MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 Wrap Up

MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 is in the books and we learned a ton. There’s a lot to digest in the day days worth of live blogs. So, I highlighted many of the key takeaways here.Related Articles

1. Benchmark Email To Live Blog MarketingSherpa Summit 2016
2. MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 Live Blog Day 1
3. MarketingSherpa Summit 2016 Live Blog Day Two

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Infographic: Click-to-Call Commerce

Mobile devices are causing a huge upward trend. And advertisers are noticing.

BIA/Kelsey predicts that the annual number of mobile phone calls to businesses will reach 162 billion by 2019.

That’s great news for companies. Why?

Because consumers spend more than $11 trillion on offline purchases.

Customers normally conduct online research on their mobile devices, and then call businesses to make an offline transaction.

“Marketers are allocating more time to understand how to reach mobile consumers, especially millennials. Our data shows that for many types of purchases, millennials prefer to contact a business directly by phone, and then are following through with purchases,” states John Busby, SVP of Consumer Insights for the Marchex Institute.

A study by Digital Strategy Consulting found that consumers trust ecommerce businesses more when a telephone number is present. An unlisted phone number may discourage shoppers from purchasing products.

Capital One offers their customers the option to call service reps directly from their mobile apps. So, if an individual has questions about an account, he or she can immediately receive help.

Similarly, Redfin, a residential real estate company, gives home buyers the chance to speak to a local agent about specific listings. It’s a convenient solution for customers who need answers immediately.

However, some businesses are missing the click-to-call commerce opportunity.

About 20% of phone calls are abandoned due to poor customer service and sales practices. For example, shoppers may wait 10 minutes on hold or experience trouble with automated telephone systems.

“To really reap the returns from this type of marketing, companies need to take customer connection seriously — customers want staff to genuinely understand their needs. One sign that businesses are beginning to understand this is the migration of U.S. company call centers back in-house,” writes communications consultant Shellie Karabell.

So, how do you improve customer service over the phone? Here are a few ideas to help your team:

1. Eliminate the need for customers to wait on hold

More than half of customers will abandon a call after one minute of waiting on hold. Instead, offer callers the option to receive a call-back.

2. Add a personal touch

Customers expect a personalized shopping experience. If possible, assign a designated representative to handle the buyer’s individualized needs.

3. Give decision makers actionable data

Customer satisfaction is a company-wide responsibility. Using data will help executives adopt new policies or upgrade initiatives to deliver a better customer experience.

This infographic shows us the trends behind click-to-call commerce and the opportunity to increase lead conversions.

Want to display this infographic on your site?

++ Click Image to Enlarge ++Source: Infographic: Click to Call Commerce

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What's Your Favorite Modern Marketing Color?

Remember when you were a kid and someone asked you what your favorite color is. This could cause very heated conversations on the playground over the best color. And then there were those paper fortune tellers where you could determine the course of your whole life by picking a series of numbers and colors.

As you've grown into a professional adult, the idea of a favorite color has changed considerably. You no longer fight about your favorite, but it may inform your wardrobe choices or your decor choices. If you work for a company with strong color-based branding, this color may inform your daily life as a modern marketer. In our world of Oracle, the color red plays a prominent role.

But what if you are a designer and you need to use different colors to distinguish different products in an event guide. This is less about branding or secondary colors, but more as a visual wayfinding device. Have you ever followed the blazes on trees while hiking or a painted line on a hospital floor? This is the same kind of color choice. Can this color stand for this thing? Does it have meaning? Will people remember it?

The session guide for the Modern Marketing Experience has been released and each product section is indicated by a color. Below are the listings from the guide.

• Red: Bold = marketing automation for B2B marketers
• Maroon: Complex = cross channel marketing for B2C marketers
• Yellow: Optimism = data management
• Orange: Exciting = content marketing
• Blue: Trust = testing and optimization
• Gray: Balance = best practices

Do these color choices match your product preferences? If you are interested in diving into the psychology of color for branding way beyond that infographic you've seen (which is included), here's a great blog post from HelpScout.

If you are looking for an opportunity to discover your favorite modern marketing color and proudly display it, register today for the Modern Marketing Experience in Las Vegas. The theme of the event is How Modern Marketing Works for You, so you can look forward to learning about what works and what's next in modern marketing.

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Content Marketing and Advertising Meet in a Dark Alley: Who Wins, and Why?

Traditional advertising pretty much had its way with the 20th century.

Big campaigns with big budgets from big companies influenced the things we did, said, and thought. And it’s safe to say that influence continues into the 21st century.

But content marketing is starting to make some noise of its own. In fact, interest in content marketing has risen rapidly in the last five years.

What are the differences, advantages, and disadvantages of both? When should you use advertising, and when should you use content marketing?

And which method is better?

We’ll answer those questions and more in this article.

What is advertising?

Advertising is a direct form of marketing communication where companies, political parties, religious institutions, government agencies, and interest groups build awareness of their products, services, events, and ideas.

To accomplish this task, advertisers run campaigns with a limited, but focused, use of media that may include:

• Billboards
• Banner ads
• Radio spots
• Television commercials
• Print magazine ads
• Pay-per-click ads
• Infomercials
• Pop-ups
• Skywriting
• Product placements
• Email

The job of advertising media is to convince people that a product, service, or idea will solve their problems or satisfy their wants.

Here are four ways you could look at advertising:

1. A company runs a six-month advertising campaign announcing the launch of a new product through a series of television commercials, banner ads, and staged product demonstrations in select cities.
2. A political party launches a tour of lectures, public service announcements, and emails to inform voters about where their candidate stands on the issues.
3. A city government purchases newspaper ads and mails out flyers to announce a new recycling program.
4. A start-up sponsors content on BuzzFeed, purchases an advertorial on Gawker, and budgets money toward a Google AdWords campaign.

However, traditional advertising has some notable disadvantages (and notable differences with content marketing).

It’s expensive

If you look at the best advertising campaigns of the 21st century you’ll notice blue-chip brands — companies and organizations with deep pockets.

For most of us, even the bare bones Apple: Get a Mac campaign is out of our reach, never mind something like the complex production behind BMW’s The Hire.

It’s built around a campaign

Instead of a long-term effort, advertising campaigns usually run for a short period of time, say three to six months depending upon campaign objectives and budgets.

Today, however, popular campaigns like Dos Equis’s The Most Interesting Man in the World can extend their life on places like YouTube or Vimeo.

The product is the focus of the ad

Because of their expensive production and short shelf life, advertising campaigns put the product front and center.

In Budweiser’s iconic Whassup commercial, where a group of friends go around asking each other “Whassup,” two of the friends mention that they are drinking a Budweiser.

In Volkswagen’s The Force, a young Darth Vader attempts to use The Force on a Passat, which is front and center.

There’s a limited window of exposure because the media is not owned

Traditional advertising is a combination of three entities: the publisher (television, radio, magazine), the company/advertiser (often companies hire an ad agency to create and manage the campaign), and the audience.

The company/advertiser buys space on the publisher’s media property for a limited time to get exposure to their audience. Once that time expires (once a month in a magazine, a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl), the advertising campaign media is removed, and the audience doesn’t see it again, which means …

The media is gone once the campaign ends

As I mentioned above, the digital age has changed this in many ways since commercials are often published on YouTube. But they still may be eventually removed from a company’s official channel.

It’s a one-sided relationship

The Marlboro Man, an idea created by ad agency Leo Burnett Worldwide for Marlboro cigarettes, is considered the third-greatest advertising campaign of the 20th century.

It was brilliant because it appealed to the rogue streak in men — that drifter bent. The campaign said, “Smoke Marlboros and everyone will think you’re cool.” What man doesn’t want to look cool?

Yet, like most advertising campaigns, it was a barrage of images and messages. There was no conversation. No relationship except “buy our product.” No space for feedback.

The disadvantage of putting the product “front and center”

Let me pause for a minute and explain why putting the product “front and center” in traditional advertising is a disadvantage. The truth is, when the product is part of the message, we understand right away that it’s a sales message.

That’s not a terrible thing — any reasonable person will understand that a company is in business to sell their products and services.

But this is where content marketing comes in because this hard-sell approach has gradually weakened traditional advertising. If we’ve learned anything about advertising and marketing in the last 20 years, it’s that customers want to be heard.

What is content marketing?

Before we go on, let’s briefly define content marketing:

Content marketing means creating and sharing valuable content to attract and convert prospects into customers, and customers into repeat buyers. The type of content you share is closely related to what you sell. In other words, you’re educating people so that they know, like, and trust you enough to do business with you.

The types of content companies use include podcasts, blogs, social media, videos, white papers, infographics, SlideShares, and research reports.

Like advertising, content marketing aims to convince people that a product, service, or idea will solve their problems or satisfy their wants.

However, there are some important differences with content marketing.

You own the media and the content

The main difference between traditional advertising and content marketing is that with content marketing, the company becomes the advertiser and the publisher. Instead of selling your products or services to someone else’s audience, you build your own audience — and then determine what to sell.

That’s the story behind our company, Rainmaker Digital, which started as a blog and blossomed into six distinct product lines.

The product is not the focus of content marketing

With content marketing, you may spend roughly 90 percent of your budget on creating content that educates, inspires, and entertains — and only 10 percent on selling a product.

Ten percent may seem small, but the trust, relationships, and authority you build during the other 90 percent really does a lot of the selling for you.

With content marketing, you position yourself as someone who is an authority, can be trusted, and is likable, so when it comes time to sell something, people are already in line.

Content marketing is a long-term game

Since content marketing focuses on solving customers’ problems, keeping the audience engaged, and inspiring them to overcome challenges, the practice becomes a long-term game.

Heck, most of us don’t have the brand equity, authority, or pocketbook of a company like Apple, Dove, or Budweiser … so we can’t win with the one-off nature of traditional advertising (particularly if it flops). We can win, however, by consistently publishing quality content.

You open a two-way conversation

In many ways, content marketing was built to satisfy the consumer demand for a voice.

Blogs invited replies and questions through the comments section. Social media sites like Twitter and Facebook tore down the walls that separated consumers from companies, allowing people to talk directly to businesses.

This two-way conversation promotes a better business and better product when the company listens and adjusts.

Content marketing helps you build a media asset

A great example of a company that built a business around content marketing is Buffer, the popular social media app. During their early years, they first outfitted their blog with outstanding content and then the team started driving traffic to their website through guest posting and content syndication opportunities.

Canva, the easiest-in-the-world-to-use design software, forced people to take notice of this small company with its relentless publication of epic posts like 60 Free Fonts for Minimalist Designs or The 30 Best Free Social Media Icon Sets of 2015.

There’s another important issue I need to point out very clearly here: Companies who invest in content marketing should avoid building on other media properties. This is called digital sharecropping, and it exposes you to the whims of the property owner and prohibits you from capitalizing on the value of a media asset. Let me explain.

When companies invest in content marketing by publishing content on a property they own (their own website), they build a media asset that may be worth money down the road. For example, Brian Clark has been offered seven figures for the copyblogger.com domain — just the website, not the products that actually generate revenue.

People understand the immense value that driving a ton of traffic brings to a company. Content marketing helps you build those traffic streams.

When to use advertising

Let me make this clear: Here’s what I’m not doing. I’m not recommending that you should never advertise. When you think about the benefits of both advertising and content marketing, you’ll realize that one is not better than the other. You just need to figure out which one will help you meet your specific goals.

So, when should you launch an advertising campaign?

One of the biggest challenges new businesses and freelancers face is exposing their products or services to prospects. Think of advertising as a mechanism that quickly closes that gap.

This could be as simple as running a month-long Facebook ad campaign or a Google AdWords PPC campaign.

Of course, advertising is expensive — from the planning and production of the media to the buying of ad space. But if done right, it can result in a quick flood of visitors to your site.

Another benefit of advertising, particularly online advertising, is you can get immediate results.

In the early 2000s, I was in control of a $250,000 Google AdWords campaign — and I loved it. Within 24 hours of writing a text ad and a landing page, I could see results, adjust, measure, and repeat.

It was a fast-paced, accurate way to learn about what worked and what didn’t.

Of course that was not my money, and you may only be able to budget $200 a month toward Facebook ads, but the cost may be worth the results.

When to use content marketing

Copyblogger built an audience through content marketing (two blog posts a week for a few years) before we sold anything from the site. Once we had an audience clamoring for a product, and they told us what that product should be, we built it and sold it to the audience.

Today, the website is 10 years old, and you will occasionally see a promotion — whether it’s an announcement about the Rainmaker Platform, the launch of our podcast network, Rainmaker.FM, or that we’re reopening Authority to new members.

So, when is the best time to use content marketing? All the time. Here are some specific examples.

• Build a community. This is the goal of just about every business in the world (whether or not they realize it), and content marketing helps build relationships over time as you solve customer problems, inspire them to overcome certain challenges, and entertain them with your personal stories.
• Get found in search engines. You increase your chances of ranking higher in search engines when you have consistent, up-to-date, quality content on your site.
• Distinguish your company from your competitors. Content marketing allows you to carefully and methodically spell out the differences between you and your product and other businesses and their products.
• Take on a Goliath when you have a small budget. Canva (the design software firm I mentioned earlier) didn’t have the resources to compete with a Goliath company like Adobe. How were they going to get attention? Publish mega posts with highly valuable content. It worked.
• Cut through the clutter. Like most small companies, Crew (an agency that manages creative projects) didn’t have a chance standing out in a world awash with technology start-ups. How were they going to compete? By launching Unsplash, a website loaded with free, high-resolution images.

Now that we’ve covered the differences between content marketing and advertising, let’s test your knowledge with a little quiz.

Can you tell the difference between content marketing and advertising?

Here are the rules: Below you’ll find five real-world examples. Your job is to guess which ones are content marketing and which ones are advertising.

Then I’ll explain the answers.

1. Blendtec’s “Will It Blend?” videos

Answer: advertising.

The Blendtec YouTube channel displays many of the classic features of content marketing — consistent publishing, entertaining format — but this video is advertising because the product is the main focus of the content.

2. Old Spice’s “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like”

Answer: advertising.

Wieden+Kennedy, the advertising agency behind this campaign, originally launched two or three commercials on short rotation, but soon discovered their popularity and spun out more than 100 minute-long YouTube videos.

That’s certainly content marketing, right? Again, no, because the product was front and center, and they are no longer making similar videos. It was a limited-time campaign.

3. GE Reports

Answer: content marketing.

As Contently’s Joe Lazauskas said, GE is the new Red Bull when it comes to content marketing.

“Tomas Kellner, a former ‘Forbes’ editor, crushes his reporting, and the stories on GE Reports regularly go viral on Reddit. Brands usually go viral on Reddit for ruining the world or releasing really bad lip-syncing videos, not for their content marketing.”

4. Madden NFL 16 | Madden : The Movie

Answer: advertising.

Can you guess why? While the product isn’t really front and center, it is central to the plot, and the storyline drives this movie trailer.

It’s a one-off commercial announcing the launch of Madden NFL 16, which makes it more of an advertorial than traditional content marketing.

5. Rainmaker.FM podcast network

Answer: content marketing.

While the title of the Rainmaker.FM podcast network refers to Rainmaker Digital, our company name, none of the shows explicitly discuss our products except for a short ad bumper at the start or end of each show.

And each show — 24 and counting — consistently publishes useful, compelling content for a growing audience of people who are interesting in digital commerce, content marketing, writing, editing, podcasting, LinkedIn, self-publishing, SEO, YouTube, public relations, entrepreneurship, and more.

Your turn

So, how did you do on that short quiz?

Do you feel like you have a better understanding of the differences between advertising and content marketing? Do you feel like you know when to use one rather than the other?

Let me know in the comments if you have any outstanding questions or thoughts. I would love to hear from you.

The post Content Marketing and Advertising Meet in a Dark Alley: Who Wins, and Why? appeared first on Copyblogger.

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2015 Testing Year in Review: 12 months of macro- and micro-yes experiments

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Earlier this month, I brought you the first in a series of 2015 Testing Year in Review blog posts. For this next post, we’ll be looking at tests using both KPI macro-yes(s) (conversions) and micro-yes(s) (clickthrough).

Here are results of the 2015 tests we ran based on the primary test metric and level of confidence achieved. Anything under 95% level of confidence (LOC) is considered inconclusive, meaning the test did not have statistically significant findings. We want all the tests to be above 95% LOC because then we can say (with 95% confidence) that the changes we made are having the impact we want. The size of the boxes represents the range of LOCs, and the black lines are the midpoint, where half the data is above, and half below the line. The box represents the middle 50% of the data.

 

The big blue box shows the wide range of LOC’s for macro-yes tests. The base of the box is at 50%, and the black line (the median) is at 88%, indicating that less than half of these tests reach 95% level of confidence.

The small green box on the right is micro-yes tests. The range is high and tight, and the median is 97%! This is what we want. Half of these test are above 95% LOC, and the other half stay above 88%. Micro Yes tests are producing statistically significant, actionable insights about our audience.

Of course it’s much easier to increase clickthrough on a page than it is to increase the number of actual sales. The problem that these charts exposes is, less than half the macro-yes tests are reaching 95% LOC. Let’s look at it another way. In the charts below the level of confidence remains on the left, and the relative difference has been added in to show the direction and magnitude to provide insight into these parameters.

The macro-yes chart looks almost like a random scatter plot of data points with some aggregation at the top, where tests that reached 95% level of confidence start to accumulate.

The micro-yes test data points push to the top of the chart, forming a nearly solid line at the top. In addition, we see that line shoot off the right, indicating these test not only reached 95% LOC, but also had a large relative increase, a win-win! Are the macro-yes tests doing that?

Lastly we can look at the data by testing category. For macro-yes test we can see the same wide range of distributions among the various categories. Most of the boxes are big, with medians well below 95%. Some of the box plots drop all the way down to 30% LOC.

In the micro-yes tests we see straight away all the boxes are pushed high up on the chart. The median level of confidence is 97%! With these tests we are obtaining reliable, reproducible results we can act on with confidence.

 

Key takeaway

I often see tests that are optimizing a home page, landing page or some other area high up in the funnel, and tracking macro-yes as the KPI. Naturally we want to impact the bottom line with every change we make, but this approach to testing is not giving us the reproducible results we want.  We should always be tracking the macro-yes, but we don’t necessarily need to measure it as the primary metric. With every inconclusive macro-yes test, our time, effort, and resources are being wasted.

Meanwhile, micro-yes tests are getting the wins we want, without the attention they deserve. People walk toward a macro-yes one step at a time. Micro-yes tests are like the quiet gardeners who go about their work, clearing the path, pulling the weeds, consistently making small improvements that lead to big changes in the overall look and feel of your website. Let your Micro gardeners prune the tangled vines and overgrown branches. Allow them to provide a clear path for visitors to get to the places you want them to go. The data shows they are good at it, and reliable too.

 

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The Pupil Becomes The Master: Five Things Mobile Advertising Can Teach Desktop Marketers

Mobile companies understood mobile-specific strategies long before the widespread adoption of mobile devices and increased adoption of smartphones and tablets. With more than three years of experience and state of the art mobile expertise, there is a lot that can be learnt.

Fred Joseph, COO of S4M, offers some takeaways for planning and executing campaigns for the mobile era:

1. When it comes to creatives, keep it short and catchy

Some brands are used to creating long scenarios as used on desktop (i.e. a 25 second video). However, what we’ve learnt from the mobile user experience is that users have short attention spans. Very short. The shorter and the stronger the message, the more likely a user will be engaged – and bearing in mind that our attention spans have dropped from 12 seconds (in 2000) to 8 seconds (2015) according to a survey conducted last year by Microsoft you really need to make every decisecond count!

Keep things short and sweet and move away from disruptive banner ads that have a tendency to distract users in a negative way rather than enhancing their mobile experience. See a recent example by Adidas here: Adidas ‘Superstar’

Smart marketers need to think more along the lines of immersive augmented app experiences, where they are giving something enhancing to consumers.

For example, this Christmas, S4M’s in-house team created a 3D cube interactive format for mobile devices (the cube is interactive on desktop by clicking and dragging the cube: on mobile it’s tactile) which was used as a holiday greeting for their clients, a format that is only interactive when viewed in a mobile browser.

2. Location is the new cookie

Geo-fencing and geolocation are key to targeting the right individual due to the intimate and individual nature of the smartphone. They allow for a clearer understanding of user behavior by following the entire customer journey. There’s also the benefit of being able to measure mobile investments and mobile store campaigns enable the measurement of direct ROIs. Geolocation can also deliver personalized advertising scenarios and transform ads to a service. For example, presenting a store locator or helping users locate the nearest point of sale can prove an extremely helpful service. There’s no imitating users or delivering irrelevant ads when efficiently dealing with location data.

A great example of this is the Adidas mobile-to-store campaign. The goal of the campaign was to drive sales to Adidas brick and mortar stores, assign a value for mobile in store-conversions and prove that mobile brings incremental value to the business. They pursued this by leveraging location extensions in the search ads, which meant users were directed to the store locator page and thus boost in-store traffic. They then pulled pertinent information from the Adidas retail stores, plus relevant industry data and developed a unique way to report an applied conversion rate. The results proved that mobile ROI brought a 680% incremental increase in ROI and a 20% conversion rate from mobile store locator to in-store visits. For desktop marketers, location is one of the biggest considerations to start making when planning a campaign.

3. The power of now

Users increasingly expect to get what they want in the immediate context and in their exact moment of need. There is a huge battle waging for a customer’s attention and it’s being battled out in ‘mobile moments’ (anytime that a user pulls out their device). The power of immediacy must be harnessed and understood properly by marketers, who need to make sure their customers can get what they want in that precious mobile moment.

A great example of this is played out in how we search. Google processes an average of over 40,000 search queries every second, or 3.5 billion searches per day…or putting it into a wider context that’s a staggering 1.2 trillion searches per year (Google search states here).

This recent post from Think with Google discusses the idea of the “micro-moment” (or mobile moment), the small everyday moments in life that prompt us to search the web with an intention of acting immediately.

Image Source

A few examples of micro-moments:

• Your juicer just broke. You need to search to find a new one, or research the best or most economical ones currently available.
• You just watched a news report about the snowfall in New York. You search to find out what you can do to help.
• You see a product you’re thinking about buying in a store. You search to find out if you can get a better price or find a better option.
• Your child wants to play in a park but it’s pouring with rain. You search online to find out where to go.

Each moment where a customer is engaged with their mobile device provides an opportunity to impress or disappoint.

Fail to deliver timely ads and not only do marketers risk losing out on immediate sales but on a longer term they also risk their brand equity and being shut out by consumers irked by invasive messages that would otherwise have been useful had they been properly timed.

4. Cross-channel

When marketers truly understand their customer’s journey they can better adapt the channel mix taking into consideration multiple mobile devices. Companies need to ensure that their marketing departments are set up to effectively orchestrate the cross-channel mix and that the ad can follow the user whatever mobile device they are using (be that a smartphone, tablet, watch or other wearable).

When designing a creative that’s headed cross-channel, check that it works across devices (iOS to android to desktop) and that any calls to action are integrated and flow across the campaign.

For example, when you create a video ad on desktop, it can’t be used on smartphones as it won’t play and deliver the same way. The same applies for smartphones to tablets. This means that not only does a marketing strategy need to be mobile-dedicated, the creatives need to be device-specific too.

Marketers also need to take into consideration the cross-channel operating systems (OS) between iOS devices and Android devices. Never assume that just because a customer has a MacBook that they’re also using an iPhone – increasingly customers make frequent daily journeys between iOS and Android devices so creatives that play out well on both will reach the customer whatever their OS of choice is. The brands that follow this journey with ease will reap rewards.

5. Don’t hide from the mobile world

Desktop marketers need to bear in mind that desktop users are also mobile users. Even if the user started and ended their journey on a desktop, there will likely have been mobile device usage along the way. This doesn’t mean that a desktop strategy will suffice for a mobile advertising campaign, however.

Digital strategy campaigns need to contain a mobile-specific strategy. With the increasing adoption of wearables, mobile devices are not going away; in fact, more are being added to the mix. The brands that are already responding to this explosion are the early adopters who will win the trust of consumers. They will be respected rather than reviled by users as their content will be relevant, useful and timely.

Conclusion

The companies that will excel with marketing strategies that truly reach their customer with the right message, well presented, executed at the right time and in the right context will doubtless win the trust and respect of the consumer while increasing sales and customer retention in a way that is second to none.

Mobile marketers are now adopting strategies that include such a powerful mix of consumer considerations to capture that small “mobile moment” and the desktop marketers who embrace these new power tools will similarly reap rewards. The pupil has certainly become the master!

About the Author: Fred Joseph is the COO of COO of S4M.

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Rainmaker Rewind: 12 Tips for Creating Calls to Action that Work on LinkedIn Pulse

This week’s edition of Rainmaker Rewind features our own Sean Jackson and Mica Gadhia on The Missing Link.

The dynamic duo welcomed John Nemo, bestselling LinkedIn author and trainer, to discuss calls to action on LinkedIn Pulse.

John Nemo is not only personable and an absolute pleasure to listen to, he also knows LinkedIn inside and out.

John is a bestselling LinkedIn author and trainer who helps small business owners, coaches, consultants, trainers, and sales and business development executives use LinkedIn to generate more sales leads, clients, and revenue for themselves.

He takes Sean and Mica through the step-by-step process of giving readers everything they need to take the action you want them to take.

Click here to listen and learn from The Missing Link.

Have time for a couple more? Check out these great episodes …

In this episode of Youpreneur, Chris and Brian talk about what it takes to be a digital entrepreneur and what that means for brand-building business owners.

Youpreneur:
The New Future of the Digital Entrepreneur, with Brian Clark

In this episode of Hit Publish, Amy asks the question: “When it comes to marketing, what’s in a name? Does it really matter what you call your products and services?” Well … yes it does. And Hit Publish is here to help.

Hit Publish:
How to Generate Powerful Product Names That Don’t Sound Gimmicky

And one more thing …

If you want to get my Rainmaker Rewind pick of the week sent straight to your favorite podcast player, subscribe right here on Rainmaker.FM.

See you next week.

The post Rainmaker Rewind: 12 Tips for Creating Calls to Action that Work on LinkedIn Pulse appeared first on Copyblogger.

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A Field Guide to Reviewing Email Marketing Data, Part 3

In the first two parts of our explorative email marketing field guide, we went over deliverability, design, content and messaging. In the last, we’ll talk about a lesser known strategy that elevates your email game to a whole new level. It takes it out of the hands of artistry and into the realm of science – which executives will be thrilled about.Related Articles

1. A Field Guide to Reviewing Email Marketing Data, Part I
2. A Field Guide to Reviewing Email Marketing Data, Part 2
3. The Prospects Of Email Marketing In The Cloud

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How Community Outreach Can Boost Customer Acquisition & Retention

Strategies for boosting customer retention and fostering customer loyalty abound. But among companies that seek to build, sustain, and grow their customer relationships, few seem to talk about community outreach.

It’s kind of understandable. In a marketing climate that’s increasingly data-driven, it’s sexier for execs in the boardroom to talk about, say, analytics and funnel optimization than about employee volunteer programs and corporate social responsibility. Or: sure, let’s talk about outreach for two minutes — then let’s wrap up this meeting.

This shouldn’t be the case, though. While it may not always seem clear how disaster relief efforts and 3R campaigns would translate to reduced churn and improved retention, community outreach can, in fact, work wonders for your customer relationships.

Outreach improves corporate image and brand reputation

People are less likely to do business with companies that are perceived as irresponsible — according to Cone Communications, 9 in 10 global citizens say they would boycott a company if they learned of irresponsible behavior.

On the other end of the spectrum, companies that are able to visibly demonstrate their ethics and show a commitment to the community are more likely to have a stronger reputation and attract customers who care deeply about what a business stands for.

• In a study by Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business about how outreach can influence consumer attitudes, a grocery retailer experienced a one-unit improvement in customer perception and a 1.8-point increase in share of wallet after it invested in employee fairness and local sourcing as part of its community initiatives.
• Behavioral science researchers found that consumers tend to reward companies with outreach activities by being more loyal to them. Community outreach was even shown to have a stronger effect on customer loyalty than did service quality.
• According to Harvard Law research, community outreach and corporate social responsibility programs create distinct value that leads to increased customer loyalty, willingness to pay premium prices, and lower reputational risks in crisis situations.
• Cone Communications found that 59 percent of Americans are more likely to buy a product associated with a non-profit-corporate partnership. Here’s more data from that study:

  A separate study revealed that 56 percent of US consumers will travel an extra ten minutes out of their way to buy a product associated with a cause they care about.

• A Marketing Science Institute report asserts that, for organizations in B2B environments and supplier-customer relationships, community outreach can foster customers’ trust.

Clearly, community outreach can make a positive impact on your corporate image and brand reputation. It improves how customers perceive the value of your company, which in turn increases their satisfaction and heartens them to stay loyal to your business.

Outreach bolsters your local presence

Whether you’re managing a small business or an enterprise-level organization with multiple locations, community outreach establishes and improves your relevance in local communities where you operate.

Note the success of Small Business Saturday: first held in Roslindale Village, Massachusetts, sponsored by American Express, and organized in partnership with a non-profit (National Trust for Historic Preservation).

The beauty of Small Business Saturday is in its simplicity. Encouraging shoppers to patronize brick-and-mortar businesses, American Express generated an incredible amount of positive coverage and participation on social media and even garnered the support of President Obama.

The campaign also revived local economies in the US and invigorated a customer base of millions of consumers to shop local: on the second year of Small Business Saturday, consumers spent approximately $5.5 billion at local stores and restaurants in lieu of the holiday.

Community outreach doesn’t necessarily have to be about saving the sharks or ending famine in the Horn of Africa. The key is to strategically invest your resources in efforts that help your organization create meaningful connections with customers in the local community. So find a cause that matters to them.

A campaign as simple as allowing neighboring schools to hold fundraising evenings in your stores or developing a localized procurement program amidst gentrification can resonate powerfully with customers, inspiring loyalty and brand advocacy.

Outreach enriches the customer experience

In the Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business cited earlier, customers of the grocery retailer were found to be less enthusiastic about the company’s commitment to environmental friendliness. This attitude wasn’t so much a matter of an active refusal to save the planet; rather, the outreach wasn’t sufficiently tied to anything that directly benefited the customer experience or responded to immediate needs.

Contrast this to a successful program devised by British retailer Tesco, which rewarded shoppers who used reusable bags with loyalty points. By attaching a customer experience benefit (savings) to its outreach, Tesco not only attracted consumers who shared the same values; it also added a kind of affinity and reward component that, in the eyes of people looking for a place to shop, distinguished the company from the competition.

Who knew these could make such a difference for a company?

Whole Foods Market has a similar reusable bag program. If a customer uses a reusable bag, they have the choice of getting 10 cents off per bag or giving that 10 cents to a charity.

It could be that you’re managing a luxury development brand whose beach resort locations attract divers, in which case a coastal cleanup sends a better message than organic agriculture. Or you could be managing multiple casino properties, in which case consumer trust can more effectively be earned with a responsible gaming program than, say, carbon offsetting schemes.

In terms of boosting customer retention, it is important to tailor your community outreach efforts in ways that enrich the customer experience. Listen to customer feedback and analyze your data: these are excellent starting points for identifying relevant causes and customer experience opportunities. The more beneficial the causes are for your customers, the greater the impact community outreach will have on customer retention.

Outreach makes your brand less vulnerable on social

It can go wrong so quickly for organizations that experience communications crises or ethical lapses, especially when these come to light on social media. When customers leave, and leave because they believe you did a Bad Thing, it’s not easy to win them back.

Remember “United Breaks Guitars”?

In one fell swoop, a three-minute song on YouTube turned an unresolved customer issue into a national embarrassment for United Airlines, prompting a Harvard Business School professor to write:

“In social media, an entity’s size and brand recognition make it more vulnerable to parody and attack, not safer.”

Community outreach minimizes that vulnerability. It provides a measure of insurance against any negative issues or customer experiences affecting your brand reputation — while also amplifying positive messages and emotions involving your organization’s ability to do good and right things.

Outreach enhances stakeholder value

A number of studies have explored the relationship between improved customer retention and increased stakeholder value. It certainly makes sense that satisfied, loyal customers can result in better market performance, a more stable customer base and reliable source of future revenue, and a more valuable company.

But it can be the other way around, too: stakeholder value serving to reduce defections and keep customers. Stakeholder value enhances a company’s investment prospects; these investments can then be focused to more effectively develop the business’ customer relationships.

This is where community outreach comes into play: it enables better access to funding and makes it more attractive for investors to commit capital to a business that sets high social and ethical standards. (Some even invest exclusively in organizations with a proven track record in community outreach — think sustainable supply chains, say, or adherence to labor or performance standards.)

• A Journal of Business Ethics study found that, following relief efforts for the deadly 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia, market reaction was generally positive for companies that donated, with larger donations yielding greater increases in return.

And it’s not just the investors, either: employees of companies that are highly engaged in the community are more likely to stay, perform well, and make a positive contribution to the satisfaction and loyalty of customers.

• According to a University of Bath study, corporate social responsibility and community outreach improved employee perceptions of and commitment to their companies.
• Rutgers University found that employees who were able to participate in community, social, or environmental outreach while on the job were more satisfied with their jobs by a ratio of 2 to 1.

It’s clear that community outreach galvanizes external and internal stakeholders, acting as a powerful value creation platform. And the effect of such a platform does not go unnoticed by customers, who will certainly be drawn to companies that achieve strong market performance as well as to businesses with engaged, happy employees.

Community outreach as an executive decision

Community outreach typically involves giving your company’s resources — be these in the form of money, time, products and services, volunteer hours — to the local community in which you operate. But it’s not an exclusively philanthropic construct; it is also one of the most effective strategies for boosting customer retention and driving the growth of your organization.

Make commitment to community outreach an executive decision. Don’t treat it as an afterthought or leave it out of the discussion in your next meeting. How your business works and engages with the community will change the way the community does business with you.

About the Author: Chris Campbell is the CEO of ReviewTrackers, a review management and customer feedback platform designed to help companies efficiently monitor online reviews, manage brand reputation, and enhance the customer experience in ways that make a positive impact on the bottom line.

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