28 Insights on Business and Marketing by Warren Buffet

I’ve been a consultant or owned a business for almost over 30 years. When you’ve been in business or worked with as many business owners/entrepreneurs as I have you start to see trends. I thought I’d try to capture some thoughts I’ve learned so far in this journey. What follows has no order or sequence it’s just general truisms I’ve discovered working with some amazing people throughout the years…

1. There are things in your business you should be doing, and you know you should be doing but you put them off last. Do these first.
2. More unproductive time is spent doing the things you should outsource. Find opportunities to outsource things you really shouldn’t be doing and if you can’t outsource then find ways to put these into a system where you are more proficient.
3. Marketing hasn’t changed all that much, only the tools and the way you communicate with your target market has. Learn the foundations of marketing, branding, and positioning.
4. Start the day with the most important thing you need to do and end the day with asking what you accomplished. If those 2 things don’t match up make a change immediately.
5. The phone is still one of the best networking tools on the planet and beats social media hands down.
6. Follow up and consistency are the cornerstone of a strong and growing business.
7. Your target market is more educated on your product, service, or idea than they have ever been. This gives you an opportunity to really solve solutions; the challenge is solving the right solutions.
8. People make decisions both emotionally and logically. If these are out of sync in your offering or process people will run for the hills. Your offers have to make emotional and logical sense.
9. People have made up their mind before they talk to you. It’s your job to help them come to the conclusion that you, your product, or idea is what they have been seeking.
10. Rely on experts. It is said that you don’t know what you don’t know. Don’t allow this to happen in your business. Find the things that are critical to know to give you a competitive advantage and work with experts to help you understand how to capitalize on these things.
11. Instill a dedication to being the best for yourself and your team. This will take you farther than any marketing strategy.
12. Test your reasoning and thoughts. Design tests in your business and marketing so that you can prove yourself right or wrong. Then iterate these.
13. All businesses need systems, what are yours and have you developed them.
14. Understand your markets buying signals and buying timeframe. In certain markets there are trigger events that cause your market to be aware of a problem or seek a solution. The birth of a child is a good trigger event that spurs a whole host of purchase decisions. What is your target market buying signals, timeframe, and trigger events?
15. Attention is becoming one of the scarcest resources. If you get someone’s attentionrespect it and give them what they want or seek.
16. If you’re just getting started or rebooting, start with your big idea, a strong website, and find unique ways to reach people who want what you have. Spend zero amount of time in social media until you have this figured out.
17. You have hidden revenue in your business; the trick is finding where it’s at with as little amount of effort as possible.
18. Act. More people fail by not acting than they do by getting their idea in motion. When you act you get feedback, when you get feedback you improve, and when you improve you ultimately get to something that works in the marketplace.
19. Trust yourself. You know deep down inside that your idea will work now prove the world wrong.
20. Quantity rarely trumps quality. This is even truer when you look at the amount of effort and time you put into your business. Make sure it’s quality and not quantity that you are measuring.
21. No clear metrics. Write down and track the key metrics that drive your sales, prospecting, and efficiency of your business.
22. Focus on what you can control and let go of the things you cannot. Or better yet find ways to flip the things you can’t control in your mind in a way that you can control them within yourself.
23. Learn to look at a situation in 3 ways, your way, their way, and as an observer looking at both.
24. Most sales can be defined by a straight line, and this straight line happens even before you talk to your prospect. The better you get at managing that line the more sales and business you will create.
25. Seek a yes or no, if it’s a maybe you should run. A yes or no is a decision, maybe will always have lingering questions.
26. Your success is your own. No one cares more about your success than you. Don’t rely on someone else to be your driver in success.
27. Find a way to banish need from your negotiations. The other side can sense this. Even if you do need that deal or that project operating from this mindset will make it harder to close.
28. Know your why.

8 Ways to Make Your Business More ‘Human’ on Facebook

Facebook comprises the bulk of daily Internet-related activity for many of its 1.4 billion users, particularly those who access the site via mobile devices.

For some, Facebook is the Internet — functioning as a portal for news and information, not unlike AOL and Prodigy did in the early days of the World Wide Web.

More importantly, Facebook is a place where its users hold conversations with family and friends and where they routinely share stories of the happenings in their lives, both significant and trivial.

Taking into account how well Facebook has woven itself into users’ lives, businesses need to find ways to integrate their message — indeed, themselves — into conversations in a more human, people-centric fashion, maximizing the value of the “social” aspect of social media.

Here are eight recommendations for you to consider.

1. Think Customer Service, Not Just Marketing

More than likely, your marketing efforts on Facebook won’t translate into sales — at least not directly. Even when sales do occur, they typically comprise only a small percentage of your overall volume.

Instead of merely thinking of your Facebook page as a sales and marketing channel, view it as a vehicle for customer service, such as in this example from AnswerFirst Communications, a telephone answering service.

You could also use Facebook Messenger to hold personal, real-time conversations with customers. Facebook is testing a business version of the platform, for which you could sign-up.

2. Provide Information Your Customers Care About

Most people operate with a “what’s in it for me” mindset, which means the content you produce on Facebook needs to focus on customer concerns and interests rather than your own.

That is not to suggest an occasional promotional post announcing a sale, new product, or contest is out of bounds, only that, when creating content, you should put the needs of your customers first.

The article “8 Facebook Post Types for Boosting Engagement” contains tips for content that will resonate with your customers.

3. Put a Personal Face on Your Company

In social media, people relate better to other people than they do to businesses. So, on Facebook, put your people at the forefront.

Through its “People Make the Difference” initiative, Knight Oil Tools, an oilfield services company, routinely showcases employees who have reached particular milestones, such as employment anniversaries.

Stories don’t always have to relate directly to business. When feasible, share personal stories, such as activities involving you and your employees, hobbies you enjoy, birthdays, or other meaningful events. Even use an occasional “selfie” when doing so.

For example, Brendan’s Irish Pub, based in Camarillo, Calif., celebrated its HR director’s birthday with a Facebook post.

The rationale: As people get to know you on a personal level, they may become more interested in your business.

4. Feature Your Customers

There are several ways you can shine the spotlight on your customers. Ask them to share photos of themselves using your products, praise them publicly via a post, or start a “customer of the week” series. Testimonials are another good way to feature customers while building brand reputation and trust at the same time.

SmartPak, an equestrian retail company, features profiles of customers talking about their use of its products, via Facebook posts.

5. Share Your Support for Charitable Causes

If your company supports a local charitable activity, such as a fundraiser, share it in a post. Include photos of you and your employees participating in the event. Many people — Millennials in particular — appreciate companies that express social consciousness and concern for their communities.

Community Coffee, a retail coffee brand, used Facebook to promote its “Military Match” coffee donation campaign.

6. Incorporate Humor

Reading and sharing humorous stories is a big part of what draws people to Facebook. While your business needs to stay true to its corporate culture, when possible, insert some humor in the form of a funny story, anecdote, or image.

T-shirt retailer, Johnny Cupcakes, borrowed inspiration from the newly released “Mad Max” movie to create this humorous image.

7. Tell Your Company Story

Form relationships with your customers and fans by telling them why you started the business, lessons you’ve learned along the way, and plans. Also, share your company values and the passions that drive you.

The Facebook page posting interface includes a feature called “Milestones,” intended for just that purpose. It enables you to build a chronology of your company’s history that includes its founding, significant achievements, and landmark events.

8. Talk About What Inspires You

Another reason people use Facebook is to find inspiration, so share what inspires you. Post quotes and photos, stories about people who mentored you, or significant events in your life, both personal and professional.

Even though Facebook is notorious for triviality, it is the meaningful moments that occur in a person’s life that others respond to most.

Conclusion

Facebook may not be the best avenue to sell your products or services, but it is a platform where you can sell “you,” and where your business can express its individuality and unique personality.

It is a place where you can socialize with your customers, developing a more personal relationship with them over time. As people get to know you, the trust that will accrue as a result could, in turn, lead to sales.

7 Ways to Get People to Share Your Content

People who are new to content marketing sometimes say, “I want my post to go viral.” Or, “We want content guaranteed to go viral.” It’s a great goal, but even the best marketers in the business don’t go viral every time they publish.

Getting a post to go viral requires a mix of first-rate content, a responsive audience, and serious content promotion skills. It is rare for an unknown blogger or videographer to come up with even a genius idea and have it hit the mainstream.

While viral hits are unusual, practical marketers with reasonable resources can see a viral win at least a couple of times of a year. They just have to understand their audience, content promotion, and what content tends to get shared.

We’ve covered content promotion in other articles. (“The Secret to Successful Content Marketing” is a recent article.) But we have not considered what makes people share content. So let’s take a look at that now.

There are two levels of sharing content. First, there are the deep psychological forces that shape our behavior. Then there are the more tangible, quantifiable things that get people to share — like added images, colors, and features that get us to click.

Psychological Forces Behind Sharing

It appears no one, even online, likes a sour puss. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have found people are far more likely to share positive content than negative. Other data supports this.

HubSpot’s Dan Zarella, for example, found negative comments suppressed audience growth.

The U. Penn researchers also found people shared content that inspired awe in them. Awe was the most powerful indicator of sharing. That’s also what Noah Kagan, the Internet entrepreneur, found after he studied 100 million articles and how they were shared.

Practical, useful content is also far more likely to get shared. You can see this all over the Internet, in “most popular posts” lists on almost any site. “How to” posts do well, especially when they are easy to understand and to apply. The New York Times discovered this in their study, The Psychology of Sharing. Ninety-four percent of the people they interviewed “carefully consider how the information they share will be useful to the recipient”.

How to Get People to Share Your Content

1. Make it easy for people to share your content. Any more than 2 to 3 clicks of a button, and it’s too much work to share your content. One simple example of making content easy to share is “tweetables”. Blogger Michelle Shaeffer recently added tweetables to her posts and got significantly more traffic.

2. Ask them to share it. Don’t make people remember that they could share your content, either. Remind them with a call to action. Pinterest pins with a call to action get 80 percent more shares. Tweets that ask people to retweet them get 51 percent more retweets than tweets that never ask.

3. Use images. Tweets with images are 94 percent more likely to be shared, and photos on Facebook get 53 percent more likes. According to media firm Social Bakers, 93 percent of the 5,000 most shared posts on Facebook last spring were photos. Only 3 percent were status updates.

It works for Twitter, too. Tweets with images are 92 percent more likely to be retweeted.

4. Create “round-ups” as blog posts or other content. Round-ups are a content format. You ask a bunch of experts one question, then round up all their answers in a blog post. Round-ups can also be SlideShares or audio recordings, but most of the time they’re blog posts.

Round-ups can get very high share counts. That’s because once the post is published you can reach out to everyone who participated in it and suggest they promote the post. Experts who get asked to do roundups typically have large audiences. So instead of just you promoting your post, you have all the experts you worked with promoting your post.

Round-ups leverage the principle of influencers. They are just one tactic of the growing popularity of “influencer marketing.” Here’s some more evidence of the power of influencers.

5. Write listicles. Listicles are articles based on lists. This post is a hybrid listicle. Some people look down on listicles as being too formulaic. But for better or worse, listicles get shared more than almost any other format. That’s why people like me keep writing them. To see an example of how widespread listicles are, check Jeff Bullas’s very popular blog. These are the most popular posts on his site.

Eleven of those twelve posts are listicles. Noah Kagan’s analysis of 100 million articles also confirmed listicles get large amounts of shares. In his study, only infographics get more shares than listicles.

6. Write strong headlines. We published an entire post on how to write better headlinesa few months back. It’s worth a read if you want to write better headlines. Your headline largely determines whether or not your article gets shared. 80 percent of people will never read beyond your headline.

One of the most important keys to writing good headlines is grab to your readers emotionally. There’s a tool that can measure the emotional power of your headlines, and even give them a score. It’s the Advanced Marketing Institute’s Emotional Marketing ValueHeadline Analyzer.

While this tool is helpful, don’t abuse it. Don’t promise things in a headline that your content can’t deliver. Facebook recently named this “linkbaiting,” and has banned it.

7. Write long-form content. The blogger who advised us all to “write epic s*&%,” was on to something. Epic content gets shared. Three different studies support this.

Here’s what the Buffer app blog found on a recent content audit.

Here’s what Neil Patel found.

And finally, here’s Noah Kagan’s data.

There’s plenty of proof that longer posts get more shares, but less than 5 percent of bloggers write posts longer than 1,500 words. That’s according to Orbit Media’s survey of 1,000 bloggers from earlier this year.

Those are just a few ways to get people to share your content. There are dozens of tricks of content creation, content promotion and audience engagement that I haven’t mentioned here.

What’s your favorite way to get people to share your content?

How to Monetize a Blog (8 Online Business Owners Explain)

Learn how to monetize a blog from eight online business owners.

In this post, I interview 8 online business owners about how they make money with their blog.

We’ve written about how we make money on our blogs.

We also discussed the question: How much traffic is needed before monetizing

Today we want to go a little broader. And to do that, we need to be very specific.

We are going to let other business owners explain how they make money on their blogs.

Lets get started!

Thinking about moving abroad? Check out the Expat Family Handbook!

How to Monetize a Blog

The following interviews are from online business owners – all of them making money with their blog.

The monetization methods include:

1. Direct ads sales (banner advertising)
2. Sponsored email blast (I recommend AWeber for email lists. Here’s why)
3. Events and promotions
4. Affiliate marketing
5. Subscription newsletter This is a great reason to start a newsletter.
6. Patreon.com is kinds of like Kickstarter for artists
7. Click ads Here’s how to improve your PPC earnings
8. ShopHer Media

Here are the details and the specific sites using these methods:

8 Bloggers Explain How They Monetize a Blog

Here is the breakdown of how eight bloggers are monetizing their blogs.

1) How We Monetize ILoveTheUpperWestSide.com

We have a pretty unique monetization model for ILoveTheUpperWestSide.com.

It’s a local area blog that reports on events and stories on the Upper West Side in NYC, but it also funnels leads into a real estate sales and rentals system. People love our content and trust us to help them find their next home.

We also have a banner advertising system. Because we target such a specific geographical area, it’s more lucrative to sell ads directly to businesses in the area (as opposed to using a network like AdSense).

2) How I Monetize Burger Conquest: A Marketing and Burger Blog

I write the marketing and burger blog Burger Conquest. I monetize my blog via three methods:

1. Foodie Blog Roll: – this is like Google AdSense but only for Food Blogs. It won’t generate a lot of money but you’ll get a little here and a little there. I don’t maximize exposure to the Foodie Blog Roll which is a personal choice but you can certainly go further. To sign up, 75% of your posts must be about food and you must have at least 2500 page views per month.
2. Email blast via MailChimp: I’ve built up a decent sized email list through which I send out a weekly blast with cool food and beer events in my area. Bars, restaurants and event producers can buy an entire send from me or choose a more affordable option to be listed in one of the 7 positions available in the weekly blast. If a bar or restaurant needs help coming up with or producing a food and or craft beer event, I am available for consulting which would also include promotion through the email blast.
3. Events and Promotions: I produce a lot of my own events like NY Burger Week (which expanded to South Florida & Charleston, SC this year) and the Fall Burger Crawl.

I also run produce The NYC Good Beer Passport which gets customers a number of craft beers at a number of locations for a low price. It lasts all summer long and helps to raise money for local charities like the Food Bank For NYC. It also helps bring business to bars and restaurants during the slow summer months. These are the hardest forms of monetization but also the most rewarding.

David “Rev” Ciancio
Yeah! Management | Idle Hands Bar | Burger Conquest | Follow me @Yeahman

3) A Colorful Journey Blog Monetized with Affiliate Marketing

Carolyn Dube runs A Colorful Journey an arts and crafts blog. Carolyn has affiliate programs set up through her site. While she has a Shop page, all items link out to other sites. She also runs art workshops online and in-person. She intentionally does not sell ad space to maintain a high user experience even though she has the necessary traffic.

4) Monetize an Investment Blog with a Premium Newsletter

After leading 5 investment management organizations in my career, I decided to set myself up as a consultant to leaders.

Initially in 2011, I started a blog for free with weekly articles that addressed the concerns of leaders in the industry. I linked my blog to various social sites and also used direct email.

After a short while, interest in my views picked up. I then decided to charge for my blog. I charge $1,449 a year for a weekly report of 500-1000 words.

I charge a lot because:

1. I give away lots of stuff for free on my web site
2. I want people to respect what I have to say
3. I want clients to get used to paying me a lot and hire me for larger projects.

There may be lots of stuff that is cheap or free on the internet but no one can offer my insights. The pressure to meet these expectations juices my creativity.

5) How I Monetize My Sports Blog

I’ve been running OffTheRecordSports.com since early 2009. I’ve made a few dollars off of it and have learned a ton about what you need to do about running a blog.

First off, let me say that the folks who want to try to get paid subscribers are absolutely fooling themselves. Even if you get a few people, that’s not much money, certainly not what you could make doing it the right way. Even major newspapers that have tried going to subscriber models are learning that the web doesn’t work that way.

The idea is to get as many eyeballs as possible to your blog and make money selling ads based on impressions. Simply put, on the the web, eyeballs are the key and you will be paid according to that. No traffic? No money.

There are a number of places you can go to monetize your blog and they usually have traffic requirements before they’ll hook up with you. At one point, OTR was up to 50,000 unique a month and was a Google PR4. That’s not bad for one guy doing it himself. That opened me up to ad networks. I used Technorati and a few others over the years. They give you code to put in your site and then their advertisers (major companies) have their ads rotate on your site. You get paid based on how many times it appears.

You can also sell individual ads to companies you have contacts with if you want to go that route. I say, “have fun and good luck.” It will be a colossal waste of time, in my opinion. If you can pull it off, good on you. It is NOT easy to do. Ad sales is a different animal.

Another way you can monetize your blog is to get paid for links. There are many companies that will pay you to include a link back to their site in exchange for money. I¹ve had companies offer me anywhere from $40-$200 for a single link in a blog post. Be VERY careful doing this. If not done properly, it can be seen as black hat SEO and you could be punished by Google. That is not good at all. Be sure who you are dealing with and make sure you know how to do it the right way so your blog doesn’t get smacked down by Google.

Sometimes you can get people to pay you for a guest post. They write a post and pay you to publish it. I rarely do this unless I know it will be well written and in the voice of my site. I’ve had companies submit content that was laughable. I’m hardly the Wall St. Journal but I do have standards.

Micah Warren on Twitter: @MicahLargeMedia

6) Tumblr Blog Monetized with Patreon.com (M. Alice LeGrow)

I run two monetized blogs: BirthdayPartyPrincess.tumblr.com and Bloggerghast.tumblr.com

The first is a blog about my work as a birthday party princess, and the second is a character blog, written as a fictional account of the lives of people in the graphic novel series I authored from 2004 to 2011. The first is just a monetized blog by itself and the second is being monetized to finance an eventual web comic series.

Both are monetized through Patreon.com, but use different systems.

The first charges patrons per post and the second on a total monthly basis. I use incentives like patron-only content videos and locked posts to encourage people to sign up and contribute, as well as have different rewards in place for different tiers of donation.

Patreon.com is an amazing monetization tool for bloggers just starting out, who want a simple, no-fuss way to set up payment immediately and to offer tiered rewards to backers. All patrons have their cards charged at the end of the month and payments are automatically sent to your checking or Paypal account. Patreon.com takes a cut of about 10%.

M. Alice LeGrow

7) How I Monetize Virtual Work Team Blog with Click Ads and Affiliates

I use both Commission Junction and Google AdSense on my blog. Right now Google AdSense is working better than CJ for us.

Mrs. Shilonda Downing Virtual Work Team LLC

8) Monetize With Click Ads and ShopHer Media Affiliate Program

I work with FreeMania.net & MomShar.com and we have managed to successfully monetize both blogs.

Here are some of the ways that we monetize in order of most to least profitable:

1. Google AdSense: AdSense is easy to implement & maintain b/c it does most of the work for you! I would recommend doing a combination of image ads & text ads to maximize profitability.
2. MySavings Media: You can sign up to become a partner with MySavings Media (nowShopHer Media) & they will share earning opportunities with you through your portal. They gather earning opportunities that you can select.

Shari Medini

9) How We Monetize a Travel Blog (Bonus)

We use five primary methods of monetization for our travel blog. They include:

1. Affiliate Marketing
2. Amazon Associates
3. Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
4. Link Sales
5. Display Advertising

Things I wish I knew before my startup journey

As part of my consulting, I meet entrepreneurs with a startup or who want to start one. I spend two hours as part of my business initiation to understand the person and maturity of the product idea. I ask them to explore a few things (listed below) before they are ready to invest the time and effort. Here is a reminder: Plans are a necessary evil. You plan with the understanding that all plans might not work.

I became an entrepreneur coming from a family with no entrepreneurial background. This is the list of things I wish I had known before I took the plunge.

Get ‘buy-in’ from family

Let me start with my biggest mistake. I did a lousy job of making my wife understand the need for me to start my own business and this haunted me through my startup journey.

Start talking to your family about the startup idea, both the success and failure scenario. Write down their questions and try to answer them. Do not ignore ones which you do not have an answer to; go and get answers. Do not expect them to be convinced with your answers, but still make an effort to explain.

Once they accept your decision, they may still feel insecure because there is no consistent income. Most of them are hesitant to bring up the topic so as not to upset you. Take the initiative to talk about it and look at alternatives and challenges. You need to prepare them more than yourself for the startup journey.

Remember it is your idea, and no one believes in your idea more than you do

Do not expect them to understand your idea and validate it. If they are uncertain about the project, it will affect you. You need to protect yourself from emotional pull downs in the startup journey.

My wife lost trust in my word to bring money home every month to run the family. (I had failed a few times). It was admirable of her to continue to support me and I am lucky to be with her today.

One could follow a lean startup idea while developing the product. Please do not start with quitting your job. Start with writing the code for your product or the business proposition.

Write the value proposition message for the product idea 

To start with, fill the below format for your product idea and use this in talks with others to describe the product. For a platform idea, with more than one customer type, fill this separately for each customer type. When you discover new things, update the same to make it more complete.

• For << this type of customer>>, Who << has this type of problem>>
• We offer<< this solution>>
• Which is <<different in this way>> From <<other competitors>>

Leverage the KISS philosophy (keep it simple,stupid) to complete them. Do not use buzzwords and keep it as simple as possible. For greenfield ideas, find a set of firms with businesses that are closer to your idea.

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Also read:  Why you should not start a startup

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Fill the business model canvas 

The Business Model Canvas (BMC) is a strategic management and entrepreneurial tool. It allows you to describe, design, challenge, invent, and pivot your business model. Today, firms like Strategyzer train people on how to fill out this model. The BMC has questions to help people structure product ideas in their quest for new business models.

Keep the following points in mind while filling out the BMC:

• You need not have answers to all the questions. You know what you know, and what you do not know is not an issue.
• In search for answers, you get to network with people who might become co-founders, moonlighting employees, or customers.
• The BMC serves as a baseline to form a mental mindset of the product idea.
• Be prepared to hear that your idea is lousy and is not needed. Listen and make notes; do not argue.

Application of UI Design  

A lot of technical people feel that they do not have the UI skills but at the same time cannot afford to hire UI talent. If you feel that you need a good design for your product, you can learn UI skills.

• Attend online courses (some are free) on UI design practices, and get familiar with design concepts.
• Do research on innovative websites and applications. Use trial versions and take snapshots for features that you want in your application.
• Share designs with your developer and ask him or her to develop them. Any UI developer will feel motivated to come with more ideas.
• Never tell your developer that you have no idea about designing. Talk to some of your friends or contacts who might be working as UI designers in larger corporates. Ask them for feedback and share it with your developers. Be sure to water down the harsh part of the feedback!

Website design

Do not benchmark the first website with the corporate site. It should be something simple with focus on the customer. If there are multiple customers, choose one customer segment and target it. You should display the value proposition and ‘call to action’ for this customer on the home page.

• The effort required for the design layout of the website is different from the developer’s effort to program the website.
• There is an additional effort that comes with website content (images, text). As a techie, one often understands design and developer efforts, and underestimates content input.
• It would be good for the content writer and UI designer to work together (say for 36 hours) in a focused way and complete the website to prevent delays.
• Do not expect the website to be a one-time affair. You might have to update the website multiple times. Plan to perform minor updates without a designer.
• Some websites talk about the company, product features, and the team. These are good for internal pages in the website. When the end user likes the value proposition on the home page, he will want to know who is behind that product and what its features are.

 Build your network  

 As a cooperate employee, one can attend special interest groups and share ideas. I was a part of a cloud camp, and Android and Amazon meetup groups. Being an early member helped me create a network with entrepreneurs who I am in touch with even today.When you hear a speaker talk of the challenges in an area, you understand the situation better, and can ask questions.

• Be a part of TIE, and try to participate in iSpirit sessions and attend meetings in Microsoft Accelerator. Some may ask for a small token amount for networking sessions, it is worth it.
• Attend meetings; be open to meet people who are planning startups in your area or a different one.Attend enough meetings to identify the right community for your idea.
• Free industry sessions of India Product Leadership helped me learn concepts like value proposition, the Business Model Canvas, and digital marketing.
• Blogs of close.io showed me that my sales challenges were due to my ignorance.
• YourStory helps in the searching for competitors or becoming aware of other startups in your space.

 Gain domain experience

For techies, please reach out to professionals to get domain exposure and get your value proposition validated by domain experts. Try connecting with them through your friend circles. Some of your contacts will describe similar startup situations. You can look at their website and compare it with your plans.

Learn about the selling process

In my startup, we began with a product idea in the greenfield area. Today, I know that the greenfield area expects that we introduce the product concept to the customer and then sell the product. Being a techie in those days, I considered creating products in greenfield was cool and did not question our capability to sell products, even in areas with competitors.

If your employer provides you with pre-sales opportunity, take it even if you have to spend additional time. Sales is not account management with existing customers but also cold calling. As a techie, you may have limited or no sales capability. Sales exposure in a large company would help you learn the customer development process and tailor the same for your startup. Be open to learn from your mistakes and cultivate the ability to be resilient after rejections.

Explore external consulting opportunity

If you have niche skills, go ahead and take up consulting assignments. You can do it over weekends or at night. Look at these opportunities as a way to validate your solution to a problem.This is also an opportunity to test your ideas without actual risk.

In 2011, I failed to leverage consulting opportunities that needed cloud skills. I know of colleagues who leveraged their Big Data skills and have startups in that space today. I still remember a friend running a cloud company asking me to experiment my ideas by offering me his infrastructure.

Remember all interactions might lead to the creation of new networks and relationships. That gives you the opportunity to articulate and sell your skills. But give limited hours to consulting and be aware that you are preparing for your product, and not to become a consultant or a service company.

Print advertising: innovations deliver when there is a deeper message to be conveyed

Have you ever countedthe number of ads in your newspaper? I did.

On one of the recent weekends, a leading English daily greeted readers with a full front page ad followed by number of large and small display ads. When counted, that day’s newspaper had 42 large display ads – quarter page or more. That’s hundreds of large display ads, almost every weekend, through 35 plus editions of this newspaper.

Print media, which attracted 41% of total ad spends in 2014 (television advertising stood second with 38% share) is at the heart of marketing strategy and media mix. The challenge for brand marketers is to create ads that make an impact and meaningfully engage customers – both at an emotional and a rational level.

Easier said than done.

In recent years, we have seen some amazing creative executions that unleash print’s ability to deliver a multisensory experience. Here are some examples of print ads that add an extra level of cognitive processing for deeper customer engagement – by experimenting with shapes, sizes, placements, technology etc.

Highlighting Product Features through Ad Placement

This center spread Ford ad is a wonderful example of effective ad placement and playing with shape creatively.

The shape of the ad gives readers a sense of sharp blind turns and illustrates how the LED headlights of the car can see around the corners.

The copy says – “Sees around the corners…before you do”.

How Instantis Instant?

Nescafe took their ‘instant coffee’ad to a whole new level through print.

The brand included two foldable paper mugs in branded newspapers with coffee powder in those cups.  Reader could just add some hot water and enjoy their morning coffee, with someone they are sharing that particular moment with.

High Tech Product’s High Tech Ad

This Moto X ad showcases its vibrant range of colors in a magazine ad. The phone in the magazine ad changes colors when users press on the small color buttons at the bottom of the ad.

This print innovation was made using polycarbonate paper that covers LED light pipes, which are illuminated via circuitry running to the color swatches.

Innovation is Way of Life

Inspired by musical greeting cards, Volkswagen created a talking print ad. The idea was to drive the brand message that innovation is our way of life and it reflects even in the way we communicate.

As readers opened the last page of newspaper, a light-sensitive chip attached to the page announced the arrival of “a perfectly engineered car” – the Vento.

Result: Dealer inquiries went up by 200%. Vento achieved 12 per cent of its annual sales target in a single day.

Coffee That Stands for Best Aroma

When Bru Gold wanted to engage customers with the richness and aroma of their fine coffee, they sprayed a special perfume on newspapers, the smell of which was that of actual Bru Gold.

The readers while reading the newspaper could smell the coffee.

An Unmissable Call to Action

Tata Motors print ad for their Zest sedan had a very clear objective – driving customers to dealership.

The 4 page advertorial supplement came with a transparent packet stuck on the newspaper that had a uniquely bar-coded car key. Readers could visit a nearest dealer and match the bar code and stand a chance to win a Tata Zest.

The car key in newspaper ad communicated ease of owning the car / gave a sense of ownership resulting in increased footfall at the dealerships.

Jo DekheWohDiwana

When Kajaria Ceramics launched their 3D range of tiles that offers depth in designs, they wanted newspaper readers to get a sense of those innovative tiles.

The print ad was a 3D rendered image. The ad came with specially made 3D glasses stuck on the ad for viewing the ad. When viewed through 3D glasses, the ad gave a near real life 3D experience in the print ad itself.

Layered Smartphonewith a Layered Print Ad

When Lenovo launched Vibe X2 as ‘World’s First Layered Smartphone’, they wanted to highlight the innovative layered design through print ad.

Lenovo partnered with Voconow to overlay an interactive digital layer on top of their print ad.

When customers viewed the ad through Voconow app, they could see the smartphone from different dimensions, range of colors, product specs and could even buy the smartphone while watching the ad (instant call to action).

Does every print ad need to be as innovative as in above examples? Shashi Sinha of IPG MediaBrandssums it up nicely, “While regular print advertising definitely has its place, innovations deliver when there’s a deeper message to be conveyed.”

Innovative, solution-led print advertisementsengage customerswith the brand and drive last mile conversions.

Creative Marketing Ideas to Boost Your Business

We’ve all hit it – that wall that seems to sap away all your magical creative marketing juices. Suddenly you feel like Peter Pan without his pixie dust.

If you’ve never seen Run Fatboy Run, it’s a great movie!

All you need is a bit of help to kick your marketing strategy back on track. And guess what? We’re dishin’ out 64 creative marketing ideas and inspirational tips to help you bust through that brick wall. Let’s get started with…

• Social Media Marketing Ideas
• Urban Marketing Ideas
• Contest Marketing Ideas
• Marketing Ideas for Contest Promotion
• Content Marketing Ideas

Social Media Marketing Ideas

Push your handles – If you’re really looking to bump up those Twitter followers, you can’t be afraid to be a bit shameless. Speaking at a conference? Put your Twitter handle on the slideshow (heck, keep it in the corner the entire presentation). Ordering new business cards? Better include that adorable handle!

Very cool Twitter-themed business card from Luis Felipe Silva

Join in on weekly hashtag themes like #ThrowbackThursday – If you want to build your social media following, you need to be an active participant in the community. This means posting regularly, and also joining in on fun weekly social media traditions that already have a loyal audience. Show the kids how hip you can be!

Vines – Vines, quick 6-second video clips, are largely under-utilized. With a little work and some fun content, you could become a big fish in a small pond on Vine.

Pin your own images (and others) – Don’t underestimate the value of this image-sharing site. Post your strongest visual assets (templates, infographics, etc) on Pinterest and link them to your webpages for some serious traffic.

Keep social tabs on competitors – Facebook business pages allow you to follow other accounts via the Pages to Watch feature. Follow your competitors and see what they post, and which of their posts get the most shares and likes. See what works and follow their lead.

From Inside Facebook

Urban Marketing Ideas

Living in a concrete jungle allows for some pretty creative concepts.

Step out on the streets – In an online age, there’s something to be said for going au naturel and exercising a little IRL marketing. Go old school with flyers and poster in local cafes, do some sidewalk chalk writing. This strategy is most effective for locally oriented businesses, but it can work for anyone.

Street chalk Twitter handle by Marquette ITS

Commission a mural – Try getting permission to decorate the side of a prominent building with a large mural.

Great Di Bruno Bros mural found on Yelp

Use your surroundings – Get a little imaginative and think about how you can use your urban surroundings for potential marketing magic.

Very creative urban marketing efforts by Vijar Barbecues, found on Owni

Unusual sponsorships – Urban living results in some unique marketing opportunities you won’t find elsewhere. They secret is, you need to think creatively to capitalize on these opportunities.

Citi Bank sponsoring Citi Bike (image from Bicycling)

Contest Marketing Ideas

Photo Contests – Photo contests are great for a number for reasons – they’re relatively easy to enter (anyone with Instagram and a few spare seconds can submit), and they also provide sponsors with a great form of user-generated content that can be reused and implemented elsewhere.

Check out Harpoon Brewery – they’ve mastered the art of photo contests. (And click here for moreInstagram marketing ideas.)

Video contests – Not as many people will enter video contests, but you’re more likely to get a higher caliber of content since creating a video requires more effort on the user’s part. This kind of content can be extremely valuable for businesses down the line, especially when you have talented filmers creating video content just for you!

Submit your vote contests – Voting contests get a ton of entries because they’re so easy to participate in (just click a button, in most cases). What’s cool about voting contests is that you can use the data obtained from the votes to create a mini data study. Share what you learned in a blog post!

Caption Contests – Post a photo and ask users to submit their best caption – this kind of contest can get some pretty great laughs.

Sweepstakes – The most traditional of contests, sweepstakes/giveaways are a tried and true classic. They are quick and simple to enter – plus it’s easy to ask for email subscriptions as part of the submission form.

Marketing Ideas for Contest Promotion

Post to deal sites – People love free stuff, some more than others. The people who really love a good deal tend to frequent deal sites and forums. There’s almost always a sweepstake/contest forum section where you can add your contest into the mix.

I’ve seen contests in which 90% of traffic is driven from these types of sites – alright, they aren’t always the most qualified leads, but if you want quantity over quality, this is a sound strategy. Start of submitting to Slickdeals and go from there. This can be a great form of restaurant marketing.

Hashtag-ify your contest – Adding a relevant (and unique) hashtag to your contest helps you keep track of entries and makes them easy to scan through and organize. Besides, they’re just plain fun.

Make contests super sharable – This means adding “share this contest” buttons if you have an entry form on a website, or simply encouraging social sharing in general. The more people who know about your contest, the merrier (for you anyway)!

Offer bonus points for sharing – If you offer users bonus points for sharing news of your contest via social media, they’ll be much more likely to concede. Tools like Rafflecopter make it easy to offer users extra entries for different actions (e.g. Joining the mailing list = +5 entries. Sharing contest on Twitter = +2 entries).

(image from Website Spot)

Notify email subscribers of contest – Remember, you already know that your email subscribers like you and are interested in what you have to offer. If you’re running a contest for a free year of your software, you know your subscribers are going to want in!

Promote your contest on (all) social media – If you’re running a photo contest via Instagram, make sure you still promote the contest on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, etc. You want all your followers, across all social media networks to know about your great giveaway!

Share buttons from WordPress plug-in

Content Marketing Ideas

Write for your audience – The best pieces of content are the ones directed at your key audiences. Understand your customer: know their pain points, what gets them psyched, and what keeps them up at night. Killer content address your audience’s needs and concerns!

Add a visual element to ALL your content pieces – People get bored with text really fast! To keep visitors reading, it’s essential to have images breaking up your text paragraphs. Don’t overlook the importance of a visual element, even in blog posts that are predominantly text-based. You can see some examples of highly visual business blogs here.

Infographics – We know readers love visual content, and infographics are a prime example of beloved, linkable visual assets.

While the idea of creating a top-notch infographic may sound daunting, it doesn’t have to be hard. You don’t need fancy software – in fact, you can make a decent infographic just using Powerpoint. There are plenty of infographic guides templates out there to get you started. Speaking of…

Useful templates – Templates are another powerful form of visual assets that visitors find extremely helpful. Templates serve as a visual framework that can help users create custom piece without completely starting from scratch. Take this landing page template as an example – it explains the basic layout and fundamentals, letting users get a grasp on great landing page essentials before making their own.

Graphs and Charts – The infographic’s less cool cousins, one-piece graphs and charts still have their place as formidable pieces of visual content. They may not be as impressive as infographics, but they require considerably less time and effort to create and are still shareable, so don’t be afraid to use them generously. For visual learners, a graph will be much easier to interpret than a chunk of text and numbers. Make sure you appeal to all kinds of learners!

That’s why you find so many dragons at the animal shelter (image from Reddit)

Videos – Video is incredible when it comes to drawing in and retaining the attention of users –retention rate for visual information can reach 65% vs. 10% for text-based info. Plus, customers who view product videos are much more likely to convert than those that don’t. Video content is a powerful tool, whether you’re trying to demonstrate how your product works IRL or educating visitors.

Statistic lists – Are you hitting a content idea wall? For an easy content marketing fix, collect interesting statistics on a subject matter related to your biz and create a blog post about what you’ve learned. Massive stat lists are easy to make and extremely sharable. Plus, some of the wilder stats may get your gears turning about other content ideas, such as…

Future predictions – Play the soothsayer by predicting future trends in your industry – just make sure you have at least some data to back up your hypothesis.

Controversy – Controversial content always earns attention, but it’s not for the faint of heart – playing with fire can get you burned! Rather than stirring up controversy yourself, the safer road may be to answer or respond to larger industry controversy with your own interpretation.

Rumors travel fast

Aggregate awesomeness from other sources – Another easy way to create killer content is to curate quality content from elsewhere. No, it’s not stealing … at least, not if done properly.

It’s completely kosher to borrow content from other sources if you’re doing something new with it. For example, take our guide to the best SEO Reddit AMAs. The content we quoted from was originally posted on various Reddit forum threads. We took what we deemed the “best” portions of the Q&As from different threads and put it all together to make a super SEO advice guide. This new post is much easier for users interested in SEO to read, rather than scouring through various Reddit threads. NOTE: Play it safe by always giving credit where it’s due.

Ask the experts – Another great content marketing idea is to interview industry thought leaders with set questions and share their responses in a blog post; for example, our interview with industry experts on the future of PageRank. This kind of content tends to do well, and it’s always interesting to see where industry gurus agree and where they don’t. One great thing about sharing expert opinions – chances are, the folks you write about will share your write-up with their own followers! (Pro tip – ask the opinions of groups with large Twitter followers!)

A very impressive panel of experts

Top 10s – People go nuts over top 10 lists – top 10 tools, top 10 blogs, you name it.

Lists – Piggy-backing on top 10s are lists in general. Starting your title with a number can make it stand out more in search listings (e.g. 3 Ways to Slice a Pineapple). Why do people love lists? Because they are super scannable and quick to read. This is probably why over a third of Buzzfeed’s posts have a number in the title. Great content strategies involve a mix of quick, snackable content pieces and more in-depth, long-form articles. Variety is the spice of life, yo.

Product comparison guide – Decisions, decisions – oh, the pitfalls of capitalism. It’s tough being a consumer with so many products to choose from. Help out users with a marketing comparison guide, especially if you have a series of product offerings for different needs. If you’re comparing your product with competitors, be objective and fair; maybe you’re a better fit for small businesses, while a competitor is better for larger corporations.

Alternatively, write up a comparison guide for a product you don’t offer, but which relates to your audience’s business. For example, a video game reseller could write a product comparison guide for different video game controllers. This is helpful content that gets relevant users familiar with your brand.

Content is an open door – Don’t just create awesome content and abandon it – feature your best stuff in other related blog posts as well. You can link to or call out other pieces of content mid-post, or list some related articles at the end of your post. Something along the lines of “Want to learn more about ________? Check out our _________ guide and our __________ infographic.”

Content, love = apples, oranges. (Image from Disney’s Frozen)

Slideshare – The slideshow is back and better than ever! Repurpose PowerPoint presentations for audience-friendly slideshares. Check out these tips from Jonathan Colman on getting more views on Slideshare.

Webinars – Host your own free webinar or partner with another business for twice the expertise (and twice the promotion power). Webinar are a great source of business leads.

Google related search – Checking out the Google related searches (found at the top and bottom of the SERP when you perform a search) for a keyword query is a great tool for generating content ideas. Just Google a term and see what related searches turn up. You may be surprised!

Pop-up opt-in – There’s a lot of debate around newsletter opt-in pop-ups. They’re annoying, they’re intrusive, but quite often, they also work! A/B test one and see how it affects your newsletter subscriptions. If newsletter subscribers have proved to be valuable leads for your business, do what you must to obtain them.

Continue your lucky streak – Not sure what to write about? Go into your analytics account and take a peek at your most popular posts to see what subjects users get excited about, then write a variation or extension of one of your most popular posts.

eBooks – Another great marketing idea is to write a comprehensive ebook on a known pain point or popular industry topic, then create a quality landing page around the offer. Better yet, don’t start from scratch; repurpose past blog posts and articles into a mega e-book collection.

101 guides – There’s always someone just starting out in the biz; beginner’s guides and Industry Knowledge 101 content pieces will always get linked to and shared around by newbs.

Even great content needs promotion – Don’t just publish your content and expect it to promote itself; share it with your email subscribers and social media followers.

Post about industry hot topics – What’s the buzz in your field? Post about topical news and trending topics related to your industry to get in on the burst of action and show that you’re in the know.

Guest Posts – While the SEO value of guest posts has been called into question, there’s nothing wrong with guest posting if done right. Just focus on the value of getting your brand in front of a new audience, rather than the links.

(Image from Flickr user matsuyuki)

White papers – Guides, e-ooks, white papers – they’re kind of all the same thing, but labeling your assets differently can help your message resonate with different audiences. Test your labels to see which works best with your prospects.

Quality content – This should go without saying, but only produce quality content that you can be proud of! Google hates thin content, and users don’t like it either.

Show some skin – I mean metaphorical skin of course – show that you are not a robot. Don’t be afraid to have some fun and show off your company’s personality. Express yourself; and if that means literally showing some skin, well then, more power to you. You’re human after all.

Online magazine – Producing your own virtual magazine is another epic form of content marketing. For a great example, check out Dark Rye, a stylish online magazine produced by Whole Foods. For a quick and easy fix, make your own online newspaper with Paper.li.

Podcasts – Podcasts are great because users can download them and then listen on the go! Possible podcast concepts include discussing hot industry news or interviewing experts, in your space.

Cover events – If you attend a conference (or even an online event), consider writing a post about what info you gathered from the event, what you found valuable, etc. Chances are others will find it valuable too! Use the hashtag from the event in your promotional efforts.

Collaboration – Collaboration can extend your reach and build your reputation. Consider all the different partnerships you could build – partner with a charity? A related business? You can co-author a blog post or guide, co-host a webinar, etc.

Memes – Memes are fun and familiar for internet-goers. Get a little cheeky with some fun memes – it’s easy to make your own with sites like meme generator.

#SummertimeSadness

Social proof – Sometimes great content marketing ideas also serve as fantastic forms of social proof. Take this inventive content project by a haunted house called Nightmares Fear Factory. They take photos of victims…er, I mean guests, and post them to their Flickr feed. The photos are absolutely hysterical and prove that Nightmares Fear Factory is as scary as they claim to be! (Thanks for the heads up from Shopify).

Divvy up your content – Don’t go content-overboard or you’ll end up overwhelming users. We live in a competitive attention economy, and if you’re creating new stuff every single day, people may tire of you, even if everything you share is excellent. Them’s the breaks, kid. Figure out what pace works for your audience.

Conduct a content audit – Is your existing content up to snuff? What is driving conversions? What isn’t – and why? Asking these questions might make you sweat, but you’ll be better off knowing the truth. Finding the answers to these questions will ensure that your marketing strategy moves forward in the right direction.

Branded tools – Create awesome, valuable tools that your audience will find useful. You can use parts of the tool to push towards your product offering, but make sure the tool itself is high-caliber – don’t just make it a glorified sales pitch. Providing free tools will make users think fondly of you and extend your brand as more people share your awesome free tool!

Mobile! – With 79% of internet users conducting online shopping via  mobile devices, you should be embarrassed if you’re not mobile-friendly. This is not optional, although many still treat it like it is.

Gameification – Gamification is a great marketing idea to get users excited about engaging with you. As on Whose Line is it Anyway, the points are meaningless, but you’d be surprised how much people really enjoy getting points. We all love instant affirmation – it’s like virtual crack!

Apps like Belly and Foursquare combine gamification with customer loyalty programs. Starbucks also has its own tame version of gamified loyalty programs in which you earn stars for Starbucks purchases. Consider if gamification could work for your biz.

Get by with some content help from your friends – There are a ton of great tools out there to help you find quality content (Storify & Buffer to name a few). Remember, you don’t want to just share your own content – sharing great pieces by others in your industry shows that you’re a team player and valuable source of unbiased knowledge.

Comics – While newspaper funnies are a dying breed, online comics are alive and thriving! Consider making your own internet comics that relate to the absurd and surreal aspects of your industry. Try free tools like Pixton or Strip Generator to get started.

Copy the masters – Watch to see who is creating great content, and follow their lead. Take a close look at clickbait sites like Upworthy and Buzzfeed that get a ton of shares; while their audience and content subjects will be different from yours, they serve as an excellent study in how to improve your marketing strategy. What are they doing right? Can you implement something similar?

Take your time with titles – While we’re on the subject, Upworthy is famous for their killer, clickable headlines. Even a superb blog post won’t get the attention it deserves without a good title. Should it be clever? Eye-catching? SEO-friendly? Think about what will appeal to your audience. It’s recommended you write as many as 5-10 titles for every article, then choose the best!

4-1-1 – The 4-1-1 concept comes from Andrew Davis, author of Brandscaping. Davis’ social media sharing strategy dictates that for every six pieces of content shared on social media:

• 4 should be content from other industry influencers that is relevant to your audience
• 1 should be your own original, educational content
• 1 should have a sales aspect (coupon, product news, press release), aka, a piece of content most people will simply ignore.

The philosophy behind the 4-1-1 concept is that when you share industry thought leadership, you’re building relationships within the industry and demonstrating a certain level of selflessness which earns serious reputation points that come in handy in the long haul.

17 Tips For Marketing Films & TV Shows Online

Over the past few weeks I’ve had a number of conversations with people involved in film & TV marketing about how best to use social media to virally promote movies and TV series online.

There are a few things unique about marketing films and TV shows. Timing is incredibly important – you must build up as much hype in the short space of time leading up to and around the launch as possible. Another unique factor is that films and TV shows, by their very nature, are content gold mines – a huge privilege when it comes to crafting a powerful content marketing strategy for an upcoming film or TV show launch.

Unfortunately, movie marketing is not a science, but there are a lot of lessons we can learn from those who have successfully (or unsuccessfully) marketed films & shows before us. Below are 17 strategies, tactics, case studies & ideas for creating an exceptional online marketing campaign for your next movie or TV show.

#1 Do Something Remarkable – The Publicity Stunt

Seth Godin, one of the brightest minds in the marketing world, summed it up perfectly when he said “by definition, remarkable things get remarked upon”. I am a strong believer that word of mouth is the most powerful form of marketing. If you want to leverage viral marketing of any sorts, you must begin by doing something worth talking about.

When Game of Thrones marketed their latest series in the UK, they erected a bus-sized dragon’s head, appearing to have been washed up on a Dorset beach.

When these guys launched Chronicle, they flew remote controlled humans through New York City, scoring free publicity from hundreds of media outlets. Do something remarkable.

#2 Pre-Roll Video Advertising

Pre-roll video ads are an incredibly effective tool for drumming up interest and seeding your trailer online. They’re relatively inexpensive, and you aren’t charged if the viewer clicks ‘skip’ within the first five seconds. Using a service like TubeMogul you can easily have your trailer appearing before related videos on YouTube, as well as sites like IMDB, 4oD, Vimeo, and many other sites.

The important thing to remember with pre-roll advertising is to give the viewer a call to action i.e. something to do right now. This could be visiting the movie’s Facebook Page and engaging in a social game about the film, or entering a competition to win premier tickets, or perhaps just going through to the movie’s official website to watch the full-length trailer. Of course, the more interesting you can make it for the viewer the better.

#3 Be Smart With Press Junkets

Press Junkets are one of the movie industry’s most powerful publicity tactics. Essentially, these events fly as many key journalists, critics, and reporters to a location where, over the course of a few days, the press can conduct interviews with all of the main actors and directors from the film.

Be smart with who you invite to your press junket. Don’t limit yourself to journalists – they’re not the only people who can create buzz around your film. While the main journalists and critics will be key, you may also want to experiment with inviting influential bloggers and fans to the event. One tactic may be to run a ‘mini press junket’ in all of the major cities that you’re planning to launch in. This will open up huge potential to run a social media competition for a number of fans in each city to attend their local press event and meet the cast.

#4 Let your viewers experience the story

The Hunger Games had one of the most forward-thinking digital marketing campaigns of the decade. I’ll touch on various aspects of their strategy throughout the post, but perhaps the most innovative aspect of their strategy was their ‘Virtual Hunger Games’, whereby users could join a district and compete against other districts, just like in the film.

This virtual game enabled viewers to experience what the characters in the film experienced, while engaging with other fans of the film. What was incredibly smart, was how this game also tied in aspects of gamification and social integration to incentivise users to invite their friends, share updates, and ultimately spread the word about The Hunger Games virally.

#5 IMDB Listings & Advertising

They say that the hardest place to sell a book is in a bookstore, but with millions of people visitingIMDB on a daily basis in search of new films and TV shows to watch, it’d be ridiculous to ignore this site in your film or TV show’s digital marketing strategy.

There are some great posts explaining how to get your film listed on IMDB. My advice is to be as comprehensive as you possibly can when filling out the information required in the listing, and do whatever it takes to drive people to review the film. IMDB is a search engine, and much like Google or YouTube, their algorithm is driven largely by relevance and popularity, so you’ll want to make sure that your film page contains as much information as possible, and is well linked throughout the site.

IMDB also have an excellent range of advertising packages, which are worth looking into. Another tip is to leverage film lists. Try creating ‘top 10′ or ‘top 50′ lists for films of your genre, featuring your film or TV show somewhere in the list. It’s a bit sneaky, but providing your film is relevant and a valuable edition, no one’s getting hurt!

#6 Involve your audience in the making of the film

In the months leading up to the launch of The Dark Knight , Warner Brothers launched the award-winning “Why so Serious?” campaign, which brought Gotham City to life. The video below shows how the campaign encouraged over 10 million fans around the World to visit landmarks around the World in full Joker make-up, creating a huge amount of buzz for the film.

Involving your audience in the making of or promotion strategy of the film is a fantastic way to get some die-hard early fans. There are countless ways to do this, from running a competition to be featured as an extra, to crowd-funding your film or TV show using a platform like Kickstarter, where people are rewarded with exclusive gifts for helping to fund the making of the film.

#7 Go to Town With Your Video Marketing

We seldom buy things that we have not seen or tested in some capacity, which is why trailers are absolutely essential to marketing films & TV shows. In my experience, though, just ‘having’ a trailer is not enough. It must have a great seeding strategy, and be ultra shareable to produce great results. I’d advise that the lower your marketing budget, the more effort you put into the latter part.

For content to spread at a compound rate i.e. ‘go viral’, it must push the audience to experience an emotional extreme. This can be through humour, fear, sadness, enlightenment, anger, lust, or any other strong emotional trigger. Think about any video, meme, or infographic you know that went incredibly viral – what emotion did it heighten? If you can create your trailer in a way that genuinely alters the viewer’s emotional state, you’re onto a winner.

When you have a great video trailer, you need a seeding strategy. I recommend initially uploading your video onto your film’s landing page ONLY using something like Wistia. This will encourage people to share the URL of the film website, and not a YouTube link, for example. Because you control the design of your landing page, this gives you more control over the visual experience, while also raising awareness of your social competitions or other things you may want to promote on your official website. After a week or two, you can then seed your video trailer onto YouTube, promoting it further through pre-roll ads, YouTube playlists, AdWords etc.

#8 Create a visually compelling & functional sub-site

Despite being exceptionally well designed from a graphics perspective, most film landing pages tend to lack in functionality. Typically, film landing pages contain a countdown to the film’s premiere and a full-screen graphic from the film’s artwork. If you’re lucky, the film trailer may be embedded on there.

As mentioned before, I recommend initially seeding your video trailer via your official sub-site, because you have the opportunity to make it visually exciting, while encouraging people to engage further with your social apps, competitions, virtual games, and other digital marketing initiatives.

Be sure to keep your sub-site simple, while featuring enough interesting content to keep visitors engaged with the other aspects of your digital marketing strategy.

#9 Make your Facebook Page Interactive

When you visit the Breaking Bad, Hunger Games, or World War Z Facebook Page, you’re presented with a huge variety of games, contests, and fun apps to use. On top of this, the updates are frequent and very engaging.

I could write a whole series of articles on Facebook Page marketing in itself, but I want to touch on three key areas: design, apps, and timeline marketing.

First of all, when it comes to designing your Facebook Page, make it visually compelling. So many films and TV show Facebook Pages don’t make use of the huge amount of space that Facebook offer your to brand your page and drive engagement. I’m a big fan of using the cover image in creative ways to attract attention to the app section of a page. Get creative with your design, but keep everything above the fold bold and inline with the film branding. When done well, it looks incredible.

In my opinion, Facebook Apps are what typically make or break a Facebook Page’s ability to prove significant ROI or not. Social apps are extremely powerful at driving engagement, as they can be hooked directly into the open graph to get users sharing and inviting their friends to the film’s page.

While I would advise developing a custom made app, If you’re on a budget there are plenty of affordable services out there, such as Wildfire and WooBox, which enable you to run social contests on your Facebook Page for very little.

Finally, when it comes to posting timeline updates, keep it visual, balanced, and engaging. Photos and videos typically generate the most engagement on Facebook, so be sure to incorporate this into your strategy, while balancing the type of content you post. In terms of frequency, I usually find that two posts per day works well on Facebook. If you’re struggling for time to keep posting updates, you can use a schedueling tool like Buffer or Hootsuite to manage this.

#10 Using Niche Social Networks – Vine, Instagram, Pinterest

While Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter will almost certainly be at the centre of your social media strategy, that doesn’t mean you should avoid the smaller platforms, such as Vine, Instagram, or Pinterest.

There have been some fantastically creative film marketing campaigns done using platforms like Vine. The trick is to understand these platforms and create a content strategy that fits the audience who use them. For example, Sundance Film Festival use Pinterest to highlight the best independent films. While they may only have 4,497 followers, many of these followers actively share Sundance’s pins on their own wall – enabling them to spread virally.

Similarly, Instagram is a photo-filtered image sharing platform. The Great Gatsby movie cleverly used Instagram filters to make photographs of the film, actors, and events have an old look, resonating both with the ‘Instagram style’ and the old theme of the movie.

#11 Auction props used in the film or TV show

This is perhaps one of my favourite examples of film companies utilising the content they already have in a creative way that markets the film.

I first heard about the Breaking Bad TV series through a friend who posted a link to this websiteon Facebook, saying that you could buy a teddy bear or pair of underpants used in the film for a five-figure sum. Auctioning these generated a huge amount of publicity for the TV series, gaining coverage on Mashable, The Verge, Gizmodo, CNN, and many others.

#12 Use social competitions & quizzes

It may not be the most innovative way of driving engagement online, but quizzes and competitions are a good balance of low risk and high reward. They virtually never fail to drum up buzz, and providing you get the reward or incentive right, they can work wonders in getting people to share your content with their friends.

When running competitions and incentivised quizzes, a trick that never seems to fail is offering a large incentive for people who invite more of their friends to join. An easy way of doing this is to set up a unique URL parameter system whereby they receive an extra 5 or 10 entries to the competition for every friend who enters via their unique link.

If you’re using a tool like Wildfire or Woobox to create your quiz / competition, they both have this virality function built in.

#13 Using Celebrity & Brand Partnerships

Whether you’re an independent film or a well-financed Hollywood movie, you will likely have some affiliation with various brands – be it through official partnerships, or unofficial endorsement of certain products. If the latter, make sure you contact the marketing directors of these brands and ask whether they’d be happy to help promote the film on social media – the worst they can do is say no, but as it’s in their best interest, they’ll probably say yes.

If you do have celebrity actors or major brand partnerships, make sure you’re utilising their audiences online. Coca Cola have 74.5m fans on Facebook and 2m on Twitter, which is 30x larger than the total audience of the 007 / James Bond social media accounts. When the two partnered on the launch of Skyfall, James Bond utilised Coke’s social media following to the max, enabling them to drive a huge amount of engagement in a short space of time.

#14 Persona Marketing

Your film or TV show will almost certainly have a character that the audience connect with in some way or another. Many film marketing campaigns have intelligently played on their audiences love (or hate) for certain characters by building a persona around those characters on social media.

The Ted character on Twitter is a fantastic example. With close to 700,000 followers, Ted continues to post funny comments that spread like wildfire. While this has obviously taken time to build up an audience of this size, it’s effectively free marketing for the film now – on any given day Ted can post a tweet reaching hundreds of thousands of people, and driving thousands of retweets.

Similarly, in the run up to the 2011 Muppets film, the marketing team behind the film decided to host Google+ Hangouts between fans and characters from The Muppets films. This campaign captured the attention of millions of people.

#15 Using Memes & Other Forms of UGC

Memes are becoming a great way of leveraging your audience’s creativity to build highly shareable content that subtly promotes your movie. The benefit of using memes are that they’re easily customisable, extremely shareable, and very quick to produce. To put their popularity into perspective, a search for “Breaking Bad Memes” in Google returns over 18 million results.

Another similar tactic is to use caption contests, fan art, or other types of tongue-in-cheek user generated content to leverage the collective sharing power and creativity of your audience. The Muppets had a fantastic campaign in 2011 where fans could submit hilarious posters for other films with a Muppets twist – e.g. The Pig With the Froggy Tattoo, and Breaking Prawn.

#16 Using Google Adwords

Every day, there are millions of searches made in Google for film and TV show recommendations. One of the quickest ways of reaching this audience of potential viewers is through Google Adwords. It’s certainly not the most creative or cost effective way to market your film, but it is an option.

One option that could be particularly effective is using AdWords to bid on local cinema based terms e.g. when people search in Google for “Oxford cinema films”, you may want to run an advert promoting your film at that specific cinema. Alternatively, you could run ads on genre terms like “action film recommendations” or “good action films”.

#17 Facebook Advertising

Facebook Advertising can be very effective when done correctly. I’ve written about this topic extensively in a number of places, but the main point is that you must understand what does and doesn’t work on Facebook. First of all, Facebook Ads are a “one to many” form of advertising, where unlike Google Adwords (which is one-to-one), you can pay to show your advert in the timeline of one person, and their interaction with your ad can automatically drive free interaction from their friends. Basically, Facebook Ads are really effective if your adverts are genuinely shareable.

From a technical perspective, I’d recommend using predominantly page promoted posts targeted to appear in ‘news feed only’ on an oCPM for clicks or conversions setting. We’ve spent £10,000s on Facebook Ads and this combination of settings consistently outperform anything else.

Final Thoughts

Marketing films and TV shows is not an easy task. If you want to stand out from the crowd, do something remarkable, be ambitious with your marketing goals, work with experts, and don’t believe the myth that you need a large budget to achieve great results. Money helps, but creativity is the real currency in marketing.

Which Are the Best B2B Lead Generation Strategies?

When it comes to B2B lead generation, what really impacts the bottom line?

In this post, we’re going to talk about how one health-tech company generated a 5,100% ROI from a $1 million integrated online marketing campaign. We’ll also look at how a major accounting firm generated $1.3 billion in pipeline revenue from content marketing.

But before we jump into the case studies and discuss specific strategies, let’s find out which lead generation strategies are actually driving the best results for B2B marketers.

Which B2B Lead Generation Strategies Work?

The answer to this question depends on who you ask.

If we were to go by Hubspot’s study of the best B2B lead sources, we’d conclude that SEO is the best (identifiable) lead generation channel.

If, on the other hand, we used Chief Marketer’s data on the same question, we’d conclude that email marketing is the most effective channel for B2B lead generation. Needless to say, there are similar surveys reporting that social media and content marketing are also the most effective forms of B2B lead generation.

Why so much variation?

The likely answer is to do with audience biases. A survey conducted by an email marketing provider is almost certainly going to have different results to one conducted by PPC management tool, as their audiences have different skillsets and biases, skewing the results of their sample. As such, we should take the specific ranking of different strategies in these studies with a pinch of salt.

Inconsistencies aside, the online strategies that consistently come out at the top are:

• Email marketing
• Search marketing
• Social marketing
• Content marketing

We’ll look at each these in more depth in a moment, but bear in mind that how you use a lead generation channel is more important than what lead channel you choose.

Twitter can be used to close a $250,000 lead for a B2B business, or it can be used to spam potential leads and tarnish a brand. So, while the channel/strategy you choose will play a large role in how effective your lead generation is, how you execute your campaign will play an even bigger role.

With this caveat out the way, let’s look at some of the ways that B2B companies are using the four strategies listed above to generate impressive results.

5 Ways to Generate B2B Leads Online

In this section, we’ll cover the four strategies outlined above, as well as a strategy that hasn’t been mentioned in any of the studies, yet it enabled one B2B company to generate a 5,100% ROI from a $1 million investment.

First though, let’s talk about one of the oldest strategies in online marketing: email marketing.

1. Email Marketing

Email marketing is one of the few online marketing channels that has stood the test of time. In fact, email is 23 years old this year, and it still trumps the top spot on many B2B marketer’s lists of B2B lead generation strategies.

One of the biggest trends in email marketing at the moment, that has generated great results for many B2B businesses, is marketing automation.

Not sure what the fuss about marketing automation is? Read this. In short, marketing automation tools are effectively hybrid email marketing tools that connect with your CRM to enable you to automatically send highly targeted emails to leads that are personalised specifically to them.

When Thomson Reuters upgraded to a marketing automation solution, their revenue increased by 172%. Another company increased their revenue by 832% (going from $80,000 in debt to $2 million in revenue) in just three years.

While traditional newsletters and email marketing are still important, the ability to capture more data on users and use behavioural-triggers has enabled B2B marketers to get a lot smarter with how they target users in the inbox.

2. Content Marketing: From Blogging to Microsites

By creating a total of 48 infographics, videos, and Q&A blog posts targeting C-level prospects of large market cap financial institutions, the public accounting firm Crowe Horwath generated $250,000 in revenue attributed to content marketing.

If 6-figure growth doesn’t get you excited, perhaps 10-figures (a billion) will.

In 2012, Xerox created a microsite offering relevant tips to business owners. The result? 70% of the companies targeted interacted with the microsite, adding 20,000 new contacts to their pipeline, 1,000+ of which scheduled appointments. The value of those appointments exceeded$1.3 billion in pipeline revenue.

Given the broad scope of content marketing, a good question to ask is what type of content should B2B companies be focusing on to generate leads?

Well, you could go by which tactics are most commonly used by other B2B companies (displayed below). The risk of this approach is that, by definition, you’ll be doing what everyone else is doing.

While there is some wisdom in following trends, there’s a good argument to do exactly the opposite of what other marketers are focusing on.

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

Whether you’re a contrarian marketer or prefer to stick to what’s working for others, a good content marketing strategy requires a degree of diversity and experimentation to understand where the biggest growth opportunities are for your business.

So, by all means, experiment with the common and uncommon tactics. Whether you use microsites, blogging, research reports, or infographics, the important thing is to test what does and doesn’t work so that you can gradually refine your lead generation over time.

3. Search Marketing

Organic search marketing is arguably one of the most valuable long-term strategies for generating B2B leads.

About 5-6 years ago, I was working on the SEO campaign for a major business stationery brand. It was one of my first ‘big campaigns’ that I was allowed to manage in my previous job.

While I can’t take the credit (their in-house SEO team and previous agencies had laid a great foundation for us), I watched the site’s revenue from SEO increase by over £4 million, just from a handful of keywords reaching #1 on Google.

Getting to #1 in Google is a lot harder today than it was five or ten years ago, and it can barely be summarised in a few sentences.

If I were to attempt it, though, I’d probably say that good SEO in 2015 is largely a bi-product of doing things well in other areas e.g. design, conversion rate optimisation, content marketing, and social. While there are exceptions, this is increasingly looking like the rule.

4. Social Media

Calling social media an effective B2B lead generation strategy is a controversial discussion to be starting.

While social media scored very well on both of the aforementioned ‘studies’, we can just as easily find reports where social media channels are regarded as the least effective lead generation strategies.

The bottom line is, social media isn’t inherently a poor channel for B2B lead generation. The reason social media is sometimes rated poorly on these aggregate studies is because most B2B companies have an ill-fitting social media strategy, to put it politely.

While tens of thousands of companies blast out self-promotional drivel, a minority of businesses use it generate and nurture millions of dollars worth of leads. In this instance, it’s best to learn from the minority rather than the majority.

One of the most obvious ways to generate B2B leads from social media is using LinkedIn. An commodity risk management company managed to generate over $2 million in pipeline value through their lead generation strategy.

Another consideration is that social media is an integral part of content marketing, and to some extent, search marketing. How successful will your blogging or infographics be if no one’s following your company’s updates on social media?

5. Integrating it all together

It’s said that success leaves clues. Well, when a $37 billion company generates a 5,100% return on investment on a million-dollar marketing campaign, it might be a pretty good clue.

From a $1 million investment in an integrated marketing campaign that included display ads, email marketing, campaign websites and content marketing, the healthcare technology company Optum generated $52 million in new business.

So, what’s the clue?

I believe it’s this: exceptional lead generation results come from a relentless willingness to experiment with different tactics, and to combine tactics across multiple channels.

Only by experimenting, can you truly know what does and doesn’t work, and when you know this, you can use your time and budget more effectively to generate higher returns on your investment, and better lead generation results overall.

32 Clever Lead Generation Ideas For Your Next Marketing Campaign

Ready to fill your pipeline with leads? Read on. Image source.

As marketers, we spend absurd amounts of time and resources creating content and planning campaigns. For many of us, the end goal is to generate new leads that will eventually become paying customers.

We know that a steady stream of leads is an essential component of keeping a business afloat – but coming up with original and effective ways to attract and convert qualified leads is easier said than done.

So how about a little inspiration?

Here are 32 proven and actionable ideas to energize your lead generation efforts.

Optimizing Your Landing Page for Lead Generation

1. Create a product video

65% of us are visual learners. Why not explain your offering in a way that speaks to the majority?

According to this case study, product explainer videos can generate leads at a rate of up to 33%. When done right, videos keep us engaged and can inspire us to take action.

Product videos don’t need to be long or complex, and with tools like Animoto, they’re increasingly easy to make.

65% of us are visual learners. Why not explain your offering in a way that speaks to the majority?

TWEET THIS

2. Don’t mention spam!

A test run by Michael Aagard showed that including the phrase “100% privacy – we will never spam you!” on a signup form reduced conversions by a full 18%.

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It’s okay to reassure privacy, but try doing it in a fun way that doesn’t include the word “spam.”

When in doubt, run A/B tests to be sure your signup forms are optimized for conversion.

3. Try the squint test

Squint (or take a few shots of whiskey, your choice) and then look at your website. Does the call to action stand out?

In this study, a travel website tested a CTA in the left column against a more contrasting CTA that passed the squint test. The result was a 591% increase in leads.

Go squint at your landing pages now!

4. Give fewer choices

Hick’s Law carries the principle that fewer choices means less confusion – and less confusion means more leads. This is why you should limit confusion by having a single CTA.

MySiteAuditor decreased the options on a free trial signup page from six to one and saw a 25% jump in their conversion rate.

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Read the full case study for that here.

Content Marketing for Lead Generation

5. Use gated videos

Wistia’s Turnstile allows you to add email opt-in forms to your videos. You can even set the form to appear in time with a verbal CTA.

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When Wistia purchased Facebook ads to send traffic to their video campaigns (bought at $1-2 per click), they saw an 11% increase in free trial conversions. Check out the full case study here.

6. Make excellent posts downloadable in exchange for an email

Quoteroller created a list of SEO directories in Australia, which was receiving 800+ visits per month but wasn’t generating leads.

After adding an option to download the post in a PDF format in return for an email address, the post peaked at five new leads per day and has resulted in 200 new email subscribers so far.

7. Optimize your about page

Whatever you may call it, your “about” or “team” page is very important to your business. This is where people see who you are and what you’re about. It’s also a great place to have a call to action.

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Jen Havice wrote this whopper of a post on how to generate leads on your about page. She suggests including a solid value proposition in your headline and breaking up copy into manageable chunks, as well as having a clear idea of where you’d like visitors to go next so you can guide them with a compelling CTA.

8. Blog consistently (actually do it)

This one’s old – we know by now that blogging is effective for generating leads. In spite of this, not many companies have strong and consistent content calendars (many give up when no results come in the first month or two).

Goodbye Crutches is an online shop for knee scooters and other accessories to help eliminate the need for crutches. They were struggling to drive traffic and sales through traditional advertising.

They put together a content schedule for six months, blogging every single day. Six months later, organic traffic had doubled.

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But remember that once you’ve built up the traffic to your blog, your job isn’t done. Your readers have self-selected as being interested in what you have to offer, but they’re not yet on your list.

Make the next step easy for them by adding relevant CTAs to your blog posts. Unbounce does this well, with CTAs targeted to each of their blog categories. If a reader is interested in a PPC blog post, chances are they’ll be interested in the ebook as well – and willing to enter their email address in exchange for it.

Blog posts in the PPC category on the Unbounce blog lead into a CTA for a PPC-themed ebook.

If you’re looking for ways to leverage your blogging efforts to drive leads, this article is a great place to start.

9. Create and optimize evergreen content

Super in-depth posts take long to write but can pay off over time. If you frame them correctly, they can turn into content pillars that continue to draw traffic long after their publish date. Consider the screenshot below, which shows the traffic for a post on the Interact blog entitled “How to Make a BuzzFeed Style Quiz.”

With a steady flow of traffic comes opportunities for lead generation.

In a recent post about optimizing old blog content for conversion, David Cheng shares how to identify and optimize evergreen content on your blog. After doing a content audit to determine which posts continue to draw traffic, he suggests updating popular posts with CTAs that point to relevant lead generation campaigns.

Using Social Media for Lead Generation

10. Identify leads on Twitter with Followerwonk

On Twitter, you can think of leads as fruit. Some are ripe and ready to use your product, while others need some time or nurturing and would be a waste of time for you to contact. Followerwonk helps make the distinction for you.

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Seer Interactive put together a whopper of a post on how to use Followerwonk to identify leads, filter them and reach out to the most ripe leads to generate new customers.

11. Promote your tweets

Krave cereal ran a test and found that customers exposed to multiple promoted tweets are 12% more likely to have an intent to purchase.

While promoted tweets are a form of sponsored content, they should resemble typical tweets you see in your feed. Yes, you’re paying to be in front of an audience, but you still need to keep the tweets fun and valuable to your audience. Steamfeed put together a list of the types of tweets brands should focus on to remain relevant.

To maximize the potential of promoted tweets, link to a landing page that is on the same subject as the tweet. For your lead generation campaigns, this will help continue the conversation and ultimately increase conversions.

To maximize the potential of promoted tweets, link to a dedicated landing page.

TWEET THIS

12. Write on LinkedIn

A venture capitalist once told me that he only invests in games when a new platform comes out. For example, when the Xbox was released, he invested in Xbox gaming startups.

Well, a new platform has recently come alive for content producers: LinkedIn just opened up their publishing platform to all users so anyone can create content. And I’m willing to bet you should invest your time in it.

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It is being rolled out slowly and has yet to hit critical velocity, which means there is an opportunity to stand out. According to a study by Hubspot that surveyed 5,000 small businesses, LinkedIn vastly outpaced competing social networks for lead generation.

Remember that getting your post read on LinkedIn is just one part of the battle. You must also have a strong offer and a paired landing page to follow through and capture leads.

13. Use Twitter cards

Twitter makes it really easy to capture leads right in the activity stream usinglead cards. It’s the Twitter equivalent to the signup box that you see on most blogs.

Twitter isn’t just putting on a smoke-and-mirrors show either.

Webtrends decided to put Twitter’s lead generation cards to the test and was able to increase leads tenfold while lowering cost per lead 500%.

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Fortunately, Twitter cards are pretty easy to set up and lead gen cards are free to use. It’s a no-brainer, really.

14. Answer questions on Quora

This question and answer site has ballooned in popularity and can no longer be ignored. Don’t believe me? Check out the graph below.

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Quora allows you to create a profile with links back to your site or landing page, so answering questions in a useful way gets you direct exposure to leads who are asking about your solution. Quora recently implemented full text search which allows you to search for any term in full and reduce the amount of irrelevant discussions to sift through.

Eventbrite leveraged Quora by answering questions users had about what they should do on New Year’s Eve. They put in the effort to make their posts useful and targeted to the users, linking back to Eventbrite events. You can use the same tactic – but link back to a landing page – to leverage Quora as a lead gen source.

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Check out the case study on how Quora drove conversions for EventBrite.

15. Send SlideShare traffic to a landing page

With more than 60 million monthly visitors, you’ve likely heard of (and used) SlideShare. But did you know that with a pro plan you can collect leads right on the platform?

If you’re not willing to pay, SlideShare is still a great way to generate leads. As Ana Hoffman suggests in her epic SlideShare traffic case study, you can link to a landing page in the presentation, description and in your profile.

Ana Hoffman links to a lead gen landing page in many of her SlideShare presentations.

Using tactics such as the one above, Ana has made SlideShare into her second largest referral traffic source. If you want a breakdown of the tactics she has used to generate traffic and leads on Slideshare, check out the comprehensive study.

16. Practice social listening on Twitter

A quick search on Twitter will give you a list of people who are currently interested in what you are doing.

There is no other place to get this kind of real-time information and it’s an amazing opportunity to engage with people who are mentioning your product or have a problem you can solve.

GNC found that many customers and potential customers were asking questions about health and GNC products on social channels. By actively engaging on social, GNC was able to increase inbound sales from social media by 25%. See the full case study here.

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You don’t need to have the resources and money of GNC to pay attention to what’s being said on Twitter. Services like TweetBeep let you set up Twitter alerts which work the same way as Google Alerts. Pretty genius for keeping tabs on conversations and potential conversion opportunities.

17. Google+ communities

Just like LinkedIn groups, Google+ helps bring people with common interests together. Their communities offer opportunities to become an influencer and reach potential prospects to drive conversions.

Farfetch is a curated website which features products from independent designers around the world. They used Google+ to showcase new products, leading to a 116% increase in Google+ followers who converted into paying customers at a rate of 1%.

For an in-depth look at how to use Google+ for lead generation, check out this guide put together by Content Marketing Institute.

Offline Tips for Lead Generation

18. Flex your expertise on television

WP Curve had their best month ever in March 2014, largely due to appearances on Fox TV and Forbes.

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The key to appearing on television is to have a unique position. WP Curve gives people access to developers to help with their WordPress sites (yawn), but Alex, the founder of WP Curve, framed the company’s USP as being vital to rejuvenating an aging web (which sounds way cooler than fixing WordPress bugs).

The connection between television appearances and new subscribers is historically difficult to track, but WP Curve’s television appearancesignificantly increased search traffic for branded terms – and search traffic accounts for 42% of WP Curve’s new signups. With TV as their megaphone, WP Curve saw a 27% increase in recurring revenue for in March. Read all about it here.

19. Warm calling

If you’re going to call prospects, do your research so you know who you are calling, what they are looking for and how you can help. If you’re going to ask someone to give you their time and attention on the phone, at least have the decency to explain why they should listen to you.

Sales Gravy created the rules for cold calling in the 21st century and concisely sums up how cold calling should be treated today: it should always be targeted and shouldn’t use the “spray and pray” method.

If possible, John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing insists that you should only call after you’ve received a referral. He heard these impressive stats at a conference:

“Cold calling results in about a 1-3% success rate for getting an initial appointment and it’s generally abusive to both parties. When that same call is made with a referral, the rate jumps up to 40% and even much higher when that referral comes from within the company.” – Mahan Khalsa, co-author ofLet’s Get Real or Let’s Not Play

20. Speak at an event

Being a speaker at a physical event can yield highly qualified leads because as a presenter, you hold a position of authority. If the talk goes well, you’re sure to find prospects afterwards and you can use these connections to find even more leads.

Crazy Egg co-founder Neil Patel speaking at a marketing conference. Image source.

As part of the marketing plan that drove 100,000 new users in just two years, CrazyEgg founders would speak at any and all marketing events that would have them. Not all the events matched up perfectly with the product, but each one brought in new customers.

Using Referrals and Reviews for Lead Generation

21. Strategic partnerships

Businesses often create ecosystems of companies – whether affiliates or integrations partners – with lead-sharing programs as incentive.

The key to finding and building partnerships is to find larger companies who need what you do, then build your product into theirs using an API in return for advertisement of the integration on their site.

In their blog post discussing how they took a SaaS startup from $0 to profitable in three months, Tint cited partnerships, particularly with Wix, as a primary reason for growth.

Partnerships may take time, but they can act as barriers to entry for competitors because your company will have a direct connection with a larger company that potential customers already use. And once they’re established, partnerships can drive leads for a long time.

22. Pro plans for influencers

Especially in the early stages of a company, having thought leaders as customers can drive hundreds of new signups. Don’t be stingy. Give away all of your product features to well respected bloggers and influencers and their communities will follow.

In the early stages of a company, having thought leaders as customers can drive hundreds of signups.

TWEET THIS

All you have to ask for in return is an honest review of your product. As long as you establish a decent relationship with the bloggers before asking for the review, you should be safe from getting blasted with bad reviews.

71% of B2B product purchases start on Google. If the first thing that comes up is a positive review for your product, that’s one point for you!

In their post about getting 100,000 new users, Crazy Egg cited giving away free memberships to bloggers as one of the top four reasons for signups.

23. GetApp

You likely understand the advantages of having a trustworthy site review your product and list it in their inventory, but how can you make it happen? Syndicated with sites like Business2Community, GetApp allows you to pay to get increased exposure across a portfolio of sites.

Mavenlink is a marketing SaaS company that thrives off of lead generation through external sources. With traffic coming from GetApp, they aregenerating tons of qualified leads, achieving an 11.9% conversion rate from click to trial. See that case study here.

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24. Your email signature

If you’re anything like me, you send hundreds of emails every week. To get the most out of these emails, consider linking back to your site or landing page in your signature.

Like any organization, the British Red Cross must generate revenue (donations) somehow. One way they’ve collected leads is by adding links to donation pages in every employee’s email signature.

Prospects who engaged with employees using the modified signatures were20% more likely to end up making a donation. Pretty impressive, right? Read all about that in detail here.

To make the tactic more scalable, get your customer service team use an email signature that says “refer a friend to get 15% off.” After all, your customer service team sends a ton of email and is in contact with a wide variety of people, making them an opportune group to use this method.

Services and Tools for Lead Generation

25. AdRoll

Assuming they had a positive experience, people who have already seen your website are warmer leads than those who have never been exposed to your brand. This is precisely why you should use AdRoll to “follow them” around the web and get them to come back and make a purchase.

Art of Tea used AdRoll to target customers who abandoned their online shopping cart. The campaign resulted in a 5x increase in Art of Tea’s ROI. Full case study on that here.

Art of Tea used AdRoll to acquire customers who were abandoning their carts and they saw a 5x increase in their ROI.

26. The infamous pop-up

As much as I hate to put this one in here, in many cases, pop-ups have been known to increase opt-in rates.

In a case study on the AWeber blog, a niche website tested a sidebar alongside a pop-up signup form. Over the course of seven months, the pop-up collected 1,375% more subscribers.

This pop-up resulted in 1,375% more subscribers than its sidebar opt in form counterpart. Image source.

If you’re going to test this out on your own site, here’s my advice: at the very least, make your pop-up look nice and make it easy to exit out of if the visitor isn’t interested.

27. LaunchBit

I don’t like to encourage the renting or buying of email lists, but LaunchBitoffers a viable alternative.

With their service, you can choose from a curated list of email newsletters and sponsor those that share your target customer. Sponsoring allows you toadvertise your lead generation campaigns in email newsletters that matter to your target audience. LaunchBit screens all lists to make sure they’re legit and handles the transaction from sponsor to advertiser so the experience is smooth for all.

The Launchbit Marketplace can give you access to newsletters which share your target customer.

Kinvey used LaunchBit to promote its new ebook in an effort to generate new email subscriber leads. The campaign was so successful that they started naming LaunchBit the $3 machine because every time they put in $3, they got a lead.

28. Social hubs

You post on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Google+ all the time, but the lifespan of those posts is just over three hours on average.

If you’re looking to extend the life of your posts, you may want to consider a social hub to embed directly on your site. These hubs work by tiling your social posts into a grid. You can then insert CTAs within that grid to collect leads from your social content.

Uberflip, maker of lead-generating social hubs, put their money where their mouth is by converting their entire blog into a hub. The result was a 9x lift in email subscribers in the first month. Read all about it here.

Uberflip converted their entire blog into a social hub and saw a 9x lift in email subscribers.

29. Data.com

Owned by Salesforce, Data.com is one of the largest databases of companies that exists today. It helps you streamline your lead generation by spending less time searching for new leads, ultimately giving you more time to interface with potential customers.

Nucleus Research used Data.com to identify and filter new sales leads quickly and precisely. This resulted in an ROI upwards of 200% and a massive increase in annual revenue. See the full case study here.

30. AdWords

AdWords allows you to place forms right inside of a search ad. Although this works for collecting interested leads, it’s worth noting that email addresses are put in after just a small snippet of text (as shown below). This means that you won’t get the same qualification as you would from a landing page.

By sending AdWords traffic to a dedicated landing page, Red Oak apartments increased leads by close to 300%.

Red Oak apartments increased leads by close to 300% with the help of AdWords and this dedicated landing page.

For a comprehensive guide on how to not waste your money on AdWords, follow this guide.

31. Drip

Drip is a great way to generate more leads from passive traffic. The service provides popup technology that isn’t too obtrusive. Drip will collect leads from interested users and funnel them into your email marketing program.

Drip allows you to insert popups onto your site to help collect leads.

Temper.io, a subscription service that measures how customers feel about your business, used Drip to simply drive awareness about their email newsletter.

With Drip, Temper was able to generate over 1,000 new email subscribers in two months. These subscribers were then presented with special offers to transition them into paying plans.

32. Quizzes

Quizzes are surging in popularity, but in order for them to be an effective method for generating leads, they must be done right.

SkilledUp, one of my consultation clients, is an online courses site which holds the unofficial record for the most comprehensive Microsoft Excel guide on the internet. This whopper of a guide sees thousands of visits each week and helps people from all walks of life. Yet when it was first published, it wasn’t generating leads.

Then SkilledUp implemented a quiz which tested people on their Excel skills. The quiz, which sent leads to MailChimp, generated 1,438 leads in the first two and a half months.

Adding a quiz to the SkilledUp website resulted in 1,438 new leads in two and a half months.

There are three things you must get right for a quiz to be effective:

1. The user interface must be fluid and simple to use. No radio buttons allowed – they remind us of school quizzes.
2. The topic has to be hyper-relevant to what you do (if you’re guilty of putting a superhero quiz on your clothing store website, just stop).
3. There has to be a sufficient award at the end to warrant the collection of a lead.

Take the lead

A sales funnel filled with leads is a great way to validate that your marketing efforts are delivering value to your prospects. When lead generation is done successfully, everyone benefits.

As marketers, the pressure is always on us to deliver qualified leads into the sales department or through the sales funnel. We all understand the importance of lead generation – it’s coming up with fresh and effective ideas that can sometimes be tricky.