Marketing Your Multi-Product (or Multi-Division) Brand.

If you’re marketing at a business with multiple products, then you may often run into issues of conflicting goals and agendas. Different product teams might be competing for resources, or could be operating separately from the other teams or divisions. The problem is that while you clearly see how these products are connected, your customers don’t.
For example, if you’re a consumer packaged goods company (CPG), the brand managers for each of your products are probably working with multiple agencies – one in charge of creative, another managing your go-to-market strategy, another for press releases (note: all of these agencies are responsible for regularly wining and dining you).
So how can you help your buyers see your company as a single, unified brand? And how can you market multiple products without diluting your message, or overwhelming your audeince?

1. Prioritize Your Products

Brands with multiple products are always in danger of confusing their audiences – if someone is interested in two products, you want to present a unified front, and you don’t want to overwhelm them with multiple messages. Marketo’s scoring capabilities actually allow you to score interest in multiple products, and by prioritizing your products, you can avoid the risk.
For example, if Product A is a higher priority than Product B, a person who is interested in both products will be primarily shown marketing related to Product A. If you’re running lead nurture campaigns, you’ll want to place that buyer exclusively in a Product A-centric nurture track. This is simply a matter of selling the most important product first – the fact that your buyer has shown interest in Product B shouldn’t be disregarded, only given less priority. You’ll still want to use this information for cross-sell opportunities and bundle deals (selling multiple products for a single price).
Note: if you’re going to prioritize your products, make sure you have buy-in from the C-suite – as a company, you’ll need to clearly define the priority of products, as well as the goals around each.

2. Base Interest on Behavior

Once you have an idea of which product is the highest priority when approaching a buyer, you’ll need ways to understand the depth of that buyer’s interest. If you have multiple brands or products, use scoring to determine that interest based on their behavior – not just who they are, demographically speaking, but what they do.
For example, if a customer is searching online for nutritional information about Pepsi products, and she clicks on a video ad for Pepsi, that customer is interested in Pepsi and should be scored accordingly – even if, according to her demographic information, she’s in the target demographic for Quaker granola bars (a product of one of the biggest multi-product consumer good companies – PepsiCo).

3. Research Personas and Lifestyle

Customers purchase brands that fit their lifestyles and their choices, which is my third tip for managing multiple product lines is to use buyer personas. Use observation and research to create personas, or fictionalized representations, of the buyers you would like to reach (or are already reaching).  How do they live their lives, and what type of products would fit into their lifestyle? For example, let’s say that you make breakfast bars, and your buyer persona for that product is highly active and works out several times per week. By creating this persona, you might realize you have an opportunity to market your energy drink as well – just make sure you’re prioritizing, as we covered in the first tip.

In summary: as you market your multi-product brand, remember that customers don’t think about SKUs, or which product is owned by which brand manager – they think about how your products fit into their lives. Prioritize your products, use behavior-based scoring, and create personas to gain a deep understanding of your customers.
Are you marketing multiple products for your business? What challenges have you faced, and what solutions have you found? Let us know in the comments below.

The Colossal Content Marketing Report: Blogging Basics and Beyond

Last week, competitive intelligence platform TrackMaven released their “Colossal Content Marketing Report” – an analysis of blogging culture, pain points, analytics, and more. As you’d expect from a company whose bread and butter is organizing huge amounts of information, TrackMaven didn’t skimp on the data collection. For this report, they analyzed over 1.2 million blog posts and 2 billion social shares.  

Although the report is about content marketing in general (including emails, whitepapers, webinars, case studies, website copy, infographics, and social media content), TrackMaven decided to focus their analysis on blogs. “Blog posts are a sum of content marketing’s parts,” the report explained, “often combining the statistics and research of whitepapers, ebooks, and case studies with the design of an infographic, but with greater length than social media posts and greater personalization than website content.” Fair enough!

Here are some of our favorite takeaways from the report:

When Should I Blog?

This is one of the questions marketers ask us most frequently, and our answer is usually “as often as possible,” as long as you update it consistently. At Marketo, we post to our company blog every single business day – usually, that means five times a week. But blogging takes a lot of time and energy, and many content marketers don’t have the bandwidth to write, edit, and publish a blog post every day. That’s why you want to blog on days (and times) that it really counts.

When TrackMaven examined social sharing for the the 1.2 million blog posts they examined (taken from the 4,618 blogs), here’s what they noticed:

• Blogs are most frequently published on Tuesdays and Wednesdays – 18% of all posts are published on Tuesdays, and 18% of all posts are published on Wednesdays
• The weekends are the biggest days for social shares – on average, 18% of all social shares happen on Saturday, while 14.6% of all social shares happen on Sundays.

These stats are even more remarkable when you consider that 87% of all posts happen during the workweek, and only 13% are published on the weekend. So while Marketo won’t be switching to “weekend only” posts any time soon, marketers looking for big ROI might take advantage of the less crowded weekend blogosphere. After all, that 18% of all social shares is ripe for the taking.

As for what time to publish your blog, TrackMaven’s research indicates that the majority of blogs are published between 9am and 6pm EST. As you can see in the chart below, the most blogs are published between 11am and 12pm:

Of course, that doesn’t mean that you should publish at that time. In fact, you may want to differentiate your blog by posting at a less crowded time. Also, as you can see in the chart below, blogs published between 9pm and midnight EST tend to get the most social shares.

 As TrackMaven explained, “leisure hours are readers’ preferred time to read, reflect, and share the content that resonates most with them…just because your content is educational or work-related doesn’t mean it should come during working hours.”

Where Does My Audience Share?

TrackMaven found that when it comes to sharing blog posts, the vast majority of social shares come from Facebook and Twitter. Of the nearly 2 billion social shares they examined, 38.6% of social shares were on Twitter, and Facebook “likes” accounted for 33.8%. This should come as little surprise, considering that Facebook and Twitter also have the highest user counts – Facebook has 1 billion active users, and Twitter has 560 million.

TrackMaven also noticed that readers were more likely to “like” a blog post on Facebook than to “share” it (although Facebook shares still accounted for a whopping 26.7%).

But even though LinkedIn and Pinterest both lagged significantly behind in total social shares, TrackMaven was quick to point out that these are still important networks for marketers. LinkedIn, after all, has 240 million active users (not too shabby!) and fills a particular niche as a professionally-oriented network. And while shares on Pinterest only accounted for 0.4% of total shares, the site is still a powerful network for consumer and B2B marketers alike – according to a recent report from BizRate, 69% of online consumers who visit Pinterest have found an item they have purchased, or will purchase, compared to only 40% of online consumers who visit Facebook.

For us, all of these stats confirm the advice we always give to marketers – to embrace experimentation, measure carefully, and find out what works for your organization. While it’s essential to track how  others in your industry are running their marketing programs, truly strategic marketers are focused on their own results, along with the strategies of their peers.

9 Email Marketing Mistakes (and how to avoid them)

We’ve all been there. It’s the day before Cyber Monday: you’ve crafted the perfect marketing email – it’s sophisticated yet straightforward, creative yet factual, and guaranteed to inspire customers to open, click, and convert in one seamless motion.
With a slightly self-satisfied smile, you hit “send” before you realize…
… that the link to your site was broken. Or one of the images is missing. And unfortunately, there is no “Undo” button for email (yet).
We’ve collected a list of common email marketing blunders and tips for avoiding them. We’ve also included a cheatsheet at the end, which you can use to verify that each email you send is truly good to go.
1) A subject line that is unrelated to the email – sometimes intentionally designed to tempt recipients to open the email (“subject line bait”).
How to avoid it: Make sure the subject line conveys the punchline of the email. If the email contains multiple messages, it’s best to have the subject line match the message in the first section of the email (the one your recipient reads first).
2) Broken links or links that don’t work as intended – including links that don’t work or send readers to the wrong place.
How to avoid it: Click every link in your email to make sure they function appropriately. Better yet, have someone else click them (in general, having someone else checking your mail is an essential part of the cheatsheet we included at the end of this post).
3) Incorrect spelllling – enough said.
How to avoid it: Some browsers and online editors offer inline tools that will show a squiggly red line to indicate a spelling mistake. Those are good as a first pass. However, for better reliability, we would recommend that you copy / paste the body of the email into a word processor and run a full spelling and grammar check.
4) Funky layout when images are not displayed - an email that is reliant on images and doesn’t render correctly when images are disabled. Some email clients and browsers don’t have images enabled by default, so a lot of people will not see the images you’ve included in your email.
How to avoid it: Test your email in image-disabled mode and make sure it displays well. Always include an alt-text for each image so some of the images’ meaning is still presented.
5) Breaking the law – according to the CAN-SPAM law, you must include your physical mailing address and a link for unsubscribing from your mailing list in each email you send.
How to avoid it: Include these two elements in your email template so you don’t need to worry about them in every email you send.
6) Poor mobile layout - not optimizing your email for mobile devices (or at least making sure they look reasonable). Considering the ever-increasing percentage of recipients engaging with email on mobile devices, this one is important.
How to avoid it: To start, check how your email looks on a few mobile devices (iPhone, iPad, android). It might be that you only need to make some cosmetic changes; it might be that you need to replace your template to a mobile-friendly or responsive template. Even after finding the right template, it’s probably a good idea to continue testing any new emails you create on a mobile device.
7) Incompatibility with certain email clients – your recipients read your emails on many different platform combinations: different hardware (Mac vs PC vs Mobile), operating systems (Windows vs Mac vs Linux), email clients (gmail vs outlook), browsers (Explorer vs Firefox vs Chrome). They all display the same email slightly differently – or very differently. You don’t want your email to look bad on any of them.
How to avoid it: It will be near-impossible to manually test your email on every platform combination. However, when starting to use a new template, it’s a good idea to test it on a few popular combinations. There are also online services that will do the testing for you.
8) Excessive or insufficient length – your email is so long that people either don’t get to the end, or – worse- feel overwhelmed and unsubscribe. Alternatively, your email is so short that you don’t make full use of the attention your readers have offered you.
How to avoid it: The best way to determine your readers’ length preference is to A/B test. Send two versions of the email – one with 10 product images, one with 20. Or one with 5 content items and one with 8, and look at differences in clickthru rates, unsubscribe rates and conversion. Optimize and continue testing.
9) No personalization or segmentation – sending the same email about the children’s socks sale you’re running this weekend to customers who only ever buy women’s lingerie, or football merchandise, or dorm room accessories.
How to avoid it: This one isn’t a quick “fix”, but there are initial steps you can take: Start thinking about segmenting your customers by their shopping behavior, demographics, site engagement or other attributes. If you need some help kickstarting your segmentation thinking, check out the Segmentation course on Custora U and the Segmentation cheatsheet with plenty of examples of ways to segment.
10) And finally, as part of our ‘read 9, get one free’ promotion, here is a bonus mistake to guard against: Being boring. For example, your email is so boring this happens:


 
How to avoid it: Personalizing your messages and ensuring your emails are timely and relevant are a good start. If all else fails, here’s a collection of funny animal videos, the funniest Amazon product reviews, and a meme generator to ensure you have all the tools you need to spruce up any email.

How Every Marketer Can Change Their Dirty Data Culture

Just like a hiker drinking untreated and unfiltered water from a dirty creek, putting raw, untreated and unfiltered data into your marketing automation and CRM will make these systems perform at a suboptimal level. And that’s putting it politely!

Unfortunately, many marketers see dirty data as too costly, too time consuming or, and let’s be honest, too unexciting of a problem to solve. However, we at LeanData, LOVE addressing our customers’ dirty data issues, as we believe that the convergence of cloud technology, readily accessible social channels, and smart process can deliver highly impactful results from data quality investments.

Regardless of the vendors or systems you use to address your dirty data, here are some best practices that every company can do to get started:

Change your Company’s Mentality

Your marketing automation and CRM systems shouldn’t give the people featured on Hoarders a run for their money. The first step is easier than you think: search for “test”, find a completely useless test lead… then press DELETE. Congratulations, you’ve taken the first step in your journey, but more importantly you have now changed the mentality that data should never be deleted or merged. In data quality, the adage “less is more” definitely applies as marketers need to focus on quality over quantity.

A bloated database full of test leads, bots, orphaned contacts, or bounced emails, is not just an annoyance, it is harmful and gives the sales team an excuse to declare that “marketing just sends us junk” (we are sure you have heard that many times). The willingness to delete junk or merge duplicate accounts is a very important shift in mentality. As you find more junk data or duplicates, take the extra couple of seconds to get rid of them – you will be surprised how good it actually feels!

Focus Your Collection/Sanitation Efforts on Key Data Points

Sure, it would be great to know every lead’s height, weight and astrological sign, but chances are there are only a couple of key data points that will actually allow your company to market and sell to each prospect more effectively via better lead management, scoring, segmentation and messaging. Common highly actionable data points include: location, vertical, annual revenue, and title. Once you have picked the 1-2 impactful fields for your company, be fanatical about collecting those data points on every form, list upload and sales calls.

If it’s Important, Standardize

Ever notice how many different ways there are to greet someone:  “hi, hello, hey, yo, what’s up, how’s it going?” People have just as many ways to abbreviate their title or describe their industry, or even share the size of their company.  Because of this, it really pays to bucket and summarize the myriad of possibilities for important data points. Marketing automation is a great tool to use to this end, as it makes it easy to match your CRM revenue bands with those displayed on your forms, or to automatically bucket titles by common keywords or abbreviations. The big benefit here is that bucketed values allow for easy reporting and segmentation across the fields that matter to you.

Low Hanging Fruit is Fast and Just as Delicious

Even if you are in the unfortunate position of having complex account ownership rules or back pointing integrations that make data cleansing daunting, there are easy wins available. Start with the safest and easiest – 2 records belonging to the same rep, for example. Get those done first before trying to tackle harder merges or issues.  Even if these only cover 10% of the dirty data problem…you just fixed 10% of your data quality problem!! You now deserve a glass of ice cold refreshing lemonade (or maybe even a margarita if it’s a Friday afternoon).  Not only does this type of approach allow for bite size improvements, but it builds momentum for the harder, trickier merge sets.

Sure, dirty data can seem like a tough issue to address, but with the trend towards data driven marketing, data quality is a critical factor that can make or break your ability to achieve your sales and marketing objectives. So try out these best practices that will make your data healthier or share your own in the comments below.

The Digital Marketing Mafia: A Breakdown

If you’ve ever received emails selling Viagra, one hundred Facebook likes, or the classic Nigerian businessman wanting your bank details, you’ve glimpsed the underbelly of digital marketing.

Digital marketing can be a powerful tool in any industry (including the financial industry and the healthcare industry) but today I’d like to discuss one of the dangers — what I call the “Digital Marketing Mafia.” These organized syndicates arefar more insidious than the low-level criminals — and you may be using their services without even knowing it.

Here’s a complete breakdown of the Digital Marketing Mafia:

Bots (aka The Associates)

A bot is much like an associate of the Mafia: it is the tool that lets the system operate. Bots are automated applications that set up hundreds of fake profiles on a variety of websites. After they are done, they bring those profiles to “life” so that they carry out illegal activity.

It is possible to build a bot to replicate any repetitive task, like commenting on blogs, creating email accounts and profiles, bookmarking on social media and even submitting articles.

Many websites set up bot detectors, such as CAPTCHAs (“Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”). You’ve probably encountered these — they ask users to input a series of letters, numbers, or words to prove that they aren’t bots. However, bot profiles are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Some of them are impossible to distinguish from actual people. They even make friends on Facebook, and post updates!

Bot Makers (aka The Soldiers)

These are the programmers who set bots loose in the digital marketing world. Bots are fast and cheap to make, because bot makers collaborate on underground bulletin boards and forums to pick up the skills.

If you are talented at making bots, you can bring in a fairly decent income. Bot makers earn money by creating bots for clients, as well as by selling the services of their own bots.

Bots as a Service (aka The Capos)

Many bot makers have a difficult time finding a steady revenue stream, because what they do is illicit in nature. However, just as in the Mafia, leaders emerge and assemble a group of bot makers to create a service. They provide a front, such as an online tool, to appear legitimate and offer the services of their bot makers.

The focus of capos is on increasing business value, such as boosting social media rankings, attacking the rankings of competitor websites, and increasing SEO performance.

“Legitimate” Business (aka The Boss)

Some “legitimate” businesses use these services/tools as a part of their digital marketing campaigns. These businesses then contract their services out to other companies, who often have no idea how their marketing results are generated. This is a very common model in digital marketing, particularly in offshore SEO.

The takeaway? The next time you engage a digital marketing agency, explore their methods for generating results before signing any contracts. The actual tactics that your potential vendor uses may surprise you. There are legitimate, ethical ways to increase your digital marketing profile. Choose a provider that you can trust.

Ever had a run-in with the “Digital Marketing Mafia”? What steps have you taken to keep your business legitimate, especially if you rely on outside contractors? Let us know in the comments below.

28 Attributes of Good Content Marketing to Rock Your Social Business!

Content marketing is the new buzzword. However, the truth is content marketing has been around for decades, since conversations and business have existed. Content marketing is not a new shiny object invented via social media. I wrote a piece on the topic you can check out here.

Is everyone really a content expert?

Every marketer, consultant, tweeter and Facebooker around seems to be talking about content marketing. Unfortunately very few of them have ever done it themselves or really know how to help others write or integrate content to drive real results.

If you are working with a social media consultant or agency be sure to look behind the magic curtain. Do they have a blog of their own? When is the last time they wrote good content? Is anyone reading the content? Is the content getting shared? Is it integrated with the rest of their business or is it an add-on band-aid? When is the last time they sent an email to the list of names they have been collecting via their blog the past year? Do they have an editorial calendar or any rhyme or reason to why and how they are using content marketing, if at all?

It’s similar to the concept of the Facebook page pushers of a year ago who were bashing “strategy” telling customers all you need to do is tweet and get a Facebook page for $1k with a side of a website that tweets for another $2k. It’s funny how now overnight they are all “strategy experts” yet in checking their career profile you’ll find they have spent little time to none actually ever doing strategy for any real business.

You get what you pay for with any service or product. The best thing you can do is educate yourself the best you can and do your research. It doesn’t have to be more expensive or take more time to do it right. Chances are finding a resource with the right experience to help your business will save you money and bring a higher return than many of the fly by night social media operations.

Becoming a social business is not the same thing as doing social media or being social. Social business requires integration of processes, mindset changes and direct investment in specific goals and objectives.

What is content marketing?

Content marketing is an umbrella term encompassing all marketing formats that involve the creation and sharing of content in order to engage current and potential consumer bases. Content marketing subscribes to the notion that delivering high-quality, relevant and valuable information to prospects and customers drives profitable consumer action. Content marketing has benefits in terms of retaining reader attention and improving brand loyalty.

Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing relevant and valuable content to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

I know what it is, now what?

I like simplify where many want to complicate. Below are what I believe to be the top attributes for content marketing that will drive results.

If you have spent any time working in marketing then this should seem like common sense to you.

Bottom line you want to develop content that inspires and connects with your audience with a goal of bringing them closer to you and your brand. You want them to click, double click, share, and come back for more.

28 Attributes of Content Marketing that Rocks! 

1. Goal Driven - Set goals and objectives for each piece. Is the goal to inspire, educate, establish authority, generate leads? Should support higher level business and marketing goals and objectives.

2. Audience focused – Content must be focused on the reader more so than your own self promotion. Know your audience. Know what they want, need, desire. Get in their head and connect with them via content that helps them in business and/or life.

3. Findable – If your target audience can’t find it, it’s all for nothin’!

4. Shareable – Make it easy for people to share with their friends on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, email, etc.

5. Simple – Shouldn’t require a PHD in rocket science to understand.

6. Authoritative – Author speaks and writes from knowledge, experience and authority.

7. Engages – People are inspired to click, double click, comment and become part of the community.

8. Actionable – Should be clear what action the reader should take to learn more, join community, contact you for further information, hire you, request proposal etc.

9. Real – Should have a healthy balance of transparency, authenticity and professionalism.

10. Believable – There should be no doubt that they can trust you and believe what you say. Many factors play a role with this including design & layout of site, source of content, grammar, quality of information, authority and more.

11. Validated – If facts, data, or stats are used the source is clearly provided and all can be validated as truth. This will also help establish authority and ensure content is believable.

12. Valuable – Provides reader with valuable content to help them learn, grow or be inspired.

13. Relevant – Should  be relevant to where the reader is in business or life.

14. Resonates – Should invoke a feeling of shared emotion or belief with the reader.  They should understand and be able to relate to the content, context and meaning.

15. Compelling – Grabs attention, unique enough to read, understand, persuade, change thinking and remember.

16. Integrated – Not stand alone information. You brand, expertise, experience, services offered should support the content to best establish authority, believability etc.

17. Educational – Provides value in regard to knowledge and teaching of a topic reader is interested in.

18. Passionate – Should be obvious the writer is passionate about topic and is not just writing to drive blog traffic or other objectives.

19. Positive - Who wants to read a blog that does nothing but complain? Not many people. Content should be positive and make the person feel better, know more and be inspired to do more whenever possible.

20. Forward thinking – Should not dwell in the past, old technology but should at minimum be present day and preferrably forward thinking. Take people along with where you are going if you are visionary person.

21. Inspires – Inspire readers to learn more, do more, be more and become one with you and your brand.

22. Connects – Inspires the reader to connect with you and your brand. Your goal is to build and nurture a relationship with them.

23. Achieves – Helps the reader achieve their goals. If you focus first on helping reader achieve their goals, you will achieve yours by default.

24. Purposeful – The content has a purpose, is not rambling, meaningless mumbo jumbo.

25. Brand loyalty – Content should help drive brand loyalty with reader. The content should be a good representation of your brand, personality and not a glossy piece of corporate collateral from the 1990′s that describes what you wish you would be when you grow up.

26. Quality – Content is of high quality. Should not be written in a hurry, have grammatical errors or read like it was written by a 5th grader.

27. Open – Author is open to other ideas, willing to enter into a healthy debate and genuinely listen to differing opinions.

28. Conclusive – It has an end. It doesn’t just ramble and ramble but it is clear when the content piece starts and ends.

Avoid the following: 

1. Focusing too much on sales. You don’t want to sound like a used car sales person.
2.  Overly opinionated.
3. Closed minded.
4. Argumentative. Don’t bite the fingers off of your readers who may comment with a differing opinion. Be open to new ideas and opinions.
6. Egotistical.
7. Self promotion.
8. Random Acts of Marketing – If it’s not in the budget, not in the plan and not integrated then chances are it’s a RAM. RAMs will eat every last dollar of your ROI for lunch, breakfast & dinner. Avoid them at all cost!

Your Turn? 

What do you think? Do you agree with these attributes? What ones would you add? What content inspires and connects with you? What are your favorite blogs or content creators that capture your attention?