4 Steps to Account Based Marketing Success

4 Steps to Account Based Marketing Success

ABM is gaining ground with many companies, especially IT companies and businesses with complex products and long sales cycles. The reality is that most B2B companies realize 80% of revenues from just 20% of their customers. Still, traditional marketing is evenly spread through out the whole customer base, generating in a great deal of wastage.


Account Based Marketing is targeted marketing to the accounts that stand for the largest potential in revenue. If you’re thinking it’s time to get started or improve your ABM, here are four steps to set you on the right path:

1. Begin by identifying your top accounts

The majority of B2B marketers fail to produce reliable lists of their top accounts. Doing so is vital. The key to getting a high ROI from AMB is understanding targeted accounts.

First and foremost, establish the business value of your accounts Identify where the largest sales potential lies  Establish where each account is in the buying journey  If they’re current accounts, understand which products they have or have not purchased

Work together with sales and finance to create a list of high-profit target customers and document the information you need. Your initial investment in this process will enable you to make smarter investments, delivering the relevant content to the right people at the right time and generate sales.

2. Create valuable content

Your ABM program will feature ads to draw target customers to content published on your website. In this age of self-serve customers, your website needs to offer a much heavier dose of useful content relative to its sales pages.
You need a content marketing plan that becomes a roadmap to consistently producing valuable content in the form of blog posts, eBooks, video, research studies, infographics and more. As you create a content marketing plan, consider the following:
An ideal way to discover your customers’ information needs is to interview them. Also, ask your best sales people to create a list of questions they’re often asked

Audit your existing content. It’s possible you have useful content in various forms that aren’t published on your website. Even content on your website could become more valuable and relevant to current needs with some updates  Create customer case studies when possible, and include industry specific references in your content Communicate big ideas to establish industry expertise and become perceived as a thought-leader

3. Use a targeted distribution platform

Target via social media. LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook advertising programs offer highly targeted advertising programs Align marketing activities such as events and email campaigns with your ABM plan Vendemore offers an ad distribution service where top accounts are targeted based on their IP address. Learn more about how to place ads on large media networks to be seen by the employees on your target list

4. Measure your marketing efforts based on accounts

With ABM tactics website visits will come from people within the companies you’re targeting. Your challenge is to measure and assess user behavior.

Record ad impressions by account Use Google Analytics to gauge traffic and record engagement metrics from top accounts Set up systems with your CRM and marketing automation enabling you to measure win rates Establish revenue per account measures Consult with analytics professionals to develop a useful formula to measure sales and marketing costs per account

Informed by the type of analytics outline here, you’ll work with your sales managers to create smart follow-up strategies to nurture and/or close deals.

ABM takes time

Be fair and understand ABM takes time to gain traction. If your sales process usually takes over six months or more, resist evaluating results after just a month or two. Gather metrics on a monthly basis, but give it at least six months before you draw any conclusions

Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – How Similar or Different are They?

Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – How Similar or Different are They?

Most people would agree that marketing has become extremely technology-intensive. IT spends in various other sectors may be paltry, but the spends by marketing on technology have remained steady, despite the sluggish economy.
Email marketing is a key component of marketing technology. Most companies may already be using it in one form or another. Another related component is marketing automation. However consumers often mention the two components in the same breath. There are even debates in the industry about marketing automation being what email marketing aspires to be. However, in reality, they are an adjacent, but comparable, bunch of tools.
Email Marketing and Marketing Automation – The overlap

• Email marketing was traditionally used to reach out to individuals, keep them informed and stay connected. Companies would purchase email databases and use an email server with the capacity of high-volume mail blasts to send out mails to those in that database. Better capabilities emerged over time including:
• The ability to get leads from alternate sources
• Management of such leads
• WYSIWYG editors to draft emails using templates
• Monitoring and analytics

Marketing automation goes a step ahead with:

• Automating email campaigns
• Not only manage but score, prioritize, and nurture leads
• Not limited to email campaigns but includes mobile and social campaigns

However, some providers and vendors of email marketing claim that they too offer these capabilities, thus confusing customers.
How they work?
All of these tools help you develop, improve, and promote leads effectively to a “marketing database.” In B2B set-ups, tools help qualify and nurture leads until the point where sales teams can engage them using CRM platforms. In the case of B2C, such platforms will likely produce specialized offers to further engagement or drive transactions. Users can segment databases into certain subsets and prioritize and engage them, depending on behavior and attributes.
What exactly do they do?
Managing leads
Marketers must understand how to manage leads and prospects. Some of the high-level capabilities that can be considered include:

• Lead acquisition
• Information management
• Lead prioritization and routing
• Lead nurturing and engagement

Managing campaigns
While email messaging is important, social campaigns are also becoming imperative. Several vendors’ social widgets aim to grab enrichable email ids so that one can continue proactively marketing to that person. The capabilities that can be included here are:

• Campaign design and management
• Campaign creation and development
• Campaign implementation
• Campaign monitoring and analysis

One area where email marketing is distinguished from marketing automation is Landing Pages. While one can consider building and managing of landing pages as an extension of campaign management, they must be examined as a distinct challenge. Some capabilities to check for are:

• Page form and creation
• Testing and optimization
• Integration of web content and experience management

While email marketing and marketing automation are equally essential in the toolkit of a digital marketer, both have significant overlaps. While email marketing vendors focus on B2C use cases, marketing automation vendors target B2B use cases. However, a fair amount of crossover is observed among subscribers sometimes.

Marketers must thus, while evaluating tools, learn what each tool does and check what best matches their requirements.

Customer Experience Lifecycle / journey

Get Ready for Customer Experience Design Now! #CXDNow

 I will be interviewing Doug Folds, the product manager for IBM’s new Journey Designer product and one of the sponsors of the show to discuss his plans for bringing the practice of Customer Experience Design into the mainstream as a #NewWayToEngage.
If you are a customer experience designer, a journey mapper, an omni-channel marketer, a startup founder, a product manager or just someone who is interested in understanding this important topic further, #CXDNow is where you will expand your knowledge and hone your skills. Over the course of the series we will develop a body of work for the community that examines the business case, the core concepts and the specific practices that will enable you to design great experiences that enable your customers to find success on their journey.
While CXD has been around for quite some time now (often referred to as simply #CX, a cousin to #UX), it is just now finally coming into it’s own, hence the name of the show, #CXDNow. The Intention is to not only address the current state of the field but also to impress upon the business community the urgency for adopting these practices NOW. Given the soon to be released book, “X – The Experience of Business Meets Design” from my friend and colleague Brian Solis, and the other increase in interest and focus on this subject from organizations like IBM and others, the time to better understand this subject is definitely upon us.
I first began exploring the idea of journey mapping while working as the Chief of eBusiness at the United States Mint back in 1999, where I was charged with digital marketing responsibilities for the numismatist community (aka coin collectors). It was there that I developed what I called the “Customer Experience Lifecycle” (below), which later lead to my development of the Engagement Matrix while working with Palm and ultimately the Engagement Wheel while working with the American Heart Association while serving as a Social Business leader at Deloitte Digital.




What I came to realize was that organizations needed to go beyond customer-centricity, especially given how much lip service had been paid to that idea over the years without practical change in attitude or action. Now as a result of our increasingly transparent, connected market, it’s time for radical action, it’s time to embrace greater empathy, not only for customers, but also for employees, contractors and partners. In fact, as I think of #CXDNow, I believe there are three primary pillars that need to be explored:

1. The business value of customer empathy
2. Design thinking applied to the overall customer experience
3. How we work together to create greater success

While each show in the series and posts to this blog will address its own set of issues, I am, as is often the case, looking at this opportunity more holistically. At the end of the series, it is my hope that we will have produced a unique collection of insights and resources that can be utilized to bring Customer Experience Design to more organizations and more opportunities to customer experience designers as a result.

how content marketing and native advertising are different, simply, practically.

Heres how content marketing and native advertising are different, simply, practically.

Here’s the difference between content marketing and native advertising at a basic scientific level.

 Native advertising makes customers look you up.
Content marketing can ‘convert’ the customers who look you up.
 That’s as basic as it gets. First up, this article applies those who;
1.  have a product/service that can make a unique claim.
2. are a B2C company.
Your ad agency tells you that 30 crores/year is a good budget to get your brand noticed. They would be absolutely right. You have one crore in hand. Naturally, you are worried.
1What if my campaign gets missed?
2What if the consumer doesn’t see what I want to show?
3What if all the money gets spent and nothing happens?
 Rule no. 1: Just because advertising is expensive, doesn’t mean that content marketing is going to come any cheap
Here are five great examples of content marketing that will tell you why it doesn’t come cheap.
1The Lego movie – obviously!
2Steve Jobs launching his products in his style: that's a 2 hour speech more powerful than any content so far known to man.
3Microsoft stories: have you visited the most persuasive story telling site in modern business history?
4Closer home – remember Kolaveri D? Catchy content that bulldozed language barriers.
5Visit Amul India’s Facebook page for a free MBA on content marketing. Yes, they do native advertising too, but Amul’s content gets shared willingly, at zero cost. Their books compiling decades of content are collector’s items.
 Rule no. 2: In content marketing, you own the media. If you’re lucky, other established media will give your content free mileage
So you have one crore in funds and you have set up all your owned content pages; such as your Facebook page, YouTube channel, Blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, Slideshare channel and even an Instagram account. You also have a media relations team that constantly tells you what kind of content you need to create and where you need to pitch it.
Can you ‘put out’ content in the above mediums that will have ‘shock’, ‘interest’, ‘remark’ value? Content that is so remarkable, that mediums with greater media outreach like television and print and online media, will write about it free of charge? Will it be shared by people willingly?
You don’t buy any external media; but you spend on strengthening your proprietary pages and channels. Simply put, you may not have enough audience to drive your content program. Therefore, you advertise on social media platforms and work to drive traffic, engagement and conversion into your platform.
Key point – don’t fire on all platforms. Choose what works for you and then build that one.
Rule no. 3: Content marketing and native advertising, both are exact sciences.
There’s a cause–effect relationship between what you do and the outcome you generate. A good campaign takes this into account. Kim Kardashian knows this; and she’s is a great content marketer. If you shock people, they will talk about you.
Pope Francis blessed thousands of Harley riders and their bikes as part of a four-day Roman holiday celebrating the company’s 110th anniversary. Harley Davidson, which claims to spend only 15% on traditional media advertising, spends 85% on creating experiences for its customers. When you create ‘communities’ united by experiences, people will talk about you!
You focus on building relationships and appeal directly to the old brain. That’s plain science.
Rule no. 4: It’s always ‘us’ versus ‘them’

You may use technology to standardise a product/service but your customer communication has to be one on one. It has to focus on human beings connecting with other human beings.
Hence, while it is important to be very focused on what you are, it’s equally important to clarify ‘what you’re not’.
Hence, never put out puzzles and ‘low IQ’ contests (what is the colour of a tomato?) on your Facebook page just to have people respond to your post. The people who know what your brand represents, and are choosing to like your page, will disrespect the content you put out and go elsewhere.
Rule no. 5: Nobody is interested. You can keep shouting!
You can’t make people listen! No one’s life changes because you don’t put out your ad. People are really good at ignoring what does not apply to them.
You may be able to figure out who’s likely to listen. Whose life is likely to change because you put out your ad. Your aim is not to entertain people, but to market your product to them in an ‘eyeball-grabbing’ and memorable way.
Content will make its way to an interested audience, provided it has ‘glue-power’.
Shock, connect (hummable tunes), innovation, community value are forms of ‘glue-power.’
In native advertising, which is extremely powerful, provided you have the budget to do it effectively, you are paying someone else to distribute your content. It works just fine, and is extremely valuable, provided it also sticks to the principles of ‘glue-power.’

Both content marketing and native advertising have their own place in the life cycle of a customer-centric organisation. Content marketing also brings in the ‘early adopters,’ who are targeted initially by companies before they launch their native advertising. They subsequently become influencers.

The Automotive Digital Marketing Pyramid

The Automotive Digital Marketing Pyramid

Before diving in, a bit of context may be helpful: the framework of this article was originally designed while I was successfully implementing a digital strategy as the Director of Digital Marketing for a 5-rooftop dealer group. I have since moved on to a marketing agency as the National Director of Automotive, and I now train our army of automotive reps on this same sequential process that I developed while working at that dealer group. This approach allows our partner dealerships to achieve the highest level of ROI while growing their digital marketing acumen.
The field of automotive digital marketing is constantly shifting. Unfortunately, without the proper strategy, success may be hard to come by. While we should all strive to be better than we are, I feel that there is, often times, a very important concept missing from the conversation between dealerships and digital marketing agencies. You don't become the best by looking for shortcuts- you become the best by building a solid foundation, properly executing the basics, and building upon early successes.

Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals. - Jim Rohn, American speaker & author

When it comes to digital marketing and advertising, there must be a logical game plan in place, and that plan must see past the end of the month (or quarter). I can tell you from experience that if you can get a meeting with a Dealer Principle or General Manager, your odds of selling a dealership the latest technological wonder goes through the roof. This is true not because they are ill-informed or because they are suckers- it's because they specialize in selling cars and not in crafting sequential, long-term marketing plans. So, with that in mind, I would like to suggest a blueprint for optimizing and growing digital performance within a dealership.
I have formed this blueprint using a pyramid model, meaning it should be tackled from the ground up, each level building upon the one that came before it. Just like a pyramid, Digital Strategy must be built on a solid foundation if there is to be any hope of success. Start with the foundation, and don't move on to more advanced techniques until the levels below it are there for support.

Base Tier of the Pyramid

The Website, & Website Optimization

Start with the website. Digital efforts typically have the goal of driving traffic to your digital storefront, so make sure that it is ready for primetime. I recommend the following:

• A responsive website design (so that it looks great to users of any screen size).
• A clean customer interface. Intuitive usability is tantamount.
• Custom content (don't rely on whatever came with the site when you signed up for it). Make sure to include strong "Why buy" statements that set you apart from the competition. Come up with a consistent content plan that will add useful information to your website that customers will actually be interested in.
• Compelling call-to-actions. Don’t overdo it! Fewer CTA’s actually lead to more conversions.
• Hosted chat (please don't attempt to handle this in-house).

Analytics & Attribution

Now is the time to install Google Analytics, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Tag Manager on your website and then learn how to use them. Take the free courses that Google offers and get your certification. This is the basis of everything that comes next since it is hard to make quality marketing and vendor decisions if you don't know how to properly analyze the data. Please, please, PLEASE don't just rely on reports that you get from your website company. They are a vendor just like the rest, and they need to be held accountable with unbiased, third-party data.
It isn’t just web traffic that needs to be analyzed for a car dealership. Also needed are both phone call and email analytics. Top-tier call tracking services will even quantify how many calls were fresh sales or service opportunities, and whether they converted. With email, use the Google URL Builder to create custom links for email campaigns so that you can track their effectiveness in your newly-created Google Analytics account.

Search Engine Optimization

Investing in SEO is investing in the future of your dealership. It takes time to do right, and helps improve the effectiveness of tactics found higher up the pyramid. Think long-term.

Second Tier of the Pyramid

Paid Search & Display

The website is ready, and your tracking mechanisms are in place - now it’s time to drive some traffic! Do not blindly sign on with whatever “preferred vendor” your manufacturer recommends. You owe it to your dealership to do some research and make your own decision, so schedule a ton of meetings, listen to all the pitches, and then pick the vendor that feels right for you. They may not even be the most qualified on-paper, but sometimes it makes sense to look at other factors (how well you work together, geographical proximity, recommendations from trusted friends in the industry, etc.). Start with simple search campaigns, and once mastered, move on to display (in that order). Also, if you can find a vendor that will work in conjunction with your SEO team, then that will lead to major gains in efficiency. Another tip is that if your dealership does direct mail (who doesn’t!), IP-targeted display advertising can greatly enhance the ROI of those mail campaigns.

Email Marketing

Let's take advantage of that email database! Some words of caution, however- please don't send an email to the entire customer database every time your sales manager is one unit away from hitting his bonus. That's a great way to lose your email database. Focus is the key, and remember that the goal of digital marketing is "right person, right message, right time."

The goal of digital marketing is right person, right message, right time.

Work that internal database, and then branch out into conquest campaigns.

Third Tier of the Pyramid

Video Advertising (AKA Pre-Roll)

Video advertising offers an excellent ROI and is very cost effective- at least it can be. It can also be a tremendous waste of time and energy if attempted too soon or without the proper creative assets. The worst part is that it’s impossible to tell which is which without the proper reporting and skill to analyze the return. Once mastered, however, pre-roll is top-notch in engaging customers and telling your own, unique story.

Social Advertising

Social advertising is still a fairly new arena, and it takes a more mature digital advertiser to make the most of it. The ROI can certainly be there, and by the time this point in the pyramid is reached, you will have a solid social footprint in place to capitalize on it. All the cool kids say this is the up-and-coming opportunity for advertisers, but don't throw away money before your digital foundation has been solidified.

Top of the Pyramid

Everything Else!

Seriously. If I haven't already listed it, save it until this part of your journey. Here's looking at you, Mobile Apps & Geo-Fencing!

In conclusion

There is no shortage of vendors, and some are absolutely amazing. Some, however, want nothing more than to pull the wool over the dealership’s eyes while collecting fat checks. Keep in mind, though- simply signing a contract will not make it successful. Your digital marketing absolutely must be strategically built on a solid foundation, one piece at a time.

How To Avoid The Pitfalls Of Marketing Automation

How To Avoid The Pitfalls Of Marketing Automation

Setting up marketing automation for your business may seem like a daunting task but it is absolutely necessary and worth it. Once you have your marketing automation software set up it can be like an ATM machine that will produce a consistent income.

What are some marketing automation pitfalls and best practices that you must know when you are just starting with the implementation of your marketing automation software? In this post we go through some do’s and don’ts that our co-founder, Trent, discussed in an interview with marketing automation expert Dan Faggella.

Your Optin Follow-Up Email Should Be Triggered As Soon As Possible

Leads get cold. People that were interested in some kind of offer or content that you had a week ago might not be so interested now. You waited too long and the interest waned.
The best practice is to immediately send a follow-up email after someone has opted in to one of your content offers. The email should contain intelligent suggestions for more of your content instead of just being a thank you note.

Marketing Automation Segmentation

Subscribers to your email list need to be segmented into categories based on what they are interested in so you can send them more of that. The different consumers of your content are going to be interested in different things. That is why you need a whole range of content offers so you can make it as a custom designed experience as far as humanly possible that is still automated but feels personal.
There are two ways that you can segment your email list. The first one is to send them more offers based on the content that they are already interested in. For example, if they requested a white paper on LinkedIn marketing you can send them an offer suggesting more content that has to do with social media marketing.
The second way to segment them is a more accurate way because you ask them to segment themselves into a category. You do this by using a drop down categorization menu on the opt-in form. So instead of asking for just a name and email you are asking for an extra piece of information. An example of this could be for them to select one of the following:

• I am a person that is looking for a new business idea.
• I am looking for a way to scale my business idea.
• I am in a corporate job and I am looking for a way to start my own business.
• I am in a corporate job and looking for ways to improve my company’s online presence and marketing.

These different categories have different needs. When you know who is reading your content and what their needs are you can give them more of what they need and move them down your sales funnel faster to see if they are a good fit for whatever you are selling.

Identify Your Closing Channel Of Communication

You need to identify which channels of communication you usually use at the end of the deal when it is time to close. All your content assets need to gently nudge your prospects in the direction of where your majority of sales come from.
It doesn’t make sense to push your prospect to an e-commerce buy page if you are selling high ticket monthly retainer consulting services. Those deals are usually closed over the phone or in person. So when you’re nudging your prospects towards the bottom of the funnel you can start mentioning an upcoming phone call or an option to schedule a meeting in your content.
If you are selling a physical product and you go and copy the marketing automation process of someone selling online services you are not going to be optimized to sell. Identify your strongest selling channel and build your marketing automation around it.

Thank You Page

What you see a lot after downloading a piece of gated content or after buying something online is a thank you page that simply says “thank you for your order” or “thank you for downloading.” A better way would be to use it as an opportunity to move prospects further down your sales funnel. Offer them more content that they might be interested in.
If you want to be aggressive after a sale you can offer an up-sell. If that is not your style ask your new customer to tweet about the product they just bought. Capitalize on their excitement after just buying something and let them help you spread the word.

Don’t Send “We’re Still Alive” Newsletters

You see this pretty often, companies that have nothing to say sending out the same spammy emails month after month or even worse, week after week or day after day. This is a feeble attempt to keep top of mind with your email list. If you don’t have quality content to send, mail your listless frequently. If you spam your email list you will lower your open rate and your unsubscribe rate will go up. Some of the most successful email marketers don’t send an email every day and some don’t even send one every week but when they do it is super high quality and the people on their list look forward to their content.

Conclusion

Email marketing is far from dead and can still be a great source of business. Automating it can make your life so much easier but you need to have quality content for marketing automation software to be effective. If you are looking to implement marketing automation software in your company, that is a service we offer. We invite you to initiate a conversation with us.

Digital Tactics Work Across the Buyer Journey

Social media is the No. 1 channel at every stage except conversion

Some marketing tactics are best when the audience is early in the purchase process, while others shine closer to conversion. But social media, websites, email and other digital approaches are effective throughout the customer journey, according to polling from June 2015.

The CMO Club surveyed CMOs in Europe and the US about marketing and the buyer journey. When asked which were the primary marketing channels they leveraged during various stages, more chose social media than any other option for every stage of the purchase process except buying itself.
When it came to conversion, websites and email both edged out social. These two channels were also among the top three at every other stage queried, from discovery to advocacy.
Digital advertising, like AdWords and banners, also rated highly across most stages of the buyer journey. The leading nondigital channel was events, which were most likely to be named a primary marketing channel for discovery and usage. Apps also performed well, especially for the “try” phase of the cycle.
The survey also found that CMOs are investing the biggest share of their marketing budget on the “buy” phase, but not by much. That took 21% of budgets, on average, followed by 20% for discovery and 16% each for learning and trying.

Digital Accountability Begins Now

Digital Accountability Begins Now

• by Shawn Burns, October 9, 2012, 8:00 AM

Digital marketing is awash in a never-ending array of “shiny new objects.” Be it social listening tools, the "must have" app or the newest rich media ad formats of today or the RSS feeds of a day long gone (which promised to eliminate email BTW), marketers are constantly bombarded by new, seemingly creative ideas with which to drive awareness, engage customers and ultimately generate sales.
The presence of so many new and inventive ways to market (this month alone I evaluated three new platforms all claiming to build, edit and host rich media "like never before") drives a mindset of tinkering, resulting in marketers spending too much time in the lab and far too little on the shop floor. A life spent chasing shiny objects risks driving little business value as marketers constantly search for that elusive and unquantifiable magic called “digital buzz.”
Enter digital accountability, a new breed of thinking challenging the historical tinkering mindset of digital marketers. Digital accountability has its roots in the simplest of principles –- digital marketing is a mature art. Long gone are the "amplification" buzzwords and Flash Web sites, which outside of providing a warm sense of accomplishment for the marketers that created them were unaccountable to real business results. Like events, sponsorships, branding and advertising, digital now takes its permanent place in the marketer’s toolbox -- a defined skill with defined outcomes that eliminates mystery, and most importantly, eliminates marketing waste.
Yet still the tinkering continues -- a brief trip online shows disjointed microsite after microsite, banner after banner, app after app, as marketers continue to blindly throw digital bait into the Web, hoping that customers appear. New campaign sites launch with no supporting media -- effectively digital tombstones from the word go. New Web sites launch that ignore even the most basic usability rules, trying to redesign the wheel but producing only a square. The worst offenders? Those digital experiments that seemingly do everything right to get customers on their Web property, but forgot to offer even the most basic call to action: register now, call us, try a demo, sign up for future updates, etc. -- anything that allows the hard work to be monetized in customer value.
Most unfortunately, Web analytics has not helped. The proliferation of these systems has provided marketers with a sense of accomplishing something, with no clarity on what exactly that was. Web site traffic, visitors, uniques, click-throughs, returns, abandonments, time on site and conversion metrics provide a bewildering array of reports demonstrating what’s occurred while skipping any sense of causality or business value. A digital marketer can no more improve results from a Web analytics report than he can make the news by reading the newspaper.
So what are we to do? How do we take this mature genre called digital marketing and make it truly accountable? How do marketers once and for all enter the era of digital accountability to the benefit of their customers, and most importantly, the bottom line of their businesses?
The rules of the road are straightforward -- and if these rules are applied, they will improve results and customer engagement and increase the respect of your fellow sales and marketing colleagues.
Rule 1 – Agree and target your "digital purpose."  Are you trying to engage a community? Drive new product awareness? Encourage trials? Generate leads? Sell through an eStore? Long gone are the days when a single landing page and email campaigns were launched to do all of the above. Only through a relentless focus of your digital purpose and targeting your efforts to the right audience can there be any hope of having impact with your efforts. Early adopters are not loyal customers, and both differ dramatically from new prospects -- your digital marketing should as well.
Rule 2 – Realize "digital" does not mean “easy.”  World-class Web experiences derive from a focus on the end goal, professional information architecture, skilled online copywriting, interaction Web design, business analyst-led development efforts and obsessive customer testing. None of the above can be accomplished in a few weeks, and this allows us once and for all put to rest the phrase "can’t we just launch this week -- it’s only a Web page."
Rule 3 – Pursue a D4 mindset – only make data-driven digital decisions.  Digital marketers are blessed with the most measurable marketing environment of the last century; use it to eliminate one-off decisions based on the chairmen’s preferred "shade of blue." Online customer testing, usability checklists (not dissimilar from what pilots use) and quantifiable A/B testing will guarantee that new digital experiences will have maximum results before they ever leave the door.
Rule 4 – Measure results ONLY against business value.  Stop generating Web analytics reports that are awash with factoids but lack insight on whether business value was created. The knee-jerk reaction to “show movement” around the new experience must be replaced with a methodical measurement approach around real business value. Has perception changed in the market? Did we grow the contact database? Have new customers signed up for a trial? How much revenue did the campaign generate? A rigorous measurement approach based around business value will stop the perceived mystery around digital marketing, focus scarce resources on those efforts that matter most and generate newfound respect for this critical channel.
Companies are operating in a more competitive environment than ever before, at the same time that customers are overrun with a daily feed of new digital attractions. In the midst of the challenge, digital marketers can grow their success and continue to take a larger piece of the overall marketing pie by adhering to the simple guidelines above. Digital is a mature trade and by making the needed adjustments now in how companies go to market online, exponential returns can be realized over both the short and long term. Good luck!

CRM, Marketing Automation and Tag Management

Why CRM, Marketing Automation and Tag Management Are Foundations Of The Marketing Technology Stack

How do you build a solid martech stack? Columnist Travis Wright discusses the three components that you can't ignore when it comes to a strong foundation.

Just as you can’t build a solid, long-lasting edifice on a foundation of mucky soil, the foundation of the marketing technology stack is critical to its efficacy and long-term benefit to the organization. You need to build on bedrock, and for martech, that means CRM (customer relationship management), marketing automation and tag management.
“The stack” at any given company was likely conceived by the chief marketing officer (CMO) and chief technology officer (CTO), but in many businesses — from startups to enterprises — it now stands alone in a marketing technology department. And given recent rapid changes in marketing technology, it may have been built on shaky ground (by today’s standards).
That’s where you come in.
Ideally, the various tools in your stack take your data and turn it into customized marketing programs that are 1) automated and 2) measurable. Ultimately, this means happier customers because they’re getting exactly what they want at exactly the right time.
Plus, the CEO is happy, which means you’re happy. Everyone wins.
But to achieve that goal, you need to ensure you’re building on a rock-solid technological foundation.

Started From The Bottom, Now We’re Here

A foundational principle of today’s marketing is that you need to focus on customers first. Enter CRM, the place where you keep your customer information organized.
CRM
You should be able to import data that you find, create or buy so that it can be marketed — automatically. This ties into customer management, which can overlap with CRM but is also part of the stack in its own right.
You can use an enterprise-level CRM, like Salesforce, or an SMB-level CRM like Nimble, and there are many others to choose from. The key is to start collecting your customer data, so that your sales and marketing efforts will work more effectively.
Remember that it’s more of an approach than a specific technology — there are oodles of great, specific options out there. There’s tech to automate, sync and/or organize everything from actual customer service to sales or tech support. CRM should be customer-oriented and usually features sales force automation, data warehouse technology to aggregate data, and opportunity management.
Marketing Automation
Marketing automation is designed for marketing departments and organizations to more effectively market on multiple channels online (such as email, social media and websites) and automate repetitive tasks. It’s what gets you there, and it’s made up of all kinds of campaigns, activities and other goodies that help you follow leads while relying on the criteria you need.
Lead nurturing via sales funnels, all ending with an automatic CRM update? Yes, please. We’ve worked with Eloqua, Marketo, Pardot, Silverpop and many other marketing automation platforms. Pick one that you feel works best for your organization.
Tag Management
Finally, tag management rounds out the martech stack foundation trifecta. Did you know there are well over 2,000 marketing technologies out there and counting?
Tag management helps you deploy tags on your websites with ease. If you’re not tagging, you’re not providing a link between your customers and your online presence.
You want to be agile, quick and nimble. Deploying marketing technologies through a tag management system (TMS) makes it quick and painless. This also allows you to test multiple competitive tools at the same time and get real data to show you which is the best.

As You Choose Stack Components, Invest In Keeping It Open

While the large Frankenstein marketing clouds being built through acquisition are getting great mind share, their promise of supposedly fulfilling everything an advertiser needs within one company/cloud seems to be more and more disjointed (from what the market wants), rather than connected.
Advertisers who want to use Adobe’s Experience Manager and Site Catalyst — but also try Oracle’s new Maxymiser acquisition, IBM’s Silverpop, Salesforce’s Radian6 or any other number of marketing technologies from the martech landscape — are able to do so when they’re deployed through an independently owned premium tag management tool like Ensighten, Tealium or Signal.
New automation and marketing capabilities are being added all the time, and agile marketers need to be able to deploy whatever they want, wherever they want, and to remove it if it’s not delivering. They also need to collect, own and act on all of their marketing data. To do that, they must use tools that work well with others, rather than those that lock them into a certain “system.”

Conclusion

As the CMTO at technology consulting firm CCP Global, I always suggest to my clients that they build their own custom, scalable marketing cloud, starting with the foundational tools of of CRM, marketing automation and tag management.
Once you have a solid martech stack foundation, it’s time to start building up the rest of your your marketing structure in earnest. Use all of your construction tools: list building, blogging, retargeting, social and landing page optimization.
Don’t try to build on muck. Make sure your foundation is solid first — then you can start building upon it.

Online Marketers do not perform conversion optimization

Online Marketers do not perform conversion optimization

48% of Online Marketers do not perform conversion optimization

The marketing focus has been shifting for quite a while from quantity to quality. With the right budget, every marketer can ensure that a website gets many visitors via paid or earned media.
ShotgunA shotgun approach tends to meet the business goals. But at unnecessarily high costs! By increasing the conversion ratio (CR) (and the quality thereof) you will make it possible to get better results at lower costs, and with more efficient use of resources.
Conversion optimizationResearch has shown that 48% of marketers do not perform conversion optimization. The reasons for this are diverse, but it ultimately comes down to the fact that at least 60% of marketers do not see improving the conversion ratio as a priority. Or they do not conduct optimization conscientiously.
ExampleAs a marketer, or marketing department, in the Netherlands, your goal is to sign up as many subscriptions as possible for a certain white paper. This white paper is already being offered on the international English-language version of your company’s website. To get a rapid start in signing up subscriptions you have all of the different Dutch banners on the various Dutch channels linked to the English-language website, where people can subscribe to receive the white paper. The cost of setting up these channels is approximately € 1,000.00 per month and it leads to 150 clicks/visitors on the English-language website per week. Many marketers reading this are already shaking their head.

Without conversion optimization	With conversion optimization
Every week you achieve approximately 15 subscriptions to the white paper. A conversion ratio of 10%.	After 1 week only 10% convert. For week 2 you set up a Dutch subscription page, which brings the conversion ratio for week 2 to 20%. Then, in week 3 you start A/B testing with the length and content of the subscription page. At the end of this week you discover that a short bulleted version of the page leads to 30% conversion. During the 4 weeks, the following conversion ratios have been obtained: Week 1 – 10% 15 Week 2 – 20% 30 Week 3 – 25% 37 Week 4 – 30% 45
Cost per subscription: € 16.66	Cost per subscription: € 7.87

By deliberately performing conversion optimization you, as a marketer or marketing department, will obtain considerably better business results that will benefit the entire organization.
Though conversion optimization can have disadvantages, in my opinion, these do not outweigh the advantages.
What to doTo conduct a conversion optimization, you first need to have a complete understanding of the current situation. A regular analysis of what the channels produce is also necessary.
For example, it could well be the case that the campaign is analyzed every two days. After four days it is decided to improve the campaign rigorously. At a later stage, A/B tests are conducted again to get even more out of the current campaign. All of these steps require resources, and sometimes many of these resources are not planned beforehand.
ChannelsThe example shows primarily a greater attempt at improving the results of one’s own website. However, it could of course be the case that for the white paper banner is displayed in the wrong places. If it appears that a lot of traffic is steered to the website from a certain channel that is not converting, it may be wise to optimize the messaging in the banner to set the right expectation or possibly to stop the campaign entirely in that channel. If it is decided to stop using a non-producing channel, this will directly lead to an improvement of the conversion rate.
A/B testingIn the example, A/B testing is mentioned in order to establish which landing page (the page to which visitors of the various channels are led) works best. Two versions of the landing page are made (if more versions are made it becomes a A/B/N test) and careful monitoring is done to see which of the two results show better conversion ratios.
ATTENTION: the following description is not a correct test method, but in the below-described manner anyone can immediately start conversion optimization.
Any marketer, regardless of the platform that is used, can basically start with the following. During the first week you let a landing page receive visitors and at the end of the week you look at the conversion ratio expressed as a percentage. Next you update the page rigorously, add another image and you make the page a lot shorter with a clearer call to action (CTA). After a week you look at the conversion ratio again. Then you use the version that produces best, leaving it as is, for the rest of the campaign.
To set this up properly as an A/B test, it is necessary for the two versions to be shown randomly to visitors and then after a period both versions are shown with equal frequency. In this way any variables, such as the weather for instance, are excluded. Some platforms allow this more easily than others.
ConclusionAnalysis is the most important action for making conversion optimization possible. Without insight you cannot make improvements. It is completely situation-dependent where conversion optimization can be done. Start with the low-hanging fruit by initiating the first improvements in the short term and then take it step by step. Whether this is done via A/B testing, Real Time personalization or (even) retargeting, depends on every situation and organization

How to use the Periodic Table of Content Marketing

How to use the Periodic Table of Content Marketing

If you click the image a large screenshot should appear. I hope it is all reasonably self-explanatory. There are eight areas that I have focused on, as follows:

Strategy

The fundamental key to success. Planning and focus is essential. You need a clear strategy, mapped to your long-term business goals. 

Format

Content comes in many different shapes and sizes. Note that you can use multiple formats for a single piece of content. Slice and dice! Right now, I’m writing a blog post to support a visualisation. Maybe I’ll produce a video or slideshow too.

Content Type

These are based on the common types of content that work well for our business. Many of them will work well for your brand too. Sometimes you’ll use multiple content types for a single piece of content. You could file this periodic table under a few different types.

Platform

These are content distribution platforms. You might own some of these (e.g. #59, your website). Others are social sites (your own, your network, third parties). All of these help spread the word about your content. 

Metrics

These help you to measure the performance of your content. For the purposes of brevity, I have largely grouped these metrics together (e.g. ‘acquisition metrics’). 

Goals

All content should support your primary business goals, whether that’s to generate lots of traffic, or to sell more, or to increase brand awareness. Laser-guided content will tick a few of these boxes.  

Sharing Triggers

This is largely inspired by Unruly Media’s triggers for sharing content. Think about the emotional drivers behind sharing, and make sure the content you create makes people feel something. 

Checklist

I will probably edit this post at least 10 times after publishing it, and no doubt the periodic table will need a tweak here or there. Errors need to be fixed, and all content should be properly optimised (for search, for social, and to support your business goals). Be diligent!

A few footnotes…

• I have largely numbered the table vertically, rather than horizontally, as it makes more sense to me to do it that way.
• There may be a little duplication here and there. Forgive me.
• I haven’t included certain things, such as podcasts, pretty much because I don’t use them. They may be valuable for your business, so by all means add them (I’ve left a little space here and there).
• I have included the likes of Hacker News because they appeal to our business. You may have your own alternatives.
• Some elements could live in multiple categories. 
• I designed this in Excel the day after a wine tasting event, so it is a little bit lo-fi. If there is any demand for wall charts or mouse mats then I shall hire a designer to polish it up. 

Branding Stratergy B2C : Personalized Product Recommendations

Personalized Product Recommendations

overview explained by Happy minds -

How to Get B2B Buyers to Pay Attention to Your Content

You only have eight seconds to capture a customer’s attention online. Here’s how to make the most out of every second…

If I gave you eight seconds to tell me about your product or service, what would you say?
Traditional elevator pitches are an average of 56 seconds. However, the average attention span has dropped to just eight seconds.
Eight seconds isn’t long. It was just enough time for you to read the title and first line in this blog post.

Test it out yourself.

Say, “I’m with [name of your company], and we …” See if you can get your message across before the time runs out.

See if you can get your message across before the time runs out.

How did you do?

Now, what if you had to make your message even more concise? A study showed that 17% of page views last less than four seconds. Almost a fifth of your visitors aren’t even giving you the full eight seconds.
This means that your customers have shorter attention spans than your childhood goldfish. Yikes!
As attention spans get shorter, it’s no surprise that B2B marketers are struggling to make their messages stick. According to the Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs, only 38% of B2B marketers rate their content as “effective” or “very effective”.
Here are five ways to catch and keep your customers’ attention online:

1. Work from a content marketing strategy.

A content marketing strategy helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers, so you can create content that resonates with them.

A study by the Altimeter Group found that 70% of marketers lack a consistent or integrated content strategy.
If you don’t have a content marketing strategy, you’ll randomly throw messages into the world and hope that customers read them. Creating a content marketing strategy helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers, so you can create content that resonates with them.
The Content Marketing Institute and MarktingProfs reported that B2B marketers who have a documented content marketing strategy “are more effective in all aspects of content marketing” than those who don’t have a documented strategy.
For tips on improving your content’s results, read “10 Steps to an Effective B2B Content Marketing Strategy”.

2. Design for conversions.

Make sure that your design encourages visitors to read your content, opt in to your list and learn more about your products.

Your website’s design has a huge impact on your customers’ buying decisions. In fact, a study by Rareform New Media found that “48% of people cited a website’s design as the number one factor in deciding the credibility of a business”.
When you redesign your website, it’s easy to get pulled into the latest design trends – opting for a site that “looks cool” as opposed to increasing your conversions. However, if your site isn’t increasing your conversions, it’s not doing its job.
Make sure that your design encourages visitors to read your content, opt in to your list and learn more about your products. If you’re not sure how visitors are reacting to your site, you can use heatmap software to see where they look and what they click.

3. Get up to speed.

40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.

If you only have four seconds to capture a customer’s attention, but your site takes five seconds to load, you’re in trouble.
According to an Akamai study, “40% of people abandon a website that takes more than 3 seconds to load.” Meanwhile, a one-second delay in page-load can cause a 7% loss in customer conversions.
Look at your bounce rates and determine if your website’s speed is impacting how long visitors stay on each page. Be sure to test your site in different browsers and on different platforms to see how long it takes your pages to load. You can also use the free GTmetrix tool to test your site’s speed.

4. Make your site mobile friendly.

A mobile-friendly site is no longer an option.

A mobile-friendly site is no longer an option.
According to a study by MarginMedia, 48% of users say that if they arrive on a business site that doesn’t work well on mobile, they take it as an indication that the business doesn’t care.
Google is also giving preference to mobile-friendly sites. If your site isn’t optimized for all devices, your rankings may suffer.

5. Improve your copy.

Much B2B copy is boring and robotic. These 5 tips help you improve your copy.

Every word in your marketing has the power to engage leads and convert them into customers. However, much B2B copy is boring and robotic. Here are five ways you can improve your B2B copy:

• Capture your audience’s attention with strong headlines and intriguing introductions.
• Use stories to keep readers engaged.
• Cut the corporate jargon.
• Focus your copy on your customers – not on yourself.
• Make sure that all of your content includes a call to action that motivates readers to take the next step.

Also remember that most people don’t read online content word by word. Their eyes dart around the page. Get your key messages across in your headers, sub-headers and introduction to ensure that more customers see them.

How The B2B Marketing Funnel Works

When it comes to being a marketer the most important principle I’ve learned is this: know thy funnel.

It was the first thing I learned and to this day I need consistent reminders to wrap my head around the concept.

We’ve written about the general marketing funnel before and the several ways companies visualize them. In this post we’ll focus on the B2B marketing funnel, and discuss the channel data used to expand each stage.

Let’s start with a broad view of why marketers should always be thinking about the marketing funnel.

What The Marketing Funnel Is Used For

The marketing funnel is for defining and improving your marketing strategy.

A marketing funnel is a set of stages that map the customer journey and marketers measure how effectively they are filling the funnel with new leads, and how well those leads convert through each stage.

Like a video game, progression is the objective. Each stage of the funnel can provide marketers with guidance.

For example, demand generation directors look at the funnel from a numbers perspective. They want to know what  the conversion rates are for each channel and funnel stage, and how much revenue each generates.

As a B2B content writer I use the marketing funnel to understand the purpose of each piece of content. I ask, is this content meant to drive brand awareness? Is it to convince a site visitors to submit a lead form?

Below is an illustration of a marketing funnel from a primer on the subject by Zach Bulygo for Kissmetrics.

While this is great for visualizing the customer journey, let’s talk about each stage from the perspective of B2B marketing.

What The B2B Marketing Funnel Represents

It’s important to remember that the marketing funnel is an ideal representation of the customer journey, see below:

We like to think web users see a few ads (impressions), eventually visit your site (first touch), download your content (lead conversion), and are so blown away that they pick up a phone to call sales.

Unless you’re selling half-priced 30 packs of Pabst Blue Ribbon outside a frat house, your marketing funnel and the customer journey is far more complex than you think.

In reality the customer journey is nuanced. In reality it’s messy, like this:

Understanding How Prospects Really Become Customers

Marketers typically agree on funnel transition points and set up events to measure them. For example, downloading an ebook is an event that converts a web visitor to a lead, and signing up for a product trial converts them into a sales qualified opportunity.

In between the key transition points are more touchpoints (e.g. site visits, downloads and sales calls) but marketers can’t focus their efforts on all of them.

Choosing a limited number of transition points (events) to focus on is necessary because the real customer journey is elaborate, long and convoluted.

Using The Marketing Funnel To Reduce Wasted Ad Spend And Optimize Channels

Marketing reports allow companies to see how well prospects convert at each stage of the funnel.

Anonymous website visitors, marketing leads, and sales opportunities all have specific metrics associated with them. Let’s examine some of them in more detail.

For top-of-funnel channels, study engagement metrics and point of origin information. This includes websource information, impressions, and web referral data. These three pieces of information answers the question: where do anonymous visitors come from.

TIP: One of the most important elements of optimizing the top of the funnel metrics is connecting anonymous click data with lead contact information inside the CRM.

For bottom of funnel channels, look at sales opportunities and revenue by channel.

Below you’ll see some helpful metrics for measuring performance for each stages of the funnel.

For more discussion on metrics, see our list of demand generation metrics that demystify growth and revenue generation.

Know Thyself Thy Marketing Funnel

The B2B marketing funnel is a wild animal. It’s a way for marketers to represent the customer journey is an easy to understand manner.

The marketing funnel is an ideal representation of the customer journey. To understand how customers actually journey through it, we use pipeline marketing data,
We as marketers try to solve a variety of technical and creative problems, and the guiding principle is know thy funnel.

Branding and Marketing : Top 3 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Success

Branding and Marketing : Top 3 Ways to Measure Content Marketing Success

Companies of all sizes have committed resources to content marketing, but not all of them understand how they should be measuring their efforts. Jesse Noyes, VP of Product Marketing, Content and Communications, at Kapost, says that there are three things content marketers should be measuring to ensure success and relevancy to their business.

Production

We all produce lots of content, but do you know what it really takes to get it done? Are you keeping track of how long it takes to produce each content piece, from a single blog post to a full campaign surrounding an ebook? If content is the thing that fuels your pipeline, then you need to measure that pipeline. You need to establish benchmarks around production and make sure your team is meeting deadlines. If every project becomes a slog and takes time away from other activities, that should weigh into the cost-benefit analysis of your content. Oh wait, that's what marketers call ROI.

Reach

This is the easiest part for many marketers because all the sharing tools give you these numbers. Yes, it may be all manual and siloed, but it is relatively easy to determine which social channels drive traffic to your content. This helps you understand where your prospects and customers are and which ones are helping to amplify your content across their networks. The engagement around your content is what you are looking for. These are retweets, shares, clicks, comments, hearts, stars or whatever other symbol your audience's favorite platform uses to indicate audience engagement. By understanding the reach of your content, you understand how to drive more people to the top of your funnel.

Conversion

Conversion is the most important metric to consider when measuring content success and most marketers do not go deep enough into this whole category. You can start by understanding how many people clicked on the offer and completed the form for a download, but you should not stop there. Do these leads become qualified, either by a marketing lead scoring model or by a salesperson? And the next step of the process is to understand how your content contributes to closed deals, cross sales and upsells. Finally, are you supporting customer retention efforts with your content and how does that convert? Every piece of content has multiple conversions along each stage of the buyer journey, or funnel, pick your marketing metaphor, and the more informed you are about this, the more relevant your content will be in the future.

Branding and Marketing : Marketing Personas: Beginners Guide

Marketing Personas: Beginners Guide

The basic marketing persona template

I love this description of a marketing persona from the team at Krux:

With personas, businesses can be more strategic in catering to each audience, internalize the customer that they are trying to attract, and relate to them as human beings.

So how many of these “human beings” do you need to create? It is recommended that you make three to five personas to represent your audience; this number is big enough to cover the majority of your customers yet small enough to still carry the value of specificity. Hubspot has tons of examples of companies who have created marketing personas, and there are templates galore for making personas of your own. 
Many of these templates include the same basic information. You want to know who the person is, what they value, and how best to speak to them. Here is a quick overview on what you should include in your marketing persona template:

Name of the persona
Job title

• Key information about their company (size, type, etc.)
• Details about their role

Demographics

• Age
• Gender
• Salary / household income
• Location: urban / suburban / rural
• Education
• Family

Goals and challenges

• Primary goal
• Secondary goal
• How you help achieve these goals
• Primary challenge
• Secondary challenge
• How you help solve these problems

Values / fears

• Primary values
• Common objections during sales process

Marketing message
Elevator pitch
Don’t worry if some of these aren’t quite clear yet; we’ll go over an example in just a second.

Additional persona information specific to your customers

Beyond the basics, you will find that your specific business might need specific information. Personas can vary from business to business and industry to industry. An Internet news company would require different customer information than a medical supply company, and a persona built for a buying funnel might look different than one built for a blog.
With that in mind, here are some miscellaneous bits of information that you might consider adding to your personas.

• Hobbies
• Real quotes from interviews with customers
• Computer literacy
• Where they get their news
• Blogs they read

How to create a marketing persona

So where do you get all the information you need to make a persona take shape? There are many sources of information on your audience, from the tiny details logged away in your site statistics to actual conversations with real-life customers. Cast a wide net when coming up with information related to your personas.
Here are three places to look:
Check your site analytics.
Inside your analytics, you can see where your visitors came from, what keywords they used to find you, and how long they spent once they arrived. This data is key for personas as it can reveal the desires that led your audience to your site as well as the tools they used to get there.
Involve your team in creating profiles. 
Get the team together—not just marketing, but customer service, growth, development, and more. Anyone with interactions with customers and customer data should be involved in sharing their perspective on what makes your customers tick.
Social media research
You can also do some research with social media. Use social media listening to find your potential customers asking questions or airing problems your product can solve on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn, or even try Pinterest for retail-oriented insights.
Ask your audience questions.
Who knows your customers better than they know themselves? Surveys and interviews are often a critical component to building a useful marketing persona. In particular, interviews can reveal deep insight into your customers since you can really dig into their answers and follow up with the goals, values, and pain points that will resonate the most with them. For personas to become useful tools, it’s best if they’re based on interviews gathered from salespeople, customer service interactions, and the buyers (customers) themselves.

Step-by-step guide to filling out a marketing persona template

Now that you know where you’re headed with a marketing persona, the next step is to actually build out the profile. Here’s how we might fill out the template above at Buffer to help find and connect with our core customers.



Let’s take a look at each field and talk about how we filled it out.
Give the persona a name.
The name can be whatever you choose. Make it a real name so the persona feels like a real person.

A persona should have enough psychological detail to allow you to conveniently step over to the persona’s view and see your products and services from her perspective. A persona can function almost like another person in the room when making a decision—It is “Sally.” She looks at what you’re doing from her particular and very specific vantage point, and points out flaws and benefits for her.

Identify the persona’s job, role, and company.
Your greatest resource for coming up with jobs for your personas is likely to be customer surveys. When you are building the surveys, you can include a field for job title, company size, and type of business. For instance, a recent survey of Buffer users showed that a large percentage are small-business owners—founders, owner/operators, or one-man teams. These can all fit nicely into a single persona.
Discover demographic information.
For demographic information, you can glean some insight from Google Analytics, plus your best educated guesses and survey info. Drilling down into the Google Analytics stats can show you where your visitors live as well as age, gender, affinity, and technology. Navigate to the Audience section of your Google Analytics to see all this and more:

Here is a sample of what you might see from Google Analytics for the interests of your site’s visitors. (If you cannot see certain demographic information, you may need to enable the feature or contact your Analytics administrator.)

For the elements you cannot find in your analytics, you can supplement with survey results. Many tools like Survey Monkey offer suggestions for how to word certain demographic questions to ensure you get the most accurate responses and avoid any confusion.

By this point, you may be wondering, “Is all this information really essential?” It might seem like fluff, but details like this do serve an important purpose. This is how James Heaton, writing for Tronvig Group, puts it:

These details have two functions:
First, they help force the creators to get into character. Specificity is a good way to push the process deep enough to facilitate genuine understanding of the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of your customers. We are not all naturally good at this, and it’s important for a persona’s effectiveness.
Second, it can help you find previously undetected tactical opportunities for your product, service, or institution. These can make what you do more useful and relevant in your customer’s lives. Where does your product or service constructively intersect with what Sally does or what Sally cares about? Once uncovered, these are very valuable insights.

Expressed visually, diving deep into personas can be the catalyst that turns a crude sketch into a true portrait.

Goals and challenges, values and fears
Actual customer interviews will be helpful in determining the objectives here. During your interviews, ask questions similar to the following—a great list from Marketing Interactions—to get a good feeling for your customers’ goals and challenges.

• What’s important to them and what’s driving the change?
• What’s impeding or speeding their need to change?
• How do they go about change?
• What do they need to know to embrace change?
• Who do they turn to for advice or information?
• What’s the value they visualize once they make a decision?
• Who do they have to sell change to in order to get it?
• What could cause the need for this change to lose priority?

While coming up with these goals and challenges, you can also identify the ways in which you can help customers meet these goals and overcome the challenges.
Your intuition here will be helpful. Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer and approach the solution with empathy. Consider what common objections arise for them during the sales process. What might keep this customer from closing the deal? Then brainstorm ways you can help.
Marketing message and elevator pitch
This part is all up to you! Put your knowledge and information to use and determine the best ways to meet the needs of each type of customer. At this step, “message” refers to how you might describe your product for this particular type of person.  Are you a complete social media service? An enterprise customer management tool? Then your elevator pitch can go into detail and set a consistent message on how to sell to this customer.

Examples of marketing personas

As mentioned above, marketing personas will vary from company to company, and each place will be unique. There will, of course, be similar themes that run throughout all personas. It’s when you get into detail that you start to see where the differences crop up. There are lots of neat examples online where companies have shared one of their own marketing personas. Here are a few shared by Hubspot and Buyer Persona.

Takeaways

 Marketing personas will help you identify with your audience and better solve their problems. And when you solve their problems, everyone wins. 

Be sure to include the whole team in coming up with these personas as everyone brings a different perspective and different information to the table. Then once you have your personas in place, act on them by using specific messaging with your content and by empathizing with customers as they go through your funnels.

The results will be a better experience for the customer and a more engaged user for your business.

What experience do you have with marketing personas? Are there elements of your persona template that have been particularly helpful? I’d love to hear what’s worked for you in the past or what you’re excited to try for your next persona experiment.