Hi, I’m Nitin Malik
a B2B SaaS Marketing Leader Content Ninza Data-driven Marketer

11 Techniques To Increase Free Trial Sign-ups

How to Make Your Blog the Ferrari of Lead Generation

Blogging has emerged one of the most popular trends in content marketing in past 3-5 years. Many of the businesses now revolve around blogging itself.

Good news is – their success has forced most modern marketers to take blog marketing more seriously. May be that’s why, today most of companies have a blog section on their websites. Bad news is – most of these blogs work as a token presence and don’t realize their true potential for the business.

Ever wondered why?

After all, all marketers launch the blog with lots of expectations –

• Create great content that will go viral,

• Generate lots of traffic to the blog,

• Achieve Wide Reach & Shares for each blog article,

• Finally, gain better conversions

Initially, it looks simple:

Let’s create lots of (supposedly) good content. Share it on social channels. Make the blog articles SEO friendly. Do some paid promotion (provided you’ve got big pockets).

And then wait for increase in blog web traffic. 

In many cases, if content is original, its quality is really good, and other key fundamentals are in place, the web traffic gets a boost. Usually, more web traffic means more leads and hence, more sales. However, in case of a blog, most of marketers remain happy with just higher blog traffic. Leads from blog? Nowhere near to expectations. Lead generation through the blog is still a dream for most of marketers. That really nails the usability of blog. Blog should deliver qualified leads for your business. Otherwise, it’s all fluff. To me, after all, any business activity is driven towards the revenue.

No?

Making interesting conversation is one thing and converting those conversations into revenue is another ball of game. Lead generation through blogging is challenging but very much possible.

How To Get More Leads From Blogging

Lead generation with blog can be in different forms – email signups, downloads, free trials, subscription, service purchase etc.

This article will help you implement some winning tactics to transform your blog into a source of lead generation for your business.

More Blogging = Better Chance of Lead Generation

First, fix the basics. Create lots of blog content. More you blog, more your chance of getting new customers. When I say, create lots of blog content, it is implicit that it has to be of high quality.

The best thing about leveraging blog content is that it’s all organic. And in organic search, nothing can beat the blog on SERP (Search engine result pages).

Focus on Creating Long-form Content

You must have heard about long-form content, right Long form content refers to the LONG articles discussing a topic in highly detailed manner – ranging from 2,000+ words to 20,000 words. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you would have come across it on many occasions in articles like this one (2,100 words), this one (2,561 words) and the one you are reading is (3,000+ words).

Scared? Please don’t. Long form content can be your best friend for blog lead generation.

Long form content will win the war for you when it comes to all popular search engines and most importantly, with your blog readers / potential customers. And this is accepted and proven by industry leaders across the globe.

A Quick Flashback

Till 2013, short-form content was the norm. Anything between 350 to 700 words article was considered the best practice. Marketers around the world used to publish 3 to 5 such articles each week. Despite being poor in terms of content quality and relevant information, it worked well for them.

A time came when Google was filled with crap stuff and keywords-stuffed articles. This forced Google to change their algorithm in 2013 to serve the end-users. This was the deserving end of short-form content and rise of the long-form (over 2,000 words) content to get higher rankings in search engines. Initially, there was some apprehension about the feasibility of long-form content.

“When readers started moving to the internet, media analysts thought long-form journalism was in trouble. Attention spans were going to shrivel. Readers wanted short, they wanted snappy, they wanted 140 characters and not much more (though a listicle on the side couldn’t hurt). Who would want to scroll through an 8,000-word article on an iPhone screen?”

– Naomi Sharp

But, the massive success of long-form content around the world has proved that such fears were misplaced. Moz and BuzzSumo analyzed over one million articles (in 2015) and found that content over 1,000 words consistently receives more shares and links than shorter-form content.

“As a content marketer, you have to create long form content, meaning 2000+ word, high-quality blog posts.”

–        Neil Patel

Don’t forget that long-form content is loved by all relevant stakeholders – Google, Influencers, and your readers. As the studies show that long-form content is preferred by Google as well as readers, which directly affects your blog rankings and blog traffic.

Back in 2012, SerpIQ conducted a study around more than 20,000 keywords. (Look at the screenshot below.) The results showed that the average content length of each of the top 10 results was more than 2,000 words. The average number of words for the content in the #1 spot was 2,416. For the #10 spot, the average number of words was 2,032.

As you can see, there is a decline in content length as we move from first to the tenth position. This graph indicates that the trend of long-form content getting better traction had started in 2012 itself. Pandu Nayak, the technical staff member at Google and creator of the Panda algorithm update, posted the following from this article on long-form content:

Users often turn to Google to answer a quick question, but research suggests that up to 10% of users’ daily information needs involve learning about a broad topic. That’s why today we’re introducing new search results to help users find in-depth articles.

BuzzSumo found that “the longer the content, the more shares it gets, with 3000-10000 word pieces getting the most average shares (8859 total average shares).”

The long-form content is comprehensively researched, well-written and SEO-friendly. So, if you want to get good blog traffic, better user engagement and lead generation from blog, than start creating long form content.

2,000+ words article is good.

3,000+ words article will be better.

5,000+ words article will be great.

More blog traffic means a higher chance of lead generation from the blog.

Here is the math:

Assume your blog gets 1,000 visits per month for short-form content (700-1,000 words max). Out of these 1,000 visitors, 2% sign-up – 20. It’s proven that long-form content gets higher traffic than short-form content. So, now your blog gets approx 4,000 visits per month for long-form content (3,000+ words). Out of these 4,000 visitors, 2% (same as earlier) gets converted – 80. Notice the difference? It’s 4 times more leads. Now, coming to the length of the content. Just churning out 2,000 to 4,000 words article won’t help. Without a doubt, quality comes first. So, if you can write 2,000 to 3,000 words blog articles with the right mix of quality and promotion, you can double your conversion rate.

Focus on Long-tail Keywords

Focusing on long-tail keywords can be very profitable for your blog strategy. What are the short tail and long-tail keywords?

Short tail keywords (also known as ‘Head Terms’) are 3 words or less.

Examples include:  ‘Digital marketing,’ ‘Digital Consultancy’, or “marketing company.” Long-tail keywords are those three and four keyword phrases that are very, very specific to whatever you are selling.

Examples include:  ‘Digital marketing agency in Delhi NCR,’ ‘Hire a Digital Consultant in India’ or “Top 10 marketing companies in New York.”

Long tail keywords help bloggers in two aspects:

• Easy Ranking
• Higher Conversions

Source

Please note that long tail keywords get less search traffic, but will usually have a higher conversion value, as they are more specific. Here is a quick comparison between both long tail and short tail keywords for your understanding:

The long-tail keywords revolve around the user intent. You see, whenever a customer uses a highly specific search phrase, they tend to be looking for exactly what they are going to buy.

They use more specific keywords. These keywords have less number of searches but a higher chance of a conversion. For example, look at the latest average monthly search volumes for short tail and long tail keywords:

Therefore, start focusing on long-tail keywords while writing your blog articles. Link your long-tail keywords from head to tail. By doing this, you can rank for specific keywords and attract more of your targeted customer base. More importantly, you get a higher conversion rate.

Look at the chart below:

Long-tail queries converted at 26%, an enormous 160% increase over the 10%-converting head terms!

Source It’s your time to leverage long-tail keywords. Go ahead and start doing it. You may ask:

‘How to know what are the long tail keywords for my niche?’

It’s easy to find out your industry’s long tail keywords using Google Search Console tool.

Google Search Console is a free service offered by Google that helps you monitor and maintain your site’s presence in Google Search results. Discover how Google Search—and the world—sees your site:

• Which queries caused your site to appear in search results?
•  Did some queries result in more traffic to your site than others?
•  Are your product prices, company contact info, or events highlighted in rich search results?
• Which sites are linking to your website?
• Is your mobile site performing well for visitors searching on mobile?

…and much more!

Here is a quick Google Search Console process snapshot to help you find out your short and long tail keywords:

• Log in to your GSC account.
• Click “Search Traffic.”
• Click “Search Analytics.”

When you click on ‘Search Analytics’, you will see a new screen (see below).

You see different options with check boxes like ‘Clicks,’ ‘Impressions,’ ‘CTR’ and ‘Position’. Turn all of them ON.

Once you select all these options, you will see the keyword results as shown below:

The keywords with higher CTR (more than 10% at least) should tell you which long-tail keywords you should focus on. Now, you are aware of the keywords that bring traffic to your website.

Next what?

Here is a list of key steps you should take to gain higher conversions from your blog articles:

1. Create a quick list of phrases that people in your niche are searching for.
2. They should consist of a minimum of 4 words or longer.
3. Make sure these terms are included smartly in the blog articles.

And most importantly, once these long-tail keywords are finalized, you should start writing separate blog articles for each keyword. Ensure that the blog article title retains the chosen long-tail keyword. Don’t forget to use this long-tail keyword in the body text and other related keywords. Last but not the least, write a long-form blog article which is more than 2,000 words.

Offer Your Readers Exclusivity

Use content exclusivity as a weapon. Everyone likes to be part of a secret club where only a few can enter. A blog is not meant to offer everything free and at the very first instance of the click. If readers can’t have it, they would want it more. That’s human psychology. Though it’s difficult to create a sense of exclusiveness yet it can be done with some smart marketing or EXCLUSIVE content creation. So, try to offer some exclusive content to your readers for the want of additional information from them.

This can be done in a variety of forms:

• Only available here
• Limited offer
• Only available to subscribers
• Become an insider
• Today only
• Only 5 left
• Get it before everybody else
• Be the first to hear about it
• Be one of the few
• Accessible only by reference
• Free subscriptions running out
• Join exclusive content
• Only 10 available

Publish Different Types of Content

Admit it – A blog is not all about the text. In the age of rich media, your blog can serve a lot of variety of content to your readers. So be prepared to shake and mix up things a bit.

This includes:

•  Video
•  Podcasts
•  Infographics
•  Interviews
•  Group interviews

Why does this help?

Because different people prefer different ways to consume information. Start posting the different types of content and then re-purposing them in interesting ways can really make a whole lot difference to your blog. And, this will help you reach out to a wider base of audience.

Exploit CTAs while Replying TO Blog Comments

You write good content. People read your blog. Some of them leave your blog disengaged. And, some of them are engaged enough to leave a comment. Next what?

You go and answer each comment. Here is your chance to generate more leads.

Yes.

While responding to each comment, use CTAs to a landing page where they can subscribe for the webinar, or download a whitepaper / an e-book. Remember, these are the people who are interested to start a conversation with you after reading your blog. So, don’t leave them midway. Give them something extra to stay connected with you. Offer them more value than just a ‘sincere thank you’ message in the comments section. You will witness the difference in terms of web traffic, higher engagement, and the number of leads.

Caution: Don’t go overboard. Use it smartly and sparingly.

Convert Your Blog Readers into Hot Leads

Now, you have taken the needed steps to ensure that you start getting enough traffic on your blog articles. The next step is to ensure that you provide your readers with enough opportunities to convert into a lead – that too in subtle ways. Conversion is all about getting the web visitors to take the desired action on your online platform.

A typical understanding of conversion is about customers paying money to buy your service or product. That’s an incorrect way of looking at a blog lead. Conversion can be the beginning of a relationship or taking your relationship with your blog reader to the next level.

• Asking your blog readers to subscribe to your blog or newsletter can be a conversion.
• Taking the free trial offer is conversion.
• Downloading your e-book or a whitepaper is a conversion.
• Someone who followed you on Twitter liked your page on Facebook or connecting with you on LinkedIn is a conversion.
• Someone taking a free or paid monthly subscription is also a type of conversion.

Focus on the Call-to-action (CTA)

Your calls-to-action (CTAs) is your ticket to a higher blog lead generation rate. So, ensure they are engaging enough for your readers to take your desired action. Play around with your CTAs in terms of keywords, content, design, and placement. If you use a contact form then keep the fields limited to two. More than three will be a crime. Make it easy for people to convert. Here are some of the great examples of CTAs used by industry leaders.

The Content Marketing Institute use the sidebar area with different conversion opportunities:

Search Engine Land has a sticky subscribe bar at the top of each blog article:

SEMRUSH invites you to enter your website URL and start using their tool with a single click.

Crazy egg offers 30-days Free Trial on the blog page beside standard subscription options.

Summing Up

We have discussed lots of ideas which can help you grow your blog traffic and generate more leads for you. But, don’t forget – blog is a marathon, not a sprint. It demands lots of great content, constant experimentation, and last but not the least, massive patience from your side. I hope you have learned some of the good tips from this article to generate more leads with your blog. Start testing them again and again.

The desired effect may take little longer but it will form the crux of your long-run blog lead generation strategy. You just need to try these strategies to ramp your blog for better web traffic and hence, more leads.

Over To You

Are you now ready to implement these tactics and optimize your blog lead generation strategy? Share your experience after leveraging these tactics and how did it improve your lead generation with your blog?

As an expert digital marketing consultant, I have helped our customers optimize their Blog lead generation marketing with sharp strategies and flawless execution.

Few Question for You

So now I have few questions for you:

How are you generating leads from your blog?

What are your thoughts on the lead generation from blog tips shared in this article?

Do you have any tips to share?

Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

25 Social Media Marketing Content Ideas to Engage Your Audience

Do you struggle coming up with social media marketing content ideas for your social media channels? If yes, then you’re not alone. Content is the gasoline for social media marketing. Lacking social media marketing content ideas can ruin your social media presence. However, many marketers face this challenge of coming up with novel social media marketing content ideas.

Also, the content they create, doesn’t get desired level of audience engagement. This article will spot some of the finest tips, tools and strategies for creating social media content ideas that helps you humanize your business conversations.

First Questions Yourself

1. Why my audience should click on this?
2. How it brings audience closer to my brand?
3. Would I like or share this?

When you ask these questions to yourself in an objective manner, you will end up posting content which is contextual to your audience and your business. You need to mix up a variety of social media marketing content ideas to engage your audience. I have made a list of top social media marketing content ideas that have spruced up my social media presence.

Here Are Top 25 Amazing Social Media Marketing Content Ideas Which Can Be Used To Find And Create/Re-Use Valuable Content For Your Social Media Marketing Efforts:

1. Reach Out to Influencers in Your Industry  

Make a list of top 3 leaders in your industry and reach out to them by a tweet or comment. Starting a conversation with the right influencers in your industry can get you higher brand visibility. Put a question or ask for opinion on certain topic that is common to both of you as well your target audiences. This is a gradual process however if done properly, it can be one of the best source of content creation for your social platforms.

2. Post Memes or GIFs

Before I talk about the Graphics Interchange Format (the GIF’s short, formal name) and Memes, first, have a look at some of the key numbers:

1.  23 million GIFs are posted to Tumblr every day.
2. Facebook Messenger sees more than five million pass through daily.
3.  Slack counts more than two million GIF integrations each month.

Astonished? 

I am not! They are getting popular day by day. Even organizations like NASA uses GIFs of satellite imagery to transit important information, and Buzzfeed recently used GIFs to explain Greece’s debt crisis. Go ahead and create your own GIFs or Memes. You can also find GIFs with the latest and newest hashtags here! Search, discover and share your favorite Memes GIFs.

“It’s easier to be funny with a GIF than with your own words,” – Adam Pash

Adam Pash is a developer, writer, and formerly the editor-in-chief of Lifehacker, one of the internet’s most popular web sites. Pash developed the record-your-own-GIF app And Then I Was Like. Try it now.

3. Leverage Your Blog Articles

Share your blog posts on social media channels. This will work both ways for you – your blog will be promoted automatically and the best way to get your blog seen is to share it on your own social media platforms. Evercoast keeps sharing its digital marketing blog posts on social media channels that is relevant for both its business and audience.

You know it’s relevant to your business because it came from your business only.

4. ‘Appealing Question’ Post

Use different aspects of communication and ‘questioning’ is one of the most potent among them. To engage your audience, ask them questions.

Such posts provide your audience an opportunity to showcase their knowledge and gratify their curiosity. Question can be asked through a contest or poll. You can even ask them to predict a result of related event or give them multiple options.

5. ‘Did You Know’ Trivia Questions & Answers

People love to know interesting trivia about their related filed. You should post engaging content and help people know new perspective.

There are always many interesting facts and figures about any topic / industry / geography /event. Just Google it and use these facts in creative posts.

6. Answer the Client’s Potential Objections

Make a quick cheat-sheet with possible objections raised by clients in your industry. These objections may be their pain points, current trends, industry dynamics, validation of your solution or much more. Write down the answer in a crisp manner (would be better if it is supported by some data). Start posting these answers on your social channels. These posts will be a great way to tell your audience that you’re an expert in your field and how you can help your clients grow their business. It’s a potential source of content creation for social media channels as well as a tool to establish your thought leadership. Just be careful that your answers should not smell ‘sales’ in any form. If it does, it will back fire. Hence, try to be a reliable source of insights and information. Nothing Less. Nothing More. 

7.       Customer Testimonials and Reviews

It’s important to blow your own trumpet and let your light shine. And there is no better way to do that than using authentic endorsements of your business by your customers. However, the truth is – testimonials are one of the most underutilized marketing assets across B2B and B2C businesses. Social media channels are one of the best way to do that. Start promoting your customer testimonials and reviews on your social media channels. Create a great design with customer’s feedback and post it. Ensure that you position / promote the testimonials with an attitude of gratitude.

And, last but not the least, don’t forget to include your customer’s name/handle!

8.       Post Solution / Product / Services Videos

Admit it – the buck stops with your product / solution / services. At the end of the day, it’s your solution / product /services you want to sell to your customers. So, start creating short duration videos for your niche and post them on your social media channels. Visuals are eye-catching when your audience is scrolling through their news feed. It’s been proven time and time again that visuals help improve engagement, but what about videos?

Recent studies shows that:

• Social video generates 1200% more shares than text and images combined.
• 51% of marketing professionals worldwide name video as the type of content with the best ROI.
• Marketers who use video grow revenue 49% faster than non-video users.

Not Convinced Yet?

Don’t worry. Your will get convinced sooner than later by seeing your competitors doing the same.

9.       Curated Content

Content works like an oxygen for social media marketing. Not just any content – You need original content, interesting content, engaging content. However, creating original content is a long and tedious process. In Content Marketing Institute’s 2015 survey, the top two content marketing challenges that B2B marketers face were:

1.  Producing engaging content (54% of marketers)

2.  Producing content consistently (cited by 50%)

The reality is that most brands don’t have enough unique content to fill up their entire social media calendar. This challenge can be met with curated content.

80% of marketers  share 3rd-party content to improve company visibility and buzz.

For the uninitiated, here is a quick brief on Social Media Content Curation:

Social media content curation is the process of organizing and sharing top-quality content from around the web on your social media platforms.

You can curate content from a wide variety of online sources, including trade publications, social media profiles, blogs, scientific journals, news outlets, and more.

Here is a quick list of content curation tools for you:

• Klout
• Feedly
• Startafire
•   Trendspottr
•   Google Alerts
•    Curata
•   Storify

10. Celebrate a Day

There are famous holidays, festivals and national / international days. Create engaging posts around such occasions and days. Wishing your fans on Thanks Giving, Diwali or New Year can make the page more humane and alive.

Such posts can instantly connect with your audience and encourage them to engage with your brand in subtle ways.

11. Post Career Opportunities 

Use social media smartly to promote your brand through showcasing job openings in your company. It shows that your business is growing.

You can use your existing fans network to find out your next employee. Through your fans’ extended network, your company can reach out to much wider audience.

12. Highlight Newly Hired Team Members

You’ve completed your hiring process and have found the right candidate.

What next? It’s time to highlight the new team members in your post with their brief bio and interests.

This will not only help you introduce and welcome your new employees to the world but also gives a human touch to your business conversations.

13. Go for Infographics

This is visual age – less text and more pictorial. And nothing can be better than an info-graphic to tell a long story in concise yet appealing manner. People just love going through the highlighted statistics in a graphic form. It not only saves lot of time for them but also, it’s easy on the eyes. If you can create in-house info-graphics that would be great. Otherwise, you can use curated info-graphics to attract people’s attention.

14.       Showcase Your Company’s Work Culture

Every organization possesses a certain personality. Your social media channels are perfect place to showcase it in positive light Post the photos of the fun events held for employees. Cover any kind of award & reward ceremony and publish the company’s star performers.

Talk about any upcoming event(s) that your company is going to attend. Try to build some engagement around it in advance. Promote any charity work taken by your company or your annual event. Anything that throws some positive light on company’s work culture is worth sharing with the world.

15.       Share Quick Tips 

The modern user is burdened with too much information. He needs content that can be scanned quickly and still do the job.

That’s where ‘quick tips’ can help. Focus on key areas of your business around which you build a list of most important ‘Quick Tips’ or ‘How To’. Ask yourself – is it really an important tip? If yes, am I presenting it in a quick manner as promised as a Quick Tip?

Even you can break down quick tips in the form of ‘Tip of the Day’. In fact, this may work better as it won’t bombard your audience with too much information at one go.

16. Run Contests

Contests are the best way to create some buzz for your brand and re-activate your idle fans.

Create an interesting contest with some freebies offered as a reward and encourage fans to participate. For maximum participation, keep the contest rules simple and straight.

17. Industry News

Keep an eye for latest industry news and trends in your business. Make a comprehensive but contextual list of such sources – social pages / websites / publications.

Such news and articles are good fit to be shared on social media marketing and they get highest engagement from the audience. Follow these accounts and engage with them. Share or retweet their posts on your channels.

18. Answer the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Your Industry / Business 

Make an all-inclusive list of frequently asked questions related to your brand, business and industry. Keep the answers concise and if possible, support them with some data. Try to present them in some creative manner. This will also help you create a repository that can be used on multiple online platforms.

19.  Share Podcast Episodes

Podcast is an innovative way to engage with your social media fans. Topics for podcast can be varied but they should focus on customer-centric issues only. Create a podcast today and if you need some guidance on how to do it, check this postto get started.

20. Post Live Videos

Believe it or not – there can’t be anything better than a ‘Live Video’.

And social media has played a huge role in making them so popular. Almost every major social media platform has launched this feature of posting ‘Live Videos’ in last one year or so. It’s up to you to choose the right platform and start posting live video stories around your business. You can even mix this type of post with another type – Quick Tip or Did You Know.

21. Endorse Newsletter / Webinars Sign-Ups Posts

We all need to build our subscriber base. That can be done through promoting the sign-ups forms across all online mediums. Then, what is stopping you to use social media to promote it?

Post/Share the sign-up link for your newsletter, webinar, event, product demo on social media platforms.

This will not only help you build your subscriber list but also promote your brand in subtle ways.

22. Post Inspirational Quotes / One-liners

Everyone loves inspiring quotes. They always work.

Try to strike a balance between typical inspirational quote posts and quotes form industry leaders.

The quotes from your industry leaders can be about current trends, changing business landscape, industry pain points or success stories. Such quotes will have strong connect with your audience than a generic quote.

23. Host A Twitter Chat

What is a Twitter chat?

A tweet chat is a live Twitter event, usually moderated and focused around a general topic. To filter all the chatter on Twitter into a single conversation a hashtag is used. A set time is also established so that the moderator, guest or host is available to engage in the conversation.

Twitter chats offer social media marketers an opportunity to network better. It revolves around one hashtag – relevant to your brand, business or industry. Try to find out / create a hashtag that you would like to use for naming your Twitter chat. But avoid using any active hashtag used by another brand.

“Twitter chats are business networking events – minus the dress code.”          Buffer App Blog

If leveraged properly, your fans and their network will see this hashtag and may engage with your brand though this hashtag. It ensures higher brand visibility for your business.

Key points to follow when hosting a Twitter Chat:

·        Create a clear and succinct hashtag related to your brand

·        Pick a day and time for executing Twitter chats

·        Introduce a relevant topic and prepare a list of questions around it

·        Start promoting your Twitter chat

24. User-Generated Content

People love to share their opinions, comments, feedback for the published content. This is called ‘User-generated Content’. It’s up to you to pick out the right content form the heap of this ‘User-generated’ content and promote it on your social media channels. You can even promote such fans’ content to present them as your social ambassador to garner better brand visibility and engagement.

25. Post Client Success Stories

Talk about your company’s case studies / client success stories on social media channels. Create a smart post that briefly showcases client’s challenge, your solution and business impact. Such posts will have more impact compared to typical posts as they talk about real life business situations and their solutions. Hence, create and post the most of them.

Summing Up

Now, you have come to understand different type of social media marketing content ideas that can be posted on your social media channels. You can mix up the variety of these social media marketing content ideas and then find out your most popular content types. The goal is to deliver content in diverse forms and get the best ROI out of your social media marketing efforts.

Have you used similar kind of social media marketing content ideas on your social channels before?

What was the impact?

Are you ready to jump in and mix up the social media marketing content ideas to great extent?

Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

Personalize Employee Experience with HR Tech Transformation

Dear Business Leaders, I have one simple question to ask to all of you. ‘What Value You Want to Derive the Most from HR?’

I believe that your answer may revolve around –

‘More operational efficiency, better employee productivity and higher retention rate at lesser cost’.

Right? Now, it is your turn to ask the question back to me. ‘How to achieve that sustainably in 2020 and beyond?’ The easy answer is – ‘HR Tech Transformation’. You see? It’s simple math.

But before we go into ‘what, when, where, how etc.’, let’s first understand the ‘what’ part of it.

What is HR Tech Transformation?

A rookie in HR may ask, “What is HR tech transformation?”

Many people confuse HR Tech Transformation with just implementing a new HR software in an organization. There can’t be a bigger myth than this.  A good HR software will consolidate all the disparate legacy HR systems, workflows and processes, tools and individual applications to streamline HR operations. Is that all? Of course not! I wish it was that easy. Let me clarify.

Today, HR is expected to play the role of a strategic partner. To overcome these challenges and many more, HR is supposed to deliver human-centric seamless employee experience with the power of digital technologies across the enterprise. HR Tech transformation has the power to revolutionize how your workforce engages with the workplace.  As a result, the technology empowers the HR department to be more agile and efficient and significantly contribute to the business value – like a true strategic business partner. The most compelling evidence is – every industry is going through different kinds of digital tech transformation that include mobile computing, cloud computing, virtual reality, artificial intelligence, machine learning, automation and more. In effect, the HR industry is no exception to this phenomenon.

According to the recent KPMG report, by 2020, adopting new technologies in a workplace will not only change the way of recruitment but will also decrease the manual workforce.  So, no prize for guessing that ‘HR Tech Transformation’ is the buzzword today. In 2020 and beyond, HR Tech Transformation holds the key to a better-digitized future where technology enables and empowers the modern workforce to deliver its full potential. This becomes much more imperative amid the COVID-19 crisis, when companies are struggling to manage end-to-end employee experience while trying to be equally agile and business-focused.

How To Accomplish HR Tech Transformation

To accomplish true HR Tech Transformation for an organization, it demands a fresh mindset.

It necessitates to re-imagine the employees as the new consumer. 

Once you start taking your employees as your consumer, only then you will focus on how to deliver end-to-end optimal employee experience across the employee lifecycle. Remember, good employee experience equals better customer experience. More importantly, for an organization, HR tech transformation should not be just about HR but it must align with:

1. Align with the organization’s key business objectives
2. Aim to be more efficient and cost-effective
3. Focus on delivering  a great employee experience

Now, HR Tech transformation is something that can’t be achieved overnight. Like any challenging mission, HR Tech Transformation too has its own journey, obstacles and milestones. Let me explain this journey into 4 phases:

PHASE 1: ESTABLISH THE NEED

This is a phase where an organization understands the real need to digitize their HR operations. To establish the need for HR Tech Transformation, first it’s important to understand the common challenges an organization face when it comes to managing the HR:

• Poor operational efficiency
• Modest Employee engagement
• Sub-standard productivity
• Poor retention rate
• Higher operational costs
• Time-consuming processes due to legacy systems
• Lack of tangible business value

All these and more such challenges force an organization to look for alternative ways to manage the HR. So once the problem has been identified and needs are established, it’s easier to seek the right path. Don’t forget the fact that despite realizing the need to transform the HR, several organizations may not be fully ready to implement it for different reasons. Reasons may vary from organization to organization. It may be related to finance, legacy systems, integration challenges, poor digital literacy, and more.

PHASE 2: GET STAKEHOLDERS BUY-IN

Once the need for HR transformation has been established officially, it’s time to get everyone aligned towards the same goal: higher business efficiency and better employee performance.

After all, HR transformation can’t be done in isolation. It has to get the complete stakeholder buy-in from all divisions. What might be obvious to one leader in HR may be an alien idea to another leader in the same organization.  All leaders should be on the same page when it comes to aligning the organizational culture with employee experience. All leaders should be very clear about the problems the organization is facing.

For example,

• Retention rate is very low
• Employee turnover is high
• Time to replace the employees is increasing
• Organizational goals aren’t being met
• Revenue is decreasing
• Employees are dissatisfied

You may even look at external factors such as a disruptive technology, or an emerging competitor that is forcing you to consider new approaches. Therefore, a strategic level discussion starts taking shape among the leadership team to weigh in the business relevance, the cost-benefit analysis, organizational challenges, business competitiveness etc.

During this process, the organization’s leadership will be able to achieve strong stakeholder engagement and line-manager’s buy-in to make the initiative a success. Not just that, this brings out the power of strategic collaboration to its true form with shared efforts and insights.

PHASE 3: BUILD A STRATEGIC ROADMAP FOR HR TECH TRANSFORMATION

Once the leadership team is on-board, it’s time to take the next step which is detrimental to the success of the HR Tech Transformation initiative. An internal digital transformation team should be formed to guide the company from strategy and operations perspective. This team will craft a planned HR Tech Transformation roadmap from the company’s perspective to set the long run and short term goals. This roadmap may need some tweaking here and there once the HR Tech Transformation implementation partner is on-board.

PHASE 4: Choose the Right HR Tech Transformation Partner

A wise man once said, ‘Our choices seal our fate.’

So how you choose and whom you choose to be your HR Tech Transformation partner is going to be the game-changer. This phase is the 2nd most important factor in determining the success or the failure of the HR transformation initiative. First of all, you need to understand very clearly that selecting and implementing HR technology solutions is a combination of art and science. The science involves the solution functionalities, scalability, robustness, feature richness, proven implementation methodologies etc.

The art part is ‘to have the common sense’ to set eyes on the bigger picture where you aim to drive organization-wide faster technology adoption, elevate the employee experience and continue the digitization evolution. When you choose an HR Tech Transformation partner, you’re choosing several other aspects too such as:

•   Work ethics
•   Skill and capabilities
•   Solutions and processes
•   Operational excellence
•   Customer services
•   Sense of ownership
•   Sense of urgency
•   Collaborative approach
•   Flexibility to meet the future needs
•   Ability to meet the rigid timelines

…and much more.

So, do the due diligence at your end and look at the cultural fit for your organization. Two organizations with contrast work cultures can’t write a success story. So, it is recommended to be conversant with the leadership team, understand their perspective, how well they understand your business and objectives, check their past work, and judge them on their ability to add more value in your strategic roadmap and more.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Let’s admit that there is no alternative to HR Tech Transformation. Traditional HR methods are failing. Usual hiring costs are increasing, the retention rate is going up and productivity is flat-lining or going downward. All things considered, to stay relevant and add business value, HR must transform. In short, the change-makers will go ahead with HR Tech Transformation to align with a digitized present and future. By and large, they will be the future leaders, and those who fail to change and adapt now, failure is inevitable for them. To sum it up, companies can build and drive an awesome employee experience, reduce complexity, and fuel collaboration with HR’s Tech Transformation.

Do you believe that it’s high time to re-look at your HR’s business impact and align it to your business’ long term objectives in true sense?

What are your thoughts on HR Tech Transformation ideas shared in this article?

What does HR Tech Transformation mean for your company?

Are you wondering how to connect your HR technology investments with business outcomes?

Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

The Big Reset: How is Big Data Changing Traditional Marketing Roles?

I love quotes – like most of us. Don’t you just love reading inspiring quotes about life, success, change and much more?

I do. And this one is my favorite.

Now this quote reflects the shake-up happening at Coca Cola. Coca Cola had restructured their management (implemented from 1st May 2017) few months back. Beside the other common upheavals, Coca-Cola’s global chief marketing officer Marcos de Quinto has retired from the company after a near 35-year career at the company. “What’s the big deal?’ You say, “‘Corporate restructuring is nothing new. What’s in it for us?”

I agree. But there is a catch in this so-called typical corporate restructuring. ‘What it is?’ you ask again!

The Catch Is – Role Of CMO (Chief Marketing Officer) Is Eliminated In Restructuring. Instead, Coca Cola Has Created A New Role Of CHIEF GROWTH OFFICER.

“We are moving quickly to structure our organization for faster growth and to ensure we can respond to the fast-changing needs of our consumers,” said James Quincey, CEO, Coca Cola in a statement.

Source: http://fortune.com/ The way I see it:

This is the beginning of the end of the typical marketing roles.

Yes. The role of marketing is evolving in businesses fast. It’s getting easier to question the true contribution of generic marketing roles. Marketing is now being held accountable for driving real, quantifiable leads. It’s no more good enough being a typical ‘Digital Marketer’ but you must be a ‘Revenue Marketer’. If I summarize in simpler words:

Digital marketing is going to be more revenue-centric.

Are you game for the challenge?

If not, get ready to change or get ready to go home.

A recent forecast made by Forrester – Forrester forecast that at least 30% of CMOs would be canned this year because they do not have the skills required to digitally transform the business.

At lower marketing levels, the tenure ratio is much lower. The report also pointed to the need for CMOs to focus on start executing data-driven customer insights based marketing.

How to do that?

Get ready to wear multiple hats – Creative, Technical, and Analytical. This is critical because your digitally enabled customers are leaving large data footprints for you to make a sense out of it. Time is gone when marketers would guess about buyer persona in terms of age, demographics, work profile etc.

At least, the basic customer insights can be gathered easily. For example, Google Analytics is a kind of big data marketing. Google Analytics provides detailed insights into the actions of your website’s visitors, including:

·      How many people visited your website?

·      From where they came?

·      Which page they visited?

·      How long they stayed on the site?

·      Are they new visitor or retiring visitor?

·      From which page they dropped off?

And much more. But is this enough? Certainly not! Big data can help you.

Why Big Data?

The key reason is – both big data and marketers want to dig deeper to know about their targets. This large data or the right term ‘Big Data’ – both structured and unstructured – inundates a marketer on a day-to-day basis.

A marketer can leverage this large amount of data to know about its customers, their online behavior, where they hang out, which social media profile they use more often, what they click on, how they buy, why they buy and why they don’t. That’s where ‘Big Data’ can be a powerful tool for your digital marketing campaigns.

Big data can help you discover more about your customers than you’ve ever known before. In an Avis Budget case study, Tim Doolittle, vice president of CRM and marketing science, said adding Big Data to understand their customer profile “…increased the effectiveness of our contact strategy, in many cases above 30% over control.”

Let’s have a look at some key new trends that can get you evolve your marketing faster and also deliver better results.

Lead Scoring for Content Marketing Optimization

Content is the oxygen for any marketing campaign. This is more significant in 2017 where content marketing has blossomed like never before. But then content marketing is done by several brands. Only a few of them succeed. Besides the content quality and its promotional aspects for the success or failure of your content marketing, one big reason is – your ability / inability to measure against a scoring method. Writing lots of content is one thing.

Segregating the same content based on its performance is different. Big data can identify the right content that helps your customers make the right decisions. With big data, it has become easy to understand which blog posts, web page or social media post is creating desired impact.More importantly, by scoring your content or customer engagement touch points, you can use build MQL or Marketing Qualified Lead for your sales team.

Source: https://kapost.com/content-scoring-infographic/

Content Scoring table consists of different digital assets which a customer may engaged with. Each asset can have equal score to get a MQL. Based on the customer touch points, you can find out which digital asset is performing best and which one performing worst. Accordingly, you can tweak your content strategy and promote the best performing digital assets. So, get ready to score your content like a product manager – backed by right data and insights. This will do wonder for your content marketing as well as lead generation marketing.

Deliver Real-time Personalization

Days of mass marketing are gone.

It’s high time you realize the power of 1:1 marketing.

Start engaging each customer / visitor ‘in the moment’ to deliver highly contextual and personalized experience. Real-time personalization is revolutionizing the retail marketplace. Although, 77% of marketers value real-time marketing as integral to their daily operations, most of them had trouble:

• Personalizing content through messages
• Improving marketing effectiveness/response rates
• Improving customer retention
• Harnessing Big Data
• Driving ROI through sales

Source: Marketingprofs

Real-time personalization will empower markets to turn visitors into leads and promote the most relevant content /offers to its customers.

Real-time personalization enables you to optimize live customer engagement by delivering customer insights through CX. These insights may include browsing behavior, past shopping history, demographics information, click heat maps, company name or industry background. Real-time personalization helps you get the most relevant content and messages in front of your target audience the moment they hit your site. Go with A/B testing to deliver different personalized experiences like changing the home page banner based on past browsing history or showing relevant offers via pop ups based on past purchasing history. With A/B testing, you can see which one performs best for different set of audience.

The real-time personalized experience scan be deliver in different forms:

–        In-line content

–        InfoBar

–        On-page Pop-ups

–        In-page edits

–        Call-outs

–        Sidebars

–        Exit Pop-ups

But, implementing real-time personalization successfully is not an easy task.

Few of the key challenges with achieving real-time personalization are:

• Disconnected databases
• Complex legacy systems
• Under-resourced and overburdened IT teams
• Too many vendors across channels
• 3rd party Integration issues
• Poor visibility into customer behaviour
• Lack of in-house expertise

In most of the cases, real-time personalization revolves around product, pricing and promotion. You need right technology to swiftly process vast amounts of customer data and accordingly deliver right personalization rules for the online visitors.

With right technology partner, you can monetize customers’ data by unlocking untapped value from customer information in the CRM. This will not only build customer loyalty in the long run but also help you create more profitable online marketing campaigns in real time without much hassle.

Deliver a Steady Stream of Prioritized Prospects with Predictive Analytics

Lead generation is the most important marketing objectives for all marketers – and most difficult one too. Most of marketers generate leads from different channels and then pass them on to their sales team. In a sense, for them, all leads are equal. The concept of leads prioritization is totally missing form almost 70% companies globally. To prioritize sales leads, modern marketers use predictive analytics (lead scoring). As the screenshot below indicates, almost 78% of companies using predictive lead scoring are from high tech industry.

Source: VentureBeat

What Is Predictive Lead Scoring?

Predictive lead scoring is a tool that uses an algorithm to predict who in your database is qualified or not qualified. It helps you set a number of parameters which will help you determine whether a lead is qualified for sale steam or not. Each attribute will have its own score. For example, if a prospect fills the enquiry from with personal email ID (yahoo.com or gmail.com) instead of official email ID, then this lead gets minus two points. If same email ID belongs to an unrelated industry then this lead gets minus five points. Thus, you will be able to score each potential lead and send it to sale steam with right merit. What you need to do now is – assign a list of positive and negative attributes to your sales leads and score them objectively.

A whopping 79% of B2B marketers have not established even traditional lead scoring, despite the fact that companies excelling at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost. – Source – HubSpot

Source: VentureBeat

As you can see the key benefits of using lead scoring above, you must create a standardized process for evaluating lead database and prioritize your leads and get better conversion rate. Smart Insights ran a survey among their blog readers asking their opinion on the most important trends. The question was:

Here are the results:

Summing Up

Today, being a digital marketer is not an easy job. I say this from personal experience.

Before we go to a war, we should not be just aware of our weapons but also understand fully how to use them when time demands. And mind it – marketing in today’s world is not less than a war. From strategy to execution, it’s a total war out there.

And big data can be your biggest weapon in winning this digital war. If big data is not an integral part of your digital marketing strategy then you really should make it NOW. At the same time, you should know how to unlock the value of this big data – from clicks to webinars, heat maps to social networks and more. Big data can empower you with new tools and technical know-how to understand what your customers want and then tweak your digital presence and execution strategy to engage your customers for better brand experience. Focus on the metrics, get data-driven customer engagements at personal level and help them experience the brand in their own ways.

The key will be for brands to push their brands to be more human, helpful and handy as they look for relevancy in a post-digital marketplace.It demands lots of data drilling and constant experimentation, and last but not the least, massive patience from your side. Using big data may not give you the results overnight but gradually, it will help you make informed decisions which will be backed by data and insights, not just your gut feelings.

And that will be a great beginning for your next-level marketing. I hope you have learned some of the good tips from this article to evolve into a revenue marketer. And that, will be a new era not only for your marketing career but also for your organization too as now you’re not just a mere spectator in revenue generation. You will be on your way to be a big wheel, rather than just a nut bolt of a wheel.Share your thoughts in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

The Best Ways to Do Market Research For Your Business Plan.

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