Content vs selling
All entrepreneurs and businessmen from start-ups to midsized companies have a dilemma about how to invest their time:
- In creating content
or
- In selling

The latter gives faster rewards but has limited reach.
The content creating will give reach but minimal results in the short term.

Not all entrepreneurs and businessmen are good salesmen.
Not all entrepreneurs and businessmen are good content creators.

Content marketing opportunity or need
Hence the choice is pretty straightforward :
- If the entrepreneur or businessman has the money to spend and time to create content – lots of interesting content.
- On the other hand if the company has huge loans, the faster money comes in, the faster the company can repay the loans by focusing on selling.

If the entrepreneur wants to boost his sales or generate leads fast, he needs cold calling or email marketing to generate as much leads as possible. Soon he will encounter the problem of missing support from marketing campaigns for branding and awareness.

Thus it would be better to have marketing in place. Marketing using advertising if the entrepreneur has the money to spend or content marketing if it is a limited marketing budget.
For content marketing entrepreneurs need to create content.

Thus in the end it seems better to invest time and effort in creating content as it:
- Costs less than selling
- Has a far reach
- Generates leads

Create content first, sales will follow and you will reach further than your current eco-system.

What’s your take on that ? Selling or content creation

Is the CEO serious ?
When the CEO, COO or VP Sales explains during a meeting their website is completely out of date and should be reviewed and renewed, we always wonder how serious they are about their business as they present the company to the world with products they no longer carry or services they have stopped providing.
Are they taking their job seriously ?

Would this CEO, COO or VP Sales handout their business cards with an old telephone number or an error in the address or email address ? Probably not.

Website relevancy important for executive compensation
Still they care less about the no longer relevant website, that gets visited by potential leads, customers, vendors / suppliers and financial institutions, than about their business cards.

The website will be visited by and will communicate to more people than the CEO, COO or VP Sales will ever speak to or meet.
All of these website visitors will get the wrong impression and will make the wrong conclusions and decisions. This will have a bigger impact than a business card with an error.
The status and being up-to-date of the website should be one of the priorities for the CEO, the COO and the VP Sales.
Hence the status of the website should relate to the executive compensation as it is the window of the company to world.

Is your website up-to-date ?

We have 2 websites that are promoting both our web services:
LEADSExplorer: Caller-ID for your website
popupbooster: presenting relevant content visitors: video, ads, affiliate ads, forms, surveys and opt-in.

The first website is more than 2 years older than the second one which should have impact on the visit sources and findability. It also receives about 8 to 9 times more traffic (Alexa #287,000).

We use Google Analytics to have an overview of the traffic, sources and content.
For lead generation we use our own LEADSExplorer which gives visitors data by company.

LEADSExplorer:
	Traffic sources    Although this website is quite longer on the Internet and many links have been created over the years the main source is Google search. The many links have been created by article and presentation publishing, comments on blog posts, press releases and a few blogs writing about the service. No advertising whatsoever since 6 months.
	Web analytics    The bounce rate is high: 77%. This is mainly due to: - The very different content on the website: people end up on web pages not immediately looking for such a solution. - The blog which receives 26% of the visitors. Only 10% will click to the website = 2.6%. The high percentage of new visitors is related to this as well as the short time spend on the website. This partially explains why people only visit 1.97 pages.
	Conversion    The conversion rate to sign-up for free is about 1.6% - Even with the blog stealing 26% of the traffic and only sending 10% of it to the website - Only indicative pricing on the website available.
popupbooster:
	Traffic sources    Although this website is just 6 months on the Internet and much less links has been created the traffic from referring websites is higher. This is mainly due to the high volume of traffic it gets from a free Wordpress plug-in: 18% The links are mainly from comments on blog, presentation publishing and one press release. No advertising at all.
	Web stats The bounce rate is significantly lesser and the time on the website is quite high: 3min 15 The mini blog only gets 2% of the traffic which is not significant. On average people visit 2.92 pages per visit, which is whole page more.
	Conversion rate The conversion rate to sign-up for free is about 1.1% which is lower than the website with the high bounce rate and the popular blog. There is a full pricing page on the site available: so people know the pricing.

We still aim to improve: more visitors and a higher conversion. How well is your website performing ?

Inbound marketing is about getting people to call or contact your company or visit your website.
This instead of outbound marketing where your sales people cold call or marketing sends out email campaigns.

Although inbound marketing seems as simple as harvesting, the hard part is the seeding of the content on the Internet, in magazines or editorials.

This seeding of content implies many challenges for marketing:
- Creating interesting content: what to write about
- Distributing the content: publishing on many places
- Marketing the content: letting the world or target group know about your content
- Getting the content found on the Internet: by searches, links or referrals
- Getting people to click on links to get them on your website
- Converting from people interested in your content to people interested in your products or solutions

In the best case the content gets distributed by your audience reaching further than you ever could achieve.

Inbound marketing brings on many changes as marketers are used to push and interruption marketing that imposed itself by buying advertising space or air-time.
The change to pull or inbound marketing is especially felt as it is needed to beg for attention instead of buying attention.
The currency has changed from money to interesting, unique or remarkable content. In inbound and content marketing you pay your potential customers with entertaining content and no longer with money that brings the entertainment.

The harvesting with inbound marketing can be easy; it is the seeding of interesting and remarkable content that is hard to do.

The music industry died due to digital

The music industry almost died due to not adapting and adopting the change imposed by digital technology.

During the nineties home computers were capable of producing quality music and after 2000 the Internet gave people the channel to distribute music at a low cost.

The newspaper missed the Internet

The newspaper industry is dying due to all the blogging and the available free content – even in real-time – on the Internet.

The Internet gave people the possibility to blog and micro-blog creating quality or specific content. The Internet is both production apparatus and the distribution channel.

TV broadcasting industry could be the next prey

The next industry is probably the TV broadcasting as more and more people are switching over to streaming video content from YouTube, Vimeo and others. For the consumers is has the advantage of on-demand content instead of sequential content to wait for.
Additionally the TV industry model is nearly completely dependent from advertising which can flip over to any other medium almost instantly.

The movie industry is an experienced survivor

The movie industry is already a survivor as it survived the TV competition during almost 50 years.
The movie industry is doing its’ utmost by proposing 3D movies that give audiences a new experience (with the hurdle of the goggles).
3D movies make it harder to download over the Internet due to the larger volume of data and the difficulty of creating the same experience in the living-room. Even though 3D TV sets are coming to your home soon too.

In the movie industry a phenomenon like Paranormal Activity has shown the production apparatus can be owned by anybody due to the low cost of equipment (<$1,000) and making a low budget movie ($15,000)
Still Oren Peli needed the marketing power and the money of Paramount Pictures for the marketing and distribution of the movie.
It is clear the movie industry still has some time to keep on going and they have a plan: 3D that seems successful.

The Internet changes industries: your industry too

Each of these industries (except the Movie industry) have collapsed or are collapsing due to the change in the ownership of the production apparatus and the distribution channel: from a controlled environment to the open market of the Internet where anyone can compete.

Many services and systems will be replaced by online systems using the Internet as the channel for both access and distribution.
The Internet will cause disruptions in many industries.
Your industry too can become under threat one day.

Maybe your production process will not be under threat, but the distribution, the marketing, the sales process, the customer service or the administration will be.
Your competitors could just take advantage of the Internet in one way or another, making your company old fashioned and obsolete.

Marketing can delay the threat

Marketing is best placed to use messaging for delaying the digital disruption by:
- Claiming quality compared to the Internet offerings
- Personal service instead of an automated service
- Appropriate or suiting products or services instead of generic solutions
- Creating fear: fear of the unknown, fear of lacking security, fear of less quality

Fear will probably have the biggest effect and last the longest as it relies on subjectiveness and is in most cases intangible.

Although marketing can delay the threat, eventually marketing will not be able to circumvent it as the Internet will also step into your industry and impose changes.

How big are the digital challenges for your industry ?

Buzz history

Everything comes and everything goes away especially buzz words.

In the late nineties we had the WorldWideWeb as the buzz word, which ended in with the DotCom bubble and subsequent collapse.
After the collapse the Internet became more serious.
Then in 2004 Chris Anderson made the term the long tail popular.
In 2005 Tim O’Reilly coined the term Web 2.0 hence defining all the previous as Web 1.0.
Then we had the rise and fall of MySpace where companies even bought their assets in order to keep up with the new trend.
Since 2008 the popularity of social networks like Facebook and Twitter got the trend of social media to become popular in articles, blogs and searches.

What will be next ?
Since several years the term semantic web has been lingering around but never made it to the general public.

The next trend is clearly Augmented Reality but are your potential customers already up-to-date ?

How long will social media last ?
According to Justin Kistner social media will peak in 2012, although it already shows signs of being overly used.
The highly inflated expectations are not realistic: hence the end is probably near.

Buzz marketing

Every new buzz word allows marketing having the opportunity to jump on the new current interest.
Marketing has the possibility or the task to redefine the messaging by adjusting to the current or next trend.

The questions are:
- What is the next trend ?
How to spot the next trend that is relevant for your offering ?

- When to jump on the new bandwagon?
Jumping too early and the audience or potential buyers will not understand.

- How to repackage the same offering with the new buzz?
The existing product or offering needs a face-lift in order to be rejuvenated to match up with the new buzz.

This is buzz marketing where trend spotting and timing are all important.

How good is your marketing in exploiting the next buzz ?

The IT dept questions

Whenever you are selling software solutions or security systems to companies you need to face the IT Department: The IT manager and his highly trained staff.
They will question you about all possible imaginable issues and other competing technologies.
They seem to know more and are aware of more technologies than your technical sales support staff.
Apparently they can ask more questions than you or your technical sales support can ever answer as they have had trainings and courses about IT technologies.
Sometimes we wonder if they have had trainings in posing difficult questions or posing the next question.

On the other hand the business managers or directors of the company have a limited number of questions. They are more interested in the benefits and the advantages for their business or the company: if we implement this what would it cost and what’s the return on investment ?

If you can get the VP Marketing interested then the required budget is no longer a problem as in many cases marketing budgets are beyond all other budgets in a company.

The relief by cloud computing / web services

When cloud computing and web services will become generally and commonly used then there will be no IT Dept. Probably only a CIO as the IT Dept. has become obsolete due to the fact all an employee needs is a browser.

Then solely the business manager or company directors will decide and rule.
No more questions about the technology.
Just questions about the benefits and advantages of using your solutions.

When will this happen? The process of converting to could computing and web services has already started.
Will this mean also the end of the technical sales support in the software business ? Probably.

Business model perception: Google vs Amazon

The perception people have of your business model is most important as changing is almost impossible.

Google is free
Google is perceived as a free Internet service supported by advertising. Any other business model like paying for services they offer or software on an appliance are unlikely to become an instant success or will take long to succeed.
Whenever Google launches or promotes a paid service (Google Apps), people and companies abstain as they have perception of free services.
Google tries to lure in users or businesses by offering a free service of Google Apps (Freemium), but still the hurdle of paying remains.

Amazon is paying
People are used to pay for goods and services for Amazon. Purchasing books from Amazon with a credit card was from day one. It seems evident getting your credit card out when visiting any of their website.
When Amazon launched Amazon Web Services (AWS) for storage and cloud computing nobody grumbled about paying for these services.

The right perception from day one

If you going into business make sure the perception is correct from day one as changing later will only cost time, effort and money and will waste a lot of energy unnecessary.

- If you aim to supply quality products or services make sure you provide quality from day one.
- If you aim to have a premium pricing for exclusivity make sure you are exclusive at start.
- If you aim to address youngsters make sure your products and services target youngsters.

Changing the perception people have is utmost difficult to do and you probably have to lure people in order to get your customers.

Investigate the perception

You need to investigate in order to know what exactly the perception of your customers and potential customers is about your company.
This you need to keep in mind when designing and developing the next generation of products.
Launching a product that not matches the perception will only cost you money for marketing and promotion. Mostly wasted money as you will be trying to convince people to change their perception.

Whereas you put product on the market matching the perception less marketing is needed and advertising can limit itself by focusing on the benefits and features.

What perception have your customers of your company ?

Social media is a communications channel between people.
Social media is often presented as marketing channel too.

If it is a marketing channel then it must be possible to:
- Insert marketing messages
- Distribute marketing messages
- Predictability

Insertion into social networks
Inserting marketing messages is no problem as each of your employees could be an insertion point.

Distribution problem
However getting them distributed seems to be the problem: you can not force people in social networks to redistribute your advertising. Thus for inserting he message you better use people that have a certain authority or respect in their social environment. In order to keep their authority or respect these people can’t distribute to frequently marketing messages.

Predictability of success social media marketing
Even if you use the authorities or respected people in social online groups still predicting the success is impossible as too many factors need to be present: message, timing and current interest.
Any major news that is important for the social group will disturb your success level.

Ability to measure social media marketing
The result of printed and broadcast marketing has become difficult to measure due to the large number of available channels and methods but they have proved their success rate since many years.
Online marketing excels in the ability to measure as not one click get lost.
Due to the chaos of social media marketing the results are probably impossible to measure.
As companies prefer to spend money on methods than can be measured social media marketing is not favored.

Social media marketing: to be used less
Anything with an unpredictable outcome is not liked by businesses. Companies want certainties. They prefer to pay an amount of money for a certain result. More the result becomes uncertain the less likely businesses will spend money on it.

Social media marketing has a high uncertainty.
Maybe social media marketing is not suited for businesses to count on for their marketing.
Of course there will always be managers that want to take the gamble in their eagerness to win the high return if they succeed.
The main spending on marketing will stay with conventional methods for a long time. A lesser amount will be gambled on social media marketing.
It is a probability trade-off between certain and uncertain methods.

Social media marketing will mainly stay a communications channel like it was intended from the start.

Do you use social media marketing ?

Close deal – Maybe – No
The best thing that you want to happen is to “Close the Deal”.
The second best that can happen to you is getting a clear “No”.

If you get a “Maybe” then you are nowhere and you have to invest more time and effort in the sales process in order to stay in competition.
Hence this sales process can go on for weeks or even months:
- Not knowing what you are up to
- Not knowing if you have to invest more time and effort in the potential customer
- Not knowing if you have to quit now or later

This uncertainty will make your overall sales efficiency decrease as it will bother you.
Hence the best thing after a “Deal” is getting a “No”.
That will end you investment and waste of time and capacities.

However in the case you see a future opportunity you need to continue to contact the company.

How to get the “No deal”
The problem is to force the potential customer to say “No” in order to allow you moving on – instead of:
- Maybe
- Soon we will make a decision
- We have some more questions
- This issue needs to get explained
- Can you give more details on
- Do you have other references?
- Would it be possible to implement these features?
- We want to see another competitor before our decision
- Can you demo to the VIP from the headquarters?
- …
All these will require more time, effort and money to be invested in a deal that might never going to close.

Forcing the customer can only be done by
- Asking straightforward and hoping he is honest.
- Asking contrary questions and see how they respond to them
- Asking a sequence of eliminating questions
You should feel if the manager or director is still motivated to sell your solution to his company management.

Getting a “No” is not so bad: relieved
Getting a “No” is not as bad as you stop the bleeding of money.
It stops the worrying.
Allows you to focus on the next deals.

Without a “No” you need to:
- Go back to your management to ask for more investment based upon the chances of succeeding
- Motivate your coworkers again to present to or to work on this prospect further.

Getting the “Deal” gives you the victory and getting a “No” releases you from continuing to invest time and effort in the lead.

If you get the “No” ask why and analyze the reason with your team as it can be used for the next prospect or lead qualification.

Have you ever feeling relieved when getting a “No” ?