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Do you know the “prescription” for effectiveness?

Here’s a “secret” in business….

If you’re hitting the goals, clients rarely want to dig deep into the details.

But if you’re not, they will ask questions.

Just because we can get super finely detailed in digital marketing doesn’t mean we should. Prior to surgery, do you really want to know the fine details of the procedure?

It shouldn’t matter if it works, right?

Our friend Rich Castellano is a plastic surgeon and author of The Smile Prescription. We asked him for his thoughts:

“My highest recommendation for personal efficiency in relationships is relentlessly pursue what will make the other party ‘smile’ more.

If you get the job done, why would clients need to know the details?

In a business relationship, you approach a business transaction with a pain point: low yield on Facebook, unable to monetize on social, or in my case, people want to look and feel their best.

When clients walk out of our offices with a BIG SMILE on their face, we know that we did our job. If we are unable to make them smile, then we still have more work to do.

Effectiveness is all about the end result – creating the BEST customer service experience by analyzing and quantifying what makes your client smile more! When you are better at this than your competitors, your business will rise to the top.”

See the point?

Client gratification and project success is measured by the ends, not the means. The “prescription” for effectiveness is empathy.

Identify what’s preventing the client from smiling– then optimize to smiles.

Clients rarely need to know the nitty-gritty if your decision making is effective and you’re efficient too.

But consider the difference between effectiveness vs. efficiency.

If efficiency is the speed of an airplane, effectiveness is its direction– it’s only a matter of degrees between having a successful flight and going off course and crashing.

This is why effectiveness is the prerequisite. While you don’t want to inundate your clients with too much information (dense, frequent updates), it’s important not to go silent either.

We’ve learned there are two instances where clients will ask questions:

If their stats are tanking.
If we’ve gone too long without providing them with updates.

The best way to avoid both of these is by using the 9 triangles pairing of MAA/CID:

Even though internet marketing may appear mechanical, your judgment call is important and overrides robotic precision. What do you think is most important in terms of performance and optimization actions to take next?

Do you have any other business “secrets” to be more effective? Let me know in the comments below.

The Bounce Technique – Persuasion And Relating To Your Audience

By Ben Dahl Leave a Comment

Using “I” can be okay in writing if you use it the write way. Don’t beat your chest with a “me, me, me” attitude. Instead, balance the use of “I” and “you” to create empathy with your audience and create persuasive content.

[Read more…]

3 Nightmare Clients to Avoid

By Dennis Yu 2 Comments

This morning, a digital marketer at a company I won’t name pinged me on FB messenger for “just a minute” to help him with something. It was the 3rd time I’ve dropped what I was doing to help him.

I finally replied, “You know I do this for a living, right?”, and he was taken aback and slightly shameful that he got caught. He had no intention of hiring us– getting as far as he could until asked to pay.

He’s not a bad person, and you (an expert in your field) are not bad for valuing your time.

It’s just that things get tricky before money changes hands.

The client wants to know you’re capable of helping, easy to work with, and affordable. There’s often multiple hoops to jump through with decision makers– other stakeholders have to say yes for a deal to happen.

Maybe the potential client is interested in hiring you, but their expectations of what’s possible, given their content, resources, competition, timeframe, and budget are unreasonable.

Infusionsoft expert Paul Sokol said this about setting the right expectations with clients:

Paul Sokol

“The behavior and way prospects or clients interact with you is 100% based on how YOU have trained them to engage with you and your business. When you create clear boundaries about the relationship (what channels you use, when you respond to emails, when you take calls, billing policies, etc.) it’s much easier to stick to your guns when people try to push the envelope.”

Perhaps they believe all is fair in love and war– that as long as you don’t have a written and signed contract, teasing you for free consultation will fly.

Qualifying clients is the antidote to this problem.

Stop wasting time talking to unqualified prospects who only dangle the carrot in front of you to lead you along.

Our Director of Operations, Logan Young, is an expert at qualifying leads and when asked about his method for inbounding and on-boarding, he shared this analogy:

Logan Young

“If you’ve ever played poker with a novice player, you know they’re not hard to spot. Rather than waiting for the right hands to bet on, they match every ‘raise’ that comes their way – viewing it as a chance to win more chips.

After a few hands, their night is over.

On-boarding clients operates under this principle. If you have no filter – no spine to say “no” to the unqualified – you’ll attract all the wrong clients.

Don’t de-value your company by setting the entry bar too low. We all have to ‘fold’ sometimes…we all have to say ‘no’.”

Here’s a few of my past mistakes, so you can see what happens when you ignore these rules:

“Anne”

“Anne” was a big time marketing executive, priding herself on hiring the best and having New York-sized budgets with top ad agencies. She invited her team to our workshop and loved it so much that we spent an hour after the session to give private consultation at no charge.

Anne said that she wanted to work with us and understood what it cost to hire top talent. We gave her an on-site meeting at our expense to flesh it out, including 10 hours of prep work to determine an SEO strategy and how to rebuild their site. We got them going on Google Grants – $10,000 a month of free AdWords – something one of their marketing people argued wasn’t possible, but actually was.

We fielded a few dozen requests from her team over a couple months, including a 2 am international call, where she said to just bill her, whatever the cost.

To be nice, since they had a good cause, we billed only $500 for all the work we had done until that point, after which she replied that she was a non-profit and couldn’t afford it.

Though we had a verbal agreement, her view was that she never signed a contract, so we couldn’t bill for any of what we’d done. I told her to consider the work a donation to her organization.

Lesson: be clear and upfront about your pricing and get a token commitment to show they are serious. We charge $750 for a consultation,. Usually these clients are bleeding somewhere, so we diagnose and recommend strategies that not only solve these issues, but increase ROI, which more than pays for the initial investment. If they can’t or won’t do that, you have a red flag. It means they don’t value your time or don’t have the budget to pay for you.

The consultation will include team members running through the Client’s Strategy Assessment, getting access to their accounts, performing quick analysis, talking on the phone with them for an hour, and even key points and a summary afterwards. Take a look at this article to see what makes consultations high in value.

“John”

“John” is a self-proclaimed serial entrepreneur and semi-famous in the self-help space. He’s got multiple books out on how to be successful and wealthy.

We fielded several calls from him and his CTO, after confirming he had the budget and was willing to pay our base $20,000 fee. In fact, the fee wasn’t an issue since he had spent millions as an entrepreneur and investor.

We brought our top optimizers to help, sharing our expertise and internal optimization documents. Later, the CTO claimed we didn’t do anything he didn’t already know. A few other digital marketing experts I respect had similar experiences with him- where he asked lots of questions, just wanting to get free consulting under the guise that he was just testing their knowledge.

John didn’t want himself or his CTO to get outed, since it runs counter to the image he is trying to portray.

Lesson: people will dangle money in front of you that might not be real. Qualify leads with inbound marketing and make clear your packages in advance.

The common mistake here is assuming people who say they want to do business will actually pay. Multiple meetings can be a sign of interest, but not a willingness to pay an invoice unless you respect your time up front.

I’m not saying avoid follow-up on inbound requests or force everyone to shell out $20,000 before you even respond to them.

–Kyler Patterson Marketing Manager HostGator

“My tip is to not provide a potential client with too many details in your proposal. If you give them all the information they need, then they won’t require your services. I unfortunately found this out the hard way when I first started accepting clients. Demonstrate your knowledge, but don’t give away all of your secrets to win the account.”

Key lessons

Don’t let any random person be able to book time on your calendar or offer free consultations to people who don’t fill out at least an intake form. Do you see the top neurosurgeons out canvassing people at the mall, like the Asian places with teriyaki chicken samples on toothpicks?
Assemble a few packages that describe what you do in detail. Then you don’t have to re-explain the same things over and over. Having a package doesn’t mean “cookie-cutter” any more than a Tesla or an appendix removal operation isn’t governed by expert procedures. Even a one pager will do.
Crank up your content marketing efforts so that all your leads are inbound. In other words, you talk to only folks who come to you. If you have to call them, then the burden is on you to prove expertise. Whereas when they come to you, which is 100% of our business, you know your referral machine is working.
Create a screening process to surface the good clients and filter out the bad ones. Nobody will check a box called “bad client”, so you have to set clear criteria by what they want, what they need to pay, what you will do, what they will do, and so forth. Don’t forget to filter for the “jerk” factor- easiest way to do that is ask them to rate their previous or current agencies. If rated poorly, that’s how they’ll likely rate you. You need only 6-7 questions in your intake form- they’re not joining eHarmony.
Have an admin run the process. They can schedule, qualify, collect payments, and share basic documents. Protect your valuable time. Have a virtual assistant do this for a few hundred dollars a month. Worth it, right? Look at how dentists use assistants, such that in your 90 minute visit, you saw the doctor for only 5 minutes of it.

In your eagerness for more clients, don’t hastily jump into every meeting request or ignore the warning signs of a freeloader or bad client. We’ve all chased that big brand that gave us their business card and got us excited.

When I bought most of the web software and services for American Airlines, I was like Anne and John– guilty of teasing vendors, since I knew the American Airlines name carried weight. The number of fancy dinners and golf outings are more than I can count.

As a public figure at Yahoo!, I learned to respect other people’s time. I wouldn’t accept a meeting unless I was genuinely interested in their product.

And likewise, instead of just ignoring messages from vendors, I replied to every single one. No sense in ghosting them– rejecting the offer via a stream of ignored communication. I would respect them by telling them up front.

But what if you’re not a pro? How do you apply these principles to your business to drive inbound leads and have potential clients respect your time?

Easy. Partner with someone who does have the experience so you don’t ever have to cold call. You can help field leads and execute projects like a good apprentice should.

You don’t even have to work at that company. They can be your mentor— someone who believes in you enough to put their reputation on the line, in exchange for your hard work and eagerness to follow directions.

So rather than look at the lead generation game as a matter of trying to close everything that comes through, which is the scarcity model, flip your mindset. Think of this as you wanting to focus on your best clients, which means saying no to as many bad or maybe deals as you can.

Fire your worst clients.

It’s not that you want to turn every potential maybe into a yes. Rather, make every yes much bigger and be okay with not needing to explore every single lead.

And that is how you protect the value of your time. Spend it with those who already respect it and pay you well. Those who treat you poorly are usually the ones who pay the least and expect the most. You know it’s true, so don’t let fear of missing out (FOMO) cause you to make the mistakes I’ve made.

You want to DISQUALIFY as many people as possible, as counter-intuitive as that sounds– by clearly publishing what you do and what you don’t do. And if your marketing materials represent that you’re the cheapest game in town, do you wonder why you probably not only get horrible leads, but not many either?

–Gavin Bell, Founder, Blue Cliff Media

“Once you realize people are willing to pay for your time, you’ll wonder why you ever gave away free consulting. Some people won’t be able to afford your rates, but that’s fine. Focus on the people that can. Those are the people that ultimately, will be better to work with in the long run, and the people you’ll be able to get the best results with.”

Remember that it’s an honor to talk to the doctor– pretend you’re wearing a white lab coat. You’re a professional, just like the high-end doctors that have spent years in their craft.

You’re not a used car salesman trying to make a quota at the end of the month– start acting professional!

8 Key Points Of Good Communication

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Scenario: your team is assigned an article for a client due in one week. You’re good at writing, so you knock out the writing requirements. You then send it to your editor, who knocks out the editing. Now it just needs to be beautified, so it’s off to the graphic designer.

Then it sits with them. Despite your efforts to contact them, the due date rolls around and the client fires you… all because of one person.

In a business setting, communication ties in with iteration. That’s why they’re part of the same concept. You can’t coordinate without communication. As elementary as this seems, it’s still a big reason projects drop and clients end up becoming dissatisfied.

With that in mind, here’s a simple set of strategies that may help you break down the communication barrier:

Better to get stuff out that is decent than delay and not ever post.
Put together a simple framework on how to communicate– whether it’s replying to an email, attending a meeting, writing an article, or whatever.
No fear = no procrastination.
Learn how to manage your email/schedule.
Consider the importance of iteration and how basic communication (even saying “I don’t know”) is the easiest way to avoid failure from lack of response.
Always tell others what you are doing when asked. Post your work, and pass it off if you can’t finish it.
Don’t get caught up in the details of planning so much that you fail to execute.
Do, Delegate, Delete (DDD). Either do it or pass it off, and then delete it. Don’t save it for later when you see it. This breeds procrastination, and as more things shovel in on you, it will slide further back and languish.

As elementary as these tips may seem, it’s failure to implement such practices that results in failure to succeed. In fact, because they’re so elementary, people tend to think they don’t need to put them into practice because they’re already “second-nature” to them.

That’s not the case.

–Logan Young, Vice President, Strategy BlitzMetrics

“In sports, they always preach the importance of mastering the fundamentals. Any team working
together on a project should operate by this same principle. Being a good communicator might seem simple, but I’m constantly surprised how often problems boil back down to someone’s inability to communicate effectively.”

The more people and more steps you have in a process, the greater the risk of failure. When the “weakest link” doesn’t do their part, they ruin it for the team.

Having you and your team consciously practice good communication will gradually transform your setbacks into desired results.

What To Do With Results From Split Testing

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

Rather than using blunt force to completely cut off audiences that aren’t performing as well, consider that at the right price, nearly any audience can be profitable.

That means bidding and budgeting can make “okay” audiences perform as well as any other audience, such that we allocate marginal dollars to where we get the most marginal return– a core microeconomics principle.

So lower budgets on lower performing audiences to see CPL go down. Then manual bid, if still necessary to force down the CPL. This is a more elegant approach than basically excluding an entire audience.

A great Corporate Stay in Vancouver

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

I’ve been to Vancouver half a dozen times– an easy 2 hour drive from Seattle or a short flight up from Portland, SF, or LA. My favorite experience was hiking Grouse Mountain with Brad Twohig, before he become a big-time venture capitalist and before I became 70 pounds in the obese category.

This is Canada’s San Francisco, in my opinion– clean, high tech, and very outdoorsy. There are tons of tourists (Asians, like me) and much to do downtown. When I was there a few days ago, I saw a movie and caught a bunch of Pokemon. I’m at Level 29 now.

For those trying to save money, I’d recommend you fly into Seattle and then drive or take the super scenic Amtrak up. When I bought Brad’s ticket, which was for our trip to see our buddy Markus Frind, it was under $250 round-trip from New York to Seattle, even last minute. Had I bought a ticket from New York to Vancouver it would have been almost triple that.

The folks at corporatestays.com reached out to me as an influencer, offering me a free stay at one of their locations in exchange for an honest write-up.

So I chose their downtown Vancouver location (Vancouver, BC– not Vancouver, WA), among the many they have in North America, South America, and Europe.

It was on the 20th floor, right next to the stadium and the SkyTrain—high enough that you can actually look into the stadium and see the scoreboard.

I was there on business, so there wasn’t time for going to any of the games.

But I did manage to go to a restaurant that is now my favorite one in Canada—Chambar.

Chambar

It was so good, I went there twice. Unbelievable lamb shank and desserts. And with the Canadian dollar worth only 76 cents against the US dollar— everything is on sale!

I’m a frequent business traveler, doing over 300,000 miles per year, so convenience and simple luxury is key. Being right in the middle of downtown is great.

The condo itself was what you’d expect from a 3-star hotel. Having a kitchen was nice, if you’re staying somewhere for a long time and wants some comforts of home. I was on the road for the last two weeks in San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, Miami, Salt Lake City, Phoenix, and other places.

The washer/dryer was nice—and they included the soap packets, too. Saved me the effort of going to a fluff and fold, which is what I typically do on the road. I won’t pay $100 to do laundry, normally preferring to pay $10 to drop off my luggage of clothes and pick it up 4 hours later.

The condo has some standard features like a doorman, small gym, and outdoor pool/jacuzzi. It was snowing outside, so I wasn’t “that” badly interested in going in the jacuzzi..

The whole check-in and check-out process was fast and efficient. Better than what you’d typically get through some other services.

The condo I got was well priced as well– way cheaper than a hotel. The bed was comfy, too. No pics of the bathroom, since I feel weird taking pictures there.

Surgeons don’t leave the emergency room to go out to knock on doors

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

You spend all this time talking to potential clients– they appear to have money, interest, and clear need for your services.
But somehow they don’t buy– they went with someone else, balked at the price, were just milking you for free consulting, or turned out to be jerks.

How do you avoid all this?

Know that surgeons don’t leave the emergency room to go out to knock on doors.

Imagine that you run a hospital and somebody waltzes into the emergency room.
They demand that you parade out every single type of surgeon and specialist you have.
Each one has to explain what they do and how they do it.

And all the while, you’re hoping that this patient will buy one of the procedures.
But the longer you spend answering their questions, the more you know it’s costing valuable time.

If you’re a consultant, freelancer, or agency, do you see what’s happening here?

Unless they have clear pain, don’t try to sell them on a surgery.
And unless they walk into your emergency room, don’t go out of your way to talk to them.

But what about generating leads, you say?
I can’t just sit there hoping that if I build it, they will come– we have to sell, right?

Yes, and you do that by putting out a lead magnet– a demonstration of your expertise.
And you qualify these people by using the “strategy assessment” to get their goals, content, and targeting.

In other words, if someone comes to the emergency room, the doctors aren’t going to just start operating.
No matter what the patient “thinks” the problem is, the specialists will take blood, x-rays, and diagnostics.

And you know that most patients are wrong in their self-diagnosis.
They also believe that they can get a heart surgery for the price of heartburn medication.

Same thing, right?

We follow a process called MAA— short for Metrics > Analysis > Action

As much as the would-be patient wants to get straight to action, we always follow these 3 sequential steps.

Metrics is to collect vitals via bloodwork, x-rays, and such– called the “strategy assessment” and access checklist.
That means we have not only their GCT (goals, content, targeting), but access to their analytics and ads.

Analysis is where they must pay for our time, so we can properly diagnose the issues and make a recommendation.
We don’t do this for free– our time is valuable and they must respect it by buying a “Power Hour”.

Action is the treatment plan, which could be surgery, medication, hospitalization, or other procedures.
And like any modern hospital, every procedure is governed by a checklist with the price associated with that package.

Are you operating with this efficiency– to not waste time with hypochondriacs, tire kickers, and witch doctors?

Are you making sure that you’re charging properly for your services by not giving out free consulting, even if you need the money?

But it’s XYZ MegaCorp, you say!
And all the more reason that if they’re qualified (heard of the BANT acronym?), they can put down whatever you charge for an hour.
We charge $750 for the Power Hour, but others may charge as little as $97.

For actual implementation, do you have a checklist for you and your people to follow, so you can create “repeatable excellence”?
If not, then you have random outcomes and too much manual, custom effort.

Logan Young is our Director of Operations, and stresses the importance of setting client expectations to keep things running smoothly:

“It’s essential to establish aligned expectations with a client from the get-go. If you let a client dictate the terms of your process, they will only continue to do so once you start implementing, questioning your practices and techniques at every step along the way”

But every client is different, you say!
You want room to be creative and to not be a robot cranking out objects on the assembly line.

The Tesla Model S is a template, too– and not low quality, mass production.
And every major surgical procedure has nuance, but is still governed by checklists, all the way down to how to scrub your hands before starting.
Do you think these doctors are just robots?

If you’re an agency, consultant, or freelancer, embrace the power of process.

The summary flow is this:

Strategy Assessment > Power Hour > Package

And this aligns with MAA: Metrics > Analysis > Action.

Implement this and watch your client headaches disappear, your lead gen struggles go away, and your operations run more smoothly.

5 Tips to Make Facebook Your Lead Driving Machine

By Alex Ownejazayeri Leave a Comment

Facebook’s lead generation capabilities are powerful. With the right strategy, you can drive warm prospects to landing pages, registration forms, or checkouts for no more than $1.

And yes…

… it’s possible.

Tip 1: Get your plumbing in place.

What’s Plumbing?

It’s the term we use for tracking. This includes analytics and tracking pixels aka “tags” that you can add to your site using Google Tag Manager.

Without tracking, there’s no attribution of conversions to specific ads or landing pages. This means lost revenue, since you’ll be paying for ads without knowing which ones are driving sales.

Plumbing is critical for analytics, driving more revenue from abandoning audiences, and for creating lookalikes (to find similar customers). By putting users into buckets you can remarket to them, creating a personalized customer experience – a step in nurturing folks through funnel logic.

Pro Tip: Use the Facebook pixel instead of the Conversion Tracking pixel, since Facebook has shifted away from it.

We have a do it yourself guide with checklists to help with implementation.
Tip 2: Boost to audiences that are warm.

Use custom audiences (your email list or your website traffic). They’ve already opted in and consume your content, so they’re more likely to want to hear more or buy.

You can build lookalike audiences from these lists to find similar customers too.

Website Custom Audiences (WCAs) are retargeting audiences who have visited other pages, but have not ended up on your “success page”. This “bucket” is typically full of folks right at the bottom of your funnel who need only a nudge to convert.

You must have plumbing in place first– otherwise Facebook can’t do the targeting for you.

Tip 3: Create similar ads to choose “winners” and boost evergreen

Ads manager allows you to “create a similar ad set”. When targeting audiences, start off with interest, workplace, and even behavioral targeting, but don’t do these all at once. Create similar ads with a few specific interests and boost them all at once.

Once the ads start picking up traffic (over 500 impressions), pick out the interests that are performing the best (low Cost per Engagement (CPE), high relevance, high engagement).

Start combining effective interests together to start building saved audiences that you can boost to directly from future posts.

This “scientific method” of targeting is great for discovering ad/audience combinations that can be boosted evergreen.

When a piece of content drives consistent engagement at a CPM of $2 or less, set it as “ongoing”, so it can continuously push traffic through your funnel (this can be done on Twitter and LinkedIn too).

Alison Herzog is an expert marketing strategist, thought leader, and figurehead for women in the workplace. We promoted an article about her on our Facebook page using this method.

We promoted against 5 different interests and compiled an ultimate “engagement” audience, which made a massive jump from a max of 27 engagements to 119. The relevance score sat at 8 for some time with a CPE of $0.17 (before the audience started to burn out), indicating or goals, content, and targeting were all aligned.

Tip 4: Video. Video. Video.

Have you scrolled through your news feed lately? Video is hot on social and with Live being Facebook’s latest release, it gets favored in the news feed.

Use every opportunity to create video content, because it will drive excellent engagement for a fraction of a penny.

Tip 5: Micro-targeted ads

Some of these companies that are spending 20k a day target broad audiences and lose money doing spray and pray advertising.

Facebook lets you micro-target using the Dollar A Day strategy– the biggest bang for your buck on social.

Hint: you can do this on Twitter and LinkedIn too!

Because you’re targeting audiences of less than 1,000 people, you stretch your ad spend for maximum impact – hitting just the influencers.

Do you have complaints about the new iPhone? What would you like to say to Tim Cook?

Or perhaps you’d like to avoid the round and round with customer service like we did with Uber.

We have a guide on this featuring stepwise checklists, so you can do it too. This is the ultimate form of lead generation, since you incept the executives and influencers at the companies that you’d like to work with.

Who’s your dream client? Write a blog post or article on a high authority site and micro-target them.

Then let me know, so I can applaud you for it!

Have you used Facebook for lead generation? Let me know how in the comments below (tell me about your saucy lead ad tips).

Humanizing B2B: Connecting with real people in a machine-driven world – Interview with Kelsey Carroll of HPE.

By Dennis Yu Leave a Comment

One of our main goals at BlitzMetrics is bringing out the human element in an otherwise machine and data-driven industry– to give it that human touch.

Kelsey Carroll leads branded social content for Hewlett-Packard Enterprise. Prior to her current role, she ran PR for an independent film studio in Austin, TX and then got her start in marketing with the integrated agency, W2O Group. When she’s not reviewing ad copy and creative, she can be found eating Mexican food and seeking out the perfect karaoke song.

She recently answered some of our questions and shared some advice on the importance of the human element while applying it to B2B campaigns:

Why is being human important (especially in B2B tech)?

The robots haven’t taken over (yet). While it’s true that many commoditized, repeatable tasks have been automated, B2B tech sales has remained a largely relational person-to-person business. People like doing business with people that they like and trust… it’s that simple.

But how can a big brand come off as likable, relatable? Being human is important, especially in B2B tech, because we believe there is a person behind every transaction and we attempt to connect with those people through shared experience. For example, one of Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s key partners is Dreamworks Animation. Instead of saying, HPE FlexFabric increases rendering efficiency, we might lean into the story that families love Kung Fu Panda and HPE technology makes that possible.

Since people are getting better at spotting and avoiding ads, how can you make sure your ads attract the right users’ attention?

Let’s say you’ve done everything right in the social advertising world, according to Dennis Yu. The plumbing is set, your targeting is on point. You’ve optimized the process so your content has landed in front of the right people at the right time. You’ve “hacked” the mysterious algorithms (!) But, there’s still a person on the other end receiving your message. That person can skip, scroll past or even block your ad if it’s not useful, entertaining or valuable. Ads that attract and attain the right users’ attention are usually the ones that embody at least one of those key attributes.

How can content marketers make an emotional connection and get an audience to care about their brand?

As content marketers, we need to be honest with ourselves. Even though I am not necessarily the target customer for B2B tech sales, I’m always asking myself, and challenging my team to ask themselves, “Would I share this? Would this make me smile? How useful it this?” It has to pass the human litmus test, or else it will get scrolled past, skipped over. There is such a competition for people’s attention these days and any the most captivating, through-provoking, visual content will be worthy of anyone’s time, let alone your target customers’.

Social media provides a unique opportunity to make a connection, then track behaviors and responses to form a relationship, over time. From awareness to interest, to consideration, and ultimately, conversion, the narrative should remain consistent. It’s like someone who goes from being a stranger to acquaintance, and then a friend who becomes your best friend. The person doesn’t change, you just get to know them better, while they build credibility and gain your trust.

What’s the best channel to reach a B2B audience?

It depends on what your goal is, of course. If you’re going for more of an awareness play, I say, go where the eyeballs are. Facebook and Instagram’s ad tools allow for some pretty sophisticated targeting, plus they reach almost 2 billion of the world’s population.

Since one-to-one social selling is more about finding that exact right person within a company that makes the buying decisions, LinkedIn is most likely the best channel to search and locate for that person. With tools like Sales Navigator you can track and qualify leads all within the LinkedIn environment, which seems pretty efficient.

What advice would you give to a brand that doesn’t have a big budget for creating content or promoting it on social?

I think a common feeling towards social media marketing for small businesses is that they tried it and “it didn’t work.” Marketing on social media isn’t any easier than any other method, but it’s far more efficient.There are a variety of different levers that can be pulled, like width and depth of your targeting, and small tweaks in graphic or messaging. The more disciplined marketers will A/B/C/D/E test these different variables in order to optimize.

Sometimes smaller brands can create their own attention by being the early bird as social channels roll out new features. As we saw with Facebook Live, the News Feed has been favoring live content and brands who leveraged saw a bump in engagement and reach.

All in all, focus your efforts on one or two pieces of hero content that tell your story in a visual way. Once you nail down who your specific target audiences (the more specific the better), try promoting it for just a dollar a day. It’s a small enough budget that you can learn as you go. Once you’re more comfortable and you’re seeing a response, you can add fuel to the fire as you optimize.

What are your predictions for 2017 marketing trends?

Share of attention is shifting to dynamic & easily-digestible, mobile content

There’s a palpable tension building as mobile migrates toward mostly-video (i.e. Snapchat, Instagram) slamming into the fact that no one has the patience to watch videos that aren’t extremely captivating. The problem– or opportunity, if you’re savvy– is that by nature, every brand cannot create “extremely captivating” content. The cream will always rise to the top. Consistency is key for strong brand awareness. If a brand has a strong narrative in place, it’s easy to translate it from LinkedIn to Twitter, and maybe even Snapchat. Every marketing campaign should have a strong, concise message that is easily replicated across different platforms.

Remember these takeaways:

Show that there’s people behind the brand. Focus on relatable messages rather and shared experiences.
There’s people on the other end receiving your message- so make sure your message captures their attention and meets their needs.
The best channels for reaching B2B depend on your goals, but LinkedIn wins due to refinement and access to decision makers.
For small budget efforts, focus on content that tells your story and target a highly refined version of your intended audience with a $1.00/day budget. This provides a test bed to play around and optimize your message to see what works.

Are you thinking in terms of business-to-business, or human-to-human?