Business

The Good, the Bad and the Downright Ugly Examples of Storytelling With Data and why Good Storytelling is Great Business

Posted on by Jim

Storytelling conveys purpose and businesses with purpose are noticed and win the loyalty of consumers. So it’s not enough to have a product or service that solves a problem – your company needs to stand out.

The rate that businesses collect data today is phenomenal. You can now collect data on every aspect of your business and, in fact, your life.

Despite the surge of solutions, such as BI tools, dashboards, and spreadsheets over the recent decades, businesses still are unable to fully take advantage of the opportunities hidden in their data.

Dashboards and spreadsheets only tell you what is happening. But, they do not tell you why.

What’s the root cause of smart people using dumb graphs?  It’s actually simple. We aren’t naturally good at storytelling with data.

“In school, we learn a lot about language and math. On the language side, we learn how to put words together into sentences and into stories. With math, we learn to make sense of numbers.

But it’s rare that these two sides are paired: no one teaches us how to tell stories with numbers. Adding to the challenge, very few people feel naturally adept in this space.”

Source: Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, “Storytelling with data – a data visualization guide for business professionals”, Wiley, 2015

Exploratory vs. explanatory analysis

Many people tasked with creating presentations have forgotten, or never been taught to make the distinction between exploratory and explanatory analysis.

Exploratory analysis is what you do to understand the data and figure out what might be noteworthy or interesting to highlight to others.

When we do exploratory analysis, it’s like hunting for pearls in oysters.

We might have to open 100 oysters (test 100 different hypotheses or look at the data in 100 different ways) to find perhaps two pearls.

When we’re at the point of communicating our analysis to our audience, we really want to be in the explanatory space, meaning you have a specific thing you want to explain, a specific story you want to tell—probably about those two pearls.

Too often, people err and think it’s OK to show exploratory analysis (simply present the data, all 100 oysters) when they should be showing explanatory (taking the time to turn the data into information that can be consumed by an audience: the two pearls). It is an understandable mistake. After undertaking an entire analysis, it can be tempting to want to show your audience everything, as evidence of all of the work you did and the robustness of the analysis. Resist this urge. You are making your audience reopen all of the oysters!

Concentrate on the pearls, the information your audience needs to know.

Examples of exploratory data being used in an explanatory way

Importance of B2B Storytelling

In reality, successful B2B marketing strategies are not just about logic, technical processes, and facts. The world has come to realize that it’s about connecting with people on an emotional/psychological level.

According to research by Google in partnership with Motista and CEB, 50% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy if they can connect emotionally with your brand. It starts with your business’ goals, objectives, mission, and vision. If a B2B buyer sees that there’s a common ground, they identify with your brand, which creates a sense of trust.

Based on the same study, 71% of B2B buyers purchase when they see personal value in your business. Along with that, 68.8% of the B2B buyers surveyed are even willing to pay a higher price to do business with a brand they believe in.

But what does “personal value” mean in B2B marketing?

It’s the professional, social, and emotional benefits you experience in addition to the actual product.

Simply put, emotions elevate customer satisfaction and customer experience. Based on a study by The Good Relations Group, the honesty of the vendor plays a big part at 93%. Moreover, personal recommendations also drive purchase action at 91%.

Although these are not explicit emotions such as happiness or sadness, they are deeply rooted emotions that are powerful enough to influence decision making. At the end of the day, purchasing is a risk. You need to trust the seller that he/she is not taking advantage of you.

Further, positive emotions increase a customer’s loyalty, improving the chances of them becoming brand advocates. In an age where customer loyalty is everything, businesses should take every chance they get.

Data storytelling is about communicating your insights effectively, giving your data a voice.

Data Storytelling is not a new concept. Companies have been attempting it for many years now and have seen the success.

Here are some examples of how Spotify, Slack and Uber have all utilised the power of data storytelling to communicate with their customers.

Spotify
 

spotify

In recent years, Spotify, a music app, has sent annual recap stories to their customers in the format of an email. These short stories pull interesting statistics for each user such as the number of minutes they’ve listened to music on their app. This is an engaging way of communicating the value of their service instead of simply sending them an invoice or simple thanks for using us.

 
Slack
 

slack

Slack, a communications tool replacing the traditional and outdated train of emails, is utilising storytelling to create a different dialogue with customers each month at the time of invoicing.

In place of sending an email with the invoice top and centre, Slack sends a visual story communicating the key ways its customer has utilised their service. This high-impact dialogue is shifting the conversation with customers.

 
Uber
 

uber

Like Spotify, Uber has used data storytelling to communicate annually with its customers.

In place of an annual recap email showing the total amount of money you have spent with Uber, they have shifted the conversation to show how much value the service has delivered to their riders. Showcasing personalised statistics of your experience with the app, you immediately can see how much impact they’ve made to your everyday life.

 
Source: Nugit.co blog – What is Data Storytelling?

Today, it’s difficult to find a successful brand that does not have a good story behind it. Stories provide meaning, create context and evoke a sense of purpose. Most humans are more receptive to stories than compared to facts or data as stories help us relate, empathise and remember. This is why more businesses are increasingly recognising the importance of storytelling.

Just as Storytelling is the success factor behind every Hollywood hit movie, it is often the one differentiator between super successful B2B Marketing Campaigns and ones that no-one remembers.  And just as everyone tends to respond better to visual imagery than text or dialogue only, a company’s ability to maximise the messaging effectiveness of their data using Storytelling will often determine whether they can convert the interest garnered from their marketing campaign, into new or repeat business.

If you’d like to be sent Monthly Marketing Trends and News Updates by email, complete the subscription form below and submit it, and you’ll be accepted into our Monthly Newsletter group.

I’ve put together a Storytelling Marketing E-Book (pdf) to coincide with this post.

It’s free to anyone who downloads it before the end of January 2020. Just complete the form on the Free Resources page to access your free pdf file download.

Yours truly,
James (Jim) Spurway
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”

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Do a Bezos – learn how to future proof your company by becoming customer-centric like Disney, Harley Davidson or Zappos.

Posted on by Jim

Post summary:

  • The customer is firmly in the driving seat and with it comes to a required change in how you build and nurture relationships with potential and existing customers.
  • Companies that put the customer at the heart of their organization are experiencing an increase in customer lifetime value and a reduction in churn. By being customer-centric.
  • Becoming a truly customer-centric organization takes time, but you can start off all small. We share four best practices in becoming a customer-centric company.

A customer-centric way of doing business is a way that provides a positive customer experience before and after the sale in order to drive repeat business, enhance customer loyalty and improve business growth.

But, a customer-centric company is more than a company that offers good service.

Both Amazon and Zappos are prime examples of brands that are customer-centric and have spent years creating a culture around the customer and their needs. Their commitment to delivering customer value is genuine – In fact, Zappos is happy to fire employees if they do not fit within their customer-centric culture!

But, how important is being customer-centric?

The good news is that’s becoming very important!

Econsultancy recently asked what the most important characteristic is in order to establish a truly “digital-native” culture.

The answer to that question and leading the responses with 58% was to be customer-centric.

Yet, according to the CMO Council, only 14% of marketers believe that customer-centricity is a hallmark of their companies.

Here’s the thing:

Executing a successful customer-centric strategy doesn’t happen overnight. You need to start somewhere. And in this case, it’s understanding the definition of what customer centricity is.

What does it mean to be customer-centric?

Customer centricity is not just about offering great customer service, it means offering a great experience from the awareness stage, through the purchasing process and finally through the post-purchase process. It’s a strategy that’s based on putting your customer first, and at the core of your business.

When you put your customer at the core of your business and combine it with Customer Relationship Management (CRM), you collect a wealth of data, which gives you a full 360 view of the customer. This can then be used to enhance the customer experience.

For example:

  • You can use customer data to understand buying behaviour, interests and engagement
  • You can identify opportunities to create products and services for your best customers
  • You can use customer lifetime value to segment customers based on top-spending customers

Not only does focusing on the customer make sound business sense, but research by Deloitte and Touche found that customer-centric companies were 60% more profitable compared to companies that were not focused on the customer.

“Client-centricity is the most important factor in a successful business digitalization since client-centric companies are 60% more profitable compared to companies not focused on the customer” – Deloitte, July 2017

The challenges of becoming a customer-centric organization

The power shift between brand and customer happened during the economic downturn. Customers became more selective in which brand they chose to spend their money with.

The winning brands were the ones who treated their customers with respect, offered great service, and built a relationship with them that still exists today.

During the recession, another game-changer took place – social media marketing and social selling exploded onto the scene and mobile became a major part of the customer journey. Customers can now compare products and services in real-time and across multiple devices, which has presented a huge challenge for many brands.

Research has found that companies are struggling with this change and are unable to become a customer-centric organization – with the biggest challenge not being able to share customer information across departments.

Most companies do not have all of the components in place to claim they are customer-centric, but the most important part to remember is this:

You need to start with your customers, not your products and focus on what your customers want to do.

By designing your company from the customer’s perspective, your organization will be focused on the customer’s needs.

Four Best Practices to becoming a Customer-Centric Company

By being customer-centric, you will want to anticipate customers’ needs and delight them with products and services they may not have thought of, but will immediately fall in love with (i.e. the Apple iPhone or iPad).

Thus, a customer-centric brand creates products, processes, policies and a culture that is designed to support customers with a great experience as they are working towards their goals.

The four best practices that stand out regarding customer-centricity are:

  1. Brands that are committed to customer-centricity are passionate, and truly believe the customer comes first. They believe that without the customer, they cannot succeed in business (which is true) and want to see the world through the customer’s eyes. Marketers inside customer-centric organizations understand what customers want and use customer data to capture customer insights and share this across the organization.
  2. Brands that are committed to customer centricity focus on what the customer wants and needs and develop products and services around that.
  3. Brands that are committed to customer centricity focus on building relationships designed to maximize the customer’s product and service experience.
  4. Brands that are committed to customer-centricity analyze, plan and implement a carefully formulated customer marketing strategy that focuses on creating and keeping profitable and loyal customers.

How to measure the success of a customer-centric company?

Not every organization will have the same customer metrics to measure customer-centricity. However, the three most important customer-centric metrics that should be carefully monitored are churn rate, Net Promoter Score and customer lifetime value (CLV).

  1. Churn rate

Acquiring new customers is becoming more difficult. Therefore, more companies are investing in keeping existing customers instead of trying to find new ones. Here’s why:

  • Acquiring new customers can cost up to 5x more than keeping existing customers
  • A 2% increase in customer retention has the same effect on profits as cutting costs by 10%
  • On average, companies lose approx. 10% of its customer base each year (also known as customer churn)

Companies with a high retention rate grow faster.

The key to success is to understand why people leave, and why people remain customers.

To calculate the churn rate, measure the number of customers who left in the last 12 months divided by the average number of total customers (during the same period).

  1. Net Promoter Score

Are your customers happy? How do you measure customer happiness?

The answer is through NPS.

NPS or Net Promoter Score focuses on uncovering customer loyalty by asking only one, simple question:

Each time a customer responds to this question, the answer is then segmented based on predefined criteria:

  • Promoters (9-10): These people are in love with your product or service and are likely to refer you to potential buyers. The customers who rate you a 9 or 10 are repeat customers and will have a high customer lifetime value.
  • Passives (7-8): These people who rate you a 7 or 8 are content with being a customer of your business, but are the most likely to switch to a competitor should they find a new or better product.
  • Detractors (0-6): These people are not happy with your product or service and are likely to damage your brand reputation by sharing their negative experience with their friends, family and connections.

The more Promoters you have, the healthier your business. Simple, really?

And the fact that it’s simple to implement and measure makes the NPS a favourite with company boards and executive committees.

  1. Customer lifetime value (CLV)

For a customer-centric business, the most valuable “asset” is their customer base.

If you’re investing in long-term relationships, you can calculate the “health” of the relationship with customer lifetime value or CLV.

CLV measures the amount of revenue a customer contributes to your business for as long as they are a paying customer. It starts with their first purchase and ends when they stop doing business with you.

To calculate CLV, add up the total revenue you have earned and multiply that with the length of the business relationship. Then, deduct the initial cost of acquiring them.

For example, if a customer spends $1,000 annually, and the average “lifetime” of a customer is 10 years, then you multiply $1,000 by 10 years ($10,000). Now, subtract the cost of acquisition (in this case, we’ll estimate $1,000), and the CLV is $9,000.

Not bad, right?

Calculating CLV helps you understand why it makes sense to invest in keeping your customers.

Conclusion

The shift towards becoming a truly customer-centric organization is both complex and long but, do not be put off by this as even the smallest changes to policy and processes can have a significant benefit for both employee and your customer.

Being a customer-centric organization is the Holy Grail towards unlocking the true potential of customer value. Always put yourself in the shoes of the customer and minimize customer effort and maximize customer value.

Do you consider yourself a customer-centric organization?

If you want a second opinion I’ll give you 15 minutes of my time for free to conduct a quick Q&A session. I’ll follow that up with a one-page report including a Customer-Centricity Score (CCS).

Make a booking in my online calendar here.

If you’re looking to enhance your customer-centric capability, we have some exclusive offers for products that the likes of Amazon, and Zappos.

You are going to need to create more and better content that your customers want. The more value you offer them, the more they’ll feel like they have found a home. On the content marketing side, I use and recommend Semrush.

Once you have created some content, the easiest way to use that content is to have an App that curates and posts that material at different times, i.e. set it up once then let it run. I use and recommend Missinglettr.

Email Marketing will grow your business faster than any other marketing medium!  I use and recommend GetResponse.

If you’d like to be sent Monthly Marketing Trends and News Updates by email, complete the subscription form below and submit it, and you’ll be accepted into our Monthly Newsletter group. We’re giving away a FREE INFLUENCER MARKETING E-BOOK at the present time to everyone who joins our list.

Just complete the form on the Free Resources page to access your free pdf file download.

Yours truly,
James (Jim) Spurway
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”

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Discover the reasons why your business should use the Go-To-Market Strategy secrets today. Do you need more than one? Profit. It’s scary good. Boom.

Posted on by Jim

Show me the numbers!

This year, 472 million entrepreneurs worldwide attempted to start 305 million companies, and approximately 100 million new businesses (or one third) will open each year around the world.

That means 274,000 businesses open every day. At the same time, 239,000 business close every day.

Can you see how that number of businesses competing for that scarce resource called “capital” might be a problem?

Let’s drill down even further and focus on one piece of this overall pie. The Fintech Sector.

It’s estimated that 100,000 technology startups reach the basic funding stage every year. Angel investors (including friends and family members) help about half of these companies with their initial development. Fewer than 10% (about 4,000) are then able to show enough promise to actually receive a first round of capital from venture or private equity sources.

If you are an entrepreneurial manager who has reached this milestone, it’s a major achievement — your technology has progressed from an interesting concept to a promising commercial opportunity. You’ve probably demonstrated your product’s potential with a subset of customers and now experienced investors are willing to place a bet on you.

The challenge becomes how to sell your product and create a sustainable revenue stream so that you can further develop your product offerings, build your infrastructure, repay your investors, and pay yourself. Unfortunately, many tech startups get stuck at this stage because they can’t quite figure out a scalable way to go to market. Often, this is because they’ve been founded by technologists, and sales is not an area of expertise. Or perhaps it’s because the only person who is passionate enough to sell the product is the person who developed it. Or people may believe their invention is good enough to sell itself. The consequence is that sales don’t become a focus of attention until the cash starts to burn.

Figuring out a go-to-market approach is no trivial exercise — it separates the companies that will be successful and sustainable from those that won’t. In our work with startups over the last several years, we’ve heard dozens of questions related to how to start thinking about sales: Should we put together a direct sales force or sell indirectly through others? If we sell directly, should we organize salespeople by market, industry, geography, company size, or some other principle? Will our salespeople require technical support and work in teams? Should we bundle maintenance and other services into our sales approach, or sell them separately? Can we get our product to market through other channels, such as social media or advertising? What about pricing? The list goes on.

The problem is that these are fundamentally the wrong questions to begin with. They all focus on the perspective of the startup and the technology, but startups need to take their customers’ perspective to understand how to approach the market. They should think about what the customers are trying to achieve and what problems they need to solve — and then think about how the product can help them be successful.

For example, earlier this year a five-year-old software company asked us to help its sales team do a better job of selling to large enterprise organizations. The company was already breaking even operationally after two rounds of funding. But despite some successes in pilot projects, the salespeople had not been able to expand their deals from “interesting trials” into ongoing revenue streams.

After talking with the VP of sales, the CEO, and several of the account managers, we realized we had heard a lot about the software’s virtues but much less about the customer problems and pain points that the software was meant to address. Eventually, we asked this team to focus on three large enterprises and to describe the business challenges these potential customers were facing. Once they developed this context, the salespeople were able to identify a number of very large opportunities where their software could help.

For instance, they learned that one strategic objective of the customer was growing its data centre hardware business. They then saw that their software, which could help data centres reduce operational costs, could be incorporated into the customer’s equipment just like word processing software is embedded into personal computers. This led them to see that one way to bring their product to market was to partner with this customer (and others like it) instead of selling directly to data centres. In this way, their “customer” could actually be an important part of the go-to-market strategy.

Veteran salespeople might recognize this “consultative selling” approach and dismiss it as old hat. The point, however, is that the consultative selling mindset needs to start before the go-to-market approach is developed, and it must evolve as the sales strategy evolves. Figuring out how you go to market is not a one-time exercise for a new company; it should be an ongoing process, constantly informed by a deeper and deeper understanding of customer needs and how your product can meet them.

If you are part of a startup or a relatively new company that needs to accelerate revenue growth, consider how this approach might apply to you. Start by identifying a small number of very specific customers — either company (if you are a B2B player) or desired consumer segments (e.g., urban professionals with specific characteristics). Then put yourself in the shoes of these customers by thinking about their issues and by talking to them not about your product but about their challenges and pain points. (Startup expert Steve Blank, for example, suggests that you talk to dozens of potential users as part of a “customer development” process.)

Once you’ve taken these steps, you can begin to experiment with a go-to-market approach with the expectation that you’ll continue to refine and change it based on experience and further insights.

Figuring out an approach for going to market is one of the toughest things for a startup to do. But without understanding the customer’s issues, it’s almost impossible to get right.

What are the major components of a go-to-market strategy?

Some answer “what is your go-to-market?” by talking only about their marketing but go-to-market is a strategy that extends across the organisation.

To get a feel for the major parts of a GTM strategy, I’ve summarised the GTM plan of a serial entrepreneur, Stefan Groschupf, taken from this great blog post.

I’ve slightly shifted around the order as point 1 should, in theory, be after point 2 but it makes first-timer logical sense this way.

Craft a value matrix and messaging around the pain point

This is a good way to understand what the pain point is and how to set up messaging to address the pain point.

Identify the buying personas involved in the journey

At DMO we realised, by analysing sign-ups, that the person who first signs up or enquires about the product is often a manager and not an end-user as we imagined. Yeah, this was a surprise.

Also, we found that the gatekeeper we needed to clear is often someone in charge of data security, so we created additional detailed docs explaining how we secure data.

There are a number of people involved in the stages of making a purchase including:

  • The initiator who first comes across your product.
  • The user.
  • The influencer.
  • The decision-maker.
  • The buyer who approves the budget.
  • Final approver.
  • Gatekeeper – such as the IT dept in charge of data security of vendors

Understanding these people and what each one needs during the process helps create the right content and processes you’ll need to make the sale.

Understand your buyer’s journey

In short, figure out your top of the funnel, middle of the funnel and bottom of the funnel so you know what docs are needed at each stage.

DMO’s top of the funnel is the blog and integration listings which leads to the home page containing videos and testimonials to get attention.

DMO’s middle of the funnel is live chat and demos to answer key questions.

DMO bottom of the funnel is the trial, educational emails, one to one product walk-throughs and pricing quotes to get to a sale.

Choose a marketing strategy

This is where you figure out your inbound and outbound strategies.

For DMO, it’s primarily about content.

We started with email and then realised we did not have the messaging and target market nailed so went to content until we knew more.

You might use only one or a mix of self-service where they enter credit card and buy, inside sales, heavy-duty field sales or a channel model.

At DMO we started as a self-service product and then added inside sales because larger companies need to build layers of trust in you and the product, especially if they are in the finance sector.

If you need some inspiration or don’t have a template to start gathering the information together to create a Go-To-Market plan, download this free word file.

If you want a second opinion about the need to use a Go-To-Market Plan I’ll give you 15 minutes of my time for free to conduct a quick Q&A session.

Make a booking in my online calendar here.

If you’d like to be sent Monthly Marketing Trends and News Updates by email, complete the subscription form below and submit it, and you’ll be accepted into our Monthly Newsletter group. We’re giving away a FREE E-BOOK titled “INFLUENCER MARKETING REPORT”,  to everyone who joins our Monthly Newsletter list this month.

Just complete the form on the Free Resources page to access your pdf file download.

If you’re looking to enhance your customer-centric capability, we have some exclusive offers for products that the likes of Amazon, and Zappos. I wrote a blog on this subject which you can read here.

You are going to need to create more and better content that your customers want. The more value you offer them, the more they’ll feel like they have found a home. On the content marketing side, I use and recommend Semrush.

Once you have created some content, the easiest way to use that content is to have an App that curates and posts that material at different times, i.e. set it up once then let it run. I use and recommend Missinglettr.

Email Marketing will grow your business faster than any other marketing medium!  I use and recommend GetResponse.

Wishing you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy and Prosperous 2020!

Yours truly,
James (Jim) Spurway
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”

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6 Helpful Tools to Promote Blog Posts in 2020

Posted on by Jim

These tools will boost your postings in the social news feeds of Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Pinterest etc.

Blog Content Distribution

Over the last few years, the average engagement rate of social media posts declined dramatically, especially on Facebook, Twitter and Linkedin. This resulted in a dramatic loss of traffic to bloggers and content marketers.

The following tools will help you to more effectively distribute your content, cut through the noise and increase the exposure of your content in social media feeds.

“Content is fire, social media is gasoline.”

– Jay Baer, New York Times best-selling author.

Peer Promotion on Linkedin with Lempod

Benefit: Find existing groups of people (pods) who are ready to support your content with likes and comments on LinkedIn. Comments within the first hour of your posting are most important!

How: Apply to join a pod that corresponds with the type of content you post. Once you’re accepted, all the members of the pod will auto-like and comment on your LinkedIn postings. On average you’ll get a 5 to 10x boost in views.

Supported: Only Linkedin (Personal profiles and company pages)

Cost: Each group (pod) you join costs USD 5 / month.

Lempod reviews by others 1, 2, 3

Tap into new audiences with Quuu

Benefit: Real people and businesses share your content on their social media profiles, allowing you to tap into new audiences that were previously beyond your reach.

Bonus: The people sharing your content will have followers already interested in similar and relevant topics. No bots, all real people.

Supported: Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Costs: Once a piece of content (e.g. a blog post) is $40 per month.

Automate evergreen content promotion with Missinglettr

Benefit: Schedule a year’s worth of engaging content within minutes and regularly drive traffic back to your blog, with zero ad-spend.

How: Once you publish a blog post, Missinglettr analyzes the content and automatically formulates a series of social media posts pre-filled with quotes, hashtags, and images.

Supported: Facebook pages, LinkedIn (Personal profiles and company pages) and twitter

Costs: After the free 30-day trial, plans start at $15 per month.

Get more shares with Triberr

Benefit: This tool enables you to get more shares on their content by helping each other out. Be part of a smart, savvy and talented group of content producers, be part of a tribe.

How: Import your content into your tribal stream and they’ll start sharing it to their own audiences. Connect your own social network accounts and you can return the favour and share theirs too. Can’t find your tribe in the 60,000 to choose from? Make your own centred around your topic of interest and get going.

Cost: Completely free, for the basic plan.

Boost Your LinkedIn Reach with Captain Linked

Benefit: Boost the reach of your LinkedIn posts by automating engagement.

How: Captian Linked replicates what many companies do manually via their internal slack or telegram channels: Orchestrate social media actions of individuals to drive wider audience reach.

Recommendation: You get the most out of the free version if you reach out to people in your network and ask them to install Captain Linked and follow you.

Supported: Only LinkedIn (Personal profiles and company pages).

Cost: Free plan for individuals.

Reciprocal sharing with Viral Content Bee

Benefit: Viral Content Bee is a reciprocal sharing community. Quite similar to Triberr. Viral Content Bee is helping users to promote their content to their target audience.

How: To participate, all you have to do is share some content from other members and in return, they’ll share the work you’ve produced.

Supported: Twitter, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Mix

Cost: Free, for the basic plan.

As someone who blogs regularly, I constantly find that I’m either not dedicating enough time to promoting my blog posts across my social media channels, or I just forget entirely!

I’ve been using an awesome tool recently (called Missinglettr) that pretty much takes care of all of that for me.

Now, whenever I publish a blog post, I get sent an email (within minutes of me hitting ‘publish’) inviting me to review a full 12-month social marketing campaign for the blog post I just published. All I need to do is review their suggestions (making edits if I need to) and that’s it. My blog post is then marketed across my social channels for the next year – driving traffic back to my site.

I use and recommend Missinglettr.  Quite simply… I love it!

Full disclosure: I am already an affiliate of Missinglettr so if you chose to become a customer of them, I would receive an affiliate commission.

If you want a second opinion about the need to use some kind of content curating and distribution programme I’ll give you 15 minutes of my time for free to conduct a quick Q&A session.

Make a booking in my online calendar here.

If you’d like to be sent Monthly Marketing Trends and News Updates by email, complete the subscription form below and submit it, and you’ll be accepted into our Monthly Newsletter group. We’re giving away a FREE E-BOOK titled “INFLUENCER MARKETING REPORT” to everyone who joins our Monthly Newsletter list right now.

Just complete the form on the Free Resources page to access your pdf file download.

If you’re looking to enhance your customer-centric capability, we have some exclusive offers for products that the likes of Amazon, and Zappos.

I wrote a blog about this subject which you can read here.

Yours truly,
James (Jim) Spurway
“When you change the way you look at things, the things you look at change”

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Even celebrity faces don’t guarantee success – so why risk your money when 85% of all startups fail within three years?

Posted on by Jim

Have you lost money through an investment in a startup? Don't feel too bad because you're in good company!

Kim Basinger, Nicolas Cage, Burt Reynolds, Hulk Hogan, Eva Longoria, Kiefer Sutherland, Selena Gomez, and Neil Young are just some of the stars that have invested anywhere from several hundred thousand to tens of millions of dollars into great ideas, supposedly great teams, or the next world-beating product, only to meet with failure. And yes, I know what you’re probably thinking. They could afford to make a bad investment, and be able to pick themselves up and keep moving forward. The average person not so much. And you’d be right.

Being rich was never a good indicator of one’s ability to pick a winner when it comes to investing into a person, company, idea or product.

So, what’s going on here? Why do startups fail? And more importantly, how many startups fail?

This is a question I hear a lot from Startups, corporations, investors, economic development folks,
academics, and journalists.

I’m from a Banking and Investments business background and have invested in and started up nine (9) companies in the past 26 years.  For the past 5 years, we’ve used a company called CB Insights to conduct market intelligence. It wasn’t always the case, sadly.

Their market intelligence enables us to see which companies and startups have the best innovations and smartest products by following investments made by the biggest corporations. Need to know which tech startup Alibaba has poured money into? Which IT service provider nabbed a fat contract from Amazon? CB Insights reveals all and more so you can also place your bets on future winners.

In their 2019 updated study of why startups failed, they analysed 101 failed companies and came up with their “Top 20” reasons why startups fail.  I’ve done my own post mortem of investments I’ve made that have not panned out.  So I thought I’d do a head-to-head comparison of my small universe of experience vs a data munching monolith like CB Insights!

Let’s first look at my Top 5 reasons vs CB Insights, and then I’ll take a closer look at the remaining reasons their research uncovered.

CB Insight’s Top 5 Reasons Why Startups Fail.

Pricing is a dark art when it comes to startup success and startup post-mortems highlight the difficulty in pricing a product high enough to eventually cover costs but low enough to bring in customers.

Delight IO saw this struggle in multiple ways, writing,

“Our most expensive monthly plan was US$300. Customers who churned never complained about the price. We just didn’t deliver up to their expectation. We originally priced by the number of recording credits. Since our customers had no control over the length of the recordings, most of them were very cautious about using up the credits. Plans based on the  accumulated duration of recordings make much more sense for us and the number of subscription showed.”

The 2019 shutdown of genetic testing and scientific wellness startup Arivale came as a surprise to many partners and customers, but the reason behind the company’s failure was as simple: the price of running the company was too high compared to the revenues it brought in:

“Our decision to terminate the program today comes despite the fact that customer engagement and satisfaction with the program is high and the clinical health markers of many customers have improved
significantly. Our decision to cease operations is attributable to the simple fact that the cost of providing the program exceeds what our customers can pay for it. We believe the costs of collecting the genetic, blood and microbiome assays that form the foundation of the program will eventually decline to a point where the program can be delivered to consumers cost-effectively. Regrettably, we are unable to continue to operate at a loss until that time arrives…”

Despite the platitudes that startups shouldn’t pay attention to the competition, the reality is that once an idea gets hot or gets market validation, there may be many entrants in a space. And while obsessing over the competition is not healthy, ignoring them was also a recipe for failure in 19% of the startup failures. Mark Hedland of Wesabe talked about this in his post-mortem stating:

“Between the worse data aggregation method and the much higher amount of work Wesabe made you do, it was far easier to have a good experience on Mint, and that good experience came far more quickly. Everything I’ve mentioned — not being dependent on a single-source provider, preserving users’ privacy, helping users actually make a positive change in their financial lives — all of those things are great, rational reasons to pursue what we pursued. But none of them matters if the product is harder to use.”

Children’s apparel delivery service Mac & Mia found itself in a tough spot competing with highly successful companies like Stitch Fix and shut down only a year after its 2018 launch:

“Mac & Mia faced a host of competitors in the children’s delivery box space, including the aforementioned Stitch Fix, which launched its kid’s clothing service in 2018. Stitch Fix went public in 2017 and has a market cap around $2.7 billion. At least 20 other upstarts have launched similar delivery services for children’s clothes.”

A diverse team with different skill sets was often cited as being critical to the success of a company. Failure post-mortems often lamented that “I wish we had a CTO from the start,” or wished that the startup had “a founder that loved the business aspect of things.”

The Standout Jobs team wrote in the company’s post-mortem,

“…The founding team couldn’t build an MVP on its own. That was a mistake. If the founding team can’t put out product on its own (or with a small amount of external help from freelancers) they shouldn’t be founding a startup. We could have brought on additional co-founders, who would have been compensated primarily with equity versus cash, but we didn’t.”

In some cases, the founding team wished they had more checks and balances. As Nouncer’s founder wrote, “This brings me back to the underlying problem I didn’t have a partner to balance me out and provide sanity checks for business and technology decisions made.”

At Zirtual, which was forced to lay off 400 employees overnight after a series of financial mistakes and miscalculations, cofounder and CEO Maren Kate Donovan later admitted that one key
mistake was not bringing a CFO onto the board:

“If [a board] had actually been in tune, this would have been caught like six months ago… I blame myself on a lot of this, in not hiring more experienced people, but it wasn’t any maliciousness beyond just naivete…In retrospect, if we had a senior finance person and a senior ops person it would have been a completely different story.”

Money and time are finite and need to be allocated judiciously. The question of how should you spend your money was a frequent conundrum and reason for failure cited by startups (29%). As the team at Flud exemplified, running out of cash was often tied to other reasons for startup failure including failure to find product-market fit and failed pivots,

“In fact what eventually killed Flud was that the company wasn’t able to raise this additional funding. Despite multiple approaches and incarnations in the pursuit of the ever-elusive product-market fit (and monetization), Flud eventually ran out of money — and a runway.”

In September 2019, augmented reality startup Daqri shut down after burning through more than $250M in funding and failing to raise a new round from investors:

“Daqri faced substantial challenges from competing headset makers, including Magic Leap and Microsoft, which were backed by more expansive war chests and institutional partnerships. While the headset company struggled to compete for enterprise customers, Daqri benefited from investor excitement surrounding the broader space. That is until the investment climate for AR startups cooled.”

European budget airline Wow Air met a similar fate; Chairman Skuli Mogensen wrote to employees:

“We have run out of time and have unfortunately not been able to secure funding for the company…I will never be able to forgive myself for not taking action sooner.”

Tackling problems that are interesting to solve rather than those that serve a market need was cited as the No. 1 reason for failure, noted in 42% of cases.
As Patient Communicator wrote,

“I realized, essentially, that we had no customers because no one was really interested in the model we were pitching. Doctors want more patients, not an efficient office.”

Treehouse Logic applied the concept more broadly in their postmortem, writing,

“Startups fail when they are not solving a market problem. We were not solving a large enough problem that we could universally serve with a scalable solution. We had great technology, great data on shopping behaviour, great reputation as a thought leader, great expertise, great advisors, etc, but what we didn’t have was technology or business model that solved a pain point in a scalable way.”

Kolos was direct about its biggest mistake:

“With Kolos, we did a lot of  things right, but it was useless because we ignored the single most important aspect every startup should focus on first: the right product.”

So How Did My Own Experience Stack Up Against A More Comprehensive Study?

If you look at the side-by-side comparison, three of the five themes are similar.

Perhaps I was slightly luckier or more experienced than some of those startups that CB Insights investigated. However, in my experience as a Startup Mentor and Advisor, I agree with CB that for first-time Entrepreneurs who have never been responsible for running a business of any kind before, two very common mistakes are, taking your eye off the monthly budget vs actual and hence burn through your capital faster than you are raising it or making sales, and falling in love with your own invention or idea to the point where you are unable to see that consumers can make do with what they have, or that someone else can and will come up with a better, cheaper, faster, nicer etc. solution, rendering yours useless.

I’ll leave the final word on this topic to people who are legends in the world of startup investing.

A month after Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Trevor Blackwell, and Robert Morris started the Y Combinator seed accelerator in 2005, they picked “make something people want” as their motto.

 

This (admittedly) short and somewhat anecdotal study shows that failing to do this is one of the easiest ways to guarantee startup failure.

As a bonus for having read this blog to the very end, for the month of November I’m giving away a free E-Book on Email Marketing, which is one of the tools a good content marketing strategy should use.

Email Marketing E-Book

You’ll get this publication, valued at $97.99, absolutely gratis.

Just complete the form on the Free Resources page and you can download the free PDF file. 

If you want a second opinion about the business model or strategy you are about to start or have just started,  I’ll give you 15 minutes of my time for free to conduct a quick Q&A session.

Make a booking in my online calendar here.

If you’re looking to enhance your customer-centric capability, we have some exclusive offers for products that the likes of Amazon, and Zappos. I wrote a blog on this subject which you can read here.

You are going to need to create more and better content that your customers want. The more value you offer them, the more they’ll feel like they have found a home. On the content marketing side, I use and recommend Semrush.

Once you have created some content, the easiest way to use that content is to have an App that curates and posts that material at different times, i.e. set it up once then let it run. I use and recommend Missinglettr.

Email Marketing will grow your business faster than any other marketing medium!  I use and recommend GetResponse.

As always, I wish all of our readers an abundance of health, wealth and happiness.

Jim

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Why Take A Risk – Learn The Secret Of Why HubSpot Is Such A Successful Content Marketer And Sleep Like A Baby…

Posted on by Jim

Never heard of HubSpot? Who are they anyway and why are they important?

If you’ve ever downloaded a nice Marketing Infographic chances are that HubSpot was behind it. If you’ve ever searched for “who has the best (insert whatever software module a small business needs)…” then there’s a good chance that HubSpot’s name will be on that list. They are the quintessential Kings or Queens of content and branding and have perfected the freemium business model. Their free products, for example, their CRM (Customer Relationship Management) module are outstanding. DMO still uses the free version as we have not yet grown big enough to warrant the paid one.

Experts in Advertising

Every business, big or small, offline or online, if you want to attract attention generate leads, expand your customer base, generate or increase online sales, increase brand awareness or credibility or simply want to engage an online community of users, why take a risk, learn the secret of why HubSpot is such a successful content marketer, and sleep like a baby.

The world of content marketing changes constantly.

As we continue to be exposed to increasing amounts of promotions and advertisements, it’s up to marketers to break through the clutter.

What’s the best way to do this? Staying ahead of the curve by adapting effective content marketing strategies.

The 2018 Content Preferences Survey Report found that 71% of the users surveyed claimed that they consumed blog content during their purchase process. According to the same report, 40% of respondents shared that they went through 3-5 pieces of content before they engaged with a sales rep.

Attaining success in content marketing is a hard nut to crack. According to the CMI 2019 B2B Content Marketing study, 90% of the best content marketers claimed that they prioritize providing value to customers over brand promotion.

HubSpot states that “Content marketing is the process of planning, creating, distributing, sharing, and publishing content to reach your target audience. As a business, this tactic can help you improve brand awareness, boost sales, connect with your target audience members, and engage prospects and customers.”

By providing audience members with useful content to educate them on your products and services — and show them how those products and services effectively solve their pain points and challenges — you can increase conversions, improve brand awareness, boost revenue, and more.

Why is content marketing important?

Today, outbound marketing strategies (or anything that interrupts your audience members) aren’t as effective for reaching audience members and converting leads as they once were. Content marketing has become a popular way for businesses to combat this issue. In addition to expanding your reach, content marketing helps your business:

  • Educate your leads and prospects about the products and services you offer
  • Boost conversions
  • Build relationships between your customers and business
  • Connect with your audience to show them how your products and services solve their challenges
  • Create a sense of community around your brand

Now that you understand why your business should invest in content marketing, let’s review some examples so you can decide which types of content you want to create.

Content Marketing Examples

Although content marketing is an applicable and useful tactic for almost every company, brainstorming creative and persuasive ways to reach and convert your audience is no simple task. So, how can you succeed at content marketing?

To answer that question, let’s take a look at the various types of content marketing, plus some examples of each. This section will give you a better understanding of how you can incorporate content in your business’s marketing plans.

Types of Content Marketing

There are many types of content marketing your business may decide to leverage. Below are some of the most popular options.

  • Social Media Content Marketing
  • Infographic Content Marketing
  • Blog Content Marketing
  • Podcast Content Marketing
  • Video Content Marketing
  • Paid Ad Content Marketing

What HubSpot identified early is the need to have a Content Strategy.

Whether you’re just starting out with content marketing or you’ve been using the same approach for a while, it never hurts to revisit your content strategy plan — to make sure it’s up-to-date, innovative, and strong.

The first step to getting a leg up on the competition is to have a solid, smart content marketing plan in place.

What Is Content Strategy?

Content strategy refers to the management of pretty much any tangible media that you create and own: written, visual, downloadable … you name it. It is the piece of your marketing plan that continuously demonstrates who you are and the expertise you bring to your industry.

You might’ve heard how important content creation is to the growth of your business, but as you’ll see throughout this post, it needs to have a well-planned purpose. When you develop a content strategy, there are some key things to consider:

Whom You’re Creating Content For

Who’s the target audience for this content? For how many audiences are you creating content? Just as your business might have more than one type of customer, your content strategy can cater to more than one type of reader or viewer.

Using a variety of content types and channels will help you deliver different content to each type of audience you have in mind and engage everyone your company does business with.

The Problem it’s Going to Solve for that Audience

Ideally, your product or service solves a problem you know your audience has. By the same token, your content coaches and educates your audience through this problem as they begin to identify and address it.

A sound content strategy supports people on both sides of your product: those who are still figuring out what their main challenges are, and those who are already using your product to overcome these challenges. Your content reinforces the solution(s) you’re offering and makes your customers more qualified users of your product.

What Makes You Unique

Your competitors likely have a similar product as yours, which means your potential customers need to know what makes yours better — or, at least, different. This is where content comes in. In order to prove why you’re worth buying from, you need to prove why you’re worth listening to.

The Content Formats You’ll Focus On

What forms will your content take? Infographics? Videos? Blog posts? Having identified the topics you want to take a position on, you’ll need to determine which formats to budget for so you can best express that position.

The Channels Where It’ll Be Published

Just as you can create content in different formats, you’ll also have different channels you can publish to. Channels can include owned properties, such as your website and blog; and social media properties, such as Facebook and Twitter. We’ll talk more about social media content strategy in the step-by-step guide later in this article.

How You’ll Manage Creation and Publication

Figuring out how you’ll create and publish all your content can be a daunting task. It’s important for a content strategy to know who’s creating what, where it’s being published, and when it’s going live.

Today’s content strategies prevent clutter by managing content from a topic standpoint. When planning a content calendar around topics, you can easily visualize your company’s message and assert yourself as an authority in your market over time.

In my blog headline, I posed the question “Why take a risk – learn the secret of why HubSpot is such a successful content marketer and sleep like a baby.”?

Most readers are probably well down the road on their company’s content marketing journey. This blog was not meant as a free plug for HubSpot per se, although, having benefited from using their range of free tools, including free training, Learn What Content Marketing is and How to Do It [Course], I can say this – if you have to follow someone, then follow someone who has already found the right path and can lead you to success.

As a bonus for having read this blog to the very end, for the month of November I’m giving away a free E-Book on Email Marketing, which is one of the tools a good content marketing strategy should use.

Email Marketing E-Book

You’ll get this publication, valued at $97.99, absolutely gratis.

Just complete the form on the Free Resources page and you can download the free PDF file. 

If you want a second opinion about the business model or strategy you are about to start or have just started,  I’ll give you 15 minutes of my time for free to conduct a quick Q&A session.

Make a booking in my online calendar here.

If you’re looking to enhance your customer-centric capability, we have some exclusive offers for products that the likes of Amazon, and Zappos. I wrote a blog on this subject which you can read here.

You are going to need to create more and better content that your customers want. The more value you offer them, the more they’ll feel like they have found a home. On the content marketing side, I use and recommend Semrush.

Once you have created some content, the easiest way to use that content is to have an App that curates and posts that material at different times, i.e. set it up once then let it run. I use and recommend Missinglettr.

Email Marketing will grow your business faster than any other marketing medium!  I use and recommend GetResponse.

As always, I wish all of our readers an abundance of health, wealth and happiness.

Jim

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What Is A Digital Marketing Strategy?

Posted on by Jim

Do You Have a Digital Marketing Strategy, or Just an Online Presence?

What’s the difference? Why is it relevant? Will my customers know, or care?

The answers, in short, are – a) yes – b) because, without one, you won’t get new customers via the internet, and c) yes and yes – unless you don’t want repeat business or referral business!

For some Baby Boomers and Gen X’s out there, of which I’m one, this might come as a surprise. Many business owners are proud of their websites, and the fact that they are just as good when viewed on a Tablet or Smartphone.

The point they’re missing is that having a beautiful website without a strategy to drive traffic to a page on that website that you want potential customers  to visit – and I don’t mean the “About Us” page, I mean a 45-second video that explains what you can do for potential customers or your “Testimonial” page where other satisfied customers do the selling for you – is like having just refurbished a building off the main street in your town into the best restaurant in the entire state, but then not having billboards, signs, adverts in yellow pages, on radio, TV and local newspaper, mentions in local “about town” hand guides, letterbox drops, and brochures (along with a commission arrangement) at every hotel reception in town. If a Restaurant owner spends all that money and time creating an amazing atmosphere, stocking the pantry with the best fresh ingredients money can buy, and hiring the best Chef and Service Staff, but does not hire a Marketing and Sales Team, who create and implement a Digital Marketing Strategy, he or she will be bankrupt before the end of the first year of operation.

This is not a theoretical statement. I’m a lifelong Entrepreneur. I’ve invested in and started up eight businesses on my own over 25 years, and invested passively in several others. Back in the early days, we didn’t have access to the internet, so in a way, we all followed the tried and true advertising options available to us. Hard as it may be to believe, Google Adwords (now Google Ads) launched in 2000, and Facebook Ads launched in 2007. So businesses could harness the massive reach of social media for nearly two decades now.

So, what do I mean by the term Digital Marketing Strategy?

I hate to be a spoilsport, but it’s not that simple! There is no “one size fits all”  strategy. Each one is developed based on a need and hence a goal that the business has – at that time.

For example, creating awareness about your company, product or service requires a different strategy than say, running an ad campaign to entice people to make a purchase.

If your head is spinning by this time and you’d like me to explain that statement in more detail, take advantage of my free 15-minute discovery session by booking a slot on my calendar here.

The framework we use to create a winning Digital Marketing Strategy for our clients is RACE – Reach, Act, Convert, Engage.

I’ll go into as much detail as this short Blog allows, however, if anyone has specific questions, you can complete the form below.
REACH.
Buyer Stage = EXPLORATION. Publish and promote your content, allow sharing to other outposts, networks and influencers. Draw people to your content hub. Key Measures: Unique visitors; Value per visit; Fans/followers.
ACT. Buyer Stage = DECISION MAKING. Be worth finding via clear customer journeys and a content hub that is relevant, inspirational, useful and creates leads. Key Measures: Leads/lead conversion rate; Time on-site; Shares/comments, likes. CONVERT. Buyer Stage = PURCHASE.  Capitalize on marketing investment using CRO (conversion rate optimization), marketing automation and remarketing to ensure contextual relevance drives conversion. Key Measures: Sales (on and offline influence); Revenue/profit; Average order value. ENGAGE. Buyer Stage = ADVOCACY. Thrilled customers are key to social media marketing, social proof, repeat sales and referral. Start your marketing here! Key Measures: Repeat purchase (CLV – customer lifetime value); Satisfaction and loyalty; Advocacy.

Recommendation

Structure your plans to define the Opportunity, Strategy and Action.  Your Digital Marketing Strategy Plan will be more believable if you have SMART objectives for each part of the RACE customer lifecycle.

Deliverable: Use summary tables to link your strategies, KPIs and actions.

Is There A Pill I Can Take That Will Make Me Become A Digital Marketing Strategy Wizard?

I wish!! It would have saved my wife and me a lot of headaches, heartburn, sleepless nights, costly purchases, wrong decisions, frustration, disappointment and general “angst”.

The good news is that if you are a business owner you don’t have to learn everything that we’ve learned, just to create and run a successful online marketing campaign. All you need to do is know your business (what is your value proposition and why should customers use you instead of one of your competitors?). Know your target customer (who are they know, and who should they be?). And know your numbers (if I get X mores sales, what is my profit margin, and hence, how much can I invest in a digital marketing campaign to get those sales).

We can do the rest and show you how we can drive qualified business leads to your inbox, so that you can spend 80% of your time closing new customers and taking care of existing ones, and not spend any of your time searching for your next customer, ever again!

If you’d like to get more Sales and Marketing related tips, insights, and actionable strategies, you’re welcome to join the DMO “Tribe”. Just get in contact.

As a bonus for reading this blog to the end, you can download a free E-Book about Email Marketing, which you can read and apply immediately to boost engagement and opt-in rates, which usually translates to more customers!

Just fill in the form on the Free Resources page and you can download the free PDF file.

If you want a second opinion about the business model or strategy you are about to start or have just started,  I’ll give you 15 minutes of my time for free to conduct a quick Q&A session.

Make a booking in my online calendar here.

If you’re looking to enhance your customer-centric capability, we have some exclusive offers for products that the likes of Amazon, and Zappos. I wrote a blog on this subject which you can read here.

You are going to need to create more and better content that your customers want. The more value you offer them, the more they’ll feel like they have found a home. On the content marketing side, I use and recommend Semrush.

Once you have created some content, the easiest way to use that content is to have an App that curates and posts that material at different times, i.e. set it up once then let it run. I use and recommend Missinglettr.

Email Marketing will grow your business faster than any other marketing medium!  I use and recommend GetResponse.

As always, I wish all of our readers an abundance of health, wealth and happiness.

Jim

Credit where credit is due:
The original creator of the RACE framework and the RACE diagram is @smartinsights
Digital Marketing Image
Photo by Diggity Marketing on Unsplash
White Social Media Pills In A Hand
Photo by Marc Schaefer on Unsplash

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