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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How to Exponentially Grow Your Email List with a Lead Magnet

My E-mail Marketing Campaign Sucks…What to Do?

Do you find it difficult to rise above the noise and the clutter with email marketing?For most of the email marketing campaigns, the answer is going to be – YES!Admit it.We all have faced this question in our life. And why this happens?The answer lies in this wonderful quote:

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Albert Einstein

Yes.How can we expect different results if we will keep running each email marketing campaign in the same manner?After all, it’s not about what we do but also about how we do it!So, what next?

Have patience!Rather than giving you direct answers (and some more marketing gyaan), I will prefer to ask you some more relevant questions.The trick is – answer these questions and I am sure you will find your soul-searching answers:

Do You Provide an Omni-channel Enabled-campaign?

Omni-channel enablement means your e-mail marketing campaign is available on multiple channels and touchpoints (website, paid advertising platforms, email marketing, blogging, social media platforms, etc.).Leverage every ounce of your digital presence to enable your audience to access your campaign. More the merrier.If you’re delivering the same message for all your prospects, then you are making the biggest mistake.

Are your Creating Custom E-mail Marketing Campaigns for Your Prospects?

Each of your customer/prospects is at different stages of buying.Someone is just researching, someone is evaluating and some of them are at the decision-making stage.If your e-mail marketing campaign is selling stuff to people who are at the first stage of learning about your services, it won’t work.They are looking for insights, informative stuff.Hence, they will not understand your message and won’t take the desired step.

If you are educating or selling to a potential customer who is looking to evaluate your services, it won’t work.The same applies to people who are at the stage of making a buying decision and you are giving them educational stuff rather than content that helps them make an informed decision.So, understand this: You must have tailored e-mail marketing campaigns for different customers.I know your next question: how to know which customers is at what stageThat’s where lead nurturing comes into the picture.

How good you are at Lead Capturing

Lead capturing is a science that needs to be perfected to get the desired impact.At times, campaigns can get a good number of open rates and click rates but they don’t get captured as hot leads.One of the main reason for this could be your poor ‘Contact Form’ or ‘Enquiry Form’.

It’s your below-average quality of lead form that discourages your website visitors to fill in the forms.The simple goal is to make your form more interactive, more personalized – asking the right questions in the right flow. That’s all.

Are you able to nurture your leads or not?

If you are not, then you’re assuming that everyone who shares their email IDs is ready to buy from you.And if that’s true, then you can’t be more wrong.First, let me help you understand lead nurturing in little more detail:

Lead nurturing is the process of developing relationships with buyers at every stage of the sales funnel, and through every step of the buyer’s journey. It focuses marketing and communication efforts on listening to the needs of prospects, and providing the information and answers they need.

Marketo

In simple words, lead nurturing helps you send the perfect series of messages to engage, convert, and retain customers.You can drive people towards a common goal by sending each person the perfect series of email, in-app, and push messages based on their unique behavior.

You can improve the conversion rate with an automated lead nurturing tools listed below:

1.  Intercom

2.  Leadsquared

3.  BatchBlue

4.  ACT!

5.  InfusionSoft

6.  SwiftPage

7.  Enthusem

8.  AWeber

9.  Vertical Response

10. SendPepper

What is your Goal Bench-marking?

I am sure you must have set some e-mail marketing campaign objectives before you launched it. If you haven’t, do it now.

For most marketers, the typically the main objective is – increasing revenue.

However, this may not apply to all of your e-mail marketing campaigns. It depends on the content and messaging of an email marketing campaign.You can set a variety of goals that are more specific like open rate, click rate, form conversion rate, campaign traffic from different sources, page session duration, user flow, etc.Again, you should be smart enough to define different goals for different email marketing campaigns.

Keep realistic goals.Test your campaign goals against the industry average.Look for the patterns in the email marketing campaign performance.Keep your goals time-bound like achieve a 4% open rate in the first 2 months or increase click rate by 4% in the first quarter.

Here is a quick checklist for campaign performance optimization:

1. Open Rate
2.  Delivery Rate
3. Click-through Rate
4. % of Subscribed Contacts
5.  % of Unsubscribed Contacts
6.  % of Hard Bounces
7.  % of Soft Bounces
8. % of Conversion Rate
9.   Average time on landing page
10. Cost per lead
11. Cost per Open/Click Rate
12. Clicks to Conversion rate
13. Campaign Reach
14. Campaign/post share rate

Are You Tracking the Right Things?

Don’t forget that anything that gets measured, gets improved.

Many marketers do everything right except the tracking.Many tracks but they fail to track what really matters.Some of them track well but don’t measure it properly. They fail to read the hidden patterns in past email marketing campaigns.And remember, effective email marketing campaign tracking means better ROI and higher profits.

Summing Up

Top 20 Influencer Marketing Tools You Can’t Live Without in 2022

Are you tired of same cliched marketing?

Are you too fighting for eyeballs?

If yes, then this news might be of interest to you.

Recently Indian cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar joined professional networking website LinkedIn as a LinkedIn Influencer.

He is believed to be the first cricketer in the world to join the league of over 500 global influencers on the professional network.

What makes it relevant for you?

This indicates that, in past 2 years, Influencer marketing has been gaining strength in the digital world. Influencer  are changing the way brands engage their customers.Even Google Trends confirm this:

Searches for the term ‘Influencr Marketing’ increased by a factor of seven over the past 18 months.

This also establishes the fact that the influencer marketing is in its early phase and people are still learning about Influencer marketing.For those are totally new to Influencer marketing, I have written a detailed Influencer Marketing FAQs blog post few weeks back which can help you get answers to most common frequently asked questions about Influencer marketing.Who are these influencers?

Let’s see with the help of a LinkedIn Influencer profile example:

Here is a snapshot of another normal (non-influencer) LinkedIn profile:

Can you spot the difference?

Guy Kawaski has a whopping 2.3 Million followers on his LinkedIn profile with a high engagement rate.LinkedIn also provides a provision to apply for being LinkedIn influencer. You can learn about it here.And not only LinkedIn, but all the other social media channels welcome these influencers on their channels.You should decide where your brand’s target audience roams and catch your industry influencers right there.

Why Influencer marketing is trending:

• 84% of marketers now use influencer marketing as a tactic.
• 59% of marketers planned to increase their influencer marketing budget in 2016.
• 31% of high-growth firms now have a formal employee advocacy program in place.

Source: Onalytica

Though Influencer marketing looks a great way to promote your brand and engage your target audience, yet it’s not easy to find the right influencers in your industry who can help you get the most out of influencer marketing.Your ability to find the right influencers is going to determine how successful your influencer marketing campaign will be.And trust me, it’s not going to be easy.If you have tried it on your own, you must know that how tough it is to get a bunch of influencers to speak for you.

Moreover, finding an influencer is just the first step of the whole game.There are further many important steps to make the influencer marketing strategy work.But if you have the right way and right influencer marketing tools to target these influencers, it can be your cup of tea.With these influencer marketing tools, marketers don’t just find the right influencers but also discover the trending content and track the campaign success effectively.

Are you ready to improve your influencer marketing campaigns with the best influencer marketing tools?If answer is a resounding YES, then this blog article can help you.As influencer marketing is the modern way of marketing so let’s checkout some influencer marketing tools that will definitely help you to reach out to your target audience with the help of industry influencers.

Influencer Marketing Tools

I Have Compiled A List Of Top 20 Must-Have Influencer Marketing Tools To Take Your Influencer Marketing To The Next Level. Some Of The Tools Covered In This List Might Do Similar Thing With Some Unique Features.

Here it goes:

Affable

Total Visits: 1.537M/Month

Affable is an AI platform for data-driven influencer analytics and campaign management. Leading brands like Huawei, Chanel, Estee Lauder, AirAsia, Swarovski etc. use Affable’s self-service platform to streamline their influencer campaign planning and execution, right from finding most relevant influencers to measuring their impact.If you are currently managing Influencer Marketing campaigns manually over excel-files and DMs, Affable’s end-to-end influencer marketing platform can help you streamline your entire influencer marketing process.

Marketing teams can seamlessly optimize their campaigns for max ROI using Affable’s deep demographic insights. Affable tracks 3M+ influencers globally across various social media platforms – Instagram, Facebook, Youtube, TikTok etc.Here’s how you can benefit from using Affable:

1. Find authentic & relevant influencers using Affable’s Influencer & Content Discovery

2. Reach out to the influencers using Affable’s in-built Influencer Relationship Management solution

3. Track all the content – including posts and stories on your Campaign Dashboard

4. Create and export reports about the Social Metrics including Reach, Engagement, Impression and Media Value

5. Track ongoing influencer trends on a weekly basis

6. Compare your influencer performances against competitors

Buzzstream

Total Visits: 0.766 Million/Month

Thousands of the world’s best marketers use BuzzStream every day.BuzzStream discovers contact information, social profiles, and site metrics for you. It’s easy to prioritize the most important, influential contacts.

You can browse prospect lists, add contacts, and automatically find contact information and metrics. BuzzStream automatically saves your emails and tweets and lets you set reminders to follow-up. You’ll never lose track of a conversation or project again.Buzzstream helps you pPitch bloggers and journalists with a full view of your conversation history, notes, tweets, emails, their recent posts, social details, and more.

Build better profiles, spend less time in spreadsheets. You can add new bloggers, websites, and social profiles to your database as you browse the web.

BuzzStream makes my job so much easier. And I love working with the BuzzStream team because everyone from the CEO down listens to our needs and actually does something about them.

– Christian Sullivan Promotions Supervisor, Ignite Social Media Pricing: Starting from $24/Month, Compare Plans 

GroupHigh

Total Visits:0.135 Millions/Month

GroupHigh helps you find the best bloggers and influencers, manage your relationships, and measure the value of your content.They empower you with blogger index, content overviews, contact information and reach metrics.User can search 15 Million+ active blogs by content, reach, social following, location, MozRank, and dozens of other powerful filters.

The solution offers Powerful filters to segment, organize, and group your influencers and bloggers like never before.Users have the luxury of pulling lists of content creators by niche topic expertise and funneling them down by social presence, total reach and location.

“GroupHigh has helped us quickly identify bloggers, writers and media outlets that may not have been on our radar before, even after time- consuming research. I can find in 10 minutes what used to take hours. “

– DEBBIE WILLIAMSChief Content Officer, Sprout Content Pricing: Quote on Request

Inkybee

Total Visits: 0.02 Million/Month

Inkybee has the suite of tools you need to go into client meetings well prepared with all the information your client might ever need about influencers in their industry.

A suite of outreach tools help you to run successful digital outreach campaigns for your clients

Inkybee offers a powerful search engine that delivers instantaneous and detailed filtering. You can leverage a sophisticated list management tool that allows you to create all kinds of lists including dynamic lists.Moreover, make the most of relationship tracker feature to record your day to day interactions with influencers.To find out who is talking about your brand online, use Inkybee’s real-time keyword tracking tool to track and report on mentions of your campaigns across the blogosphere.

With vast set of reporting tools including dynamic trackers and pdf/csv exports, you can monitor, track and measure your influencer marketing outreach program.Pricing: Free Trial Available, Compare Plans

Nimble

Nimble is an all-encompassing influencer management tool with a particular focus on the fact that it provides the information you need on a single view.Nimble automatically updates itself with relevant prospect and customer information from dozens of data sources.

You can get a detailed insight into your contacts to see what they are doing on social and online channels and Nimble will also suggest contacts to get in touch with based on industries and keywords that you identify as important.The signals tab will even let you see when your company or brand is being mentioned on social channels.

Price: Low-Cost to Mid-Range

Muckrack

Total Visits: 0.677 Millions//Month

Muck Rack is your one-stop, influenecr marketing platform that helps you discover and pitch relevant journalists with personalized targeting.Muck Rack’s mission is to make journalists, PR pros and marketers more successful.One can build and share media lists easily, and you don’t need to maintain media lists since they’re automatically kept up-to-date.

You can receive alerts in your inbox whenever journalists are writing and tweeting about your company, campaign, competitors or any keywords.You’ll instantly know who to connect with, which stories you need to get out in front of and the trending news that affects your brand.

“I use Muck Rack on a daily basis. From the alerts in my inbox to check for stories we’re quoted in, to building quality media lists and seeing what stories are being read by the reporters I follow. Muck Rack is a great tool to get my work-life in order. I love this product.”

– Izzy Santa, Consumer Technology Association Pricing: Quote on Request

Followerwonk

Total Visits: 6.78 Millions/Month

This tool by Moz Followerwonk helps you explore and grow your social graph.You can discover important influencers on Twitter by topic and location.Utilize it to build a rundown of potential influencers to draw in and collaborate with.

Key Benefits of using Followerwonk:

• Find and connect with new influencers in your niche.
• Search Twitter bios to connect with anyone.
• Compare Twitter accounts to find overlaps and target new influencers.
• Breakout your followers by location, bio, who they follow, and more.
• Contrast your relationships with your competitors and friends.
• Match your activities to gains and losses in followers to give your followers what they like best.
• Follow and unfollow in-app to hone your social graph like a razor’s edge.
• Use super-actionable visualizations to compare your social graph to others.

Pricing: Free for 1 user, Compare Plans

 Hootsuite

From finding prospects to serving customers, Hootsuite helps you do more with your social media.You can use Hootsuite to search streams to discover social media influencers by monitoring conversations relevant to your industry

You can find out who is your target audience engaging with and whose content are they sharing.These people have clout that can help your brand expand it’s reach.Once you have a set of influencers to follow, you can add them to a Twitter list and save it as a stream to easily track what they share and who they engage with—learn from the best.

Price: Free for individuals with 3 social profiles, Free 30-days Trial, Starts with $20

Traackr

Traackr’s IRM platform is your system of record to manage, expand, validate, and scale your global influencer marketing

With Traackr, you can:

• Upload influencers to manage your data in one place.
• Assign ownership to foster team collaboration across multiple brands and geographies.
• Track conversations, validate real influence, and truly separate the winning signals for your brand.

“Traackr gives me an efficient way to be involved in the day-to-day conversations with our influential travel experts. I don’t know how I’d manage so many relationships without the tool.”

– LAURA CLEARY, SENIOR SOCIAL MEDIA MANAGER, TRAVELOCITY

Klear

Monthly Visits: 0.62 Million/Month

Klear is an influencer marketing platform that makes it easy to find influencers, research and measure influencer campaigns.Klear boasts of the largest available database of Influencers by category, location and network. You can interact with more than 700K registered Influencers directly from Klear.Easily find influencers in any category and location in the world across Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and Blogs.

Klear’s advanced filters allow you to sift through millions of profiles and focus on those who are relevant for your brand.Choose the influence level you are after, whether it’s celebrities or niche power users, find the ones with an audience in the location you are interested in. You can filter by gender, engagement levels and more.Klear also offers free tools like:

• Find Twitter Influencers
• Find Instagram Influencers
• Twitter Analysis
• Instagram Analysis
• Facebook Analysis

“Klear is the best platform to build influencer programs! We used it to identify, interact and measure relevant influencers and were very happy with the results. It is user friendly, has insightful data and a very helpful team!”

-Gladys Diaz, Marketing Manager at Unilever Pricing: Free Demo, Compare Plans

Onalytica 

Monthly Visits: 0.092 Million

Onalytica specializes in providing Influencer Relationship Management software and supporting professional services to help brands scale 1-to-1 Influencer Relationship Management results.Keep an eye on everything that is said by your key market influencers in this comprehensive and detailed timeline.Easily surface content opportunities with this feature.These maps help you understand key relationships between your influencers and lets you see who talks to whom.Stay up to date on everything that’s happening;

topic notifications, content opps and much more.This functionality provides you with the data and insights you need to understand key online discussionsOnalytica works with Marketing, Communication, Digital & PR professionals to help configure bespoke influencer programs so that they can better automate and streamline influencing activity as well as identify on-going engagement opportunities.

Pricing: Free 7 Days Trial, Compare Plans

Mention

Monthly Visits: 1.07 Millions/Month

Mention enables you identify the people in your industry that matter most – influencers and experts who are already talking about your topic on social media or the web.Find these influencers in your niche and leverage their engage network to promote your content and grow your brand’s community.You can filter mentions by influence and prioritize your most valuable contacts and reach out to them first.

You can monitor the influenecrs to find out with whom they are working and get an understanding whether they’d work with you too or not.Get live updates about your brand from the web and social media. Automated reports make it simple to share results with clients, colleagues, and management, so you can focus on more important work.Pricing: Starts with $29/Month, Compare Plan

Buzzsumo

Monthly Visits: 2.60 Millions/Month

BuzzSumo has a powerful influencers search. You can search for the key influencers in any topic area or location.It’s one of my most favorite influencer marketing tool to find the key influencers to promote my content online.

Why It Works So Well:

Buzzsumo will analyze what content performs best for any topic or competitor.

Start with filtering influencers and sharers by reach, authority, influence and engagement. You can follow influencers directly from within BuzzSumo and add them to your Twitter lists.Monitor what content an influencer shares, review the topics they share most often and the domains they share.

Moreover, export all results such as content sharers, influencers and most shared content as CSV or Excel for detailed analysis and use in other applications.I strongly recommend to try Buzzsumo to build and maintain outreach lists and engage with key influencers.

Pricing: Free Trial Available, Compare Plans

Crowd Fire

Monthly Visits: 4.71 Million/Month

Crowdfire is your super-smart marketing sidekick that will help you grow online everyday.Millions of small businesses, artists, writers, influencers, sellers, freelancers, and self-employed individuals use Crowdfire to go big on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress, Etsy, Shopify and more platforms.

Crowdfire will bring more traffic to your online shop on Etsy, Shopify, WordPress, and BigCommerce by intelligently picking trending products and creating beautiful posts featuring them. On Crowdfire 16,441,188    Creators, Sellers and Influencers are on their way to BIG Pricing: On Quotation

Blogdash 

Monthly Visits: 0.06 Million

Blogger outreach is widely considered to be the most effective inbound marketing method.Popular as a blogger outreach tool, BlogDash lets you find your market trend-setters, engage them, and cultivate ongoing relationships with them, all with a few clicks.BlogDash can help you reach 200K+ bloggers and growing every day.

These bloggers have specifically opted in to connect with brands like yours and help you achieve web-wide recognition.With BlogDash, you’ll have a list of bloggers to target within minutes, not days.With a full-featured, intuitive do-it-yourself tool, plus two turnkey managed solutions, BlogDash has made blogger outreach the ‘can’t-miss’ marketing medium.

Pricing: free to $199 per month for the tool; outreach services by quote

Social Cawlytics

Monthly Visits: 0.018 Million

Social Crawlytics is a free web-based tool that enables marketers to monitor and measure key social media performance parameters / metrics.Anyone who has a Twitter account can access it – totally FREE.People would love Social Crawlytics who are deep into SEO and / or social media marketing analysis.You can identify the influencers and your competitor’s most shared content, Social metrics, most shared authors, scheduled monitoring and a robust API.

You can find out where your competitor’s content is being shared and promoted.This tool helps marketers measure the effectiveness of the links as people share them in social media networks. It offers some of the very handy tools like social metrics, most shared authors, scheduled monitoring and a robust API.Monitor, schedule and analyse social sharing metrics in one intuitive dashboard.

Pricing: Free

Dicover.ly

Monthly Visits: 0.075 Million

Discover.ly is a Chrome add-on to get you relevant insights about people you are viewing online. The information shared is gathered from multiple social sites around the web.With this chrome extension, you can access more information about your social media connections with the people they email.

You can see your Facebook friends with a particular colleague on LinkedIn, or see Facebook and LinkedIn information from Twitter contacts.Discoverly helps us tie that all together.In simple words – you can instantly see detailed, visual social media influence and demographic information for anyone in your social network while browsing.

Pricing: Free

Grin

Grin capitalizes on the genuine influence of influencers. Its philosophy is that influencer marketing is marketing to the influencer – brands need to build a trusting relationship with potential influencers. Grin customizes its pricing to match its clients’ needs. Companies of all sizes use the software, though Grin focuses on eCommerce businesses with integrations into the major shopping platforms.

It offers all the significant features that a top-tier marketing management software should and organizes it all into workflows so that users never get lost. Grin integrates with all the major social media channels, eCommerce software like Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, email systems like Gmail and Outlook, real-time communications like SMS and Slack, and Office tools like Google Drive and Office 365

Pricing: Demo On Request

The Cirqle

Monthly Visits: 0.017 Million

Cirqle is the world’s first verified OAuth platform connecting fashion-, beauty- and lifestyle- influencers with global brands.By using Cirqle, you can connect with over more than 9,000 influencers across 50+ countries.This platform includes over 9,000+ influencers, reaching over 325 million people each month, delivering trillions of impressions across Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, Pinterest and Google Analytics.Brands receive real-time data profiles of the publishers that have applied for a campaign.

“With Cirqle, it’s not about how well you can write a convincing Media Kit or email, it’s about figures, quality and a positive attitude. Cirqle takes away the complications of self promotion to allow for an easy, stress free application process with clearly outlined expectations for you, and the brand!”

— Rachel Ecclestone, Urban Traveller Pricing: On Request

Talkwaker

Monthly Visits:  0.619 Million

With Talkwater, you can find the right influencers to amplify your message.Leverage Talkwalker as a social listening and influencer identification tool, and integrates with Hootsuite, as well as business intelligence (BI) tools including Tableau.

You can identify the influencers that matter for your needs with influencer performance metrics.The best part is – Talkwalker is completely analytics-focused.It offers analytics features for brand mentions, influencer monitoring, hashtag, competitor analysis, and advanced metrics across social media platforms.

“Talkwalker have helped us transform the way our clients do business. We’re able to find insights that keep our clients ahead of the market – whether it’s helping a financial institution find the link between social media activity and reputation or using social data analysis to provide a global fashion brand with the most effective approach for a new campaign.”

Jonny Bentwood – Chief Innovation officer Pricing: Free Demo, Compare Plans

Wrap Up

I have explained top 20 influencer marketing software tools in 2022 that will help you execute your influencer marketing strategy in much better ways.Start using these influencer marketing tools for your influencer marketing campaigns.As an experienced digital marketing consultant,

I provide a viable alternative to big digital marketing agency cost and enable you leverage modern influencer marketing tools.If you’re looking to get started with an influencer marketing campaign, or want to enhance your influencer marketing performance in terms of reach, engagement and ROI, I can help.

Are You Ready?

Are you now ready to implement these influencer marketing tools to optimize your influencer marketing campaign performance?A recent report revealed that 43% of marketers are experimenting with influencer marketing programs. and an even higher percentage claims that their influencer marketing programs are strategic. (Source: Adweek)

Share your experience after trying these influencer marketing tools and how did it improve your influencer marketing campaign performance.Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

Google Analytics is Adding a New Home Page

Google has announced its plans to provide Google Analytics users a new landing page post login.

The new post-login landing page replaces Audience Overview and offers a snapshot of curated data from several reports.Now, the users can see a curated set of data from different reports, including real-time data, traffic sources, user location, devices used to visit your website and so forth on the new home page / landing page of Google Analytics.

In its quest to deliver personalized data insights and experiences, Google analytics have tried to make few customization such as — users with goals or e-commerce will see a different home page than those without. “Home” is automatically configured based on your setup:For example, if you have Goals or Ecommerce, you’ll see the page change accordingly.

The users can now leverage the side bar options to filter the data base on the date filter like “last 7 days” and “last 30 days” — on the front itself.Earlier one had to deep dive inside to get such details.You must be asking – where is my standard Audience Overview report, which showcased metrics like sessions, unique users, page views and pages per visit (among other data points).

Don’t worry.You can still access them by clicking the Audience tab in Google Analytics’ menu.

Discover the New Page ‘Discover’For the curious minds, Google analytics has created a separate page titled ‘Discover’.This page will cover all latest enhancements on Google Analytics experience.Aptly titled ‘Discover’, this page has many relevant components which can be extremely useful for getting deeper web traffic insights.

Few of the important ones are Google Analytics mobile app, helpful features like Custom Alerts, or even useful educational materials from the Analytics Academy.You can find this new ‘Discover’ link just next to the Admin link at the bottom of your left navigation.According to Google’s launch plans, this new home page/landing page post login should be rolled out to all users within next few weeks.What are your thoughts on the news shared in this article.Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

Top 5 Video Marketing Tools that Will Make your Life Easier

Video marketing tools explained.

You must have adapted the content marketing trends by now! It is definitely here to stay but the technique to market your content keeps evolving every day.In order to communicate with a larger audience in a much-defined manner, videos marketing tools have become the new and effective way to increase engagement.

There are many reasons why video marketing can be done.From launching a new product to showcasing ‘behind-the-scenes’ to offering a tutorial, it is proven to be the best marketing tool.One, they have a power to keep the audience deeply engaged.Two, they are more visually appealing than social media posts and blogs

Three, they deliver an idea in a simple manner which is easy for the audience to digest.Now that video marketing tools are so useful, what are you waiting for?Oh, you must be stuck in ‘how you will be able to do video marketing’, aren’t you?

Here are the best video marketing tools that you can start with:

1)       Wideo

To start with, we have the most easy and fun video creation tool.Wideo comes with a lot of in-built templates, that can be customized to promote your message or has an option to create a video from the scratch too.

You can simply drag and drop elements or upload your own images and start animating in a few clicks with the best animation maker online tool.You can use Wideo for all kinds of things: company presentations, explainer videos, product demos, school projects, animated narratives, and more. The possibilities are endless!Moreover, with your own logos and graphics, the Wideo creates wonderful videos. Create videos of up to 45 seconds for free with Wideo.

2)       PowToon

PowToon can help you make creative presentations and animated videos that engage, explain, and sell your idea using free solution.The videos of PowToon can be embedded on the website and shared to social media channels also.

While there is an array of templates, characters, backgrounds and transitions you can choose from, you can also build a video exclusively on your idea from the start. Learn to make some kickass videos with PowToon today.

 3)       Flipgram

One of my favorite video marketing tool, Flipgram is one of the best video and slideshow maker to unleash your creativity!

With Flipagram’s easy to use editing tools, awesome filters and effects, and access to today’s best music, you can be creating and sharing videos in no time.Besides, you can add your favorite music to your movies and slideshows for free!On the top of that, lots of easy-to-use filters and editing tools help you easily trim, cut, merge, duplicate photos and videos.

 4)       Animoto

Animoto is a cloud-based video creation service that produces video from photos, video clips, and music into video slideshows.

Use Animoto to create videos using photos and video clips from your phone, camera, Facebook, and more.Animoto is the easiest video editor around – it will help you create a stunning video in just 3 simple steps:

1. Add your photos and videos
2. Customize your video with music, styles and other features of your choice
3. Embed it on your website and voila

Voila, it’s done.More over, you can personalize your video with 50+ different video styles to choose from.Besides, you can use hundreds of songs from their built-in music library.Likewise, leverage captions for photos, video clip trimmer, and intro/outro cards.Most important, you can share your videos with your family and friends easily via Messages, email, Twitter, and Facebook.

5)       WeVideo

A powerful cloud-based tool video editor that has some great advanced video editing features.WeVideo provides advance features like scene transitions, motion effects, green screen, and more you can build a creative video for your brand.

Since it is a cloud based platform, you can access your video projects from anywhere in the world using cloud video storage facility.Moreover, WeVideo is available as a mobile app, giving you an opportunity to create amazing videos on the go.

Final Thought on Video Marketing Tools

Like content marketing, video marketing is here to stay.With the help of these video marketing tools, you will be able to create short and clear videos quickly.While all of the above video marketing tools are perfect to start with video marketing, choose the one that best suits your requirements.

As a matter of fact, for a modern digital marketer, an all-inclusive video marketing tool must be able to provide video analytics.It is easy with editing the videos, and allows you to make a unique video or an animation for that matter.Now, there won’t be any excuse for not launching a video marketing campaign, I suppose!

In the meanwhile, did you come across any other video marketing tool other than the above-mentioned top video marketing tools?Finally, what are your thoughts on the video marketing tools and tips shared in this article?Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

20 Brilliant Digital Marketing Quotes Takeaways to Implement in Your Marketing Strategy

Marketing has evolved a lot in past one decade.You admit it or not, today marketing is all about doing something innovative, creative and inspiring.And inspiration is always in shortage.So, I’ve crafted a list of 20 amazing digital marketing quotes from some of the best minds in the marketing industry and outlined key takeaway from each of these inspiring quotes.

Here goes my curated list favorite marketing quotes:

Key Takeaway:

There is a difference between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’. And this is clearly distinguished by doing ‘marketing’ and ‘content marketing’.

For people, marketing is about ‘being sold to’.And no one likes ever to be sold to.With content marketing, you can deliver good content that helps them make good decisions.

According to one study, 70% of consumers prefer to learn about companies through articles instead of advertising.

So, find out your customers’ needs first and create quality content around those specific needs. Make the content marketing an integral part of your overall digital marketing strategy.

Key Takeaway

Make your marketing playful, enjoyable and insightful.

Yes, it’s possible to do such marketing.‘How to do it?’, you may ask!Try to make your marketing a mix of the following:

Useful + Enjoyable + Inspiring = Great Marketing

Help them know that you understand their side of story very well.Don’t tell what you do but share what can you do for your customers.Create content that solves your customers’ problems in enjoyable manner as well as empower and inspire them to take an informed action.In simple words, convince people on ‘Why’ first, ‘What’ will be sold automatically.

Key Takeaway

Learn to stay relevant in modern age.

This is my favorite quote coming from Gary.For the uninitiated, Gary Vaynerchuk is a highly successful entrepreneur and an intensely passionate public speaker.According to him, most of us don’t market in the year we live in.Many of them are marketing like 2009, some of them like 1999 and a rare few of them are marketing like 1980 even today.Most of marketers stay one step back while they should be one step ahead of the trends.Making a Facebook page in 2007 might have been a good marketing decision but today it’s nothing special.

In 2017-18, mobile and video marketing is going to be big.

And social media platforms that are betting big on video are: Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram.All these channels are used by customers more through mobile and people consume lots of video content on these channels.Got the hint?Make more videos and stay active on relevant social channels through video content.

Key Takeaway

The biggest risk is not taking any risk.

In a digital world, where dynamics are changing very fast, being unimaginative won’t help the marketers.I agree, it’s difficult to pin point what exactly might work but that’s where experimentation helps.And experimentation can be in different forms.They don’t need to be wholesome but they may work in minor doses also.

• You may choose to use different marketing tools.
• You may choose to focus on more relevant parameters.
• You can alter the way you track and measure your marketing efforts.

The key point is – keep experimenting and innovating in small measures and you’ll see the difference.Let’s understand this with a real-life example:Company: Electronic Arts (EA)Their Goal: Increase Revenue

As EA arranged to release the new game of SimCity, they released a limited time offer to drive more game pre-orders.The offer was displayed as a banner on the top of the pre-order page.While many site visitors were seeing the promotional banner, it’s large size moved the actual call-to-action button down on the page.

Their team hypothesized that simply moving the call-to-action higher on the page by changing the way the promotional offer was displayed could drive more purchases and increase revenue generated from SimCity.com.They chose to test some different alternatives to perceive what plan or design would drive more income.

The test prompt some extremely astonishing outcomes:

The variation with no offer informing at all drove 43.4% more buys. Turns out customers simply needed to purchase the game – no additional motivating incentives essential.A great many people trust that direct promotions drive buys, however for EA, this ended up being false.A/B Testing gave them the data expected to amplify income in a way that would not have been generally conceivable.Case Study Source: https://blog.optimizely.com/2013/06/14/ea_simcity_optimizely_casestudy/

So, it’s obvious that the best way to discover what may really work is to experiment with your marketing.

There are no certain win equations – every technique is unique in relation to another.It’s about blending and coordinating until you locate the most material ones and executing them appropriately.Simply don’t be afraid to experiment and innovate.

Key Takeaway

All brands want to ensure that they can furnish their customers with awesome experiences.But for that, first they should be able to find out about you.Every customer journey starts with an online search. Did you know:

• 89% of B2B researchers use the internet during the B2B research process.
• 71% of B2B researchers start their research with a generic search.
• On average, B2B influencers do 12 searches prior to visiting a specific brand’s site

Source: Think with Google When Google says ‘generic search’, it means, they’re looking for product first, not for you.And surprising fact is that B2B customers start their search journey form their mobile.

Source: Think with GoogleRight off the bat, you have to place yourself in their shoes.Start anticipating what your prospects might type in to find about your industry and / or products.

All your other marketing efforts will be futile, if you are not good at this.Therefore, if you really want to reach out to the targeted B2B customer base, you should be available on the first page of Google when your customers search for you.And being on the first page is not all about SEO only.SEO is just on part of the game.

It’s more about delivering the relevant content about their queries whenever they search for you.So, think about what your customers will type while searching for your product or services.And start your content and SEO strategy from that point.Are you ready to greet your customers on the first page of search engines when they search for you?

Key Takeaway

Marketing shouldn’t work in isolation rather it should be an encompassing notion in an organization.

In today’s digital era, marketing is a 24×7 activity.We all are marketers in our owns sense for ourselves, our employers, our brand.So why not leverage this thought while marketing a company’s product or services.This becomes more apt in the Social media dominated world where your employees can play an active role in emphasizing your brand value in innovative ways.

Marketing is about brand messaging and how you position your brand in front of your customers.And everyone form HR to sales and employees can play their appropriate role in executing a seamless marketing or brand messaging to the outer world.

The summary is:Make the most of each component of your organization to market your brand.

Key Takeaway

Marketing today revolves around your customers and not your product.

And that makes it critical for you to craft content that talks about customers’ needs.And this can’t be done by talking about your product’s technical features and capabilities.You should join the conversations happening online around your industry and align your content with what’s ‘trending’.As marketing speaker Andrew Davis puts it:

“Content builds relationships. Relationships are built on trust. Trust drives revenue.”

Focus on creating value-based content.Write content to build relationships.Start your customer interactions with customer-centric content and drive the conversation from customer’s pain points to possible solutions matched by your product.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Build your content funnel intelligently and spread it on web.

Most of us keep working on on-page SEO and off-page SEO activities for months and still don’t get nowhere near to top rankings on the first of Google Search Results Pages (SERPs).Does it perplex you too?

Simple reason is – you are too busy impressing Google while ignoring other important aspects.Want to know how to make everyone love you on web?The solution is simple – Create lots of quality content.Content is the gasoline for good Google rankings.

Create quality content in huge quantity that is valuable and relevant to your customers.Create engaging content for your blog, for social media, guest blogging, SEO article submissions, great videos, GIFs, customer surveys, case studies, whitepapers, email marketing etc.

Once people start loving your content on different forums, Google will begin noticing your content and your website.Of course, don’t forget to include right keywords in that content which will drive targeted traffic to your website and there you go.Google will detect it sooner than later and come after your site but don’t try to fool google because google is that online police which will find you even in the dark so any duplicity in content or black hat SEO techniques and google police will catch you!

All of you must ask, why we focus on SEO when it’s near to dead. But the fact is that SEO is not dead but the old ways to SEO marketing are obsolete and dead.

The current SEO practices take in account of reputation management and social so that you can’t cheat the system (i.e. Google).You better buck up the way you do your SEO because it sure is here to stay.Bonus Tip: Using tools like SEMrush, ahrefs help you keep a watch on your competitive SEO and PPC intelligence for SEO marketing.

Key Takeaway

Don’t preach but try to reach out to your audience.

Social media is all about positive engagement, not about advertising your products and services day in day out.So, become an interesting friend of your audience and deliver engaging brand stories in your industry.Many of you may think that in B2B, it’s difficult to be interesting and fun. I disagree.It’s all about the way you look at it.

Now, for example, I like Practo’s Facebook post updates as they always manage to come up with something new and innovative.Here is one glimpse of it.

Few more interesting B2B social media examples:

With campaigns and contests becoming a huge way of promotion these days, B2C brands are making full use of it.See some example where brands are performing “giveaways” to attract users to their brand.Qwertee stayed true to their brand and ran the contest every week to reach their goal of getting 100,000 total Facebook likes.Did they achieve it or not? You bet!They did giveaway 1,000 t-shirts every week and set a great example on how to “gain loyal customers through sweepstakes and giveaways.”

For a famous brand like Fossil, you must be asking why they had to do it?The only word that perfectly explains it is: RETENTIONEven after having a huge fan following, brands still need to give something that would still make their viewer feel connected and remembered for!And, they show this love to one user every month for posting a photo of their fossil item.

Here are few more examples of some great giveaways.

Coming up with such great ideas to connect and engage with customers differentiates a traditional and social media advertiser!

KEY TAKEAWAY

Focus on content relevance and quality, channel and form is secondary.

At every step of making a purchase decision, customer is on the lookout for information online. Now this content can be your or your competitors.

According to one study, 70% of consumers do an extensive research online before making a purchase decision.

How would you prefer it?

You can offer good content and help your buyers in making an informed purchase.And this content can be in different forms: customer reviews, social media, blogs, video, e-mailer, banners, ads, podcast, webinars, FAQs, case studies, How-Tos, forums etc.Add great call-to-action (CTAs) and design this content creatively and finally, distribute the content through different forms.And you’ll have a winner at your hand.

Key Takeaway

Stop selling and start helping.

Does your marketing revolve around typical sales messaging?If yes, then your marketing hasn’t evolved.Agree or not, no one likes to be sold to.But, we all like to be helped in doing what we want.And that’s what modern marketers need to do – start helping their customers with right information at the right point.It’s not that difficult.

Just replace ‘selling’ with ‘helping’ in your marketing. This is smart marketing.Find out customers’ needs and then map out your marketing content accordingly.Then, start spreading your content wherever your customers may go for finding the relevant information.Make it a continuous process as customers’ needs might keep changing.Ultimately, become more valuable.

Key Takeaway

As CEO of a digital marketing agency and inbound marketing convert, I will recommend you to go for inbound marketing.To simplify for you, outbound marketing uses ‘push’ tactics while inbound marketing uses ‘pull’ tactics.

Image Source: https://vtldesign.com/By using outbound marketing, businesses leverage mass media tools to push their marketing message to large public or they simply buy the potential leads database or advertise on Google AdWords with paid ads.Such methods are executed on the sheer hope that most people will see the ad or your marketing message and will respond to it positively.

Source: Hubspot

The above picture loudly speaks the way it will work for your brand and its reputation.Since inbound promoting lines up with the buyer’s Journey, it constructs a connection between your prospects and your brand image.This likewise pulls in prospects to your image at the opportune time, instead of interfering with them when they are NOT in the market for what you offer.On the other hand, inbound marketing focus on creating relevant quality content that fosters trust and helps users make informed decision while buying a product.

Inbound marketing always rules the marketing playbook. This is because, the biggest strength of inbound marketing is that it is more focused on providing value to your prospects than forcing them by being pushy and promotional. Advanced inbound digital resources like blog entries and premium offers can keep on generating drives years after they were initially made without costing an extra penny.So, find out where your customers are roaming and be a good guide in their buying journey

.Let’s explore this with the help of a case study:Singapore Startup Eyeota, Increases Leads by 4x for Sales Team

Eyeota is an online start-up based in Singapore with a mission for global expansion. Without the budget for external resources Felicia, Director of Marketing, recognized the need to manage the marketing in-house with an all in one marketing and sales solution.Since implementing HubSpot and an Inbound methodology, Eyeota’s web page views increased by 74% and their marketable leads have increased 4x.

Going with the facts and my past rich experience in digital industry, inbound marketing wins the race either you have money or it’s the only option you got.

Though you may need both at different points of time but in the long run, inbound marketing is better. It’s a thinking man’s weapon.

Key Takeaway

Marketing is equally as important as creating a product.

Shhhhhhh………..

I have everything, from pin to plane on my portal, but only I know about it.

Sound familiar?

It’s happening in most of the cases, especially with STARTUPS.

Reason?

They are under the impression that “if they build it, people will automatically come and buy!”But these tactics really don’t work in the digital world.Even if people come by using paid ads, there is no guarantee that they will buy anything from your site.So, what is the solution?

The solution lies in attracting people to your website, engage them with great content and offers and provide them enough reasons to visit back.You need to ask yourself: how can I optimize the customer’s online journey aligned with marketing objectives. You can make a customer-centric strategy around the AARRR framework.

It’s Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, Revenue.

• Acquisition – getting users to your site from scalable channels
• Activation – a measurable first experience on your website
• Retention – getting users to come back to your website (as much as possible)
• Referral – users referring your product to their friends
• Revenue – how you make money with your website

The best thing about AARRR is its simplicity.You can easily understand the framework and execute its various phases.It provides you actionable metrics, which makes it very popular among modern marketers for making informed decisions.

Key Takeaway

Start Blogging Religiously Today.

Yes. Let me put it in simple terms:

If you want more website traffic, then you must start a blog.

If you want higher Google search rankings, then you must start a blog.

If you want better quality of leads, then you must start a blog.

If you want higher lead conversion, then you must start a blog.

If you want higher lead conversion, then you must start a blog.

If you want better link building, then you must start a blog.

If you want higher long-term business, then you must start a blog.

If you want free PR, then you must start a blog.

If you want to establish thought leadership, then you must start a blog.

If you don’t want any of these, then blog is not for you.

Make sense to you?Then, start blogging today.

Key Takeaway

‘Attention’ is the new currency for your business.

In today’s modern world where people are facing the information overload, ‘attention’ is the most valuable and scarce resource.Why so?All brands are vying for the same ‘attention’ that is taken by some exiting competitors.

“What information consumes is rather obvious: It consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.” (Source:  New York Magazine)

People are extremely busy.With a flood of marketing thrown at them, they have become much choosier.What they don’t need is cliched marketing messaging.

They need something that break their autopilot mode.Something that grabs their attention instantly and engage them with your brand.The challenge becomes more daunting as this attention has already been taken by some other brand.Are you up for this?

Key Takeaway

Tweak your marketing strategy after understanding the customer touch points and channels.

‘Is my brand consistent across all those touch points?’, ask yourself.

It’s no secret.Customers are changing faster than we think.They are adopting new touch points to reach out to their favorite brands.

90% of customers expect the customer experience to be consistent across all channels and devices.

The rise of digital, social and e-commerce has exploded new touch points.Some of these touchpoints include Websites, Mobile app, Retail store, Point of sale, call center, Rating and reviews, interviews, Organic sharing, Community Events, Catalogues, push notifications, Promotions and Coupons, Chat Logs, Transactional e-mails, Online forums, Social Media channels, field support teams etc.

Depending on your industry and business model, there are many ways customers come into contact with your brand.Focus on identifying all the touch points and channels that a prospect might engage with the brand online or offline.And then, you optimize those very touch points across the customer life cycle.

Key Takeaway

Focus on how to improve the conversion rate.

A billion-dollar question – How good is your conversion rate?Getting a great amount of website traffic is worth nothing if you are unable to convert themIf any metric that really matters for your business, that would be the conversion rate.Your all marketing efforts are waste if you can’t convert the prospects.Being a digital marketer myself, I will recommend – Focus more on improving your conversion rate rather than increasing traffic.

How to do that?

First, enhance your lead capturing process.Lead capturing process is the most critical aspect that can affect your conversion rate.Recently, I had written a detailed blog post ‘How to Get More B2B Leads without Spending a Dollar’ explaining the techniques to improve your lead capturing process.Also start tracking your conversion rate from different channels and identify your strong and weak areas.

Key Takeaway

Find out your true purpose to be present on social media.

‘Why are you on social media?’, ask yourself.

If you’re there to talk about your product and services and highlight its benefits, then you got it all wrong.Social media is all about the people, people and people.Focus on engaging them in real conversation like you’re talking to them face to face.You should create stories around people, listen to them, respond to your customers when they comment, and stay always dependable and steady.

It’s more about creating communities and relationships. Relationships build trust and trust drives revenue.So, to summarize – create more value for your customers on social media and they will amplify it themselves for you – FREE.

Key Takeaway

Learn how to market your content smartly.

Writing great content is only one part of the game.The other more difficult part is to promote it right so that the targeted audience people can read it.Usually, it’s said that if you spend 8 hours to write a good article, then you should spend 1/3 of that time to promote that article.

Mind it – if you don’t promote your content, your content, however good it is, is useless.I have written a long form blog post on Shhhh…  Listen! Do You Hear the Sound of Higher Targeted Website Traffic? that talks about different techniques to get targeted website traffic.

KEY TAKEAWAY

Become a storyteller.

Nowadays, marketing is not about marketing a product or service but about creating and sharing interesting stories about the product which people can relate with.Stories are the best way to engage your customers so craft great stories and in this ‘on-the-go’ social media age, an engaging brand story can go viral with lots of likes, comments and shares.

When you are able to leave a long-lasting relation on viewers mind, that’s when you say, MARKETING DONE RIGHT.Remember the video made by Dollar Shave Club for their launch.It’s been 5 years to it but people still can recall it, that is because they enunciated their brand story in such a way.Let’s have a look:

https://youtu.be/XpaOjMXyJGk

Dove’s “Real beauty sketches” campaign was once a face to viral marketing success. The uplifting video struck a chord with its consumer-base.They rightly hit the masses as majority of women are their own critic when it comes to how they look.So, now we know marketing no longer means promoting your brand instead marketing means connecting to millions.

Summing Up on Top Digital Marketing Quotes

Hope you’ve enjoyed the brilliant digital marketing quotes from the industry greats.It will be more fun when you start implementing the key takeaways discussed for all digital marketing quotes.If you’ve noticed one thing among most of the key takeaways, that is – Great quality content is the solution to most of your marketing challenges.

First, focus on creating long-form quality content and then re-cycle it for different mediums.Being an experienced digital marketing consultant, I help my customers in executing content marketing and inbound marketing to generate more leads and revenue.What are your thoughts on the amazing digital marketing quotes and the key takeaways shared in this article?Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

Top 21 Email Marketing Trends in 2017

‘Email Marketing is dead’ is an old myth.

Do you know that for every dollar spent on email marketing today, an average of  $44 dollar return on investment is realized?

The statistics don’t lie.This proves that email marketing is far from being dead.The fact is, email marketing still works as one of the most powerful marketing tool to reach out to your customers.

The best part is – despite being just 5 years away from becoming half a century old and yet email marketing is still evolving like any other new technology.

However, it’s obvious that doing email marketing right is much tougher now.As a modern marketer, you should distinguish the value of email marketing compared to other marketing tools otherwise you’re going to leave lots of money on the table.For many marketers, email marketing is not effective anymore.However, the industry trends and various recent research and studies prove otherwise.Don’t forget that the email marketing is all about sending the right message to the right people at the right time.Rest are mere details.

Here are top 21 email marketing statistics with sound recommendations that prove the worthiness of email marketing for modern marketers.Compiling these top 21 email marketing statistics have not only helped me explain the deep insights on email marketing but also convey what’s happening right now on email marketing front in 2017 and beyond.

So, let’s dive in and see what is happening in email marketing industry and how you can leveragethese email marketing tips to your advantage.

E-mail users are increasing day by day. Future is also saying the same.

With Facebook boasting over 1 billion active users and Twitter boasting 255 million, people might think that social media is the biggest marketing channel.

However, these numbers falls short compared to email numbers.The number of people using emails are going to increase always.That means not just your existing but even future customers are going to be available on email.And that makes email as an important channel for brands to reach out to their customers.Your customers are waiting for you to reach out to them – are you?

Demand and supply both go hand in hand.

Same can be said about email marketing users and the email marketing software solutions. They’re increasing day by day. Some of them (mentioned below) are really effective for running great email marketing campaigns.Mail Chimp, GetResposne, SendinBlue, Campaign Monitor

Email Marketing remains a growing, go-to channel for marketers and continues to deliver strong ROI and value for marketers.

Revenue from email has also improved year over year thanks to the growing size of the email user base and market penetration.However, it’s not getting easier to achieve this higher ROI for all marketers.They must be ready to adapt faster to changing email marketing trends as industry best practices continue to evolve.

Another hard-hitting fact that can reaffirm marketers’ belief in email marketing.

Without doubt, you can too become among those marketers whose primary revenue source is email marketing.Just do what is needed.Focus on delivering contextual e-mailers and learn how to track and measure email marketing campaigns.

Video is going to be huge in 2017.

All social channels are betting big on videos.How can email marketing lag behind?The fact is – it hasn’t.As the number shows, video rocks in the world of email marketing too.So start integrating videos as a critical component of your email marketing strategy.

People love discount and offers.

Yes.

People like to get promotional emails – that too at regular frequency. However, that’s not all to it. It’s more than that.You add relevance to your promotional emails and customer will love such emails. On the contrary, take out the relevance and they will become unwanted, useless spammy promotional emails. For example, if you offer a 15% discount code on your customer’s birthday or marriage anniversary, it may encourage the customer to buy something from you as the occasion calls for it. Got the point? 

Email is Our Oldest Social Network Channel.

It’s a social era.

In my opinion, social lies at the core of everything we do.Therefore, it becomes much more critical in email marketing.So, adding social sharing buttons to your email messages can directly impact your click through rate positively.Allow your readers to share the emails they love to read.Position the social sharing buttons strategically within email message to encourage readers to share the message as their peers might be interested in similar kind of content.

Email marketing has multiple purposes

You can leverage email marketing for sending promotional content, selling your products, educating the customers, sending company newsletter and welcome series emails.This proves the worth of email marketing for modern businesses.Choose your main marketing purpose and adapt your e-mailer accordingly.

Go for ‘Opt-in’ Email Marketing

‘Opt-in email’ provides the user to choose whether to receive email.Without obtaining permission before sending email, the email is unsolicited bulk email, better known as ‘spam’.You can eliminate the chance of being spammed by building your opt-in email database list.

At the same time, opt-in email marketing not only helps you get customers’ permission but also, it’s a sign that you’re sending email campaigns to people who really want to read your emails.

Opt-in email marketing advantages:

• Maintain your brand reputation

• Tell customers that you respect their privacy

• Help you find people who wants your product

• Give you more information about your customers

• Allow you to segment your customers and target them properly

• Build long-term, trust-worthy relationships with customers

• Grow your sales

Strike when the iron is hot and get more ROI from your email campaigns with triggered emails.

Trigger emails are nothing but automated emails which are sent based on specific pre-determined events like when an email recipient:

• Clicks on a certain link

• Fills out a form

• Downloads an e-book or

• Browse certain web pages

Why do Triggered Emails Work So Effectively?

It’s no rocket science.Triggered email marketing works because they are sent automatically at the right time with the right message for the right person.Moreover, triggered email marketing is swift in engaging the customer at the right moment – just when customer is thinking about your email or the product.

Benefits of Triggered Email Marketing:

• Increases brand relevance

• Increases customer engagement

• Increases operational efficiency

• Increases customer loyalty

• Increases revenue

Dear Email Marketers,Embrace the Mobile or Die!People have shifted away from desktops to mobile when it comes to opening emails.Email marketers just can’t afford to ignore smartphones and tablets.That means email marketers must revolve their email marketing strategy around mobile devices as mobile is the key to driving more opens, clicks, and revenue for your business.You can use mobile-ready email templates or use coding skills to develop a mobile friendly email campaign.Shorten the email subject line (keep it under 30 characters) so that it fits the reader’s mobile screen easily.

According to a recent MIT study, the average size of an adult index finger is between 1.6 cm and 2 cm, which translates to between 45 x 45 px and 57 x 57 px on a mobile device. (Source: Campaign Monitor)This explains that the button size should be bigger for mobile touch readiness with 57 X 57 pixel.

Once you have optimized your e-mailer for mobile device then ensure that the landing page is also optimized for mobile and tablets. Once users click on a button, they should see a landing page that renders properly on their devices.Also, don’t forget to track the customers’ consumption of your email campaigns – on which device they see your email more?Having a “mobile-first” email marketing strategy will ensure that your emails are reaching to your target audience.

Write Personalized and Catchy Email Subject Lines

Our email inboxes are overloaded with emails competing for recipient’s time and attention.So how does a recipient differentiate the important emails from the unimportant one – by reading the subject lines.Don’t forget that your subject line is your first and only real shot at recipient opening your email.Here are some of the key things to keep in mind when writing email subject lines:

Leads, leads, and more leads. That’s what we all want. No?

All things considered, email marketing helps you get them in abundance – provided you know how to run a high-performance email marketing campaign.Make your email campaigns interesting with engaging subject lines, hard hitting headlines, relevant imagery, social sharing links, and engaging content.Of course, that’s one part of the game.

More importantly, you should know how to define a lead for email marketing channel.Moreover, lead generation from email marketing can be in different forms – free trial sign-up, filling out a form on your website, download an e-book, subscription and /or product purchase etc.

Mass marketing is dead. Long live personalization.

No doubt, email marketing with contextual and personalized messaging will get you much better results – impacting both open rate and click rate positively.And personalization is not all about addressing your customer by his first name.Moreover, it’s about right timing, right message mapping the customer journey and the sale life cycle.

Don’t forget – all buyers are not same.

As a matter of fact, they are different people with different motivations.Hence, you can’t treat all of them in same manner.List Segmentation is an easier yet effective way to simple but extremely effective improve open and click through rates.

List Segmentation Matters in Email Marketing

You don’t need to be a great marketer to segment your list. A right mix of common sense, creativity and relevant data insights can help you make the right segmentation.List database can be segmented based on the following parameters:

• Demographics

• Survey or Quiz Results

• Engagement Ratio

• Geographic Elements

• Past Purchase History

• Position in the Sales Funnel

• Click Behaviour

• Website Browsing Behaviour

• One-time customers

Email Marketing Budget is on the rise.

As a matter of fact, marketers expect great ROI from their email marketing efforts. Hence the email marketing budget is also going to increase across industries.The ever-increasing popularity of email marketing is encouraging marketers to consider increasing their email marketing budget.Furthermore,

The cost of running an email marketing campaign is much lower compared to print ads, direct mail promotions, PPC ads, Social Media Paid ads, or television ads.With proven higher ROI from email marketing, it’s recommended to increase your marketing budget for email marketing.

One size doesn’t fit all.

Admit or not, we all love personalized service.Wherever we get it, we appreciate the service and remember it as a good experience.And, it doesn’t matter what type of business you run, personalization can make a difference.That’s why, personalization wins always.So, without doubt, personalized email messages gets higher open rate and click rate.

Despite that, most of brands fail to personalize their email marketing campaigns. It’s high time they start talking to their customers one-o-one in a personalized manner.

Marketers have an analytical mind.

Above all, they love to analyse the marketing data to gather insights and measure the ROI for their marketing efforts.And, email marketing is one marketing tool that is the top / best source for analyzing their data analytics.Moreover, email marketing campaign performance is easy to measure and highly tangible – making it marketers’ favorite tool to measure their email campaigns.

What are abandoned cart emails?

‘Abandoned cart’ emails are sent to customers who have added products to their cart but failed to check out.There might be different reasons for not completing the sales – the website crashed, process was complicated, OTP wasn’t delivered on time, session got expired, or client moved to some other website during the checkout process.

The Situation

A study shows that 68% of online shopping carts are abandoned before the customer completes a sale.Of course, this is a BIG number. It means that your actual sale may only be one third of what it could potentially be.

How To Solve This

To fix this problem, you should send emails to persuade all cart-abandoners and encourage them to again come back to finish the purchase.As evident from the research, such emails have a very high open rate – 40.5%.So, you must set up personalized ‘abandoned cart’ follow up emails for different products, and send it to potential buyers who didn’t completed the purchase with right call to actions and some discount offers too.

E-mail marketing is one of the most rewarding component of a marketer’s digital marketing strategy.

Without doubt, email marketing is most effective tool compared to social media, Google AdWords and direct mail.Therefore, ignore it at your own peril.If executed with right expertise and relevant messaging, email marketing can deliver great ROI.

Yes.You’ve sent an email and one of your prospect has opened and clicked on your email.You’ve engaged your customer.

Now what?This is the moment when you can send another ‘re-targeting email’ to the engaged customer and bring him closer to conversion.But send this first re-targeting email within first hour of the first engagement.

Wrap Up

All things considered, email marketing is a powerful marketing tool that can generate lots of branding and qualified leads for your business.In my opinion, I have explained top 21 email marketing trends that will help you execute your email marketing strategy in much better ways.In conclusion, start implementing these email marketing tips for your email marketing campaigns.

Let’s send emails which your customers won’t be able to ignore.

10 Ultimate Content Marketing Tools You Can’t Live Without

Are you using any content marketing tools?

If not, then you should start using one.Content marketing tools are must to make your content marketing strategy work in true sense.It doesn’t matter if your content marketing has just started or it’s in place for some time, you shouldn’t miss on the advanced content marketing tools to take your content marketing strategy to the next level.Think about it.

Content is at the heart of your marketing.If you can manage your content in effective manner by using automated content marketing tools, that can be detrimental to your success.

10 Ultimate Content Marketing Tools

A BULLET-PROOF WAY TO OUTPERFORM THE ORDINARY.

If there’s one thing that is continuing since a long time: it has to be word of mouth or recommendation.We all take our peers recommendations pretty seriously, don’t we?And why not!If I know my peer has used a tool and it benefited him I would surely try my hands on it too.

Outbrain is one of those tool that helps you push your content across multiple publishers.Outbrain claims itself to be the world’s largest content marketplace and these mentions on social prove the claims to be true!

Besides, it helps you promote your content on much hyped websites like The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Sky News to reach the most relevant people!In addition, you can promote your content on the web’s largest publisher sites, including CNN, TIME and thousands more, through their content discovery platform.Meanwhile, Outbrain also helps in the amplification of content irrespective of how small or big your business is.Furthermore, you can reach an engaged audience through their flexible, pay-per-click model and grow traffic to your articles, blog, and your mobile-optimized or video content.

Key features:

• Optimization of content

• Building long-term connection with the target audience/readers.

• Delivering higher revenues.

• Increase in engagement such as social shares, re-posts, conversation and clicks.

Coming to their pricing, Outbrain comes with a flexible pay-per-click model.So, pay only when you get clicks on your content.With Outbrain collaborating with Zemanta, it gets even easier to scale native campaigns through their Autopilot feature.In fact, it works like an airplane autopilot—it can handle campaign flight launches, optimizations, and landing mode all automatically.Moreover, you can integrate it with google analytics too.No doubt you don’t want to go MIA on such an outstanding tool, try it right now.

DELIVER RIGHT CONTENT ON TARGET EVERY SINGLE TIME.Remember how I told you about maintaining a editorial content calendar for a always win content marketing strategy.Here, I tell you a tool which helps you with the acceleration of your editorial calendar.

ClearVoice connects brands with technology and freelancers to create content that resonates. Plan, hire, manage, distribute – consistently and at scale.In my opinion, it’s an entire content ecosystem, from discovery tools to a creator marketplace and tools to streamline your production workflow.

Also, it helps you push content directly to your content management system with their accessible API, be it WordPress, Hubspot or any other CMS.Besides, you can generate fantastic content ideas, build your team of subject-matter experts and creatives, and build your editorial calendar seamlessly with ClearVoice.First and foremost, they have divided their product broadly into three categories:FOR BRANDS:

• Maximize ROI from better content creation of articles,blogs, e-books, campaigns etc.

• Pitch influencers that best fits your content niche.

• Streamlining content workflow.

• Elimination freelancers invoice, taxes etc..basically making the process hassle-free.

Starting at $249 /mo

FOR AGENCIES:

• Catapult your content services for your clients.

• Reduction in content creation time by over 30%

• Enjoy easy workflow for unlimited clients.

Starting at $499 /mo

FOR MANAGED SERVICES:

• Custom solutions according to your requirements.

• Creation and management of content.

• Distribution of content.

Starting at $1,499 /mo

Your Content Marketing with Modern Tools like Machine Learning Above all, Contently comes with a plethora of features adding extra value to your content marketing efforts.

The creators of contently believes in ‘storytelling’.

What you get with Contently:

• Data-driven insights and machine learning to inform and improve every stage of the content lifecycle.

• A global network of curated talent, available on demand.

• Practical, proven expertise from the market leaders.

Also, they offer a content measurement tool named ‘Docalytics’ (What a cool name, right?) that provides you with content engagement insights of how many eyeballs your content is grabbing out there.It gives you even the minute details like views, time spent by a user on the page, what the user is copying or clicking and much more.Moreover, Contently discovers the most engaging part of your content and helps you insert a form exactly there so that you don’t miss on gathering fresh leads.

Not only this, contently is one of the tool that also helps you find freelance resources that way you don’t sacrifice on having original content anywhere anytime.So, your can click here to get started.

Experts in Scalable And Sustainable Content marketing.Skyword spread your content around the world.Not only does it make your content reach the target but also it helps in engagement and conversion.At the same time, Skyword enables you to find out right set of freelance writers and content writers by helping you post a job and hire the right one.Furthermore, it offers a centralized content calendar to deliver unified content messaging across paid, owned, and earned channels.

If video is one of the important part of how your convey your content out in the world, then skyword is ‘the tool’ for you.Skyword provides an altogether different platform for publishing your videos that moves people.The best thing is – Skyword empowers you to implement your content marketing strategy from the first phase of hiring a talented content writer to the last stage of building an audience through sustained publishing of original content.Go ahead and supercharge your content marketing efforts with this simple tool.You can request a demo here.

Start curating, planning and measuring your content’s impact Are you looking for a content marketing software and a content curation software?Curata is the ONE!Curata is designed specifically for B2B marketers to drive leads and revenue from content.

It covers everything from content curation to how many social shares your content got to how many pipelines you touched and to grow leads and revenue with content marketing.You can easily create custom editorial calendar and workflow to optimize content planning and creation; and leverage analytics to learn what works and what doesn’t. Use their email correspondence intelligently assigned to appropriate projectsNot only this, you get insights and customized reports according to your specific content marketing goals.

Leverage Curata’s content curation software (Curata CCS) to:

• Discover the best content across the internet for a particular audience

• Easily organize and contextualize content with just a few clicks

• Publish and promote content through integration with marketing automation applications, content management systems, and social media channels

This is one of my favorite content marketing tool. You can book a demo now.

Let your content marketing get high on steroids.Whether you are a B2B or B2C marketer, publishthis helps your content reach masses.PublishThis helps businesses produce better content more often for the web, email, & social so they can achieve content marketing & digital publishing goals.Utilizing proprietary semantic search technology, PublishThis enables businesses to engage customers, automate content marketing, improve competitive intelligence, and reduce digital publishing costs.

Besides, you can use various mediums in which you can publish and distribute your content. In my opinion, be it short-form or long-form content this tool knows exactly what your audience is asking for.Also, you can use trendspottr to find topics and stay ahead of your competitors.Moreover, this tool focuses on spotting trending content, hashtags, phrases, and even influencers before everyone else catches on.And, the creators behind this tool suggests you to share your content in various forms, such as:

• Listicles

• Newsletters

• Web articles

• Videos

• Whitepapers

• Slides

• Pdfs

Moreover, it’s API works with almost any platforms, so you can output content into any format with ease. So, get your content marketing started here.

Get Personal, At Scale. OneSpot is a data driven way to to distribute and sequence your content at scale and drive business results.Named one of Forbes’ Top 100 Brand Publishing Technology point solution companies, OneSpot positions itself as the “only content marketing platform that serially delivers multiple pieces of content to the same person, wherever they are online.”

OneSpot’s machine learning technology automatically surfaces the most personally relevant content to your visitors across channels.

As the name suggests, it ‘SPOTS’ user’s’ activity, interest and preferences and personalize the feed for them. It places your content in a sequence that is most relevant to each visitor across different channels.

Amazing, right?

How it works:

1. Builds a customer profile based on their preferences and recommends onto what to read next.
2. Remarket your content across different channels, say, email, web, social, mobile etc.
3. Personalise content in emails based on user profile.
4. Drive most relevant users to the content.

Per se, the concept is similar to Google AdWords but this one is fully focused on your content! For this reason and more, request your demo here.

Leverage Unified Data and Actionable Insights SimpleReach is the leading content data platform, providing today’s top marketers with the data and insights needed to drive content ROI.In fact, it enables marketers to unify all of their content data in a single platform.

Without doubt, marketers face challenge of leveraging content / data in silos that hampers their content marketing efforts.With SimpleReach, you can break out of data silos by measuring both owned and branded content, on site and across social channels.Moreover, SimpleReach offers actionable insights that empower customers to improve the return on their content investments, using cutting-edge machine learning and Artificial Intelligence Techniques.Above all,

it helps marketers to make adjustments in future campaigns and publishers to create campaign dashboards for programs to make improvements and report to clients.Ultimately, elevate your content marketing by signing up here.

Do you want to give your content more oomph?

Then, try Atomic AI.First, this easy-to-use tool from Atomic Reach analyzes your content and tells you how big an impact it’s going to have.Even so, it tells you the most optimal times to schedule your content and meet the needs of your audience.

From what you should be writing to what,where and when to publish , this tool tells you exactly how content marketing should be done.Atomic AI provides real time feedback in all of your writing environments, increasing engagement with your audience.First and foremost, an intelligent writing platform with real-time, insights-based feedback to maximize content performance.

• Your Atomic Score tells you when your article is ready to be published.

• Tailor your content based on the needs of your audience.

• Audience-targeted editorial workflow to optimize style, structure and language.

Also, you can add their extension to chrome while writing your article as it give you a real-time feedback on the readability of your content!So, use it within your Chrome browser on documents, social media, Gmail and more.In the first place, it looks at over 20 different factors to come up with a rating between 0 and 100, and then gives you useful advice on how to improve different areas of your content.Furthermore, you can also choose the level of your audience—from general to specialist, academic, or even genius – and the tool will tell you about the complexity of your content! Next, get started for free.

Research influencers, manage your relationships, and conduct outreach that’s personalized and efficient.No doubt, all of you know how influencer marketing is keeping up its pace in the digital world.As a matter of fact, promoting your content by the industry influencers can make the real difference to your content marketing efforts.And, Buzzstream is one of the best influencer marketing and content marketing tools.BuzzStream is web-based software that helps the world’s best marketers promote their products, services and content to build links, buzz, and brands.

Moreover, BuzzStream helps you build lists and pitch influencers – so you can get real distribution for your content. You can track and manage your relationships with influencers and publications, along with any placements you earn. Lets see how it can help you:

• Builds list of contacts that best fit your content type

• Sends mail to them from within the tool

• Manage long-term relationships by keeping in touch

• Track your link clicks and conversions.

Trust buzzstream to move the needle of your content marketing campaign.Use it in addition with buzzsumo to see how many shares and tweets you received from that particular influencer.Get group, professional and custom pricing plans for yourself here.

Conclusion

So, I have explained top 10 content marketing tools in this blog post that can (if leveraged properly) help you upscale your content marketing efforts efficiently.

Meanwhile, if you can implement one of the content marketing tools shared in this list, you can easily achieve your content marketing objectives.Are you ready to start implementing these content marketing tools in your content marketing strategy?

 What content marketing tools has your business found the most effective?Are there any other content marketing tool(s) that should be added to this list? Share your experience after trying these Content Marketing tools and how did it improve your content marketing performance.Finally, let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

Top 3 Landing Page Builder Tools of 2017

Landing pages are meant for solely one purpose – getting people to take one, specific action.In my opinion, any marketing campaign will not be successful without a great landing page.Without doubt, landing pages have simply become a ‘must have’ element in the marketing mix for every modern marketer.

What is Landing Page?

Usually, landing page is the one that an online visitor lands one.A landing page is a follow-up to the promise you made through your online ad which user saw and found it good enough to click and know more about the ad.This landing page will offer some relevant information and / or specials offers in return of visitors’ contact details.

Landing pages are also used for lead generation activities.In most of cases, it is your homepage.However, landing page can be a standalone web page (different than the homepage) too.

How to Build an Awesome Landing Page?

So, now you understand that developing an apt landing page is vital aspect of your marketing mix, next question is – how to build a great landing page! It may seem an easy task to develop a good landing page. But it’s not if you are going to build it using coding. You can use coding to design and develop a landing page from scratch but you would face following challenges:

1.   Very difficult to create a great looking landing page with custom functionalities

2.   Need lots of days to finish the task

3.   Inability to modify or update the custom coding

4.   Lack of supporting tools like A/B Testing, autoresponders etc.

You can easily tackle these challenges by using a right landing page builder tool.

Yes, you read it right.

You can use a landing page creator tool which is easy to use, feature-rich, pre-designed templates, email marketing integrations and most importantly – speed and affordability together. There are several landing page builder tools available online but it’s difficult to decide which one to start using for your landing page needs.I have compiled a list of top 3 tools which I’ve used personally and found them very effective for building your next landing page.

Here is a list of top 3 landing page builder tools that can change the way you create and market your landing pages.

Let’s dive in.

1. Unbounce

One of the best landing page maker tool available in the global market, Unbounce is a tool that allows marketers to increase their campaign ROI by building, publishing & A/B testing mobile responsive landing pages without any IT support or coding knowledge.

With a drag and drop landing page builder like Unbounce, you can quickly create, launch and test high-converting landing pages and website overlays in minutes.

Here are some of the key features that can make your job easier:

·        Create high-converting landing pages in no time

·        Tweak a template or build customer page from scratch using the simple drag and drop landing page builder

·        A/B test & optimize your landing pages

·        Pass leads directly Into Marketo from Unbounce forms

·        100% customizable & mobile responsive

·        Advanced form builder – add fields & customize

Unbounce features built-in A/B testing software so you can test different ideas and optimize your pages for maximum conversion. Simply create a variation page, change whatever you want with our drag & drop interface, and start your test.

With Unbounce’s landing page plugin for WordPress, marketers can create fully customized landing pages for their campaigns and publish them to their existing WordPress sites.It’s one of the priciest landing page creator tools, with their cheapest plan set at $79 per month

Pricing

Starting from: $79/month

Pricing model: Subscription

Free Trial: Available

2. Leadformly

Leadformly is suitable for marketers looking to improve their lead generation with conversion-optimized lead gen forms.

Leadformly makes it quick and easy to build powerful, high-converting, lead forms that can 2-3X your website’s inbound leads. Usually, inquiry forms are very lengthy and boring. Leadformly solves this problem for you.You can use multiple pages for your lead gen form. All of your questions can be placed on one page, but user will see only one question per page with progress bar visibility.

That way, your website visitors won’t feel overwhelmed answering each question at one time.Leadformly’s intelligent forms automatically detect and use a visitor’s location to pre-fill fields like ‘country’ and the phone number extension, resulting in fewer clicks and more leads.Leadformly forms also have built-in validation, to ensure that the lead information you receive is correct.

Key Features

• Build forms to gather info on your site that show only the questions you want
• Add multiple steps to your form to show each question in order
• Create multiple choice questions with images
• Show questions only based on conditions you set
• Automatically add contact info to email services or your app via webhooks or Zapier integraitons

Additionally, you can easily segment your leads into different buckets based on your own pre-determined criteria.Furthermore, Leadformly leverages a smart ‘honeypot’ system that blocks spammers, while being completely invisible and non-invasive to real users.

Moreover, Leadformly offers 750+ 3rd party integrations including Mailchaimp, Zapier, Salesforce, Hubspot, and Pipedrive.As a matter of fact, it’s little costlier considering its key offering of plain forms. However, it’s pretty focused on getting you more leads by optimized lead capturing forms.

Pricing

Starting from: $37/month

Pricing model: Subscription

Free Trial: Available

3. Instapage

First and foremost, Instapage is popular for its ease of use of creating and using landing pages for online marketing campaigns.Actually, Instapage’s drag and drop editor combined with other set of features empowers you to create and optimize landing pages.

Furthermore, you get access to over 200 ready-to-go customizable templates or create your own from scratch and start using landing page for generating leads and conversions.

At the same time, the built-in Instapage A/B Testing tool helps you monitor and measure the performance of your landing pages and choose the best onesAbove all, you can track visitor behavior, increase your conversion rates, and easily enhance the overall performance of your campaign.Moreover, Instapge can be integrated with the most-used CRMs, email marketing, and advertising solutions.

The Instapage WordPress plugin lets you use landing pages with its it’s two-button publishing with complete control without any coding knowledge. All things considered, Instapage is pretty viable solution for building awesome landing pages however, it’s bit costly even for a starter plan.

Pricing

Starting from: $68/month (Billed annually) Or $76 per month

Pricing model: Subscription

Free Trial: Available

Wrap Up

In my opinion, I have explained top 3 landing page builder tools in this blog post that can help you take your marketing efforts to next level efficiently.So, now you know fair amount of specifics of each landing page builder tools to choose the right one for your business.

Are you ready to use any of these landing page builder tools? 

Are you currently using any landing page builder tools to drive your marketing ROI?

What landing page builder tools has your business found the most effective?

Above all, share your experience after trying any of these landing page builder tools and how did it improve your overall lead generation performance.And, let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

4 Mistakes In Digital Marketing That Can Make You Look Dumb

Irrespective of our experience level as digital marketers, we all make digital marketing mistakes.So, it’s not surprising that while running various digital marketing campaigns, we tend to make certain mistakes that may cost us dearly.

As a matter of fact, mistakes are part and parcel of our growth journey.However, it’s not how we make mistakes but how we correct them that define us.Be that as it may, this article will cover 4 most common digital marketing mistakes that digital marketers can avoid falling into with regards to future marketing campaigns.For this reason, let’s understand them one by one:

1. Using Too Many Social Media Channels

Social media marketing shouldn’t be ignored by modern marketers.No digital marketer will argue on that.First, take a look at this informative info-graphic on social media marketing statistics in 2017.

However, most of the businesses jump on every newly-launched social media channel in the market.This decision harms business in two ways:

One – Adding new social media channels without a concrete content strategy won’t help your brand. Instead, it will harm it further thanks to your inability to post engaging content on a consistent basis.

Two – Managing social media channels is a time-consuming job. More channels mean more time investment.

Can you see the difference between managing 3 social media channels and 7 social media channels?

The fact is –

There’s no rule that says you have to have a presence on each and every social media network, however. 

So, focus on the quality and relevance because quality wins over the quantity.Ask yourself three questions when choosing social media channels:

1. Is this channel relevant to your brand?
2. How much ROI would you get from a certain social media channel?
3. Can you manage them with engaging content consistently or not?

You should only use the networks that are the best fit for your customers and your business.PERIOD.

2. Fetching Backlinks in Abundance

For the uninitiated, here is the explanation:The links on your website may direct your users to other websites that they may find interesting or important. These are called outbound links.

Backlinks on the other hand are the links on other websites that direct their users to your website.Every digital marketer wants backlinks – and lots of them.After all, backlinks are important for search engine rankings.

The weighting of thematic clusters of ranking factors in Google:

Source: The Beginner’s Guide to Link Building

Now, many marketers believe that when it comes to backlinks – it’s always a case of ‘more the merrier’.I wish that was true.It was a very handy tactic a few years back, but not anymore.Today’s truth is – quality conquers quantity in this case too.To all popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, and Bing), only quality backlinks matter.‘What are high-quality backlinks?’, you may ask.

A Backlink is considered of high-quality if it comes from a site which have relevance and higher domain authority and higher page authority.

When a search engine measures your site’s overall SEO quality, it provides great importance to links directing to your website.Search engines look at everything surrounding the link including its content, relevance of the page, and relevance of the website as a whole.A high-quality backlink will pass its juice to your website – in simple words, pass on its credibility to your site.More credibility means a higher ranking in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

On the contrary, low-quality backlinks lack credibility hence they are unable to pass on any link juice to your site.Having lots of low-quality backlinks may make search engines believe that you’re trying to manipulate the search rankings by using spammy link building activities.Having too many low-quality backlinks can even get your site penalized or banned by search engines.

How to determine which links to pursue and which to leave?

Here are three overarching categories to consider when evaluating link quality:

Relevance

Think about why would a particular site link to you?If your answer doesn’t offer a great explanation, then drop that backlink from your list.Links without relevance are considered manipulative.But if the answer is compelling enough like both sites share the same niche, related field orIf you get a backlink from a relevant website that is associated with your niche in some or the other way, then that will be a great endorsement for your site.

Domain Authority

Domain Authority (DA) is a search engine ranking score developed by Moz that predicts how well a website will rank on search engine result pages (SERPs).

Domain authority is a measure of the power of a domain name and is one of many search engine ranking factors. Domain authority is based on three factors:

1. Age
2. Popularity
3. Size

DA is a ranking calculation created by SEOmoz and is intended to calculate the relevance, authority, and how likely the website is to rank for its given keywords. This metric is derived from the root domain of the website and not any specific page. It is very important to be observant of this.

Page Authority

Page Authority (PA) is a score developed by Moz that predicts how well a specific page will rank on search engine result pages (SERP).Page authority is a term that was first introduced by MOZ which is in fact the estimated ranking capacity of a web page.

Page Authority scores range from one to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank.A high-quality backlink will have a score >70, the medium quality will be 24-70, and low quality is <24.I advise you to focus on getting quality backlinks and ignore the low-quality spammy links.That will do the job for you.

3. Missing On Content Marketing

Design is the body and content is the soul of your marketing campaigns.That’s why quality content is at the core of every digital marketing component.

“Content marketing is the only marketing left.” – Seth Godin

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that revolves around the creation, publication, and distribution of content to a target audience in order to bring new traffic (and therefore new customers) to your business.

‘A type of marketing that involves the creation and sharing of online material (such as videos, blogs, and social media posts) that does not explicitly promote a brand but is intended to stimulate interest in its products or services.’ – Content Marketing Institute

So it’s understood that you need to create lots of content and you might be doing that in the form of blog posts, social media campaigns, infographics, videos etc. But that’s not enough.As you can see the screenshot below:

However, the problem lies with not marketing that content properly with a cohesive content strategy.Create a content marketing strategy that covers the key pillars of your messaging:

• Customers’ needs, pain points and challenges
• Industry POVs, trends and innovations
• Latest product /solution insights to inform and educate the customers

The best thing about using a content marketing strategy to drive your overall marketing is – your messaging and brand positioning will be consistent across all channels.

Coca-Cola, for example, spends more money on content creation than it does on television advertising. ( Contently)

Once you have defined your key content marketing objectives, you can start producing content based on the marketing channel and promoting it effectively.

94% of small businesses ,  93% of B2Bs , and 77% of B2Cs use content marketing.

To make your marketing a huge success, first, you should focus on creating lots of quality content. The more content you create and share with your target audience, the easier it is for you to establish your thought leadership and domain authority in your niche.Companies that publish 16+ blog posts per month got almost 3.5X more traffic than companies that publish between 0-4 monthly posts.

However, you ensure that you deliver the quality content only as your customers seek right information that can help them make an informed decision.Google can penalize you for delivering ‘Thin Content’.Thin content is defined as that with little or no value to searchers.So, don’t compromise on quality.Watch this video demonstrating content marketing in action:

4. Focus on the Wrong Metrics

Today, marketing is all about numbers and analysis.And digital marketing provides you these tangible and traceable numbers in abundance.The volume of traffic, Page sessions, Bounce Rate, Click Through Rate, Conversion Rate, Average Order Value, Live Chat sessions, Number of Downloads, Total Sales, Lifetime Value, etc.That’s a gold mine.

Digital marketers need to deliver better ROI, predictability, and profitability.However, many marketers fail mainly because they focus on wrong/irrelevant/outdated metrics.

Image Source: 360 Partners For example, if you are focusing on the number of (increased) e-book downloads but your ‘free-trial sign-ups’ ratio or ‘Request for Demo’ rate has come down, you should worry.Therefore, it’s obvious that more downloads mean more subscribers but at the end of the day, higher demo requests and better conversion rate is going to be the key performance indicator.

50% using leads and sales metrics as their key performance indicator. – TrackMaven

However, some people get worried about being unfollowed on social media.

I would say – it’s good for you.

I get unfollowed every single day. And it’s a good thing!The answer is simple – if someone unfollows you, it means he/she doesn’t connect with your brand anymore.So, focus on engaging people who are interested in your product rather than worry about who isn’t.

51% of small businesses are still primarily focused on page views, and 8% don’t measure the success of their social campaigns at all. – Simply Measured

Besides, some of the marketers fall in the trap of focusing on too much data. They try to cover all kinds of data.Avinash Kaushik has explained this problem in one of his blog posts on Web Reporting vs Web Analysis.By and large, try to get more insights from a few key metrics to improve your marketing strategy.

Learn to connect dots and find out patterns that can help you achieve your key business goal(s).You can track multiple metrics but stay focused on your most important metrics which drive revenue and business growth.For that, you need a clearly outlined high-level goal and low-level marketing objectives.

Wrap Up

In my opinion, digital marketing in the 21st century is all about doing lots of testing/experimentation. Presumably, experimentation demands precious time, energy, passion, and money. In any case, as a digital marketer, you can’t afford to waste any of these. First and foremost, stay open, stay adaptable. Don’t repeat digital marketing mistakes – especially, avoid making these common mistakes to succeed as a digital marketer. Hope you’ve enjoyed this post.

Are you all sorted on the common digital marketing mistakes discussed in this blog post?

Do you have any other digital marketing mistake/folly to share (that you used to commit)?

Is there any digital-marketing tactic(s) you’re still using despite it being not that effective anymore?

Above all, I would love to know your thoughts.So, share your opinion(s) in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

Top 7 Most Popular Marketing Automation Tools for Startups and SMBs

Marketing automation tools are in demand these days since they have the potential to transform your business. I searched the term on google trends and it becomes more obvious that marketing automation is going to be ‘The Thing’ in 2017-18

Marketers at startups and mid-sized organizations need more sophisticated solutions to meet aggressive marketing objectives.

The whole idea behind the concept of marketing automation is to: ‘Cut down your time on regular tasks and focus more of it on important tasks.’

Days of sending simple email campaigns are over long back.Using marketing automation tools enables marketers to align their sales and marketing efforts, attain higher customer retention rates and to quickly get the true value from their marketing efforts.Smart marketers prefers to automate their marketing and sales efforts. With marketing automation tools, they can turn leads into customers and get more sales from existing customers.

Let’s have a look at some of the important statistics on marketing automation tools:

• On average, 49% of companies are using marketing automation

• There are 11 times more B2B companies using marketing automation tools now than in 2011.

• 77% of CMOs at top performing companies implemented marketing automation to grow revenue.

• 94% of marketers prefer a tool that provides continuous, autonomous optimization across channels.

• 88% of marketers prefer to focus on customer interactions rather than spending time on preparing reports.

Source: CMO

All these statistics prove the increasing popularity of marketing automation tools.No surprise that marketing automation industry has grown from $500m industry to $1.2 bn in past 2-3 years.This has caused the launch of several new marketing automation tools /solutions providers.Yet, it also makes difficult to choose the right platform among so many choices.

Marketers say that the biggest benefits of automation are saving time (74%), increased customer engagement (68%), more timely communications (58%) and increased opportunities including up-selling (58%). – Adestra

Automating your marketing efforts requires a hefty investment.A crucial and most important step in choosing the right marketing automation tool.To help you overcome this dilemma, I’m sharing a list of most popular 7 marketing automation tools for startups and SMBs.And, people who are not familiar with the marketing automation concept, read this article from Neil Patel.Rest of you, jump in now.

7 Best Marketing Automation Tools:

Inbound Marketing = Hubspot

HubSpot CRM – a winner of our Expert’s Choice Award for 2017 – is one of the leading CRM apps currently available in the market. HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales platform that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close customers.HubSpot provides tools for social media marketing, content management, web analytics and search engine optimization.

You can have everything under one roof:

• Your website, CRM,

• Social media marketing tools,
• file manager, landing pages,
• conversion tracking,
• CTAs and more

…all accessible with one login. No matter how intricate your marketing strategy is, HubSpot’s Inbound marketing software takes care of it.You can track and measure all your online marketing activities – website, blogging, email marketing, and social media marketing.You can also use HubSpot to create landing pages and calls-to-action and to get SEO tips.

HubSpot acts as a content management system enabling you to update your website content, optimize it for search, and adjust it for mobile.You can even use the Smart Content tool to personalize your website for each visitor.They have a whole lot of information available on the definition itself.

Key Highlights:

• Helps you publish content to get you higher conversions

• Personalized landing pages with optimized call-to-actions

• From creating stunning mailers to personalized content to better click-through-rates

• Data-driven insights to create hyper-targeted campaigns and close more deals

• Monitoring and tracking of social media engagement

These are just some of the key benefits of using HubSpot that mentioned, there’s a lot more.

Hubspot can enable startups quickly to scale with the largest enterprise seamlessly.No doubt, with more than a fifth of market share (21%), HubSpot has the single largest market share.The workflow functionality, list segmentation and contextual marketing features are effective. It’s integration with Salesforce is also top-notch.Once installed, HubSpot CRM will run in the background of all tools you are already using, and you will be able to trigger it whenever you need it.

The list of available integrations is very long, and includes products such as Pipedrive CRM, SugarCRM, Bigcommerce, Gravity Forms, Base CRM, Google Chrome, Google Dynamics, Snapengage, Dropbox, and many more.To put it simply, HubSpot is a multi-tool.However, price can be tough for smaller businesses and start-ups though it’s available for free with very limited features.

Price: $99 /month billed annually. No Free trial available.

Why send one static email when you can program an action-based email campaign sequence?Designed specifically keeping SMBs in mind, Infusionsoft is a perfect tool if you are focusing more towards email marketing and would now like to automate your efforts.You can automate your sales and marketing, while combining your CRM, email marketing, lead capture and e-commerce in one place.

The integrated platform lets users manage their small business by pulling together data points related to sales, marketing, leads, payments, customers, and more.With Infusionsoft, business users can import and store both online and offline contacts at one place in an organized manner.The solution automatically logs every engagement with the customers and generate automated follow-up messages for different customer segments based on the level of engagement.

What differentiates Infusionsoft from the tools that have been listed here is its automation capabilities for eCommerce – order forms, payment processing, fulfillment, and inventory tracking directly within the tool.

Who should consider: Businesses with an existing strong customer base and a turnover above $100,000 should definitely consider this full-fledged marketing automation platform. The only drawback that I feel the tool has – it doesn’t offer free trial, so you need to wait for someone from the support team to set up an account for you.

What’s more – users can also access Infusionsoft on their Android and iOS enables smartphones and tablets.Infusionsoft may not have comprehensive tools matching other popular CRMs but it’s a good enough for a startup or small business to automate their sales and marketing efforts.Price: $99 /month billed annually. No Free trial available.

Aren’t we all revolving around the same thing all year- generating leads, capturing them and then nurture them?LeadSquared is a complete customer acquisition solution that helps marketers drive and manage leads in your sales funnel faster.Their ability to find leads is amazing. The landing pages come with some really nice templates so you can be up and running in no time.Also, you can link your landing pages linked to every channel you are actively using so that you don’t miss out on leads from anywhere.

You can engage your audience with landing pages, SMS, email marketing campaigns and drip-marketing campaigns.Moreover, leads can be segmented based on the behavior, lead scores, geography etc.LeadSquared provides capture technology to enables marketers to capture leads from a variety of sources – PPC, Social Media, Phone queries, chat inquiries, email inquiries, lead gen sites, WordPress, APIs and webinars.

Their lead scoring feature lets you define and configure different custom lead stages and custom lead scores. This really helps in determining the lead quality effectively. You can also create a ‘contact now’ list of these promising leads and plan your day right.Leadsquared empowers marketers with detailed performance report, monthly revenue report and you can access such reports from your mobile phone.

Sign up for their free trial here. Price: INR 10,000 /month billed annually. Free trial available.

Automate Your Email Marketing And CRMActiveCampaign’s campaign automation features allow marketers to streamline their marketing programs and reach out to sales leads efficiently.

The best thing about Active campaign is – it comes with a great user-interface which falls under the ‘cons’ side of other marketing automation tools.It is very well-designed and intuitive.It’s one of the only marketing automation tools that I’ve come across that needs practically no training.

Drag and drop facility, variety of auto-responder options, helpful pointers for smooth workflow are some of the functionalities that the tool provides.One of the most prominent elements in the ActiveCampaign platform is the drag-and-drop email designer.Utilizing the drag-and-drop interface, along with free templates and free image hosting, businesses can design the types of email marketing messages that customers are likely to notice.

Besides, you can add sales contacts, create special marketing workflows, automated follow-up sequences, track behavior multiple marketing channels, and track post-sale processes.With ability to integrate with over 150+ different tools via their Zapier integration feature, this tool comes quite handy when you want your marketing in action.

Who should consider investing: Small business enterprises who are new to the realm of automation should try this as their affordable pricing is worth the quality offered.Try their no credit card required, 14-day free trial here.Price: $49 /month. Free trial available.

Tools for- Right message. Right people. Right time.Going by their tagline, they entered into this market to target people at any level of marketing by making the work simpler and taking all the coding work in their hands.

The plus point: its ease-of-use, interface simplicity and cost.It only comes a notch below the favourite automation tools like hubspot and pardot.

If you are someone who wants to link their digital mix altogether such as CRM, social media marketing, email marketing and such marketing, Act-On is ‘the tool’ for you.

What You Get:

• You can manage and optimize all the stages of the customer experience.

• Leverage lead nurturing for turning prospects into buyers.

• Track each prospect’s activity from initial engagement and conversions to closed sales and repeat sales and beyond to engage their leads with relevant content systematically over a certain period.

• Report on campaigns, from high levels to detailed drill-downs

• Automated program templates which are equally as good as ones provided by HubSpot

• Easy drag and drop workflow even for creating landing pages

• “Expression builder” to differentiate your visitor based on their behaviours and activity

• They are soon coming up with artificial intelligence to compare leads and give them adaptive scoring

They were first to launch Account-based Marketing and their Social tools are very advanced (Forrester scored them higher than HubSpot).Act-On Data Studio helps you use get real-time customer engagement insights (Online behavior like webpage views, email clicks, and content downloads) by using BI tools to help you make smarter marketing decisions.

In simple words, with Act-On, marketers can drive better business outcomes and maximize CLV.Though on a little expensive side, it comes into two-tiers- Professional and Enterprise, take their short assessment to see which MAP (marketing automation platform) you need.

Best suited for: Small to medium businesses can benefit the most out of this tool.Price: $900 /month. No Free trial available.

Sharpspring – ‘the marketing automation tool for agencies’.

Sharpspring is perfect for small and medium size agencies as they get a completely re-brandable platform with advanced features and special pricing to manage multiple clients.

Its one of the most flexible platforms on the market, offering powerful, behavior-based email marketing, native or 3rd party CRM integration, dynamic forms, landing page and blog builders, universal CMS compatibility, and integration with hundreds of applications.

Beside the advanced behavioural-based email automation, you get built-in CRM system dynamic forms, behavioural-based site tracking, lead tracking and much more.You can also integrate with over 700+ third-party tools & CRMs via their Zapier integration.

Their landing page builder (beautiful landing page template options) works perfectly to capture higher number of leads. You can launch your blog without any fuss with a convenient blog builder that lets you to manage and publish posts easily.Moreover, you can make informed decisions and tweak your marketing campaigns by leveraging the custom reports presented in engaging ways with relevant metrics .

Used by over 6,000 businesses now, sharpspring is popular for its marketing automation tool for agencies.It provides monthly contracts.Compared to other marketing tools, this is still cost effective marketing automation tool in the market.Consider this tool if you are already comparing between Marketo and pardot.You can start here.Price: $400 /month. No Free trial available.

7 Marketing Influencers You Must Follow In 2017

Marketing Influencers are getting popular day by day.

Reason is simple – Influencer marketing is the latest innovative way of connecting with your target audience.But, randomly following each influenecr will not help your brand.It’s vital to understand which influencer to follow and which one(s) to avoid.Focus on some of the top or the best ones whose target audience and niche align with your business.To help you find out the right influenecrs, I have compiled a list of 7 top marketing influencers around the globe.

What made me choose them?

My sole criteria of choosing these 7 marketing influencrs was simple – go for those who present a unique perspective on current digital marketing trends and provide their futuristic approach about upcoming changes in the industry.If you are still at sixes and sevens with the term, here’s an article explaining you what value ‘influencers’ are adding to the digital era.

Cutting To The Chase, Here Is My List Of Top 7 Marketing Influencers Around The World.

1. Rand Fishkin

Wizard of Moz – Popular in SEO Industry

Founder and former CEO of moz, he is already helping marketing professionals giving their SEO boost.Rand fishkin is the go-to-guy for everything SEO. He always has something new and updated to speak about SEO techniques.

In 2009, he was named among the 30 Best Young Tech Entrepreneurs Under 30 by BusinessWeek, and has been written about it in the Seattle Times, Newsweek and the New York Times among others.He’s a regular contributor to SEOmoz blog – read by tens of thousands of search professionals each day.

With 386K twitter followers, he tells you his way through appearing high on the top of search engine results.To all those people who think SEO is boring, give his whiteboard friday’s a shot. They are fun to watch and informative at the same time.

Currently writing a book on ups and downs of startup culture, due out in 2018, make sure you follow him everywhere so you are not missing out on anything because he clearly is not!

Where to find: You can follow him on Twitter and his blog.

2. BRIAN CLARK

The Content Marketing Doctor

Brian Clark is a serial entrepreneur – CEO of Rainmaker Digital, founder of Copyblogger, host of Unemployable, and curator of Further.Phew!If you are seeking expertise in the field of content, Brian Clark is the one to follow.He runs one of the most powerful and influential blog.Brian can help you find a perfect anatomy on how to bulletproof your content marketing.

From blogs explaining the guide to fix your old broke content to detailed content marketing strategy to follow, you will not leave his blog without attaining some good knowledge.

An expert marketer you should follow on social media by Inc and one of the World’s Top 40 Social Marketing Talent by forbes are two of the mentions out of the lot.

Brian has been featured in a few books:

• Linchpin by Seth Godin
• Meatball Sundae by Seth Godin
• Epic Content Marketing by Joe Pulizzi
• The Lean Entrepreneur by Brant Cooper and Patrick Vlaskovits
• The $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau

…and many more!

Over the years, people have said a lot of nice things about Brian:

• In 2014, Forbes named Brian one of the World’s Top 40 Social Marketing Talent and a Top 10 Online Marketing Expert.
• Inc. Magazine says Brian is an expert marketer you should follow on social media. and one of 23 Must-Read Twitter Feeds for 2015
• Brian was ranked #3 on a list of the 100 Most Influential Online Marketers of 2009.
• Brian was deemed the most influential blogger of 2007.
• BusinessWeek says entrepreneurs should follow Brian on Twitter.
• Dunn and Bradstreet says Brian is the most influential person to follow on Twitter for small businesses.

Where to find: You can follow him on Twitter.

3.    NEIL PATEL

Perfect for Startup Marketers

Been recognized by USA’s ex-president Obama as ‘a top 100 entrepreneur under the age of 30’ and a New York Times bestselling author, Neil Patel is right at the top among modern marketing influencers.Neil Patel is an entrepreneur, a digital marketing blogger and my personal favourite. He covers everything from how to attract visitors to your websites to dim-sized problems a small or medium sized business with low marketing budget may face!

The Wall Street Journal calls him a top marketing influencer on the web.Accoridng to Forbes, Neil is one of the top 10 digital marketers.Entrepreneur Magazine says he created one of the 100 most brilliant companies in the world.Having worked with big brands like Google, NBC, general motors, he takes the most pleasure in helping out small and medium sized businesses with his experience in marketing.

All the way from gaining visitors, converting them into sales to whatever help your startup needs to increase the traffic, Neil Patel takes you through! He gives detailed explanation in every article. You tend to go on reading a single article but you end up with a lot more information in your hand.

If you’re in the initial stage of your startup, then Neil is the one to follow. Where to find: Co-founder of Crazy Egg, Kissmetrics, Hello Bar and runs his own blog. Follow him on Twitter.

4.  Joe Pulizzi

Content Marketing Encyclopedia

Joe Pulizzi is an entrepreneur, speaker, author, and podcaster.Joe Pulizzi is evangelizing the content marketing world through his keynotes, articles, tweets and his books.This was Joe who started using the term ‘Content Marketing’ back in 2001.

He’s the founder of multiple startups, including the Content Marketing Institute (CMI) – a leading content marketing educational resource for enterprise brands, recognized as the fastest growing business media company by Inc. magazine in 2014 and 2015. If you want to excel the field of content marketing, his blog is something you should turn to.

From speaking about the best practices to follow in content marketing to any recent changes (if any), he covers everything.Moreover, you can find blogs like different brands doing content right, content strategy for different social media channels, your content marketing checkup and much more.

Arguably, he is the first person to start using the term ‘content marketing’ back in 2001.

Also, you must not miss out on his podcasts and his new book Content Inc.So, now you know where to seek all your content marketing expertise from.Where to find: You can follow him on Twitter, his website and his blog.

5. ANN HANDLEY

World’s first Chief Content Officer

A keynote speaker and Chief Content Officer at MarketingProfs, Ann Handley speaks and writes about how you can rethink the way your business markets.Also, she is named as the most influential women in social media and as one of the top 20 women bloggers by Forbes.

If I have to give you my personal favourite, it has to be her co-authored book on content rules.

Moreover, she is the author of the Wall Street Journal best-seller on business writing, “Everybody Writes,” and the co-author of the best-selling book on content marketing, “Content Rules: How to Create Killer Blogs, Podcasts, Videos, Ebooks, Webinars (and More) That Engage Customers and Ignite Your Business.”

A pioneer in digital marketing, Ann is the co-founder of ClickZ, which was one of the first sources of digital marketing news and commentary.Alongwith writing for Huffington Post, Mashable, Entrepreneur Magazine and American Express OPEN Forum, she maintains her own blog on Annhandley.com Where to find: You can follow him on Twitter and her website.

6. GARY VAYNERCHUK

Author, Speaker, Marketer, Entrepreneur

Gary Vaynerchuk is a serial entrepreneur, four-time New York Times bestselling author, speaker and internationally recognized digital marketing personality.Besides, Vaynerchuk is an angel investor and advisor to Uber, Birchbox, Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, among others.Also, he runs his own digital agency and is one of the most sought after public speaker.

hrough his personal blog, he speaks about everything from digital marketing, life as a CEO, startups, social media, leadership and much much more.Moreover, he is very active on his YouTube and Instagram channel. In fact, he knows how to connect with influencers the right way, #DailyVee, #ASKGARYVEE are two of his initiatives to put himself out in front of the audience.Follow him here: Youtube, personal blog and twitter.

7. AVINASH KAUSHIK

Data Lover, Analytics Magician 

Here comes a man who will talk to you in numbers.Avinash Kaushik is an Indian entrepreneur, author and public speakerKnown as Google’s Avinash Kaushik – another Indian name in this list and a great influencer of digital marketing and analytics – he covers all things digital marketing under one roof in his personal blog.Presently, working as a digital marketing evangelist for google, he has pioneered the field of web analytics.

Basically, reading his blogs or following him would help you better your ROI and take database driven decision for you business.Furthermore, check out his QnA session where he speaks about what marketing is all about according to him.Also, you can connect with him here.

SUMMING UP

Finally, this is my list of top 7 marketing influencers to follow to get great marketing insights.Hope you’ve enjoyed this post.

Are you all sorted on which digital marketing influencers you should follow to stay up to date on the unique marketing strategies?Do you have any favourites when it comes to digital marketing influencers?Is there anyone else you think should make it to the list?Above all, I would love to know your favorite marketing influencers.Also, let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

10 Logo Design Tips How To Design the Perfect Logo

Logo Design is thinking made visual.However, it is easier said than done.On the face of it, logo designing process looks simpler however designing a perfect logo is very challenging task.Logo design is not just about toying with colors, fonts, and fancy tag lines.

Logo design is an art as well as a science.Your logo is your company’s face and identity.In my last post, I explained how to choose a perfect brand name for your business and why your brand name should have a visual identity.This visual identity is your Logo.

Some people just get their logo designs drawing on a napkin and some just get it easy by putting their brand name’s initials on the logo — while some faces a hard time for that perfect creative logo.This article will help you with tips and ideas on how to design a successful logo for your business.

Here Are My Top 10 Logo Design Tips On How To Design The Perfect Logo For Your Brand.

Let’s see what the chaos to a great logo is all about:

1. Know Your Competitors

Start with your competitors.Analyze what kind of logo designs competitors are using in your niche to reach out to their target audience.This will help you get an initial idea of what is working and what is not.

However, ensure that you don’t fall in trap of designing similar type of logo as created by your competitors.Try to be as unique as possible while creating your brand’s visual identity.More your logo can stand out from the crowd in your niche, better it will be for you.

2. Define a Brief / Context

A logo is a true reflection of the brand.From fonts to colors to symbols, everything speaks about values, benefits and personality — i.e. your brand identity.But for that, first you need to write down your vision for the brand logo.What’s your brand vision or brand story?Try to tell your vision or story with your logo.

Telling a story through your logo is the most important way to connect with your customers.You have to be very careful about what you want to communicate to your audience, what your brand is supposed to speak.So, it’s important to empower your logo with right context, tone of voice and brand story.Your logo should encapsulate all these key elements.

Let’s understand how to define a brief / scope for your logo! Ask some key questions related to your brand.

• Who We Are?

• What we do?

• Why we are here?

• How we do it?

• Why are we different than our competitors?

• Who are we here for?

• What do we value the most?

• What’s our persona?

Be honest and to the point while answering these questions.Define the answers in most tangible form and these answers will guide you during the logo design process.

Take a look what experts has to say about these logos: “Their Marketing and their overall identity is aesthetically pleasing, but it’s their visual look that I’ve come to love” says one marketing expert when asked about Adidas logo.

when asked about Adidas logo.

According to Todd Waterbury: The enduring strength of Target’s logo lies in its utter clarity. The bull’s-eye is a symbol that is immediately, simultaneously seen and understood, one in the same, as precisely what it is.

“Disney is a fantastic example of timelessness” states one source.

3. Choose a Logo Type

There is no hard and fast rule to follow while designing a logo as it’s a pure creative process.However, even a creative process can be put in a structure or a framework.Same way, while creating a new logo, you can start with choosing the type of logo from 5 main types of logo categories and show some examples of each you’ll probably recognize..

1. Symbol Or Icon

This type of logo represents the company in a simple but bold manner.In most cases, the image is abstract and stylized to give visual interest.

Some examples include:

Most companies that use this type of logo will have a very simple main logo, but may choose to create additional alternative versions that appear a little more flashy.The human mind can easily remember a simple form much easier than a complex one. It’s best to use a simple symbol or icon if you plan on building a large business.

2. Word Mark These are uniquely styled text logos that spell out the company or brand name. Some examples include:

Many times, custom fonts are created specifically for brands to use across all their marketing and branding collateral.

3. Letter Mark

Lettermarks are exclusively typographic.They use a symbol representing the company through the use of its initials or the brands first letter.Like a word mark, a letter mark is entirely text, but rather than the entire name of a business the logo relies on initials to represent the brand.

Some examples include:

Many companies choose to use this type of logo because their initials can better graphically illustrate the company better than the full name (name is too long), the name is hard to pronounce, or it’s just not distinct enough to carry its own weight.

4. Combination Mark

These logos combine a wordmark and a symbol or icon. This type of logo help us add either or both elements with much needed flexibility. Combination marks (occasionally known as iconic logotypes) are the best of both worlds, so it makes sense that they’d be so popular; they spell out the name of a company while simultaneously associating it with a visual icon.

Some examples include: A well-designed combination mark looks just as good with the elements separate as it does with them together. You might recognize some combo marks like Hawaiian Airlines, Adidas and Sprint.

5. Emblem

An emblem logo encases the company name within the design.Unlike combination marks, which position text and symbols side-by-side, emblems involve placing text inside of a symbol so that the two are practically inseparable.

Some examples include:

4. Keep It Simple

I can say it in hundred ways but essence is going to be same – Keep It Simple.Logo designing is not about being big, bold and flashy.Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.And logo is no exception when coming to keeping things simple yet sophisticated.Your logo should convey a clear and simple message.

How to do it?

Give your logo a clear-cut personality that can elicit a reaction from the audience.Don’t use your logo to display your typography skills or illustration knowledge in extreme measures. Imaginative?

Yes of course.All these brilliant logos like nike’s swoosh, bitten apple or twitter bird have few things in common:

Neat:

Say more with less. Minimalism plays a pivotal role in logo designing.Since it is often the most simplest design that catches the eye.

Memorable: Be it McDonald’s ‘M’ or Nike’s ‘Just Do It’ right tick or Chanel’s double “C”s, they all are on people’s mind.

Simple:

The very best logos are quite simple and yet discoverable even on a tiny scale. Try to design your logo as an icon or a symbol that is social media and mobile app friendly.

Unique: In the world of logo designing you are always looking to inspire everyone out there from your creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Take Honda’s logo for example, it is not a car but two people (dealer and buyer) shaking hands for building a connection.

Compelling:

It can either be just the font that you play with or the colors that you choose that may attract people to your brand.But in any which case you have to make your logo appealing and attractive enough for people to like the ‘visual appeal’ to your business.There are different unique ways to design a logo without going overboard:

• Bolder typography

• Geometric shapes

• Connecting all parts of the logo

• Using two colors to stand out or

• Going for a flatter design that is simpler and minimalistic at the same time

Avoid too much use of typography and iconography.Any design element should be used in contextual sense only.Too much decoration can make a logo feel cluttered. My Advice: If you can’t say it in a simple way, it’s better not to say it.

5. Play The Color Game to Your Advantage

Choosing the right colors is the most important element of a logo design process.So think twice (or may be more) before finalizing your logo colors.If colors don’t fit in your logo, it’s bound to fail.

Being the lightest hue of the spectrum, the color psychology of yellow is uplifting and illuminating, offering hope, happiness, cheerfulness and fun.

Use yellow to evoke pleasant, cheerful feelings.

You can choose yellow to promote children’s products and items related to leisure.Yellow is often associated with food. Bright, pure yellow is an attention grabber, which is the reason taxicabs are painted this color.When overused, yellow may have a disturbing effect; it is known that babies cry more in yellow rooms.

Within the meaning of colors, yellow is the great communicator and loves to talk.Yellow is the color of the networker and the journalist, all working and communicating on a mental level.Yellow is the scientist, constantly analyzing, looking at both sides before making a decision; methodical and decisive.Yellow is the entertainer, the comic, the clown.

Yellow helps with decision making as it relates to clarity of thought and ideas, although it can often be impulsive.Yellow helps us focus, study and recall information, useful during exam time.Too bright a color to stand on its own and will require a secondary outline, background or bordering color.Yellow is seen before other colors when placed against black. Yellow is very effective for attracting attention, so use it to highlight the most important elements of your design.

Men usually perceive yellow as a very lighthearted, ‘childish’ color, so it is not recommended to use yellow when selling prestigious, expensive products to men – nobody will buy a yellow business suit or a yellow Mercedes.Dull (dingy) yellow represents caution, decay, sickness, and jealousy.Light yellow is associated with intellect, freshness, and joy.Famous Brands: Think of all the smiley faces ball, Mcdonald’s, Snapchat.

Orange:

Unconventional. Extroverts. Happy. Youthful. Energetic. Confidence. Sociable. Friendly. Affordable. Enthusiastic. Sunny. Fascination.

To the human eye, orange is a very hot color, so it gives the sensation of heat. Nevertheless, orange is not as aggressive as red.Orange increases oxygen supply to the brain, produces an invigorating effect, and stimulates mental activity. It is highly accepted among young people.

As a citrus color, orange is associated with healthy food and stimulates appetite. Orange is the color of fall and harvest. In heraldry, orange is symbolic of strength and endurance.Orange has very high visibility, so you can use it to catch attention and highlight the most important elements of your design.Most popular in retail sector. Considered to stimulate appetite and used in some warning labels. Orange is very effective for promoting food products and toys.

Dark orange can mean deceit and distrust.

Red-orange corresponds to desire, sexual passion, pleasure, domination, aggression, and thirst for action.

Gold evokes the feeling of prestige. The meaning of gold is illumination, wisdom, and wealth. Gold often symbolizes high quality.

Famous Brands: Firefox, Nickelodeon.

Red: Action. Energy. Speed. Attention-getting. Assertive. Confident. Stimulating. Exciting. Powerful. Passionate. Stimulating. Courageous. Strong. Spontaneous. Determined.

Red is an intense color.It enhances human metabolism, increases respiration rate, and raises blood pressure.It has very high visibility, which is why stop signs, stoplights, and fire equipment are usually painted red. In heraldry, red is used to indicate courage.

Red works well on black and white backgrounds. Can mean stop, danger and hot.Red brings text and images to the foreground.Use it as an accent color to stimulate people to make quick decisions; it is a perfect color for ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Click Here’ buttons on Internet banners and websites.

In advertising, red is often used to evoke erotic feelings (red lips, red nails, red-light districts, ‘Lady in Red’, etc).This color is also commonly associated with energy, so you can use it when promoting energy drinks, games, cars, items related to sports and high physical activity.

Light red represents joy, sexuality, passion, sensitivity, and love.

Pink signifies romance, love, and friendship. It denotes feminine qualities and passiveness.

Dark red is associated with vigor, willpower, rage, anger, leadership, courage, longing, malice, and wrath.

Brown suggests stability and denotes masculine qualities.

Reddish-brown is associated with harvest and fall.

Famous Brands: All sale posters you see, Netflix, Coca Cola, KFC.

Purple:

Royalty. Imagination. Mystery. Pomp. Wisdom. Ceremony. Creative. Unique. Majesty. Anything is possible.

Most expensive color to reproduce (it was made from hard-to-find sea weed) purple is often viewed as “elitist.”Purple combines the stability of blue and the energy of red. Purple is associated with royalty. It conveys wealth and extravaganceThe difference between violet and purple is that violet appears in the visible light spectrum, or rainbow, whereas purple is simply a mix of red and blue. Violet has the highest vibration in the visible spectrum.

According to surveys, almost 75 percent of pre-adolescent children prefer purple to all other colors.It has a richness and quality to it that demands respect. Purple is ambitious and self-assured, the leader.Too much of the color purple can promote or aggravate depression in some. It is one color that should be used extremely carefully and in small amounts by those who are vulnerable to these depressed states.

Light purple evokes romantic and nostalgic feelings.

Dark purple evokes gloom and sad feelings. It can cause frustration.

Famous Brands: Hallmark, Yahoo, Viber

Blue:

Cool. Dependable. Calm. Reliable. Tranquility. Trust.

Blue is the most popular corporate color.It is the color of the sky and sea. It is often associated with depth and stability.Blue is a masculine color and without doubt, it is highly accepted among males.Dark blue is associated with depth, expertise, and stability.

You can rely on it to take control and do the right thing in difficult times.It has a need for order and direction in its life, including its living and work spaces.Avoid using blue when promoting food and cooking, because blue suppresses appetite.

When used together with warm colors like yellow or red, blue can create high-impact, vibrant designs; for example, blue-yellow-red is a perfect color scheme for a superhero.The color blue is idealistic, enhancing self-expression and our ability to communicate our needs and wants. It inspires higher ideals.

Light blue is associated with health, healing, tranquility, understanding, and softness.

Dark blue represents knowledge, power, integrity, and seriousness.

Famous Brands: A go-to color for many companies, IBM, Hp, Indigo,

Green:

Nature. Peace. Health. Serene. Fresh. Life. Harmony. Environment. Growth. New.

Closely associated with eco-friendly environment and products, peace and health.It is the most restful color for the human eye.Green is known to help alleviate depression, nervousness and anxiety.It also promotes a sense of renewal, self-control and harmony. For this reason, television guests will wait in a “green room” to relax before going on air.

The secret to using green is moderation, especially when it comes to your business’ brand.Use green to indicate safety when advertising drugs and medical products. Green is directly related to nature, so you can use it to promote ‘green’ products.Dull, darker green is commonly associated with money, the financial world, banking, and Wall Street.

Dark green is associated with ambition, greed, and jealousy.

Yellow-green can indicate sickness, cowardice, discord, and jealousy.

Aqua is associated with emotional healing and protection.

Olive green is the traditional color of peace.

Famous Brands: Starbucks, Evernote.

Black & White:

Sophisticated. Luxurious. Somber. Serious. Formality. Style. Elegance. Expensive. Authoritative.

Most logos are actually designed in black & white first.The color black relates to the hidden, the secretive and the unknown, and as a result it creates an air of mystery.Black implies self-control and discipline, independence and a strong will, and giving an impression of authority and power.

Black gives the feeling of perspective and depth, but a black background diminishes readability.Combined with red or orange – other very powerful colors – black gives a very aggressive color scheme.Black color is used for making for “high-end” brand logos, striking logos, edgy & timeless logos.

Famous Brands: Nike, Puma, CN.

Grey:

Or silver for that matter, represents Simplicity, Neutrality, and Formal.

The color gray is conventional, dependable and practical.Gray is controlled. It has a steadying effect on other colors with which it comes into contact, toning down the stronger and brighter colors and illuminating the softer colors.

Famous Brands: Mercedes Benz, Swarovski.

Multi-Coloured:

Unity and diversity. Vibrant. Fun. Easy-going. Child-like. Internet. Multi-disciplinary. Authority.

Multi-colored and “rainbow” colored logos are a relatively new phenomenon due to the web and more economical four color printing. Represents a color-branding challenge.

Famous Brands: A multi-billion dollar company, Google. Fore more brilliant color combinations, read this blog article form Canva.You can always use Pinterest or Adobe Kuler for those perfect hues!

In case, you think a single color to your entire logo may build a strong presence for your brand, think Indigo’s Blue or Breast cancer’s Pink ribbon.Or creating an iconic color combination like McDonald’s yellow-red or FedEx’s purple-orange.Check out this video to get an idea on what a color behind a logo exactly states.

Source: The Logo Company

6. Create a Versatile Logo Design

Versatility is powerful tool to stand out your logo.More versatile your logo design is – better brand visibility and eyeballs it can fetch you.Try to be more dynamic and fluid while creating your logo.Avoid being static and stagnated.Stay open to possibilities.

It doesn’t mean changing your logo every quarter, but to be fluid in nature.Versatility can enable you to showcase two different ideas or symbols at the same time.When I say ‘Logo Versatility’ – it means that it looks great on all mediums (both online and offline).

Logo Design versatility at its very best! take a look at Apple’s logo, for instance, that can look good irrespective of the color scheme.

If your logo looks good on printed paper but poor on pen drive, then your logo will fail.On the other hand, if your logo is dependent on ONE color scheme only, then it may harm your brand.Idea is to demonstrate your logo in black and/or white or a different color scheme which are not part of the original color palette.

7. Don’t Over Experiment or Innovate

Experimentation is a good trait. But going overboard with experimentation or innovation will not help. Being too simple or too innovative can kill your creativity.If a logo is tempered with too much tweaks / experimentation, it may give a good looking logo but ti will ruin the context and brand story.

Your creative energies should be devoted to tell the brand story through the logo by making it identifiable by the customers.Once your customers are able to identify your logo and recall your brand easily, that means your logo design is successful irrespective of how generic or decorative it may look.Remember: you’re designing a company logo and a logo is not an art masterpiece.

8. Use Typography Smartly

Sometimes typography is all you need to create an eye-catching logo.Typography is the art and technique of arranging type to make written language legible, readable, and appealing when displayed.Fonts are part of ty­pog­ra­phy, but ty­pog­ra­phy goes be­yond fonts.

A typeface, like any form of design, is created by designer over a substantial period of timeWhen it comes to logo design, your typeface should be unique.A custom hand-drawn typeface is way better than most gorgeous fonts anyway.I recommend you to go with custom typeface as that will stop others from copying your logo typeface.The ‘Visa logo’ has gone through a few redesigns over the years. Here’s the latest look for the global credit card company, launched this January.

The new logo has removed the ‘yellow traces from the design.However, very few would be able to find that out because of the iconic typography used by the company since long time.Here are some of the great typography logo examples:

9. Use the ‘Negative Space’

Negative space may be most evident when the space around a subject, not the subject itself, forms an interesting or artistically relevant shape, and such spaceoccasionally is used to artistic effect as the “real” subject of an image. The use of negative space is a key element of artistic composition. A great example here is of FedEx’s clever use of negative space.

Could you find it?

I request you to look closely again between letters ‘E’ and ‘X’…You could see an arrow… Yes. That’s intentional and a wonderful way of using negative space to your advantage.While designing a logo with negative space, you should start with typeface based logo or a symbol based logo.Shapes are designers closest friends.And negative spaces are no exception too.You can find shapes in negative spaces.

Once you find a shape then the next step will be to correlate real-world elements with shapes and use them in your logo’s letters.In some of the world’s most famous logos, the use of negative space has not only helped to reinforce company messaging and logo recall, but it’s also made for some great PR.Leaving white space or as we hear the term “negative space” in your logo screams attention.

Some of the popular examples include:

Not only fedex used this approach but the very famous Pinterest, Formula1, LG’s winking eye, Beats logo looking like a person wearing headphones went in for the same.See this video to check if you can guess 16 FAMOUS LOGOS WITH A HIDDEN MEANING (That We Never Even Noticed).

10. Take a cue from these great logo examples

Some logos make it big while some… just don’t.

Either you become an inspiration or a lesson well learnt.Here’s a small list of famous logos and the inspiration you can take from them:I like wikipedia’s unfinished globe constructed from jigsaw pieces and the hidden bearin the mountain favicon of Toblerone.

Check out this list of startup logos that made it big and few examples below.

Wrap Up

I’ve shared 10 top logo design tips and some insights on how to design a perfect logo for your brand.Logo design can be an enjoyable process (instead of a tedious one) if these tips are followed properly.If you are a startup or a small business, you are definitely not thinking about putting in a lot of money for your logo design.Guess what? You can get your logo design done for free or for less than $100.

Use online resources and tools!Free tools like Canva, Logo Maker comes with unique options to help you customize your logo design.Use Logo Yes for a better interface and ease of usage.For collaboration and association when designing your company’s logo, you can turn to 99 designs.You can also check out sites like awwwards, niice, pinterest for your fonts and logo design inspiration.

Maybe not the best but these tools do help you put your imagination to visual and at par with the iconic logo design already out there!How did you come up with your brand logo design?Was it a long, grueling process or a eureka moment?What are your thoughts on the logo design tips shared in this article.Do you have any logo design tips to share?Is there any other question regarding logo design you would like to be answered?Don’t forget to share what has been your experience.Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

11 Steps to Find a Killer Brand Name for Your Startup

“Why do you need a right Brand Naming Process?” you may ask.

Brand naming is the first and foremost step in your entrepreneurial journey.So, not having a brand naming process is the biggest mistake you can make.‘Why so?’ you quip again.

Let me quote.‘What’s in name?’ said William Shakespeare once!I would say – ‘EVERYTHING’.After all, it’s your name that everyone first get to know about you.

When it comes to naming your brand, it becomes much more critical – especially in today’s digital era.Just imagine what would ‘Apple’ be without its name?The name itself reflects its core philosophy – ‘Think Differently.’Without a doubt, an apt and unique brand name sets the tone for the brand.A right brand name does more than just influencing buyers, it becomes a staple to your company’s entire brand image.

When done right, a brand name can be the foremost essential differentiator of your brand.You use this name to pitch your clients and people are going to recall you with this name.A great brand name will evoke meaning and trust.Your brand name should help customers understand your products or services.But how to come up with a perfect brand name for your business?However, finding the perfect brand name is easier said than done.Did you know there is a science behind the importance of brand names?

That’s why having the right brand naming process for your brand is so important.A proper brand naming process will ensure that you stay on the right path and follow all Dos and Don’ts.Let’s dive in and understand more about the brand naming process, DOs, and DON’Ts, key things to remember.The more you know, the better are your chances of coming up with a strong brand name that fits!I’m sure after reading this article, you will be better equipped to find the perfect brand name for your startup.

Cutting The Long Story Short, Here Is My List Of Top 11 Steps To Find The Perfect Name For Your Brand.

1.  First Define a Brand Naming Approach

Before brainstorming the brand name ideas, think about a definite approach to find out your name. There can be different approaches.

Let’s have a look:

A Blank Canvas: This approach works well for a brand name like ‘Apple’ which doesn’t describe anything about what the company exactly does.It remains abstract.Though it requires you to pour in more money into advertisement since you have to convey the meaning of the brand name with a lot of promotion.Usually, big brands go for such an approach.

Saying As It Is:For a brand like Burger King that indicates exactly what the business does.More brands like Pizza Hut, have also followed the same approach.You can also consider this if you are attracting an audience that is searching generic terms on google.

Inventing Your Own:

This approach speaks about coming up with a word of your own.For example, ‘Skype’ which as a word didn’t have meaning came from sky peer-to-peer to ‘Skyper’ to ‘Skype’ after eventually dropping of ‘r’.Another brand example that followed this approach is Vodafone which came from voice, data and telephone.

Pro tip:No matter what approach you go for, make sure the name that you choose is catchy and memorable.And yes, avoid going for names that contain no intrinsic or linguistic meaning since you have to rely heavily on advertising to convey its meaning.

2.  Set The Brand Naming Process Criteria / Guidelines

Make a set of criteria or brand guidelines while choosing the brand name options. Define what does your brand will represent and how it will convey your business essence.

These criteria can be customized as per your unique requirement. For example:

• Simple to say, easy to remember

• The ideal length of the brand name

• Ideal simplicity or lack of complexity of the brand name

• Potential Abbreviation of the brand name

• Possible translation in popular languages of the brand name

• The name with a rhythm to it

• Possible spelling variation of the brand name

• Domain name availability of the brand name

• Social Media name availability of the brand name

• Similar existing brand names and chances of clash

And few more as per your unique needs.

3. Look for a positive connotation for Your Brand Name

You must have discovered till now that naming your brand is a pretty difficult process.If we dig deeper, a name can give away two types of vibes:Denotation and Connotation.Many words have both, but some words just have a literal meaning to it i.e. denotation and no emotional appeal to it i.e connotation.To make sure you are either on the positive or neutral side, here are few things you can

Easy | Simple | Supportive | Empowering | Transparent | Friendly

While naming your brand, see if your brand name is a blend of these.For example, Dove, if we see why it stands out in the crowd is because of the meaning that it conveys — softness, peace and tranquility.The key here is to have a name your audience can relate to, a name that your target audience can associate with.Pro tip: Take “reliability” as a factor while measuring your shortlisted names on a scale!

4. Use KISS – Keep It Short and Simple – For Naming Your Startup

Think about how it would feel if you had to say‘Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle’ instead of Yahoo. Or‘ Bayerische Motoren Werke’ for BMW.‘Yahoo’ and ‘BMW’ sounds much better, doesn’t it? The KISS principle states that most brand names work best if they are kept simple rather than made complicated;

therefore simplicity should be a key goal in choosing a brand name unnecessary complexity and length should be avoided.Go for a short word keeping in mind it’s descriptive enough to tell your customers about what industry you’re into.Quoting Neil Patel on brand ‘Nom Nom’, the brand name suggests food and would likely be inappropriate for a financial services company. Quoting Neil Patel on brand ‘NomNom’, the brand name suggests food and would likely be inappropriate for a financial services company.

Go for names that are-

Suggestive (Starbucks) – telling customers something about the product.Evocative (Nike named after a Greek God of Victory) – names which evoke imagery or stimulate the imagination.Lexical (Pentium) – selecting brand names after company or product.Though, there is no ‘hard and fast’ rule for having an acronym for your brand. If it doesn’t go well, then don’t force it.

Don’t use long confusing names (Marufku.com).Avoid going the “generic” way.Now, this is not particularly a thing to avoid. But isn’t it a bit put off when brands get a little too generic.

• Naming your brand after a city or a country name.
• Similarly, don’t name it after yourself as it only shows the brand as an individual unit and you will be selling the name, not the brand. Unless you are already a famous name in the industry (say, Ralph Lauren)

You will never want your trademark to become too generic after seeing this one.

Pro Tip: Try to be as unique and catchy as possible.

5. Check International Translation of your Brand Name

Always check what your brand name means in international languages.You surely don’t want to upset your audience if your brand name sounds or means something obscene in their language.

Some examples to explain this better are:

• When General Motors introduced the Chevy Nova in Latin America with poor outcomes they were not amused to find that ‘no va’ in Spanish means “It doesn’t go.”

• After Toyota introduced the Fiera in Puerto Rica they discovered that Fiera translates to “Ugly old woman.”

• Mercedes-Benz entered the Chinese market under the brand name “Bensi,” which means “rush to die.”

These are some epic failures of brand names that went wrong.Choosing a word that has a positive meaning to it would obviously help you connect and attract more customers towards your brand.Pro Tip: Be sure of the geographies you are going to work with and then check the local language translation meaning.

6. Don’t Ignore Mobile While Choosing Your Brand Name

Yes.We can’t escape the mobile even when choosing our brand name.If you’re in a business category where a mobile app going to be used by your end customers then you should visualize how would your brand name looks like an icon on the mobile app.In such cases, many of your customers may see that the mobile app logo icon as the main name of your brand.So choose a name that can be tweaked for mobile appPro Tip: Avoid using an acronym for the mobile app brand name icon as it won’t tell much about your industry or products/services.

7. Be Patient with Iterations During Your Brand Naming Process

Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither will be your brand name.Getting the right name for your brand can be a tedious process.So don’t rush to finalize it quickly.Take your time.Or should I say you got to keep the iterations coming?

Make a team of people who understand your vision for naming the brand.create a shared/collaborative document using Basecamp or Google Drive where your team members can write every tine bit of brand name thoughts come to their mind.Make a list of names with their synonyms, acronyms, and analogies.Try to find and write down various words’ combinations.And remember, it’s all going to happen in iterations.

It might take from a few days to few weeks to or even six months before you actually settle for an apt name.But don’t be worried because the name you choose or don’t choose, speaks volumes about your business savvy and understanding of the world you are about to enter.

8. Give Your Brand Name a Visual Identity

Once you’ve chosen the brand name, you should consider adding a visual identity to it.It’s an art to design a perfect logo.It may be an icon or playing with your name letters in typographic style.

You can put your brand name in TITLE CASE or LOWER CASE.You can combine two words into one, give a Curl to the first or the last letter of the brand name.A great example is Coca-Cola’s ‘red-script’ type and Double-shadowed ‘P’ of PayPal.

Visual brand language is the unique “alphabet” of design elements – such as shape, color, materials, finish, typography and composition – which directly and subliminally communicate a company’s values and personality through compelling imagery and design style.

Visible elements of a brand, such as color, form, and shape, which encapsulate and convey the symbolic meanings that cannot be imparted through words alone.

9. Keep Your Brand Name SEO friendly

Not important for all but if possible, this can be of great advantage to you.Having a name that is just simply a word or can be referred to two-three things at a time won’t do any good for you SEO-wise.

Whatever name you choose is going to represent you on the internet and your pitch that you will sell to your customers.There are already so many examples of brands changing their name for it not being search engine friendly.With SEO changing how you would show up online, you have to keep a check on your brand name beforehand so you won’t have to worry about rebranding later.

Rand Fishkin’s had to bid adieu to SEOmoz and change it to Moz since it was no longer the only purely SEO software-based brand.Choosing an SEO-friendly domain name is much easier than you think, all you need to do is keep it simple and focus on branding.Here is a detailed article explaining how to make the most out of SEO for a domain name.Pro tip: Avoid using “k” in place of “Q” or “Ph” in place of “F” because this is just going to locating you on the search engine – – much harder!

10. Check Brand Name Availability

Brand name availability is the most important step of your brand naming process.Always run down a domain availability search with your shortlisted names.You can easily check if the URL for a name you have in mind is free with Shopify’s business name generator.

It gives you as well a handful of options, variations, and suggestions based on the keyword you entered.You can use sites like TESS for trademark search if you are coining a word for your brand name.Pro Tip: Use ‘go’ or ’get’ in the domain if the name you came up with already exists. For example, ‘Godaddy’.

11. Try The Helvetica Test

Another vital aspect of your brand naming process – Font Test.Before your brand name is finalized, let it take the ‘Helvetica’ Test.This test will let you see how it will look in the print in capital letters in Helvetica Light or Helvetica Neue Bold.

The goal is to look for the font balance, visibility, and readability of the brand name.You can choose another font like Standard Sans Serif font for comparison purposes.Then, print each name on a piece of paper in a big font size with high visibility.Take this paper to the selected people and take feedback on the name’s readability and look & feel.Then, after a few days, go and ask the same people which name do thy can recall.Find out which name(s) stand out from their memories and how easy it was for them to recall a certain name(s).

Take as many people you want for the survey but make sure you do a quick try and test before you finally come with your brand name choice.Another thing that can add value to this step is to see how it will look in the subject line of an email.You can anytime turn to experts, to name a few Lexicon, Igor, and A Hundred Monkeys, for help while naming your brand.

You can run a social media campaign and let your audience itself name your brand.An alternate way is to try running ads for A/B testing if you are stuck on two-three names.Bonus Tip: Your brand must be visually distinctive to stand out from the crowd.

Summing Up

I hope now you’re clear on why you need the right brand naming process.I’ve shared key steps on how to leverage the perfect brand naming process to find a suitable name for your startup.Wait for my next post where I’ll give you my personal experience/insights on what to consider while designing your logo – another important part of your brand strategy!Point is, finalizing on a name can take just a moment or several weeks or months of brainstorming but don’t let the process stop you from moving on with your other tasks.Just start with a small step! Create your own brand naming process or use the one explained in this article.

Don’t forget to share what has been your experience.How did you come up with your brand name?Was it a long, grueling brand naming process or a eureka moment?Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.

5 Disruptive Social Selling Tools You Can’t Miss

Social selling tools are gaining popularity among modern sales professionals.No doubt, cold calling has been dead long back.Social calling / social selling is the new norm.Moreover, sales have evolved thanks to technology innovations and social selling is one effective method to impact the end customer’s path to purchase.

Especially for B2B sales experts, using social selling tools have become a necessity. Meanwhile, in a recent survey by CSO Insights and Seismic, key benefits of social selling has been highlighted by the survey respondents.

So, let’s first understand the concept of social selling.

What is Social Selling?.

In a nutshell, Social selling is the process of developing relationships as part of the sales process. Today this often takes place via social networks such as LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest, but can take place either online or offline.

Not clear yet? Let me simplify it for you.

For a layman, social sharing techniques include sharing relevant content, interacting directly with potential buyers and customers, personal branding, and social listening. Actually, some of you may confuse social selling with social media marketing. However, it’s not! First and foremost, social selling is primarily used by sales professionals and it has not much to do with marketing professionals.

First and foremost, social selling is primarily used by sales professionals and it has not much to do with marketing professionals.

Plus, social selling strives to nurture and cultivate one-on-one (personalized) relationships, rather than broadcast one-to-many (mass marketing) messages.

Gartner Report on Top Use Cases and Benefits of Social for CRM in 2017 says:

More than 50% of organisations are still failing to show the business impact of social on CRM, despite the fact that organisations who have embraced the challenge are seeing tangible benefits.

Be one of the 50% that succeed.

In addition, social selling tools enables sales professionals to interact with the potential leads during the live customer journey to purchase a product or service. This is THE MOMENT when a sales expert can initiate a contextual conversation with the prospect, help him find the relevant content / information and become ‘Go-to (Wo)Man’ for further interactions. Not just that, social selling tools allow sales team to do more in much less time and become a brand’s social advocates.

If you’re looking to improve you social selling efforts, you must start using social selling tools and platforms. The question isn’t if social selling works. It’s how.

To help get you started, in no particular order, I’ve handpicked five of the popular social selling tools to share today with you all. These social selling tools can enable your sales team with following up with leads, filling sales pipeline, and closing deals faster.

Cutting The Long Story Short, Here Is My List Of Top 5 Social Selling Tools To Meet Your Social Selling Stack Requirements.

1. Nimble

Take action, “anytime, anywhere”.

Nimble is one of the most complete CRMs and social selling tool available in the market today. Small businesses can leverage Nimble’s advanced high-end CRM features combined with the power of social media. Its ease of use and loads of advanced features work in its favor big time. Nimble covers all major social media channels: Twitter, Facebook, G+, Instagram, AngelList,Foursqaure etc.

You can keep track of all your engagement across all social channel e-mail, Twitter, LinkedIn etc.Not only you can extract data from any social profile within seconds but you can also pull data from all of a contact’s social channels into one lead record.Nimble’s rich relationship management features like contact and company details including automatic syncing of contacts, calendars, emails, social details, notifications and messages help you prepare for your client interactions.

Nimble automatically updates itself with relevant prospect and customer information from several social profiles.You can listen closely to the people that matter to your business while keeping tracks of your past social engagements within the social profile, instead of having to into the CRM.

Source: Nimble

Nimble saves you time by suggesting additional social profiles for your contacts and companies, making it easy to add new profiles from Twitter, AngelList, Facebook, Google+, Foursquare, Instagram and more.Nimble helps you automatically track your conversations wherever they happen – in email box or on Twitter or Facebook.You can easily import Twitter friends and followers to turn connections into conversations and relationships into revenue.

• Nimble Contacts App Integration
• Automatic Contact Profile Mapping
• Syncs DMs, Mentions, RTs to your contacts
• Status Updates
• Follow Contacts
• Import Lists
• Post Scheduling

Nimble knows if you’re in Gmail, Twitter, Facebook or even a Forbes article, and pulls details from emails and web pages with one click to create and enrich contact records.

Price:

$25 per month. Free Trial Available.

2. LinkedIn Sales Navigator

Find leads and close deals with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. LinkedIn Sales Navigator helps you find the right prospects – that too fast.With LinkedIn’s sophisticated algorithm, this sales tool gives you lead recommendations that are tailored to you.

Easily save leads and follow updates of your prospects to turn cold calling into warm conversations. It is one of the most widely used B2B lead generation tool and has emerged as selling platform.

“Leverage social selling to build relationships with your buyers early-on; create trust and value before you have a dialogue about price.” – Koka Sexton, Social Selling Leader

LinkedIn Sales Navigator works perfectly in helping you find the right people with suggestions customized for you. It’s integrated with Salesforce CRM. So, you can automatically bring in your accounts and contacts by importing from Salesforce Moreover, data will sync daily from Salesforce to LinkedIn, keeping your data fresh.

.

You can pursue smarter sales prospecting based on your preferences and browsing history. Besides, you can find real decision makers and influencers at the same company.

Also, use premium filters like seniority, company size, function, and much more.You can reach over 500 million members on LinkedIn, even if you’re not connected to them. Also, keep track of key contact moves and important company changes Moreover, you can package and share sales content in a way that’s better for both the buyer and seller. They can see content without downloading, and you get to track who has viewed what.

Download a Free E-book on How to Get Started with Social Selling on LinkedIn.

While LinkedIn membership is free, the Sales Navigator is not. Pricing for teams is set on a per seat basis. Pricing for individuals appears to begin with a 30-day free trial to start, followed by INR 3,900 per month when billed annually.

3. SocialPort

Push Button Social Selling Technology SocialPort is the tool that streamlines sales teams and improves leads all through optimising your social selling techniques.You can easily find and share content optimized to impact the buyers journey, attract new leads, and grow key accounts.

SocialPort is an ideal combination of marketing and sales to trackYour marketing team can share content with the sales team for them to share it seamlessly. SocialPort provides integrations with the world’s best CRM platforms and leverage rFactr’s social media content creation abilities for partners and clients.SocialPort is pretty strong on analytics side too. It provides great insights about prospects.

In simple words, you can easily eliminate the manual process of content sharing and get deeper insights into where and how your content performs best.Though it’s more suitable for enterprise class but SMBs can also leverage its social selling capabilities.

Pricing:

It starts with $10 monthly for starter plan that can be upgraded to Enterprise plan at $40 per month.

4. Trapit

Engage potential buyers at scale.

Trapit is the platform for authentic employee advocacy and social selling.If your marketing and sales revolves around content marketing then Trapit is the best solution for you.With Trapit, you can capture and curate content from over 100,000+ content sources easily. Not just that, you can share this curated content with your leads to nurture the client relations.

Trapit offers content discovery, curation, and publishing to web, iPad, and social channels through its web application. The application pulls from text and video sources and offers built-in analytics and social scheduling tools.

“With Trapit, our sales reps and executives are quickly becoming effective at reaching out to customers on social media. Even the people who were inexperienced using social media for business are getting significant engagement with their posts.” – Lisa Skinner, Senior Director, Demand Generation

The best part is – You can leverage deep analytics and reporting insights on your social selling performance and tweak your strategy based on how your customers engage with your content.

Price:

You can request for a customized demo.

5. Hootsuite 

From finding prospects to serving customers – All Under One Roof.

Hootsuite is designed for professionals who want to leverage their social media channels just more than pure marketing and branding.With Hootsuite’s platform, you can manage all of your social selling efforts from a single dashboard.

“Hootsuite’s revamped capabilities officially cement its enterprise status.” Read the report to better evaluate enterprise social media solutions and to see where our industry is headed.” – Forrester

Hootsuite has been named a leader in The Forrester Wave™.

Source: Hootsuite: The Forrester Wave™: Social Media Management Solutions, Q2 2017You can search social leads based on sales territory in real time with intuitive monitoring and search features.It can be integrated with CRMs so you can track your social channels as a lead source by pushing social leads directly to your CRM system to expand contact profiles.Moreover, it’s very easy to identify buying signals to know when to reach out by measuring prospects’ engagement with right content.

You can on-board new sales team members quickly and build new social selling skills with training so reps see value quickly.Hootsuite makes it very easy for your sales leadership to measure the success of individual sales reps, including their productivity and interaction history.You can connect your social activity with your web analytics software to see the tangible the impact of your social selling on your sales.

With Hootsuite you can:

● Manage multiple social networks including Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin and Google+

● Streamline team workflow with scheduling and assignment tools

● Track and monitor keywords and mentions

● Measure and analyze social media traffic with the comprehensive social analytics modules

● Invite multiple collaborators to manage social profiles securely

● Access the Hootsuite App Directory, a collection of 50+ extensions and applications that can be added to the dashboard for a customized experience

You can leverage Hootsuite’s strong analytics capabilities. Hootsuite lets you make smarter, data-driven social media marketing decisions with confidence. Hootsuite’s real-time analytics let you spot trends as they develop and drill down for insights on how your social content is performing.

Hootsuite is free for up to 3 social network accounts and has over 15 million users. It is the top app for Android to help you manage your business on social media.

Pricing:

Free Version Available. First paid plan starts at $19 per month.

Wrap Up

I am sure you all have been doing some sort of social selling by using social media channels as it’s all about building relationship with your prospects through social channels. However, social selling is more about listening to your prospects, joining the conversation at the right time and helping the prospects with right content and information. I’ve shared my thoughts on popular social selling tools and how they can help you generate more sales leads from social media.

Are you already using any social selling tool? Don’t forget to share what has been your experience? How did it improve your sales team’s performance? If not, then pick one of mentioned the social selling tools and start using it. Let me know in the comments section below or tweet me @iamnitinmalik.