Relevant for Google & Co

The more keywords you can present to Google or Bing the more chances of getting found on the Internet. Hence the requirement for creating as much content as possible: variations on the same matters related to your solutions.

Just hoping on one piece of content on a particular subject will score less or has less change to get found than a series of content on the same subject. Content marketing and SEO are a gamble as no-one can predict the outcome.

Relevant for visitors

As you need to create variations of the same content, the problem is that your content still needs to be relevant for the visitor landing on your website.

If your content is rubbish then the visitor will not appreciate it and leave – probably to never come back as you have wasted his time.

Hence maximize the amount of content, make sure it is relevant and brings value to the reader. And above all make it entertaining.

Improving on SEO will help the findability of your website. You will land more visitors and have more traffic. However if the landing page is not meaningful, worthless content and not relevant the visitor won’t stay on your page.
Hence the challenge is to create as much content as possible without spoiling the visit value for the visitor.
Creating massive and quality content is a skill and art.

How well does our content score for SEO and your visitors ?

The exclusive CxO conference

Lately we were called by sales reps from exclusive event/conference organizers that offer 14 meetings over two days from a selection of CxO’s from leading companies the industry. Only offered at a steep price to 20 or 25 vendors in the business for meeting up with these CxO’s that have expressed being interested in the type of solutions we provide.

These events or conferences are being held in an hotel and consists of a gala diner on the first evening for networking and 2 days of meetings.

How can one be sure any of these CxO’s are really interested in your solutions ? Especially if the sales rep uses your company’s selling points or features as main   interest of these CxO’s ?

If you hold off your participation because of the high cost, you will get a call from a manager who offers you a 30% discount as first time participant.

What is the benefit for a CxO ?

Isn’t it strange really important CxO’s would come to such an event for a series of sales pitches during 2 days ? Even if they get accommodated, taken care off and nurtured for free ?
Why should any CxO take the time to be hassled by pitches of sales reps for solutions they might not need ? Are they masochistic ?
What is the benefit for the CxO and for the company of the CxO ?

Return On Investment

For the vendor aiming to have 14 sales pitches the steep price ($30,000) comes at a high cost per lead. Even if 5 out of 14 (36%) companies can be qualified as lead, the lead price is $6,000 per lead. Even qualified leads are not sales. Even if these 5 leads would result in 3 sales (60%) the price would be extremely high: $10,000 initial cost for a sales deal (the total sales cost will be much higher).

Thus the vendors can only pitch solutions with a high ticket (>$100,000) and with very high margins in order to cover the lead generation and sales costs.
In most cases with industry leading companies when the price of the solution is high, then an RFI followed by an RFP will be issued by the company. Thus inviting all your competitors almost for free.

The CxO swindle

These exclusive CxO meeting events and conferences seem to be a swindle, only beneficial for the even organizers as the poor CxO’s have to pay by meeting sales reps and listening to their sales pitches.

If these CxO’s were really interested or looking for a solution, then they would order their staff to investigate and setup meetings in order to evaluate and find the best, most feasible or most appropriate solution for the company.

Did you ever participated in such an exclusive CxO conference ?

Perceived value is not the list price

In all sales deals there are two values:
- The cost price or the actual value
- The perceived value

In any case the perceived value should be higher than the actual value. People will only pay a premium over the cost price for your product or services in case the perceived value is higher. In all other cases it is likely they might just not buy at all. maybe in an exceptional case the customer will buy on this occasion due to all kinds of circumstances beyond this sales deal, but that won’t happen again as he wants a lower price than his perceived value.

Increasing the perceived value

The trick is to add on value by services or features to your product that increase significantly the perceived value to your product or services at a lesser cost for your product. This allows inflating the list price without any significant cost increase. Sometimes people are to much blinded by the additional services or features that they miss to see at what cost (price) they come.
For products adding functions or features – which they might never use – or add on a service ‘for free’.
For services it requires demonstrating tangible and/or intangible benefits that appear to bring value.

The higher the difference in value between the perceived and the real price increases your margin significantly.

The higher marketing or the salesrep can push the perceived value, the higher the margin on products, thus the more profit will be made.

How much does the perceived value of your products differ from the real price ?

Massive users amounts

The numbers of people that have signed-up for social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Google+ is overwhelming. Hence the interest of Marketers for using these platforms as communication channel.
The more accounts the owners of these platforms can claim the more value their business has. As their main interest is in the valuation of their business over the real revenue they generate.

Doubting the numbers

Although the numbers of users reported by Facebook, Twitter and Google+ are impressive, we must wonder how many are:
- Active users
- Humans – not bots

If you start to investigate then you will find that many (up to 36%) user profiles are empty and most people never posted.

People:
- Who sign-up but never complete their profile
- Were pushed to take an account: by Google+ or by their friends or relatives but weren’t really interested
- Having signed-up once, but forgot all about or their credentials (username/password) and created a new account on a next occasion.
- Having accounts on all platforms but only use the one that got popular in their social environment
- Having set up accounts for not honest reasons

Business:
It is possible to pay for services that create accounts on social media who will link up or follow you.

All these reasons may confirm the inquiries that indicate that 50% of all the accounts have become obsolete.
This means that 50% of your social marketing efforts are wasted or that the estimated or expected reach of your marketing efforts should be halved at least.

Conversation instead of communications channel

For a start marketers shouldn’t consider social media as an additional channel for publishing commercial messages, instead it should be considered as a platform for starting conversations with potential customers resulting in engaging them.

So don’t use follower and friend counts as success metric, but instead the actual conversations that you have obtained. Real social media marketing consists of bi-directional communications.

Do you social media marketing ?

Not gating for content distribution

While gating for your content will mainly result in collecting worthless email addresses (gmail, hotmail, aol, wanadoo, yahoo.co.uk), it is way better not gating for your content. The benefit is in the distribution of your content: the Content Marketing.
Actually their payment is in the distribute of your content which requires your content to be good and appropriate to their needs or interests.

Social content payment system

Still chances are your content never gets distributed and nobody knows about it.
This is why paying with a message on social media could be the best solution. When asking for a download, the system will ask your social media credentials in order to log in to Twitter or Facebook and publish a message on your behalf. The message you define upfront gets Tweeted or posted on your Facebook.

Beneficial social spamming

Some say this is social spamming as the Tweet is not authentic and personal.
However:
- The person can edit and change the content of the Tweet in order to make it personal or more authentic
- The content has the interest of the person as he wanted to download it
So it is personal and authentic as it relates to their current interest.

The benefit of this Pay with a Tweet content gating method is that your product or your content header gets published and distributed.
It is beneficial for:
- Increasing awareness of people
- Improving content marketing
- Boosting SEO as Google will index it (social media is still preferential)
- Better findability
Thus bringing value to the company.

Do you gate for content or not or social spam?

All too often Marketing is considered as just lead generation.
However Marketing and Lead Generation are completely different functions in a company having different goals.

Lead generation is now

Lead generation is feeding the funnel and directly related to day-to-day operations and sales. Lead generation requires the use of all kinds of marketing methods and marketing automation tools to get people interested in the current products or solutions.
Lead generation uses advertising, content marketing, trade shows, conferences, website presence and cold calling.
Lead generation is for the short term and is closely related to sales. As Sales is solely focused on revenue with ever higher budgets, the ever increasing quarterly targets will put pressure on generating more leads.

Marketing is about tomorrow

Marketing is about preparing your company for the changes in your target market. This is for the long run in order to be in line with the long term plans of the company. Marketing is beyond quarterly results and even beyond yearly revenue.

Marketing is about market research and market trends, but also building product and brand awareness. Marketing has to analyze trends, market data and forecast the future.

Still Marketing uses advertising, trade shows, conferences too for reaching its’ goals, but in a different way.
This is a long term investment.

The origins of the confusion

The origin of the confusion comes probably from:
- the fact both are related to the future but on a different time scale
- the same marketing tools both use, but with a different goal.
- the lead generation function that marketing has inherited due to their actions

If lead qualification is involved in the process it is not marketing but lead generation.
If it is about groups and market segments without being specific about one company then it is Marketing.

Arts fashion style Italian

When Louis XV King of France was born on 5 September 1638, style, fashion and art were dominated by the Italians as part of their history build up over several centuries.

Marketing the French

He became the ‘Protector’ of literature (Académie Française) allowing to flourish Molière, Racine and La Fontaine. At the same time he also patronized visual arts and music.

However his most important achievement was the conversion of the hunting lodge in Versailles into the impressive extraordinary Palace of Versailles.
His goal was to promote the craftsmanship of the French by exposing it in his palace. Not only the palace was a continuous exposition of art and style, but also the famous gardens. The rest of the world followed suite on style of buildings, interiors (Rococo), fashion and gardening. Even the British Royals and nobles.

The marketing show piece

Not solely the gardens were one of kind, but the main show piece was the Hall of Mirrors were light was abundant because of the large windows and the mirrors on the other side reflecting the light or sunlight. In those days castles had dark interiors due to their thick walls and tiny windows. This was the place to be for parties in the world.

Entertainment marketing

By not only moving the entire Royal Court to palace of Versailles, but also imposing all the nobles of France to live in the condoms in the palace, he had a grip on both their presence, thinking, activities and their style.
He succeeded in achieving absolute monarchy by increasing the Crown’s influence and authority over the Church and aristocracy.

He was picky on their clothing and their appearances. His wife Marie Antoinette focused on spending on fashion, make-up and style.

As a great marketer he brought entertainment for his audience: he made a show out his own life as nobles and guests were invited to participate in his getting dressed, breakfast and lunch. Or watching him and his queen walk by through the hall of Mirrors from his private apartment to the chapel.

He used this kind of entertainment as marketing of his style and also to give his nobles something to aim for: being allowed to be near the Sun King.

The marketing legacy

Even almost 300 years later after his death style, fashion and arts are of French origin in many occasions. This he achieved solely taking the lead from the Italians and giving it to the French. Of course at a high cost as the French weren’t so keen on his activities and spending of their tax money for his pleasure, prestige and marketing of France.

He achieved this by spending large amounts of money (from taxes) and entertaining the nobles and his guests in the gracious environments of the Palace of Versailles while showing off style and fashion during a long period (over 50 years) of his life.

Marketing will cost money, tenacity and even a show piece, but also creativity and requires new ideas and concepts to be promoted. All contained in an entertaining package in order to keep the attention of the audience.

Reading emails before action

When an email lands in your inbox do you really read the email content or:
- Do you just reply with your standard reply email ?
- Do you forward it without really reading to your supervisor as prescribed by the workflow ?
- Do you try to up-sell in the first reply ?

It is imperative that you read the email and answer appropriately to his request for information or solve his problem or issues. That is the first goal of your reply as you need to satisfy his first demand.

The impression of the potential customer

If the potential customer gets:
- A standard reply then he will feel unimportant
- Forwarded to a supervisor then why was he wasting time communicating with the first person
- A solution but also an up-sell then he will feel the focus is too much on up-selling as the expected revenue is not enough
- A reply several days later then he might have taken his decision already
- A not then he is left in the cold and needs to hope other vendors bring a solution

The cheapest leads

You should grab this kind of opportunity as these are the cheapest leads you can get: apparently without any effort from your side or your company they present a potential sale for you for free. You or your company save upfront the cost of the lead generation.
All you need to do is:
- To read the inquiry email
- Investigate into the company: what does the company do
- Investigate into the person who addresses to you (using LinkedIn, Xing, Ecademy, Viadeo or even Facebook)
- Reply solely to his question as an expert as you still need to build trust.

Read the emails of potential customers and answer them appropriately within 24 business hours.

Do you really read the emails of potential customers?

In some cases you should say “NO” to your customer and not proceed in selling to him. This “NO” is hard to do but it is better in the long run.

Saying “NO” to your channel-partner, system integrator-partner can be appropriate too when they:
1. Impose their requirements on projects for their benefit
2. Increase complexity of projects (like adding on third parties)
3. Change the requirements (rule of the game)
4. Mange you instead of you managing the partner
5. Change due dates (earlier) without having discussed
6. Change your price quotations by increasing the deliverable(s) without notifying previously
7. Call after business for urgent decision hours so you miss feedback of your staff and employees
8. Put you under pressure to decide fast upon new issues as quote needs to be in
9. Complain about everything including your products or competing products
10. Want special discount for each and every prospect
11. Discuss every item on your invoices
12. Pay always overdue
13. Want free inventory
14. Asks commission on top of received discounts
15. Ignore RMA (Return Material Authorization) procedures
16. Refuse to accept and handle faulty goods from customers
17. Call you and several employees about the same issue or problem
18. Use your information to sell the solution of your competitor
19. Pick up leads beyond their geography defined in the Partner Agreement
21. Get drunk at your yearly partner event – never sober
22. Occupy your booth on the trade show without any effort
23. Play games (sound/noise) during conference calls with potential projects
24. Receive MDF (Marketing Develop Fund) or Co-op Marketing but never spend it effectively or wisely
25. Blame you for any kind of mishap in projects

In many of these cases you might be better off without the partner as he creates:
- Overhead
- Not recoverable additional costs
- Confusion amongst your staff and employees and prospects and customers
- Loss of time and efforts
Instead of bringing in money this type of partners will cost you money.

You should evaluate:
- The amount of sales the partner brings
- The amount of additional costs he generates over one year
- How many potential customers he drove away by his actions.

Did you ever said “NO” to your partner ?