Different By Design: 6 Tips for Adopting The Principles Of Disruption and Improving Your Marketing Strategy

Less than a decade ago, one of the world’s largest transport networks was simply an imaginative flicker in the minds of two men trying to hail a taxi on a cold Paris night. After failing to snag a car, the two men came up with an idea of an on-demand taxi service at the touch of a button. What began on a snowy evening in France quickly turned into an app to request luxury sedans in a tiny handful of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. Soon it spread to include different types of rides, package and even food delivery in nearly any city on earth. That app was Uber.

Uber is now one of the world’s richest start-ups. Along with other innovative digital companies such as Airbnb, Snapchat, Netflix, and even Buzzfeed, Uber has grasped a powerful disruptive strategy that has brought it financial and scalable success in a short amount of time. Disruptive businesses such as these can pick out and then act on trends before they become a trend, building a niche in a market that many people haven’t even discovered yet. Follow these six tips to learn some disruptive strategies that will help to differentiate your business and set it up for future growth.

1) Be technologically savvy
Get to know what is happening in the world of all things digital and tech, even outside of your own industry. Something that can revolutionize your business might come from a spark of something you’ve noticed in a different market or business type.

2) Be a first adopter
Often successful companies are the first ones to take on changes and innovations and to use them to their advantage. Don’t be afraid to step out on your own when trying something new.

3) Rely on sharing
Businesses can no longer rely solely on traditional forms of advertising. Combining your marketing channels to include print, as well as digital sharing and promotion can be the easiest and quickest ways to reach potential customers.

4) Keep up with the competition
Stay aware of what your competitors are doing and be prepared to match their innovations with yours.

5) Interact with customers
Uber and the like are successful for their ability to connect with customers instantly. Listening to your customers helps to gauge demand and enhance the consumer relationship. With the rise of social media, customers are developing increasing expectations for transparency from businesses. Forming a connection with your clients will add to their loyalty and trust of your company. With constant lines of communication open to your customers, you can also respond quicker to real-time changes in the market, safeguarding you from future pitfalls.

6) Track your success
Digital data provides you with the tools and metrics to see how and where your customers are coming to awareness and consideration of your services or products. Understanding and using data effectively can make the difference in building and maintaining new business and answering needs within the market.

Why You Can Never Nurture Your Leads TOO Much

If you think that you can comfortably stop nurturing your leads as soon as they make that ever-important sale, you’re only seeing one small part of a much larger and more important picture. The fact of the matter is that you can NEVER nurture your leads too much for a variety of important reasons.

Why Lead Nurturing is So Important

Lead nurturing is an essential part of any business, but judging by some recent studies, it may be more important than you think. According to Gleanster Research, as many as half of all the leads coming into your business may be qualified, but they’re not yet ready to buy. Nurturing is perhaps the single best way to make sure you’re able to convert as much of that 50% as possible into a sale.

To make things more interesting, research from InsideSales.com shows that between 35% and 50% of all sales go to a brand that responds to a customer FIRST. This means that even if you know you’re working with a qualified lead AND you know that they’ll eventually be ready to buy, they may not buy with YOU at all if you don’t have a timely presence in their life.

That, in a nutshell, is why lead nurturing is so mission critical to your organization. If you’re not nurturing properly and using timely marketing collateral to help usher someone down the sales funnel, you may be doing little more than perfectly setting someone up to make a purchase with one of your competitors.

NSN: “Never Stop Nurturing”

Consumers want to be loyal to a brand. However, they’re also loyal to themselves and their own situations first and foremost. If you think that just because you’ve ushered a lead down the sales funnel and convinced them to make a purchase that you’ll have them forever, you’re sadly mistaken. And, unfortunately, this is one mistake that you’re likely to pay dearly for.

Remember that “making a sale” is NOT the only benefit of consistent lead nurturing. According to research, leads that have been nurtured experience a 23% shorter sales cycle than those who have not been. Nurturing over time (as opposed to just in the beginning of your relationship) can even increase your revenue over the next six to nine months by as much as 10% or more.

Remember that a constant and consistent nurturing gives way to perhaps the biggest benefit of all: retention. According to one study, it costs 500% more to bring in a new customer than it does to keep a current one. Likewise, the cost of bringing a new customer up to the same level of profitability as one of your old ones is up to 16% more. All of this is to say that by adopting the mantra of “I can never nurture a lead too much” today, you could be saving yourself a tremendous amount of money tomorrow.

Nurturing a lead to the point where you’ve made a sale is important, but this is not the point where your story ends. Consistently nurturing your leads even AFTER a sale will continue to pay dividends over the lifetime of your relationship with that person. The benefits of retention versus bringing in new customers alone should be more than worth the effort you’ll need to make.

How to Combine Your Passion and Profession to Make Your Life Purposeful

You have likely heard the adage, “Choose a profession you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.” Although the thought of this has merit, sometimes, if a person’s passion isn’t something they can easily transform into a money-making endeavor, it can be a little unrealistic. Thankfully, there is more than one way to combine your passion with your profession to create a purposeful life.

Use Your Passion to Generate Income

We all seem to know at least one person who bought a professional camera and began making money by becoming a photographer. Their profession, of course, was combined with their passion for photography and is now generating income. Another good example of this is someone whose passion is music. They have many options when it comes to transforming that into a career. They can become a music teacher at a school, play an instrument in their local orchestra, give private lessons, or even play at places of worship, parties or weddings as a way to produce an income. These are just a few examples of passions perfectly suited for generating income. There are countless others, and we can all agree that “it’s a beautiful thing when a career and passion come together.” If you have a passion like this, congrats! Unfortunately, not all passions are equally conducive when it comes to generating income. There isn’t an obvious way to create a career out of every passion.

What to Do When Your Passion Doesn’t Easily Translate to a Profession

Let’s consider an example of a passion that would be less than ideal as a career. This could include being passionate about running, biking, or being focused on giving to the homeless, third world countries, or charities. Often, these are hobbies/passions that are practiced alongside a career and don’t ever become the career itself. Of course, there are some ways to use these passions to generate income. However, it’s not easy to make money working for a charity or by giving to the homeless. It’s also hard to get someone to pay you to cycle or run. That doesn’t mean you aren’t allowed to live out your passion, though. You just might have to get creative with how you go about doing it.

Companies That Have Successfully Combined Their Passion & Profession:

An excellent example of this principle in action is the TOMS Company, which has been in business for going on eleven years. The concept they came up with was revolutionary at the time. When they began, TOMS was virtually the only company doing something like this. (There are more now.) TOMS started by selling shoes and advertising a one-for-one system. Their customers bought a pair of shoes from them, and then TOMS donated a pair to a needy child. Therefore, every customer got to get in on the giving action. Customers loved the product but liked the fact that their purchase helped a child in need even more. Today, TOMS has branched out to sell coffee, bags, and eyewear along with their shoes. As of January 2016, TOMS has given away more than 60 million pairs of shoes. TOMS is an excellent example of how you can combine your passion, in this case, helping children in need, with a profession that began selling shoes in a unique way.

How to Get Started

TOMS showcases an ideal strategy to combine your passion and profession. Of course, you don’t have to sell shoes to give back. You can also use the assets you acquire through doing business to give back. The idea isn’t to get this perfect. It’s to attempt to combine your passion with your profession in some way so that you will live purposefully. Remember, starting somewhere will get you where you want to go quicker than sitting still!

How QR Codes Can Add to the Print Experience: Best Practices You Need to Know

For years, marketers have been looking for better ways to achieve cross-media marketing. In other words, they’ve been searching for solutions that let them enjoy the benefits of both print and digital channels. Many have turned to QR codes to do precisely that. By including a QR code on a piece of print marketing, you can deliver the same message in the same way, but with a mechanism that varies depending on the preferences of the user.

It’s important to understand, however, that “using a QR code” and “using a QR code properly” are NOT the same thing. When done correctly, a QR code can add to the print experience in a number of important ways. If you want to unlock the full benefits of cross-media marketing that you desire, you’ll need to keep a few key things in mind.

It All Comes Down to Purpose

QR codes are not a novelty anymore. There was a period just a few short years ago where simply including a QR code on a flyer or even a billboard was enough to get users to stop and take notice. Those days are gone, however, as the technology itself has become yet another ubiquitous part of daily life. Because of this, you can no longer get away with using a QR code just because you want to or just because many of those in your target audience now own smartphones.

If your QR code doesn’t serve a purpose, meaning it doesn’t add to the user experience you’re trying to create, it has no business being a part of your print materials. This emphasis on purpose extends to just about every decision you make in the world of marketing in general. Never take a step simply because you feel like you should, or because a study told you that everyone else is taking it. Take a step because it’s the right thing to do for the goal you’re trying to accomplish.

QR Codes Are Not an Invitation for Mystery

Along those same lines, don’t include a QR code in a piece of print marketing WITHOUT also telling your audience what they stand to gain by pulling their smartphone out of their pocket. Again: a QR code is not some irresistible riddle that users are waiting with baited breath to try to solve. Don’t assume someone will scan it just because it’s there. If your QR code redirects to a page that allows the user access to an exclusive 40% off coupon, include a call-to-action on the print material itself that says, “Scan Here to Get 40% Off Your Next Order.”

Design is Important

If someone tries to scan your QR code and it doesn’t immediately work, chances are high they’re not going to try again. When designing your print materials, remember that QR codes that are a high contrast against a lighter colored background tend to work correctly more often than not. Keep this in mind when making design choices moving forward.

QR codes are still an excellent way to have your cake and eat it too! You get to enjoy all of the benefits that only print marketing offers, while still embracing digital marketing at the same time. A poorly designed, poorly executed QR code will do a lot more harm than good, which is why it’s always important to make choices that help ADD to the print experience instead of accidentally taking away from it.

Are You Measuring Marketing Success Based on these Core Metrics?

The ultimate success of your marketing campaigns comes down to a whole lot more than just how many total sales you’ve made, or how much revenue you’re bringing in each year. Remember, that one small move in one part of your campaign will have a ripple effect that adjusts everything around it. If you want to see how your campaigns are doing, there are a few core metrics you can employ that will tell you exactly that.

Qualified Leads

If you’re only measuring the success of your campaign based on the number of leads you’re bringing in, you’re missing the target but hitting the tree, so to speak. Leads are one thing – qualified leads are something else entirely. Anyone can bring in a lead, but that doesn’t mean the lead will ever make a sale. Generally speaking, the most successful campaigns may not bring in a massive number of leads, but they’ll have a higher percentage of qualified leads than you’ll get from the old “throw everything at the wall and see what sticks” method.

Customer Acquisition Cost

Also commonly referred to as CAC, customer acquisition cost is one of those core metrics that will never go out of style. In essence, it tells you how much money you’re spending to bring in one new customer. This metric takes into account not only the cost of your campaign materials and distribution, but also things like salaries, overhead, and more. Let’s say it costs you $1000 to bring in one new customer. That may not be a lot, but if the average value of each customer is only $800, you have a problem. For the best results, your CAC should always be lower than another important metric, your CLV or “customer lifetime value.”

Website Metrics

In 2017, and in the future, the chances are high that regardless of how you’re executing your marketing campaign, your website will play a big role in it. As a digital calling card for your business, it will be many people’s first point of contact – even if they eventually carry out the rest of their relationship over the phone or in person. Because of this, the two core metrics you’ll want to look at to determine how your campaign is doing are “time spent on site” and “bounce rate.”

“Time spent on site” will show you how valuable people think your website is. Essentially, it will clue you in on whether people feel that your website has something of value to offer based on the promise they received from your marketing collateral. If “time spent on site” is low, chances are there’s a discrepancy between what you say you offer and what you actually do.

Bounce rate is similar – if someone gets to your homepage and leaves a few seconds later, there is a problem somewhere that needs to be corrected as soon as possible.

These are just a few of the core metrics that you can use to judge the overall success of your marketing campaign. Also remember that if you make a change to your marketing efforts, regardless of how big or how small, these numbers should react accordingly. As a result, they can be a great way to track in real-time how well that great new idea you had worked – or how much work is still left to be done, depending on the situation. These are all numbers you need to keep an active eye on moving forward, both in short and long-term intervals.

Three Brothers and Success

In a town with lots of industries and choices of careers, three brothers grew up and began to pursue their paths in work. Based on their father’s wisdom and teachings, they all decided they wanted to work in a field that would eventually let them start their own businesses. The oldest became a lawyer. The middle brother became an accountant. The youngest brother, however, didn’t want to be an office professional but, instead, enjoyed food, so he became a cook. All three left home, set off to pursue their goals, and wished each other the best.

The Lawyer and the Accountant

The years passed and the lawyer made a lot of money, but he was always miserable and in debt. Everything about his job was about fighting or arguing, and eventually, he lost his own marriage. The lawyer was regularly complaining about his work whenever asked. The middle brother found himself living a life of stress. He chose to be an accountant because he thought it was a safe career path for income, but he found himself always under extreme pressure to complete his work and make sure it was accurate. The stress became so intense the younger brother was regularly sick and became a prime candidate for serious health problems before he was middle-aged.

The Cook

The younger brother focused on what he wanted, learning how to be a cook. Every day in the kitchen was where he wanted to be, so it never felt like work. His enjoyment quickly increased his skills in cooking, and soon he became a head chef. He was doing so well he chose to open up his own restaurant. It wasn’t the biggest place, and it wasn’t the most expensive. However, the youngest brother loved his job, and that made a difference in his food, his staff, and the experience of his customers.

Which Brother Had the Right Idea?

Essentially, the best place to be as a business or business leader is to love what you do every day. If you’re not happy in your work, your market position or your role, you will never be able to manifest your full potential. Happiness and satisfaction are key elements of success, especially for business leadership who look for someone to follow and emulate in their own tasks. Sure, your business can have some immediate success, as in the case of the lawyer brother, but ultimately, the angst and frustration catches up with everything and becomes a psychological burden in the workplace. Don’t be that older brother. Find your love and make it come to your career and your path. You will be happier, your productivity will be higher, and staff will follow your lead.

Making Sense of Paper Coating: How it Affects Your Efforts and What You Need to Know

A lot has been written about the effectiveness of print marketing versus digital marketing – so much so, that we’re not going to get into it here. It’s safe to say that both have their fair share of advantages and when used effectively, can compliment one another very nicely. There is one major benefit that print marketers have that their digital brethren don’t share – the paper itself.

People like to feel something in their fingers when they read it or consume it. One of the biggest contributors of that phenomenon is paper coating. Knowing how it affects what you’re trying to accomplish is one of the keys to making the best possible paper decisions moving forward.

The Role of Coating in Marketing

We’ve already covered paper stock, along with how that stock affects someone’s initial impression of a piece of marketing collateral. Making an effort to select the right type of stock can have a significant affect on the way someone experiences your marketing materials for the first time. Another contributing factor, however, is the coating – or the lack thereof.

When paper is coated, it’s treated with a compound or polymer to make sure that the finished product has certain qualities that weren’t initially present. Paper can be used to give your flyer a subtle sheen or surface gloss, for example, or it can even take a thinner piece of paper and make it feel thicker in someone’s hands. It can be used to make a rougher piece of paper feel smooth, or even reduce the way that ink is absorbed when someone runs their fingers across it.

The coating is introduced onto paper stock using an offset press through a process that varies depending on exactly what type of coating you’re talking about. Semi-gloss coating, for example, is often called “UV” coating because the paper itself is coated with a high gloss under intense UV lights.

The Many Types of Coatings to Choose From

Just as was true with paper stock, you have a broad range of different options available to you when it comes to coatings depending on what you’re trying to accomplish. These include, but are certainly not limited to, ones like:

Matte Paper.
If the coating on paper was like the paint in your home, think of matte like a flat paint. It produces a high-quality result, but the coating itself does little to help those colors pop in the way you might need it to.

Glossy Paper.
To continue with the “house paint” analogy, glossy paper would be like semi-gloss paint. It introduces a beautiful sheen into the finished product, but it isn’t necessarily super shiny like a mirror.

Coated paper.
If you’ve ever seen a piece of paper that was very, very shiny, you were looking at a piece of coated paper. This is commonly referred to as C2S paper, which is short for “coated (on) 2 sides.”

In the end, paper coating requires you to add a new dimension to your thinking concerning your print marketing collateral. You can’t just think about the impression you make when someone sees your next flyer or brochure – you need to think about the impression you give off when they feel it, too. Do you want something super shiny, or would something with a more traditional sheen do? The answer, as always, will depend on exactly what it is you’re trying to accomplish.

New Year’s Resolutions for Your Small Business

It is a tradition of sorts to make resolutions for the New Year, such as losing weight or eating healthier. Some people also include resolutions that impact their family’s future, such as resolving to plan two family vacations this year. However, most resolutions are quickly forgotten as people fall into their habitual way of living. A better solution is to plan goals for the year and break them down into smaller, easy-to-accomplish steps. Similar to planning personal resolutions, you can also make resolutions for your small business. By looking back at the year behind you and analyzing your company’s performance, you can resolve to alter your results this year by changing your behavior.

What is the Difference between Resolutions and Goals?

A resolution is a promise to take action. It is easy to break a resolution because there is nothing except for willpower holding you to that action. A goal is a specific, measurable finish line that you aim to reach by a specific point in time. The biggest difference between a resolution and a goal is the exactness or the ability to measure your results. It is possible that your resolution for this year is to lose 10 pounds. If you are a planner, you might take the time to figure out how you will do that. Perhaps you will visit the gym each day and cut out sweets from your diet. If you stick to your resolution, you will reach your goal. However, the minute you stop the change in your behavior, it’s very likely you’ll be saying hello again to that 10 pounds on your hips.

Planning a goal takes more than making a promise to yourself. Instead, planning a goal requires that you set a goal that you can realistically achieve, and then set out the steps to get you there. Once the journey begins, success is more likely if you remind yourself of your goals regularly, reward yourself as you achieve milestones, and measure your results to make changes to your plan along the way.

Collaborating with Your Team

Unless your business has only one employee, yourself, it is a good idea to sit down with your team and ask them to contribute toward making goals for this year. Many companies create three-to-five year goals and then break them down into specifics when each year arrives. Since your team will be the people in the trenches who are taking action to reach the goal, inviting them to collaborate with you on the plan will give them a reason to become more invested in the outcome.

Why is January a Good Time to Make Plans?

Not all companies start their fiscal year in January. If your fiscal year begins in a different month of the year, then start your plans then. For those who follow the calendar year, January planning will focus all of your team on where you want to go. It will drive them to work harder and achieve more as long as you continue to refocus them towards the goal throughout the year.

Don’t forget to reward yourself and your staff for incremental achievements. People need incentives and reminders to keep moving forward and improve behaviors. Work on creating good habits that make goals achievable and coach those who struggle with them. Remember everyone has something unique to contribute and learns differently. Ask your team what they need to succeed.

The Amazing Power of Peer Pressure in Groups

When Stanley’s daughter was about five and a half, it was time for her to pick out her first bike. No surprise, she wanted something with bold colors and controls. The typical child bicycle for girls was frequently some kind of flowery motif, a princess bike, or a fairy theme. However, when Stanley brought his daughter to the store, he made a point to tell her she could pick any bike in the store for her size. And she chose a bold, fire-engine red Transformers bike for her favorite TV robot heroes. Stanley wasn’t sure about the pick and asked her again if his daughter was sure. She looked around and within ten seconds was done; it would be the Transformers bike without question. So, that’s the bike she got.

A month later Stanley’s daughter went with her sister to the local park. They were back within minutes, and the younger one was crying. Stanley asked them what happened and, between sobs and hiccuping, his younger daughter blurted out she had been picked on for riding a boy’s bike. The culprit was other neighborhood kids, particularly girls. Stanley’s daughter rolled her Transformer’s bike into the garage, laid it down, and ran inside sobbing. That was the last time she ever rode that bike again. Stanley tried to see if she would ride it again a month later, but no luck. The bike ended up going to charity.

Every day at work people face decisions that they must then put in front of others, their peers. Like Stanley’s daughter, they will meet people who will criticize and oppose actions or directions chosen. Sometimes it’s for technical reasons and sometimes they do it just to be a pain. However, those peer pressure decisions can be immense depending where one is in their career. If starting out, and the opinion comes from more experienced peers, the pressure can have a huge effect on how people try to fit in, even causing anxiety in some folks. Everybody at some point wants to be accepted, and at work, it can be a fundamental requirement to gel with the “team.”

How one deals with peer pressure and compensates for it will dictate how capable of a decision-maker he or she can be. While it would be easy to assume things are top-down, dictatorial, in reality, our decision-making is often an interactive, communal function, so influence matters tremendously. Realizing this and learning how to control the pressure separates good decision-makers from those who can only operate in a vacuum. Controlling it versus being controlled means one rides their “bike” instead of losing it under pressure.

People are fundamentally social creatures, so those who want to be decision-makers need to understand how to use social influence to their advantage, not disadvantage. The last place a decision-maker wants to be is being second guessed or shamed in public when pushing a proposal. Part of effective leadership is knowing how to influence ahead of time and build decision support before the decision actually has to be made. Some call it being “political,” but realistically, effective leadership involves performance with a team, not against it.

Visual Marketing Content Trends to Prepare For in 2017

The new year often brings with it a time of unabashed change. Regarding visual marketing content, this seems to happen like clockwork every January as a legion of marketing professionals re-ignite their search for the “next big thing” to attract the attention of their target audience. If you want to make sure your 2017 begins as strong as it possibly can, there are some key visual marketing content trends that you need to be aware of.

Integration Continues

According to SmartInsights, one of the biggest upcoming visual content trends to prepare for is nothing new – a further integration of digital and traditional marketing. Only 5% of marketing professionals who responded to a survey say that their campaigns are fully optimized and integrated at this point, but 33% are actively trying to get to that point. Another 33% are currently experimenting with limited integration, and another 12% consider themselves integrated, but not necessarily optimized in the way that they’d like to be. That certainly doesn’t mean they aren’t trying, however.

Never forget: anyone who tells you that you should rely on EITHER print OR digital marketing is probably just trying to sell you something. To reach the widest possible audience, you need to look at them as two important halves of the same whole.

Visual Content Is No Longer a “Single” Technique

In the recent past, marketers tended to look at visual content the same way they looked at social media or video production – all separate techniques that made up a larger marketing campaign. This has been particularly true in terms of people who were doing both print and digital marketing. Visual content was more towards the print side of things, whereas digital skewed towards text-based materials. The wind is changing, though, and it’s clear that visual content no longer serves this purpose. Instead, it must become the very foundation of your larger campaign, the through-line that connects all of your various channels together in a visual way.

Case in point: research has shown that people following directions with both text AND illustrations do an incredible 323% better than those who are only relying on text. When taken together, this means that visual marketing content has a place in every aspect of your larger campaign, from that email you’re about to send out, to new leads, to the breathtaking new flyer you’re about to hand off to USPS. From that perspective, the biggest trend in visual content marketing to prepare for is the very idea that you’ll now be relying heavily on these elements in more places than ever before.

Looking Forward

These are just a few of the key visual marketing content trends that you need to be aware of to prepare better for what awaits you in 2017. One thing is for sure: visual marketing collateral is here to stay, and in many ways, it is more effective than ever. The shape that collateral takes is changing, though, as it should be, and it’s up to you to stay ahead of the curve, so you don’t accidentally find yourself getting left behind.