Before you publish a blog post, ensure the content, and context meet your company’s standards and the post is optimized and ready. Too often, authors get off topic or write overly complicated information without proper context resulting in a less than positive response and engagement. When we publish a post or work with clients on publishing a post, we use a checklist to remind ourselves to address a range of important factors. Below is a Blog Post Checklist that includes questions you can ask before pressing the ‘publish’ button.
It has been well over a decade since the digital revolution went mainstream. However, according to Google, 55% of small businesses don’t even have a website. The vast majority of those that do, have a website that lacks key features necessary to make digital a revenue generating channel. A common reason for this lack of focus is the belief that real business comes via traditional channels like referrals.
The problem is that referrals are heavily influenced by digital channels. Your client base needs to know exactly what makes you great and be energized to make a referral. Digital channels provide the necessary energy. A well thought out digital strategy is vital to guide the referral process.
An Integrated Digital Strategy clarifies how you differentiate your online presence and drive revenue with your website, mobile, social media, search, email marketing, apps and online advertising. Using analytics to capture customer insights will inform your digital strategies and tactics and keep you aligned around key performance indicators (KPIs).
As more customers ‘self-sell’ on the web, a digital strategy is increasingly important. It is about integrating digital into all facets of marketing and describing the role of different web channels, inbound marketing, content marketing, search and the role of and social media. Integration can range from adding a URL at the bottom of a print ad to having a common creative message on your home page and in banner ads to the sophisticated delivery of sequenced messaging on multiple digital media vehicles.
Source: RevenuePerform.com
Disruptive Technology Driving Digital
Four specific technology developments are driving a tectonic shift in the digital ecosystem:
- Mobile. Widespread penetration and evolution of feature-rich, smart mobile devices
- Social. Ubiquitous social networking and user-generated content
- Cloud. On-demand, real-time access to supercomputer power and unlimited storage
- Internet of Things. Convergence between the real and the virtual worlds.
These technologies are changing the relationships between consumers and companies. Consumers have more power to gather and process information, connect, and voice opinions. And companies can leverage vast new sources of consumer information that lets them engage customers in a microtargeted way across multiple digital touch points.
What’s the State of your Integrated Digital Strategy?
To win in the digital economy, explore new approaches and learn by experimentation, while focusing on crucial capabilities and overcoming any gaps. Ask these questions:
- Do we have a dynamic digital strategy that generates value and considers new business models?
- Do we have deep insight into how our customers are using new digital tools?
- Do we have a partnership strategy with the key technology players to enable us to respond?
- Does our marketing strategy take advantage of new technologies to enhance our traditional campaigns?
- Are we fully utilizing online and mobile channels as part of our go-to-market strategy?
- Do we have the right talent and organization to execute our digital strategy?
Addressing these questions and formulating an integrated digital strategy will ultimately make your businesses relevant in a digital era while growing opportunities and profits, as well as scaling efficiently in the process.
Identify opportunities to address now with DIGITAL EXPERIENCE INDEX.
Revenue Architects is here to help with our digital marketing assessment using the DXI or DIGITAL EXPERIENCE INDEX. It’s complimentary!
The Digital Experience Index (DXI) is based on eight interdependent dimensions: Brand, Visibility, Design, Content, Usability, Functionality, Conversion and Amplification.
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When sales and marketing work together harmoniously, all is well. Marketing builds the brand and drums up leads; sales reels them in and brings them home as paying customers. Yet we know. particularly for sales, that sales incentives are the critical driver for performance focus. With today’s more unified revenue value chain and closed-loop across marketing and sales, you may need to realign your incentive programs to drive alignment and focus on the behaviors and results you seek. Programs need to fit in with your revenue operating model and reinforce team revenue performance.
Motivate Success
Incentive systems can motivate the right behaviors and align activities across marketing and sales. The incentive model should be transparent and readily understandable while clearly motivating your teams to perform in accordance with the prevailing company revenue strategy. Incentives can be a highly effective way to encourage and motivate, build morale and drive desired behavior. A study called Incentives, Motivation and Workplace Performance showed that a stunning 92% of respondents cited incentives as the top reason they achieved a workplace goal. Incentives can have particularly big impact when the sales and marketing teams devise a program together to effectively drive sales team behavior.
The best, most effective incentive programs are SMART.
- Specific – target a specific area for improvement.
- Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress.
- Assignable – specify who will do it.
- Realistic – state what results can realistically be achieved, given available resources.
- Time-related – specify when the result(s) can be achieved.
Begin by identifying your specific and measurable performance goals. Ask focused questions:
- What exact targets and changes do we want to accomplish?
- What behaviors would we like to reinforce?
- How will we measure and track success?
- How will the incentive campaign be implemented and promoted?
Once you’ve defined core metrics of success and created an incentive program that’s right for your team, there are some additional things you should keep in mind:
Stretch targets. Incent based upon new, desired behavior, e.g. meeting a higher quota, selling a new product, etc. Rewarding existing quotas and behaviors won’t likely enhance productivity.
Find the sweet spot. Don’t set your incentive payout too high, or the sales team will neglect their core responsibilities to focus only on the prize. Conversely, the payout should not be so too low that it doesn’t drive interest. Find the measurable incentive payout “sweet spot” that truly motivates your employees.
Public recognition. Public recognition helps to affirm good behavior, boost morale and foster a sense of friendly competition among the staff by celebrating the successes.
Keep campaign awareness fresh. Send regular reminders to the staff that the incentive is in place.
Choose a long enough timeframe. Consider running your incentive program for a substantial amount of time, not just a month or a quarter. Studies show programs that run for at least a year generate a 44% increase in performance, while programs running for a week or less boost performance by just 20%.
Measure and Track ROI. Establish baseline measurements at the beginning of your campaign so that you can track results and successes back to actual sales.
Promote team spirit. Team-oriented incentive programs generate a performance increase of around 45% compared with incentive programs geared toward individuals, which yield just a 27% increase. However, both approaches can have a motivating effect, and it doesn’t have to be an either-or decision; experiment with different programs and see what your staff responds to the most.
Good luck and good selling! Are you looking to enhance revenue performance? Sign up for a revenue diagnostic using our 50-dimension model.
Companies take a number of different approaches to establishing their pricing , but many wrongly assume that they have limited control on revenue and margin by using more effective pricing strategies. Businesses can implement different pricing strategies and tactics to maximize revenue and margin. Depending on the pricing models and business-specific circumstances, it may take some time to find the right balance. The key strategy is to enable your front-line sales team with the tools and insights needed to maintain optimal pricing.
Here are some tactics you might consider.
1. Segment Around Buyer Values to Drive Value Pricing
If you’re struggling to get a grip on your customers’ buyer values, you aren’t alone. Buyer values can fluctuate based on the market competition, market sensitivity to pricing, and other challenges. For companies that serve diversified markets, a one-size-fits-all approach can leave revenue opportunities untapped. Segmentation around buyer business impact and value offers the flexibility to manage pricing differently across different segments, adjusting for those markets where the underlying business value justifies premium pricing. When managed effectively, segmentation strategies can produce margin increases of 10 points, and sometimes more.
2. Pricing Decision Support
Sales representatives have a significant influence on revenue margin. In many cases, sales professionals might be pursuing volume over margin, and with poor pricing tools at their disposal, they likely give away revenue margin needlessly when adjustments to their discounting and other pricing actions might give them better guidance. Getting this right leads to improved margins for the sales reps as well as the business. Companies should be on the lookout for tools and resources that can help sales reps handle these pricing considerations.
3. Allocate Resources Towards Higher Margin Opportunities
Profit is always welcome of course, but some sales efforts will prove to be much more profitable to a company than others. Those marginally profitable segments may be turning over a net gain, but their consumption of resources could be taking away from other opportunities that offer greater pricing power and are even more profitable. Businesses should stratify their various segments by profitability and allocate resources to the most attractive segments.
4. Assess and Adapt
With these strategies in place, use observation and analysis to evaluate the success of new pricing strategies. By closely observing the effects, you will gain insights into what’s impacting revenue and margin performance and you can fine tune your strategies.
Ultimately, the market will be the main driver in determining pricing, yet leaders are recognizing the importance of using value-based segmentation, market research and decision support to inform and enable their pricing strategies. Contact us if you need help in maximizing pricing impact.
Of all the digital marketing disciplines, nothing keeps a marketer on their toes quite like Google. Google’s recent algorithm updates gave us the cutely titled Panda and Penguin updates, but don’t let the names fool you – they meant business. Those two penalized poor content and spammy links; cleaning house if you will. I’ll take a look at Google’s new algorithm update called Hummingbird and also look at two other significant SEO trends to carefully consider in your search engine marketing plan for 2014.
Humming to Google’s New Tune?
The truth is, this update appears less overtly dangerous than the previous algorithm updates, as if you have been doing well in search engines with honest content marketing, then you are probably no worse off right now. The challenge though, is keeping up with websites and marketers that are paying attention to Hummingbird’s perceived impact.
Here are 3 key points to consider:
The usefulness of your content;
The speed if your site;
The user experience for mobile devices;
Around this point of providing ‘useful’ content, you blog is a key tool in providing ‘answers’ to searcher’s questions. The old tactic of optimizing your meta data around primary keyword phrases still holds true, but try to avoid keyword obsessing; the search engines are smart enough to understand context in the rest of your content much better these days.
Remember: long tail keyword searches make up 70% of all search engine queries.
For maximum impact, focus on adding new content that explicitly answers user questions, including “how to” blog posts, FAQs, and process tutorials. Your blog can help provide answers to some of these ‘how to’ questions and attract natural links and get picked up by press outlets – who often have a high domain authority – and can direct a high volume of traffic back to your website.
Mobile Device SEO
For mobile optimization these items are critical to ensure a quality mobile user experience, which keeps your bounce rate down – in turn – helping your search rankings on mobile devices.
Use Finger Touch Friendly Navigation
Disable Pop-up On Mobile
Don’t Use Flash Content
Scroll-to-Sections Speed up Navigation
Keep the number of videos to a page to a minimum
Compress images and combine CSS files
Use responsive design unless a traditional mobile site suits your content
What Is Structured Data and Schema Markup?
As with the importance of mobile SEO – its best friend is local SEO.
For many small online businesses and social media novices this has proved tricky to navigate while Google+ (which merged with Google Places) has evolved itself. Common mistakes are creating multiple profiles, confusing a personal account with a business one and generally not filling out all the information.
Structured Data and Schema Markup may not sound much fun either, but its function is to create a common vocabulary for describing the data on the web. Using the right expertise to implement, it allows search engines to display important information, such as hours, testimonials, reviews, menus and blog authorship.
You can find the Structured Data Markup Helper here.
You may be more familiar with Google Authorship by sight if not by name. It displays the blog authors Google+ profile picture potentially leading to greater exposure, traffic; especially if the person is an expert.
A combination of your Google+ business page and Schema, means that Google will pull in reviews and other schema information from your business and display it with your business’ Google+ page in search results.ert in the local community or industry.
A one-two punch for improving your local search results and satisfying your mobile device users, both of which will provide the proverbial nectar to Hummingbirds buzzing around your content.
Learn more about how Revenue Architects can take your SEO goals to the next level for 2014.
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Expanding Your Digital Review
Website assessments are nothing new, yet today, we need to take a comprehensive view that includes a look at your websites, apps, media, and social media presence. So, when you do your next check-up, instead of thinking “website assessment,” you should be thinking “digital assessment.” Given how rapidly things are changing in digital strategy and systems, you should be conducting a self-assessment at least each year. When we do this for clients, we call it a “DXI” – Digital Experience Index. The benefits are clear.