There’s one phone number that most people can recite, regardless of demographic. And I mean full phone number, not 9-1-1. Think about it for a minute: What’s the one phone number than most everyone you know has in common they can recite without hesitation? 867-5309.

Tommy Tutone’s hit from 1981 emblazoned the number in our minds, and while little more of the song is all that memorable, “867-5309/Jenny” has an incredible marketing lesson buried within it’s one-hit wonderness. The song is the probably drunken announcement of a man who finds the number of a woman written on a bathroom wall. “For a good time, call …” graffiti, while most often a cruel joke, is the ultimate in smart marketing.

Why? Because it hits the relevancy bullseye.

It’s a relevant message, sent to a relevant audience, in a relevant time and in a relevant location.

Drunk guys going to the bathroom in a bar are primed to hear this message, ready to receive it and apt to take action. “For a good time, call 867-5309.”

The magic of marketing, be it social media, digital or even traditional, is to deliver a relevant message to a relevant audience in a relevant location and at the relevant time. This is our challenge.

So what are you doing to make your audience think, “Jenny, I’ve got your number. I’m going to make you mine?” with your product?

The comments, as always, are yours.

There is a new trend that is on the horizon. It’s subtle so you may not even notice its happening until it’s too late. It’s mostly referred to as Dynamic Content which doesn’t seem substantial enough to truly describe its power.

Here’s a thought to help clarify.

What if your website could change for every visitor to show them the content that is MOST relevant to them?

Do you think that would impact sales and conversions? As long as the information you know about the visitor is relevant and accurate, I think it could have a tremendous impact. Back in May of 2009, I wrote a post called Dynamic Relevant Content will Lead the Way to Web 3.0 that illustrated the use of dynamic content to drive a website. It’s kind of funny to look back at the post with its rudimentary graphics. But hey it was one of my first blog posts. Here is the future of the web I had envisioned back in 2009. Forgive me for the horrible colors; reflections and so much text it makes me want to punch myself in the face. Fortunately, it still illustrates the point pretty well though.

Honestly, it isn’t too far off from what I envision today. The biggest change is that I don’t think this is limited to B2B marketers. I think it is absolutely applicable to both B2B and B2C marketers.

The Good News

The good news is that the technology to start making this a reality has arrived. Both Marketo, Hubspot and Pardot have been talking a lot about the power of dynamic content and using their platforms to drive one-to-one customization based upon collected and observed information from website visitors. Right now they are focused on smart forms that only ask for new information, smart calls to action and minimal smart on-page content.

“…relevant emails drive 18X more revenue than broadcast emails ( Jupiter Research ). Eighteen flippin’ times more revenue! And leads who are nurtured with targeted content produce a 20% increase in sales opportunities ( Annuitas Group ).” – Meaghan Keaney Anderson, Hubspot, on why dynamic content matters.

The Bad News

Business processes and marketers need to get prepared for using dynamic content. It requires an entirely different type of marketing process. It means we have to stop thinking in one-to-many and start thinking one-to-one. Does that scare you a little? Just imagine the challenges with creating content for a segment, now we have to understand every single customer and make sure we have something for them. It’s not quite that bad, for now you can use one-to-a few marketing tactics to scale dynamic content. But don’t think it gets you off the hook for thinking one-to-one in the long term.

Add Dynamic Sections to Your Website

The first thing to consider is what areas of your website should be dynamic. Should it start with a form and calls to action or are there more powerful areas where dynamic content would make an impact? Here are some areas to consider:

• Forms
• Calls to Action
• Product Recommendations
• Dynamic content fields in on-page content that customizes based on previously provided information like illustrated here by Pardot

Segmentation Options

The second thing to consider is HOW you will segment your dynamic content. There are a variety of ways you can segment your audiences to create dynamic content. Marketo put together an excellent list of options in this post that was incredibly comprehensive and better than what I would’ve provided, so I’ve included it here.

“You can present dynamic content based on a variety of information, including:

• Demographics: Characteristics about the individual, including name, company name, job title, phone, and email address.
• Firmographics: Characteristics about an organization, including location, annual revenues, number of employees, and industry.
• Past behavior: Responses to emails or actions taken on your website can help inform a person’s interests and/or place in the buying cycle.
• Products or services already purchased: Using information about past purchases can help you up-sell or cross-sell relevant products or services.
• Psychographics and preferences: This takes into consideration a prospect’s interests, attitudes, and opinions.
• Behavior of related contacts: Understanding the actions, interests, and preferences of others in the recipient’s company is critical in a purchase that involves many stakeholders.” – Dayna Rothman, Marketo

The Worse News

This is all truly amazing progress for user experience that I’m personally super excited about. But here’s the bad news. The tools that are powering the information and technology to launch this are marketing automation providers. Sure, your web developer could customize something similar but it’s the DATA that really drives this. We used to make arguments about only collecting the data that we could use right away, now I’d argue we should collect everything we can because we never know when we will be able to turn it into something actionable. Now that you have the technology to make the information more useful you are going to want MORE data. If you haven’t been collecting the data for the last couple of years, you are at a distinct disadvantage. It doesn’t mean you can’t start; you should absolutely start as soon as possible. Recognize that if your competitors have had marketing automation in place for a few years, they will have significant amounts of data that you don’t have yet.

We Must Handle Data with Care

Clearly, we need some guidelines for how we SHOULD use this data versus how we COULD use the data. First, to be responsible we need to start providing a way for people to opt-out. Right now it feels like we are night crawlers going in and stealing up as much data as we can. We love it because we feel like we are doing things that are beneficial for the user, but let’s be honest for a second. Most users have NO idea how much information we have collected in our databases about them.  Some are collecting information they are giving us, and even appending it with data from purchased sources to have a more holistic view. Part of me wants to hide it so people don’t stop giving it to me. But the responsible part of me says we need to be more transparent about the information we are collecting and how it is being used or it will come back and bite us, either in the form of nasty regulations or a nasty lawsuit caused by dynamic content gone wild.

We also need to be smart about how we actually use the data. There is some information that is helpful in customizing content and other information that is just creepy. Nothing will get more people using incognito browsers faster than sending an email for funeral services right after someone posts a status update that their grandmother passed away. Let’s be responsible folks.

If I were a financial advisor and knew that you are 38 and have two kids named Johnny and Maggie it would make sense to show you investment options on my site that are appropriate for you based on your age and helping you save for college for your kids. If I’m a B2B software company and have the same information it’s straight up creepy to customize based upon information about my age and kids. Remember that the user still views your site as a “corporate brand”. I could totally send an email from a sales rep that mentions a conversation we had about your kids provided it’s relevant and in the right tone, but to put it on my site as a dynamic content area is strange. Think it through folks. What is the right balance of customization that makes the information relevant and doesn’t freak people out.

Finally, we need to allow people to correct misinformation. For example, I research a lot of tools for clients. So I may provide information on THEIR industry to get some specific information one time, but the next time I may be looking at it through the lens of another industry or want information for myself. The example of customization in the article from Pardot is based upon the company’s CRM system. I have clients on all of those systems and may need to change the CRM system to get the information I need at a later date. Make sure you understand the audience enough to know how they research and don’t customize so much that they can’t back out of those customizations if they aren’t correct.

If you ask me, I’d say that dynamic content and the potential it holds is a huge step forward for business, for marketers, and for user experience. It’s one that we will be doing some experimenting with over the next several months, for sure.

What potential do you see with dynamic content? Are you using it now? Leave a comment and let’s talk about where dynamic content can take us. 

Does that make your blood boil a little? It sure does for me. I’ve spent my entire career as a marketer trying to prove marketing’s value to business results. To see that my “peeps” lack credibility and are viewed as not understanding business is disheartening to say the least. In the early days in my career I noticed there were two different types of companies that had a large impact on marketer credibility: sales-driven companies and market-driven companies.

The Sales-Driven Company

The sales-driven companies I have experienced view their sales team as the bread and butter of the organization. Marketing was viewed as an expense that ultimately takes away from the ability to hire more sales people. This created a battlefield between marketing and sales for budget and resources that was absolutely counter-productive. It was an US vs THEM mentality. In a sales-driven company it was very common to have a Vice President of Sales AND Marketing who was really just a sales person who inherited the marketing team through a shallow attempt at getting the two groups to work together. In these companies marketers have NO credibility, regardless of talent or business understanding.

The Market-Driven Company

The market-driven companies I have experienced focused on how the market responds to the company’s product and service offerings. They viewed marketing as a central source of intelligence for seeing market shifts early to keep the company ahead of competition. Marketing positions were highly coveted because they hold “sizzle” and “influence” in driving the company into the future. In the market-driven companies, marketers were celebrated and viewed as central to the company’s progress. In these companies marketers have SOME credibility based upon talent and business understanding.

But you know what? Neither of those types of companies had CEOs that came from marketing. Why is that? Why do marketers get overlooked for CEO positions? To be fair there are CMO’s who’ve taken the helm, but I find it far less often than I would like. Just last week at Social Media Marketing World, I asked a room of 300 marketers how many of their company’s had CEO’s that came from marketing. You know how many raised their hands? EIGHT!

Marketers Are Losing the War

While marketers may be winning the battle for getting larger budgets for things like digital marketing and social media, they are losing the war. Three stats from an article in Marketing Week cited from The Fournaise Report that validate that for me.

1. “More than a third (69%) of CEOs say they have stopped enforcing key business objectives and indicators on marketers because they have ‘continuously’ failed to prove marketing strategies and campaigns delivered business growth.”

No BS Translation: CEOs think marketers lack credibility, that they don’t understand business, and that they are failing.

2. “The report says that many CEOs have marketing departments ‘purely out of tradition’ and have ‘made the conscious decision not to expect more from marketing than branding, look/feel good ads and promotions.”

No BS Translation: CEOs think marketers are a cost of doing business, they don’t expect much from them, and that marketers are fluff stealing from the bottom-line.

3. “Just 20 percent of CEOs consider their top marketers to be ROI marketers but those that do, believe they have a ‘solid influence’ within the organisation and could go on to senior management.”

No BS Translation: 80% of CEOs don’t think marketers have influence or a path to senior management.

This report actually came out in December of 2012 so it’s not trending news. Its news that upset me so much it took me four months to process, absorb and reflect on the ramifications.

I’ve come to the conclusion that marketers are in trouble.

There are too many marketers out there who don’t measure results

Maybe marketers don’t have their eye on the ball? Maybe marketers have lost sight of the big picture? Maybe marketers aren’t credible? Maybe marketers don’t understand business? Who knows, but the reality is that marketers who understand business and how to deliver ROI through marketing have the advantage. The problem is there aren’t enough of them. There are too many marketers out there with “shiny object syndrome” who aren’t focused on optimizing what they are already doing. If you’re focused on social media and your website sucks, you’re one of them. There are too many marketers who want to be on every social channel instead of the right social channel. If you’re a marketer who is barely able to keep up with the 5 social networks and being average on all of them, you’re one of them. There are too many marketers who don’t measure results or present decks of fluff stats to “satisfy” executives for awhile. If you’re leading with stats like followers, likes, or mentions to executives you’re one of them. Frankly, there are too many marketers focused on “social media” instead of driving business results.

As a result, I think business is in trouble.

 Technology is moving quickly. Buyer’s are changing their buying behaviors every day. Marketing is evolving and I believe companies with non-marketing CEOs will struggle to keep up.  The Fortune 500 list is changing more rapidly than ever before with giants being eaten up by companies that are agile and adept to the changing marketplace.

Frankly, we don’t have time to “teach” executives about the realities of how digital is changing business. We can’t teach CEO’s what Twitter, Facebook or Path is and why it matters because they’ll probably never really get it. More marketers should be in the driver’s seat, but unfortunately too many aren’t even in the same car. It’s time to get real marketers. Too many of you are failing at building business credibility. Start focusing on what drives business and figure out how marketing can support that. Start measuring results down to sales volume, revenue and cost so you can optimize and increase ROI. Get out of the social media echo chamber and start focusing on integrated marketing. Then and only then, will you have a fighting chance of winning the war, one battle at a time.

What do you think? Do marketers lack what it takes to lead companies? Are CEOs right? Or are marketers getting the short-end of the stick? Leave a comment and join the conversation.

Facebook is getting noisy. You’ve noticed it, too. If I’ve had one person mention a lot more sponsored posts and in-stream advertising in the last month, I’ve had 100. It’s frustrating for some users, interesting for marketers and a economic boon to the advertisers using it well.

But let’s not make assumptions about why it’s happening, how people are reacting to it or what it means because assumptions are, almost always, wrong.

Do Facebook Users Hate Ads and Sponsored Stories?

The answer is that it depends on the user. Social media purists claim that “everyone hates ads,” and “nobody clicks on them.” And they’re not only wrong. They’re damn wrong. A recent campaign I saw for a company that posted a Facebook offer supported by a buy of around $5,000 saw 1.5 million impressions and 40,000 claims.

That’s 40,000 people (the brand has about 200,000 Facebook fans) that saw the ad, clicked on it and claimed the offer.

Do Facebook Campaigns Actually Make Money?

The same case study mentioned above did. Remember, they spent $5,000. The purchase item (the claim was free, but once you turned it in, you bought the product) was $30. Even at a conversion rate of five percent (which is high in SEM, but not in Facebook offers in my experience), you’ve made $60,000. (I wasn’t privy to how many they actually sold.)

Sponsored stories and Like-gathering campaigns are a bit of a different animal, but remember my thoughts from last week about conversion rates? If you know you can drive, say, eight percent of your Facebook fans to purchase an offer or deal, then driving more Likes means increasing the number that eight percent produces.

If you work backwards from the amount of money you want to make, you can determine how many fans you need at what price point to build your promotion.

Isn’t Facebook Just Desperate For A Revenue Model

Certainly the increased frequency with which you’re seeing offers, sponsored stories and ads — not to mention Facebook Gifts which is building out some compelling functionality to drive purchases — shows that the billion-user-gorilla in the room is focused on driving revenue. They’re a publicly traded company now and have to do so or investors will sack the leadership.

But I wouldn’t use the word “desperate.” Rather, I’d say they are fine-tuning the network to be a revenue engine. Certainly, they will need to watch the delicate balance of user-experience, but when enough people will click on an offer to motivate advertisers to keep coming back and spending their money, it’s hard to swallow the myth that the ads aren’t effective or that people don’t click on them.

Gifts was mentioned as part of a $5 million non-gaming revenue piece in Mark Zuckerberg’s call with investors last month. But at the rate we’re seeing gifting opportunities, I’m betting that’s because a portion of the Facebook audience is clicking and buying.

What We Can Do To Make It Better

One of my common frustration points in seeing people talking about Facebook advertisements, offers and sponsored posts is that many don’t seem to understand active participation helps Facebook deliver more relevant ads to you. Did you realize you can click on any ad and tell Facebook it’s spam, irrelevant, etc.? Even the ones on the right sidebar!

Sponsored stories and offers can be flagged as well and Facebook likely uses this activity to not only know better what types of ads or sponsored stories you won’t mind in your feed, but also to inform the advertisers on what portion of their targeting finds the message relevant.

By actively clicking on that little drop-down arrow in the upper right corner and telling Facebook what you think of that ad or sponsored story, you’re improving your own experience. So if you have some time to kill, do so.

And Then There’s THAT Complaint

Go to the Facebook page of any brand that is spending significant dollars on Facebook advertising, sponsored stories and offers and you will probably catch a few posts from users saying, “STOP SPAMMING MY PAGE!” The adverse reaction to advertising on Facebook is apparent, but limited. The problem most often stems from sponsored posts that are targeted at “friends of friends.” They never opted in to see your content so you’re foreign to them.

Unfortunately, this adverse reaction to marketing message is going to happen, but is under-informed. Unless or until Facebook offers paid subscriptions in exchange for ad-free experiences, this is the price you pay for a free social network and connection to your friends and family. It’s the old ad model — Free television programming in exchange for 12 minutes of commercials an hour. Facebook is trying to make it more relevant messaging with some success, but nothing earth-shattering yet.

Still, some people just don’t want ads. Maybe enough will that a subscription model will emerge. If not, it’s a small price to pay. But marketers will need to be prepared to communicate that to users.

What Happens Now?

Facebook is going to continue to drive revenue so the ads, sponsored stories and offers will probably continue to escalate. The more the experience becomes saturated, the more users will push back. At some point the threshold will be reached and Facebook will level it off to walk the fine line between maximizing revenue opportunities without causing user revolt.

The minute they mess that up, an opportunity exists for another social utility to become “the next Facebook.” But I don’t have much confidence that will happen.

Facebook should get better. Users should give Facebook feedback to better optimize their individual experience. Marketers should try, test and optimize to drive revenue from their Facebook presence.

As those three evolve, the Saturation may just be useful.

Why do you go to a conference? Perhaps to learn more about tactics that have worked well for others. Or to network with people in your field. Often, it’s to educate yourself on cutting edge techniques or tools.

But can a conference help you become more innovative? Can a conference help you think beyond the scope of best practices and industry trends? Is it possible to return from a conference inspired and equipped to do the creative work that will help you reinvent your business?

Last year,  C2-MTL, which stands for Creativity &  Commerce (the MTL announced the City of Montreal, which is integral to the event) was an experience that took the challenge.

I’ve been to a lot of conferences because in digital marketing the landscape changes daily and you can’t stay current sitting at your desk. Most of these conferences cover topics like  “25 things you can do to increase your conversion rate” or “how to have a human voice in social media.”  The presentations can be anything bullet-pointed PowerPoints and pep-talks to panels of people discussing a topic. At the breaks the attendees walk the exhibit hall of vendors giving pens or notebooks with their business name imprinted on them.

But people don’t stay in business by being more competent or by simply keeping up. Because of the rapid pace of change we need to constantly reinvent ourselves.

Trying to help people be more creative in business is a rather audacious goal.  To be successful, this conference had to reinvent the idea of the conference itself.

Here are some of the ways they did it:

The venue wasn’t an airless, generic, massive conference center but a revitalized 19^th century building with character and unexpected architectural features that were put to use to serve interactive art exhibits; casual, comfortably furnished meeting spaces that included sofas, chair groupings, and even a two person swing; play spaces where people could play with Legos or work on other projects at a community table and open air spaces set up like an outdoor poolside lounge with a food bar.  There are collaborative workshops and meet-ups and personal guides for attendees, known as concierges.

The schedule didn’t include just individual speakers and panels.  There were conversations,  interviews, theatrical presentations, and visual storytelling.  One of the presentations by architect Winy Maas was something I could not even characterize.  Repeating the line “what’s next?” throughout a slideshow of mind-bending architectural photos and renderings, he offered a series of images of extraordinarily bold and unconventional buildings that took the audience on a visual and mental adventure.  I’m still not sure exactly what I was seeing but by the end, I think most people who saw the presentation thought, “what’s next –what’s possible—is almost anything at all.”

The speakers didn’t fit into any one category of business or area of business.  This wasn’t a conference targeted to marketing people or designers or entrepreneurs but to everyone who wanted to expand their minds to take in new possibilities for the purpose of expanding their business. Speakers for 2013 include Sir Richard Branson, Philippe Starck, architect, inventor and designer; Elle MacPherson, the model who hosts America’s Next Top Model and who started her own line of lingerie, Fred Dust, IDEO partner, and John Mackey, co-founder and CEO of Whole Foods. The only way to classify the speakers is with the word “eclectic.”

The attendees were as eclectic as the speakers. Coming from all over the world they could not be characterized by their job description or appearance.  Last year I met a neuroscientist, a person whose agency branded a country (Israel) and a woman whose job was to take care of the needs of the performers at Cirque du Soleil, in addition to several of the people who were named the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company.

Listening to people tell the stories of the work they do was part of the extraordinary experience of C2-MTL and contributed to the experience of opening up my mind to possibilities.

I was thrilled to be chosen as an ambassador for the 2013 conference after enthusiastically sharing my experience of the 2012 conference on this blog and on my own blog. As full disclosure, I was offered a ticket to the conference this May and an additional free pass for every 5 people who use the code.  But I’d be talking about the C2-MTL no matter what, because I believe there is nothing more important and nothing that makes work more enjoyable than being creative in business.

If you are interested in attending C2-MTL in May, please email me (Ilana221 (at) Gmail.com) or let me know in the comments and I’ll forward a code for a 10% discount.

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For some of us the words “online marketer” makes us want to throw up in our mouth a little. Why? Because most people think of online marketers as those people who trick you into giving them your email address so they can spam you with crappy offers for things you don’t want. I’ve certainly run into my share of these. But here’s the reality. Love ‘Em or Hate ‘Em, we all have something to learn from online marketers.

Internet Marketers are Master Email List Builders

Online marketers know most people don’t buy on their first visit to the website. So what do they do? They give you an amazing piece of content you really want in exchange for your email address. In fact, the best internet marketers don’t even try to sell you on their primary website pages. They work really hard to capture your email address because the goal is to build a marketable database that can be leveraged to drive revenue.

This topic is top of mind because I recently had an experience with an internet marketer through my son who wanted to learn how to master talking to girls. I know you’re probably giggling a little, but he’s a little shy and he wanted to build his confidence. I’m all about building my son’s confidence so I agreed. What I didn’t expect was how impressed I would be by the marketing that followed. What I saw quickly became one of my personal favorite examples of solid list building and follow up marketing. To illustrate, I’ll share the site my son found, Double Your Dating, run by David Deangelo aka Eben Pagen. Now, I’m not sure why Eben chose to use an alias for himself on this website, maybe it’s because he didn’t want the girls he was attracting to know he sold tips for others to do the same, maybe it’s because he didn’t want his friends and family to find out, or maybe it’s because he’s a scam artist. I don’t know. But what I do know is Eben is a smart marketer. And business marketers can learn a lot from this approach to selling online.

Take a look at his home page below.  What do you see? A HUGE arrow that you can’t ignore pointing to his opt-in box.

What does your opt-in box look like? How noticeable is it? Does it say “sign up for our newsletter” with a form? 

 Here’s a tip. Signing up for a newsletter is a huge red flag that says, “SIGN UP AND LET ME SPAM YOU WITH STUFF YOU DON’T CARE ABOUT.” People don’t sign up for “newsletters” anymore, especially business newsletters, so you are going to have to get more creative if you want to build your email database.

Internet Marketers Understand the Power of FREE Content

offer the visitor something free in exchange for an email address

Eben uses several interesting content offers in exchange for your email address. My personal favorite is “an easy, effective way to tell if she’s ready to be kissed so you won’t get rejected.” Seriously, you know you want to go and put in your email address just to find out what he recommended. As a woman I can say it was brilliant, by the way! He also offers an exclusive report, scripts and a ton of stuff for someone who really wants to figure out how to attract women. And all of it is free. This page is designed to trigger on the emotional needs for the product the website sells. It doesn’t mention that he’s selling a product; rather it offers the visitor something free in exchange for an email address. And here’s some inside information. The stuff he offers here isn’t good, it’s AMAZING! My son poured over every piece and even brought them to the dinner table to ask me if I thought they were good recommendations. Guess what, they weren’t just good tips, they were brilliant tips that would actually work and help my son build his confidence without risking rejection.

Do you offer content in exchange for an email sign up? If you had to rate your content on a scale from 1 (crap) to 10 (Holy Sh!t That’s Amazing), where would it fall?

Internet Marketers Understand the Power of Trust

The other thing I want to highlight is the video Eben recorded for this page. Clearly, he knew he needed to build trust and credibility with his potential buyers and he knew video was the way to do it. You can see his confident but not cocky demeanor; hear why he created the program and what the result was for him. And honestly, he does it all without ever making it sound like a sales pitch. It’s brilliant. Now, he also understands things like production value and lighting so it looks professional. After all, at the end of all of this, he does have something to sell, if you’re interested. I would embed the video here for you, but the only place you can get it is on his website.  But feel free to check it out here.

Would you trust your company after watching the videos on your website? How are you building trust?

Internet Marketers Understand the Power of Passive Income

Internet Marketers do significant testing before they build their products so they don’t waste time

The beauty of the entire Double Your Dating series is that it is a product Eben developed years ago. And it continues to earn money today with little to no effort from Eben. In fact, he’s on to new things and has launched several other products since this one. The goal was to put forth a lot of effort in the beginning to build something great and then to let it continue to sell itself.

Now one of the secrets is that Internet Marketers do significant testing before they build their products so they don’t waste time. They test whether or not the market wants them, how much they will pay for them and even test each product before they sell it. It’s not easy, but as you can see it’s the gift that keeps giving.

Does your business have an offering that generates passive income for the company? Is there a new online product that could be developed to start one? Is there value in making money when you sleep? Heck yeah!

Internet Marketers Understand the Power of Affiliate Marketing

The beauty of products that are complete is that the cost to create them is a sunk cost. The value in selling them through third parties and paying a hefty commission for those sales is extremely high. Most Internet Marketers I’ve seen spend a lot of time recruiting affiliates to help sell their products. They pay them really well to make it worth their time. They provide them with all of the tools they need to sell them. And they rely on affiliates with large email lists, not heavy web traffic. Why? Because email is where the magic happens.

Does your company use affiliates to sell their products? Would an affiliate network attract a valuable market your company wouldn’t otherwise reach? Would affiliates help get a new product to market faster?

Internet Marketers Use Email Marketing to Convert Sales

At the end of the day, it is the automated email campaigns on the back of this that walk the buyer through the emotional triggers, objections and increasing offers that lead to a sale. The email campaigns are smart. They offer you a ton of information. Each email is valuable (if you really are interested in the product they offer) and ultimately you can choose to keep getting the free advice or you can buy the product and take it a level further. Plus, if you don’t buy their product, internet marketers offer you other types of products you could be interested in through companies that they are affiliate marketers for. This is where Internet Marketers get a bad rap.

Here’s the big difference in what they do versus what companies do. They don’t use heavy HTML design and many don’t use any. They use an email that actually contains an “email” that is written like a human on the other end wrote it. It contains links to resources, which I’m sure are all tracked making it technically an “HTML” email, but there aren’t crappy graphics all over the place. It is personable communication that draws you into the story the email is telling.

Other marketers feel this is spamming their audience, tricking them, and that it isn’t an authentic way to market.

But I’ll say this. When my son signed up for the tips from Double Your Dating, I had no doubt we would receive offers to buy the other products. But my son and I enjoyed the free tips so it was worth it. At some point, we were convinced that this was something we wanted and we did buy it. I didn’t feel like I was tricked. I knew what I was getting into, maybe it’s because I’m a marketer. But, hey, anyone who doesn’t like it can unsubscribe and never think about it again.

What do your emails look like? Is HTML causing your audience to categorize your emails as spam? Are you continuing the story in email or are you over-selling, over-offering, over-discounting?

So at the end of the day, like ‘em or hate ‘em, I think we all have a thing or two to learn from internet marketers. And you probably don’t even realize how many you are already following. I know we are evaluating Social Media Explorer to see how we can take some of these lessons to heart.

What do you think? Are Internet Marketers smart or evil? Would any of the lessons help your business? Leave a comment and join the discussion.

Want to see some internet marketers in action? Check out Jeff Walker, Frank Kern, Amy Porterfield, Mari Smith and Social Media Examiner. All of these may sell different things, but they are all smart internet marketers.

The sales funnel has been around for as long as any of us have been in business. It is a tool that has been used to visualize everything from the sales process to marketing impact on an organization. I’m a big fan of the sales funnel. It is one of the primary visuals I’ve used to help executives understand where social media and digital marketing fit into the context of business. But the truth is, the traditional sales funnel model has been dead for years; we just haven’t come to accept it yet. So why do I still use it? Because people understand it. I know it isn’t perfect, but I look for the opportunity to create progress while we work on optimizing for perfection.

Buying patterns have changed drastically in the last decade. They’ve changed so much that they have truly broken the sales funnel as we know it. Old habits die hard, so the big question is whether or not a sales funnel is still a viable model for sales concepts. Here are the biggest challenges I see with the sales funnel in today’s buying environment.

Buyers Don’t Follow a Linear Path

The sales funnel relies on the theory that someone comes into the top of the funnel and sales fall out the bottom. But is that true in today’s world? Do we start at the top and make our way through to the end? Or do we start at the top, leave, jump levels, come back, leave again, come back at the beginning and at some point come back and buy? Are we following a linear purchase pattern or an erratic path of engagement that sometimes results in a purchase?

I think the assumption that any large percentage of buyers follow a pre-determined path to a sale online is incorrect. One of my favorite exercises is to attempt to model the path to conversion. If you look at the path to conversion, this becomes abundantly clear.

We assume you come to our website from somewhere, for illustration purposes let’s assume you came to the website from a link to a blog post that was posted in a tweet. You come to the site and you read a blog post. Do you buy? No, probably not. Then perhaps, you do a Google search and find an article on our site. You come to our site through organic search, you read the article. Do you buy? No, probably not. Several months go by. You don’t visit our site at all. But then you see a link shared on Facebook to one of our products. Back on our site, you read about the product. You notice a new e-book we are promoting, your interest is peaked. You fill out the form to get our e-book. You leave. This process alone could go on for months. You could click on multiple links in tweets, you could visit from content shared on Facebook, you could find us through organic search, and not to forget you could find us through any other marketing channel. And you could never buy a thing.

Have you entered the sales funnel? Should we be tracking when you buy? If we argue that yes, any website visitor is a potential sale and we should be including you in the funnel, then at a minimum your experience in the funnel is like a 7 year old boy enticed into a pool surrounded by water slides. You’re just in the water long enough to get wet, but then you are on to the next adventure. It’s an experience of diving in, sliding in, jumping in but never staying long enough to enjoy the water. Does that make you a swimmer? It’s a question we need to seriously consider. At what point do you really enter the “sales funnel” and do you ever “enter” at all.

Distraction is the Number 1 Barrier to Sale

Distraction is destroying the sales funnel.

It’s clear that buyer behavior is erratic, but we are also finicky. Distraction may very well be the number one barrier to a sale. We get distracted and abandon our cart. We stop reading the article that brought us to you. Simply put, any little distraction means we move on to something else and we may never come back. We are also finicky buyers, what we think one day may be dramatically changed by another piece of content that contradicts our previous opinion.

We still make purchases and purchase inquiries on a whim. Something interests us and we say yes, we are interested in that. But if we can’t get the information we are looking for immediately, we are off to something else and may never come back, or it could take us weeks to come back. We are a culture of immediate gratification. How does that impact your sales funnel? If you provide all of the information needed to make a purchase, it could mean you can sell faster. If you haven’t provided enough information, it could mean you lose opportunities every day and chalk them up to casual website visitors.

We are also lazy consumers. If a purchase requires effort, we are likely to put it off until we have “time.” When we finally set aside the time, we will also take the time to do more research, look at reviews, look for other opinions and guess what. We may get distracted during that process and you may lose us.

Tracking is Flawed at Best

What’s worse? It is extremely difficult to track the true path to sale when there are only online components. Throw in offline components and you’re toast. If you rely on Google Analytics you are suffering from Last Touch Attribution Syndrome. There are a few other tools that will give you First Touch Attribution Syndrome and a couple that get into First and Last Touch Attribution Disease. Basically this means with most tools you are seeing the first campaign, the last campaign or the first and last campaign the buyer touched, but you aren’t seeing anything in between.

And here’s a real doozy. Most marketers aren’t using campaign tracking for the majority of the content marketing efforts they are using. Because it’s not a “spring” campaign, it’s a blog post. So poof. There goes any tracking.

Why are we not fighting to understand full campaign history? If we truly want to understand this erratic ride our buyers are taking us on we should be demanding that tools start to keep track of EVERY touch point, at least online. The best we can do at this point is to layer on a marketing automation tool. This is the best way to know everything someone touches on our website over time. It still isn’t perfect but it gets us closer. Progress before perfection should be your new motto. Start getting better data with what you have now, but we should always be working towards perfection.

Reporting is Abysmal

And it keeps getting worse, say you have added on a marketing automation tool and you can see every touch point. Can you aggregate data to see what the optimal path to conversion really is? Can you do predictive modeling so you know based upon historical data whether the combination of marketing channels you are using in your existing campaign will produce the results you want? Do you know if there is a combination of touch points that lead to the highest conversion rates and sales so you can start to optimize future results?

No. Reporting for online and offline is still in its infancy. We are still trying to separate marketing from sales and reporting has yet to be unified. We have disparate tools from web analytics to marketing automation to CRM. And very few companies have taken the time to connect them together. For those that have, many are suffering from Out of the Box Reporting Disorder. The problem is that there isn’t enough focus on understanding the real data so we can start to create a new model for understanding our buyer’s habits. And the companies who provide the out of the box reporting are focused on the “easy” data without taking the time to understand the data that would be transformational for a business. It’s funny honestly, because the company who does will have a huge differentiator, but it requires a lot of work and therefore it’s one of those things that never makes it into reality.

Should the Sales Funnel Be Transformed to a Neural Network?

Does the sales funnel method of visualization still apply? I would argue that the model for visualization is still a valid model for illustration purposes because it is one that is widely understood. At the end of the day there are “core” points in every sales process that most buyers go through. They may fall in and out of the funnel at various stages, but we still can focus our efforts on optimizing the path from one stage to the next, understanding we are simply modeling a process not the reality of the buyer’s progress.

But I think a new model is needed and it doesn’t look like a funnel. Rather it looks like an illustration of the interworking of a neural network. A neural network is a connection of neurons or nerve cells that work together to form the nervous system. Put very simply, neurons are what allow humans to process information, and react to the information through chemical, physical and emotional means. Admittedly, I have a very elementary understanding of the interworking of the human brain and neural networks. However, when I look at the visualization of these systems it seems like a more realistic model of purchase behaviors. Each lighted area in a neural network is an opportunity to educate a buyer and each cell body (large areas with multiple threads (axons) branching off) could illustrate where a conversion happens. This could illustrate where we are leading the buyer and the various paths a buyer could take to get there. It shows that the path to purchase is no longer linear; it is a network of touch points, decision points, and opportunities that are either taken or declined by the buyer. If we could track this it seems reasonable to assume that certain paths and certain conversions would glow brighter as they are working more effectively than others.  It could also show the black hole where potential buyers go and never return. Could we then optimize our efforts to put others down that path over less effective paths? Honestly, I don’t know. But I will tell you, if I can figure out how to model this with real data in a way that can be analyzed I’ll be the first to try. For now, I’ll continue to use a model that people recognize understanding the flaws it holds, while I try to build a new model for the future.  Until then…

What do you think? Is the sales funnel dead or alive and well? What should the model of the future look like? Is our focus on the sales funnel preventing innovation? Leave a comment and join the debate over the death of the sales funnel as we know it.

There are two sides to good digital marketing execution, whether it’s email, website, mobile, social or even customer service. One side is the technology. Without good technology, you’re crippled in today’s marketing environment. You need a fast and responsive website. You need software to help you manage social networks. You need versatile email software that perhaps even serves as a customer relationship management portal. Technology is critical. But it’s only half of the prerequisite for digital marketing success.

The other half is humanity, or perhaps better put, human-ness. The technology only gets you down the field a bit. Humanity takes you across the respective goal line.

An example: Two weeks ago I booked a flight via Priceline.com. I thought nothing about it for a few days, then couldn’t remember if I had or not. My inbox showed no Priceline confirmation, so I decided I’d not booked the ticket yet. (I’m absent-minded on the non-imperative details of things sometimes.) So I booked the flight again, only this time I received a confirmation.

But about an hour later I got a phone call from a number I didn’t recognize. I answered to a customer service representative for Priceline informing me that I’d double-booked that flight. They were going to hold the reservation from earlier since it was cheaper and credit my account back for the over-booking. Delighted, I asked why I didn’t receive a notification on the first one and it turns out I’d input my email address incorrectly. But since the charge was made on the same name and credit card number, their system caught it and they could prevent my mistake from being costly.

Two things happened here, both equally as important in delivering an outstanding digital marketing experience. First, Priceline has their system set up to throw up a red flag when someone of the same name, account, email address or credit card number books the same flight, or even a flight on the same day from the same city. The technology gets them down the field and in position to score a touchdown with the customer.

But the second piece of the equation — the humanity — punches the ball into the end zone. The customer service representative proactively takes that information and does something with it. In this case, they called the customer and explained their system noticed a mistake and they want to fix it.

Without the technology, I’d have been double booked and charged an extra $300 or so for the mistake. Without the humanity, I’d have never known, nor would I have an awesome experience to talk about surrounding the brand.

Don’t let your technology babysit your customers by itself. Make certain you are adding in the human-ness it takes to make the advantages of the technology ultimately relevant to your audience.

Had a similar story where technology plus humanity has delivered an outstanding experience? Tell us about it in the comments.

The CMO of a large retail brand stood on stage recently, proudly showing off a fan acquisition campaign that had successfully driven tens of thousands more “Likes” on Facebook. A hand went up in the audience. “Those ‘Likes’ are impressive, but how many of your products did you sell as a result?”

The CMO shrugged and said, “Well, that really wasn’t the point of the campaign. It was about acquisition.”

It’s a good thing that CMO was talking to an audience of marketers and not his or her board of directors. If they had been, that would have likely been the last words he or she uttered as CMO of that particular company.

Unfortunately, many marketers hear the word “acquisition,” and have a Pavlovian reaction, assuming as long as they do more of it, everything will be copacetic. Certainly, “acquisition,” was the point of the exercise, but it was fan acquisition, not customer acquisition at play.

These are two very different concepts.

Fan acquisition means doing something to get the attention of users on a social network so they will opt in to your messaging. Customer acquisition is doing something to convince a person to purchase something.

You can’t make payroll with more fans.

The big difference? You can’t make payroll with more fans.

Certainly, more fans gives you a better opportunity to convert them to customers. But far too many marketers see acquiring a fan as acquiring a customer and are losing in the end as a result.

I sat through two Boards of Director’s meetings recently. One for the company I work for. The other for an organization on whose board I sit. The metrics that are discussed the most at the board meetings I have exposure to include:

• Top-line revenue
• Bottom-line revenue
• Cost-per-acquisition
• Year-over-year growth
• Revenue projections
• Cost-per-unit-sold
• Customer lifetime value

The metrics that are not discussed:

• Number of fans
• Number of followers
• Number of likes
• Number of comments
• Number of shares

The marketers of today will not be the marketers of tomorrow until they understand which metrics matter to their organization’s ultimate decision-makers. Even if the decision-makers don’t yet know it, they want the former metrics, not the latter.

Connect those dots and you’ll keep your job. Don’t and good luck finding a new one.

Marketing is becoming a very different business. I’m not talking about the new tools and platforms. I’m talking about how marketers themselves have to change the way they think about the people they reach.  That change is going to be counterintuitive and uncomfortable for business people. It requires that we look at the ultimate goal as the relationship.

Now, I can hear you saying “we’re in business to make a profit.  That has to be our goal.” And I promise you, behaving in a more human way won’t hurt you there.

Think about how people choose us.  Think about what it takes for them to decide we are worth spending time with; talking to; listening to and sharing with their friends.  It’s true in your personal life and in business as well.  Did you learn how to do that in B school?  I didn’t.  But that’s what marketers need to practice today.

The relationship is an end in itself

When my marketing team meets to discuss our plans each week, we focus on how to surprise and delight people.  We brainstorm ways to inspire them or teach them something we think they’d like to learn.  Because we’re in business, we constantly look at the feedback we’re getting to make sure we’re resonating.  The goal; however, is engagement first and foremost. We nourish the relationships as an end into itself.

But even if you know that relationships are important, you may be doing them with an old marketer’s mindset.   The old world marketer’s goal is to engage in order to manipulate with only their key performance indicators in mind.

Transparency isn’t about what you choose to share

we are transparent whether we like it or not

We all talk about transparency in social media. What we sometimes forget is that with all the online communication on Facebook, blog comments, and Twitter, we are transparent whether we like it or not. People can see who we are. It’s not just what you do, but why you do it that becomes apparent. And, that’s why motives matter.

Think about your closest friends and loved ones.  You work hard to maintain the relationships because you value them.  Unless you are a social climber, or person “on the make” you don’t look at people as targets or opportunities to improve your situation.  In our personal lives we can sniff out a manipulator.  What makes you think that people in business aren’t capable of doing that as well?

There are two kinds of relationships in business and in life

It’s a radical idea to view business relationships in the same way–so much so that many will roll their eyes at the idea.  Engage with people online with the motive that you truly care about them? Little bit crazy for a business person.  But if you’re ready to shift your attitude toward healthy-relationship marketing, here’s a reminder of what the two kinds of relationships look like:

Healthy relationships

• You give without a specific expectation of quid pro quo. You do it for the relationship first.
• You genuinely care about the person
• You don’t abuse the relationship by behaving in a way that could be detrimental to the other person just to satisfy your own needs.

Manipulative relationships

• Your sole motivation for acting friendly or generous is to benefit from the relationship
• Your only desire in understanding the other person is to further your ability to control their behavior
• You judge your success only on short term results and eliminate marketing that results in engagement without conversion.

Are you ready to think about online relationships in social media, email marketing and e-commerce the same way you think about your healthy personal relationships? The comments are yours…

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Chief Marketing Officers can’t rub out CEOs. It’s not fair because the CEO can surely deep-six the CMO. And if you’re a marketing exec intending to remain employed, you probably shouldn’t go on the record saying you don’t trust the CEO. However, CEOs can mistrust CMOs all they like. And they do.

In fact, according to a recent report by Fournaise Marketing Group, 70% of the 1,200 CEOs interviewed in their study don’t trust marketers’ abilities to deliver growth. A majority state marketing professionals are unable to prove ROI on campaigns. Ouch.

A little more fuel for the fire.

The report also says:

• Many CEOs have marketing departments purely out of tradition.
• CEOs feel marketers “live too much in the brand, creative and social media bubble.”
• Marketers lack credibility.

Jerome Fontaine, chief tracker of the study concluded, “Marketers have to stop whining about being misunderstood by CEOs and have to start remembering that their job is to generate customer demand and to deliver performance. This is business.”

Apparently whining isn’t the answer.

Tradition? Bubbles? No cred? Them are fighting words.

Are you riled up at all? I am—and I never have or ever will be a CMO. But CMOs are my clients. Some of them have credibility, I think. Well, anyway, in my job description there’s this clause in the fine print that reads…

Make the marketing people look good.

So I say we don’t take this abuse lying down. You with me?

I say we play offense—aggressive offense. We pay supremely close attention to the details, focus on online marketing because it’s inherently measurable, and bury these whip-snapping, credibility-attacking, ROI-rapping CEOs in incontrovertible evidence proving us marketing pros aren’t just messing around with bubbles (whatever that means).

We need a plan.

For a starting point, I have just the thing, an eBook. It’s called, “The Plan to Grow Your Business with Effective Online Marketing.” Convenient, eh?

I’m not going to get into each of the 16 tactics in the eBook, but will try to list and explain several of the steps you need to take.

First and foremost: think inbound.

It’s time to seriously re-evaluate all or most of the “push” or “outbound” marketing we used growing up in an era of mass media domination. The costs are high. The risks are high. And not only is the ROI that seems to dictate our fate forever shrinking, accurately measuring it was never entirely feasible in the first place.

It’s time to do a marketing 180. The strategy is to “pull” people to your website, win their trust and guide them through the buying process. “lnbound marketing” is the name of this game.

Clearly define the objectives.

Begin with the end in mind. Precisely, what will be deemed “ROI?” It may be sales dollars over dollars invested. If so, you need to agree on everything that does or does not go into the calculation.

Of course, a great variety of objectives might be valid—website traffic, leads, subscriptions, reservations, various metrics, and so on. The point is this lack of credibility thing doesn’t sit well. Marketing programs and the professionals that run them should have objectives. Let no man or woman claim the marketing clowns aren’t getting the job done unless it’s crystal clear what “the job” is.

Get on the same page.

This is tricky territory, this online world we’re marketing in. Of course, you need to keep up with search, social, analytics, and all kinds of new services, strategies, tactics, tools and technology.

But it’s not just you that needs schooling. If you’re going to live in peace and harmony with your staff, peers, other departments, other chiefs, and above all, the chief of chiefs, you need to do some schooling. You’ll have some tough calls to make regarding who needs to know what. When the time comes for talking turkey, whether you hit or miss your numbers, everyone at the table needs to be speaking the same language.

Chief Executive optimization.

It may be your marketing department, but it’s also the company’s marketing department. This plays downstream and upstream. It’s not only unfair for the CEO to check out of all things online, it’s dangerous. Ideally, through some reasonable combination of strategy planning, content marketing, authority building, customer and media relations, the boss should play a meaningful part. For more on this, read this insightful article from marketing expert Heidi Cohen.

Build community.

For number crunchers, it may be a bit less than lucid, but the social media strategy you pursue must focus on building a community. Your reach and influence will ultimately factor large in your ROI.

Grow a pair.

You’ve heard it before, but it bears repeating because when committees make the marketing calls, companies tend to aim down the middle and incite next to no one. If you’re going to be held accountable for ROI, you need to target, take a stand, project a personality, march forth fearlessly and fight for the big ideas.

Embrace analytics.

Social Media Explorer’s CEO Nichole Kelly literally wrote the book, “How to Measure Social Media.” Dig in. Understand the guidelines for assessing ROI in the new media space and apply them rigorously. The practice extends beyond adopting new tools.

True ROI isn’t strictly new business. It’s the result of some combination of reputation management, brand awareness, lead generation, customer retention, and increasing revenues from existing customers. Sure, marketing needs to embrace metrics, but the company at large needs to opt-into a culture of perpetual measurement and continuous improvement.

Finally, put in for a raise.

Perhaps you can cool your new compensation requirements for some reasonable period of time while the plan kicks into high productivity. But why not be optimistic? With new ROI initiatives, you’re not only stepping up to new demands, you’re demanding marketing steps up to drive sales.

It’s execution time.

The Marketing Week article I read, “70% of CEOs Have Lost Trust in Marketers,” generated a lot of reader commentary. Very few put up their guard or reacted defensively. Interestingly, most commenters claimed to not be surprised by the figures and findings. Several responded by saying it is indeed time to execute marketing programs that unquestionably boost the bottom line.

Go get ‘em, killer.