations, first dates or that night out with friends that turned into an adventure.

Our cars become an integral part of our lives, to a point where we depend on them as we do on our coworkers, friends and family. We know their interiors like the backs of our hands, exactly when they're going to switch gears and all their little idiosyncrasies. Let's face it: we even name them.

Stories from brand advocates are incredibly powerful. We (as consumers) trust online opinions of complete strangers more than we trust any form of editorial content or advertising. So it's no wonder that brands like Volkswagen, Toyota and Subaru all have gone beyond just planting tweets and Facebook comments on billboards and have launched digital platforms with which to aggregate their customers' stories.

Let's take a look:

1. Volkswagen

After knocking it out of the park with its 2011 Super Bowl commercial, 'The Force', to the tune of nearly 55 million views, the German automaker has committed to unearthing the brand stories of its owners in a project called Why VW?. The site, which features a matrix of content spaces that include videos and articles, allows owners to add their stories about 'where they've been and where they're headed.' Currently it features some impressive tales, including one about an Argentinean man who drove his 1981 Beetle from Ushuaia, Argentina, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, as well as a very smart sponsorship of a UK man who plans to travel across the United States to raise awareness of Parkinson's and funds for research into the disease (VW donated two vehicles to transport his team and equipment). The page is a bit crowded with noncustomer, semi-promotional stories, but the campaign is still in its early stages; there's a lot of potential for unique, interesting owner stories to emerge.

2. Subaru

Subaru was ahead of the curve with its embrace of brand storytelling. Its brand site has featured a section called Dear Subaru that since 2009 has housed short stories by owners. The site was launched as part of a multichannel campaign across print and digital, but the story hub has lived on long after the paid media ended.

While looking somewhat dated, the site is completely owner-centric, featuring stories (including photos) submitted by Subaru owners. The only promotional portion is a section showing the print ads, all of which include real stories. Who knew they made tents for the top of your car? The site shows the enthusiasm and passion of Subaru owners as well as implicitly promotes features of the brand, like safety, durability, versatility, storage and all-wheel drive.

3. Toyota Camry

In spring 2012, Toyota launched the Camry Effect, in which Camry owners could share their stories. The site is the most robust of the three, very well designed (it was a FWA Site of the Day) and featuring numerous stories about the 'effect' Toyota Camrys have had on their owners' lives. The site does have some promotional content but weighs heavily in favor of customer stories.

This wasn't a short-lived effort, either. The digital component has been live for more than six months, and the recent TV campaign has featured real Camry owners telling their stories in their own words.

Embracing Real Stories

Auto manufacturers certainly aren't the only brands utilizing customer stories. Facebook has been gathering stories of how its almost one billion user base is using the social platform in extraordinary ways. Tumblr has taken a different approach but is still embracing storytelling from around the web using Storyboard, Tumblr editors' daily selection of the platform's best blogs and stories that has included such brand sponsors as New York Magazine.

What all this means is that brands are starting to realize why richer content, particularly emotive storytelling, is in many ways a smarter investment than simply putting all their eggs into paid advertising. These efforts aren't low budget, but we can safely assume that they cost a fraction of what a 30-second Super Bowl ad would. Plus, owned and earned media have the opportunity to work harder than paid media. Nielsen reports that the impact of a brand website is three times greater than that of a paid digital ad.

We've outlined some interesting things brands are doing with user-generated content, but the efforts of these automakers to encourage the sharing of personal stories are more likely to include brand evangelists and super-fans'those who share a brand's content most often. As we move further into the post-advertising age, brands have to be progressing to the realm of true, compelling, long-lasting storytelling.

Do you remember your first car?