Featured Articles

In a previous post, I described the SaaS Sales Funnel where marketers can help customers emerge from the murky ooze of the world wide web and drive towards paying for products and services. Now, let's apply customer loyalty measurements to creating accelerated and sustained revenue growth. There are three ways a company can make money: 1) Getting existing customers to buy from you again -- in SaaS pricing models, this is typically on a recurring monthly basis. 2) Getting new customers. 3) Getting existing customers to buy more things from you -- in SaaS, this means enticing customers into the next ...

Lead nurturing is SO important to B2B success. This is a great article == > Lead lifecycle in B2B marketing refers to how we manage the life of a lead from the moment it shows up in your CRM system to when the deal closes. The lead lifecycle defines where a lead can live, how a lead moves along, and what we do with a lead at each stage. Companies typically use a lead lifecycle model for two primary reasons: 1) Preventing sales leads (and potential sales leads) from falling through the cracks  2) Reporting on conversion rates through each stage so ...

A new report from Michael Stelzner and his team at Social Media Examiner reveals that social media adoption by marketers is growing steadily, but that we still have room to do more and have plenty of questions when it comes to measuring effectiveness. The 2012 Social Media Marketing Report found that and much more after surveying over 3,800 marketers from both the B2B and B2C worlds and from companies of all sizes. You can find the full report here, but I'll share my key takeaways.

Visual communication is one of the least frequently explored areas within the content world, possibly because it’s so easy to lump in with UI design, aka Not Our Problem. But many forms of visual communication clearly are content, part of the muscle of a website or other project. In the hands of a skillful communicator, visual content conveys information and ideas with extraordinary efficiency. In the content world, we pay lip service to non-textual content—and we do work with photographs, screenshots, and video—but how often do most of us get to employ custom illustration, diagrams, illustrative animation ...

A few months ago we published a fairly popular blog post called,The 14 C’s of Content Marketing. While many inquired how we came up with so many C’s, we felt 14 wasn’t enough, resulting in the development of seven additional content marketing C’s. Armed with 7 more content marketing C's, you’ll be able to deploy more powerful and efficient campaigns that solve problems and entertain.

Often cited inappropriately as a replacement for brand positioning or brand experience, customer experience goes far beyond that. In reality, customer experience is the result of how you implement your brand and how customers experience it across every touch point. Customer Relationships - Customer experience is about meeting customer needs, aligning touch points, and creating relationships. Learn customer experience basics—and how to create an enriched customer experience that gets results.

My background is that I’ve been a small business owner since 1998. I have a degree in business from Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, BC Canada (Vancouver). I’ve been doing bookkeeping for myself, and others, since 1998, primarily with QuickBooks. I’m also a certified QuickBooks Pro Advisor. So, that’s the perspective you’re getting and keep that in mind when I evaluate the software. I’ve spent from 30 minutes to a few hours with the other software seen in my online accounting software review and comparison page. Why Kashoo first? Because out of all the ...

Everything we do in a company is about selling. We all know that, right? ABC. "Always Be Closing," is the infamous sales motivation line from Alec Baldwin's character in the movie "Glengarry Glenross." I’ve been spending a lot of time with Go-To-Market strategies, campaigns and launches with my Stephdokin clients and other companies I pal around with -- I’ve been thinking about the journey of building awareness for your product and brand all the way to a happy customer giving you money on a frequent basis. I present to you … The “Stephdokin SaaS Sales Funnel-On-A-Page.” 

Friday the 13th? "Big Data Are a Macabre Clown" says CEO, Stephen King. Don’t be scared by Big Data -- TCELab officially announces launch of next generation Customer Experience Management (CEM) platform that integrates big-data tool automation and customer loyalty science. today officially unveiled its next generation Customer Experience Management (CEM) Platform, integrating a suite of big data tools with leading edge customer loyalty science from Bob Hayes, Ph.D.

“Let’s say this is your first day at Urbanspoon and I show you the following data. We’ve just launched an A/B test of that I’d like you to evaluate. [The example can be almost anything you want to test different results for – from almost any search element, PPC campaigns, email subject lines etc. In this case, I’m using a PPC example.] Imagine you are running two different ads on a campaign with 50 kewords. We’ve been running Ad A for a while and have 17,235 impressions and 272 clicks. I started running Ad ...

Have you noticed that everyone around you now seems to be an expert at something? How your boss gives you unsolicited career advice, based on his own (self-proclaimed) stellar career? Or how your annoying colleague emails you stock tips after reading the morning news headlines? Welcome to the age of the Everyday Expert. In the past, if you were a career adviser, relationship counselor, strategic business consultant, or financial planner, you had to spend years acquiring specialist skills or knowledge in a particular field to be recognized as an expert.

The folks at CMO.com have put together a good analysis of various social media platforms from the perspective of i) Customer Communication, ii) Brand Exposure, iii) Traffic to your site and iv) Impact on SEO. Here's a link to a .PDF of the report:http://www.drewsmarketingminute.com/images/2012/03/SocialMediaCheatSheet2012.pdfAnd, the CMO.com site has the original data, which is updated from time to time ... you should Pinterest it, fer shure: http://www.cmo.com/social-media-guide/2012/

Mobile - Americans age 18-34, or Generation C as they've been recently dubbed, make up 23% of the US population but they comprise an outsized proportion of consumers who watch online video (27%), visit social networking sites and blogs (27%), own a tablet (33%), and use a smartphone (39%), according to a report by Nielsen and NM Incite.

Are you an accountant thinking of using Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media tools to promote your accounting firm? You may already have a website and personal accounts with the various social networking sites like LinkedIn and Facebook, but have you created a strategy that ties them all together to further promote your accounting business? This article will show you some of the many ways you can use social media marketing for accountants to effectively grow your practice.

Do you have a full understanding of what social media marketing does for your business? MarketingProfs blogger Jason Falls says companies today don't---despite all the analytics. We blog, we tweet, we post. Our measurement systems tell us how many people read, click, and retweet. If we’re smart, we can tell how many people are seeing our messages and how many people are responding to them in some relevant way. We know how many people clicked through and downloaded whitepapers. We know how many people may have clicked through and purchased something we sell online. But for all the ...

"Leadership" has changed when a decentralized group of people can take down a government. "The Value Chain" has changed when the customer is no longer just the "buyer" butalso a co-creator. "Human Resources" have changed when most of the people who create value for your organization are neither hired nor paid by you.

In the dark and ancient days of digital yellow highlighters and outrageous claims, a cry rang out over the mountains -- a cry for sanity, integrity, and beauty in the building of landing pages. There came forth from the mountain 10 commandments to guide a certain tribe of Internet publishers in all their conversion endeavors. The landing page would no longer be a desert of confusion and bad taste.

In our continuing research on the emerging role of the Chief Customer Officer (CCO), we recently looked at the kinds of authority their firms vest in them to drive change across the organization as customer loyalty and customer experience management programs are put in place. This authority can affect the activities they do, the composition of the teams that report into them, and the budgets they control. For firms considering putting this kind of senior customer experience leader in place, Forrester has identified three archetypal models that characterize the most typical modes in which CCOs operate.

Companies, in support of their customer experience management (CEM) programs, rely heavily on the use of customer surveys as a means of collecting customer feedback. An optimal customer survey maximizes the value of the survey to both the businesses who use them and their customers who take them. This Infographic shows 4 Ways to Optimize Your Customer Survey. Specifically, businesses need customer surveys that provide reliable, valid and useful information to help run the business more effectively. Customers need surveys that let them give quick, yet meaningful feedback about their experiences. Based on research and practical experience in the CEM ...

Did you ever feel like there is a bunch o' stuff going on that you're missing? This new staggering graphic by MBAOnline exemplifies this exponentially. Excellent compilation from the folks at MBAOnline. Of course, there's no way a single person can consume this much information. So it leaves one to wonder at the incredible fabric that we weave together. Big Data? Naw. Big Life. Meandering thoughts after an intense week at 11:39 pm on a Friday night. Hope you're having fun -- 'cause that's kinda what it's all about! Here's to you, and here ...

Predictive modeling is a process by which a statistical model is chosen to best predict the probability of an outcome. The use of predictive modeling was illustrated in the excellent movie, Moneyball, in which Billy Beane, the manager of the Oakland Athletics used predictive modeling to select the players for his team. When executives make decisions about how to improve customer loyalty, they rely on many sources of information, including personal knowledge, past experiences of similar situations and even predictive models of expected performance.

I had the special treat of going with my niece and her 9 lady entourage to a local Wedding trade show. Needless to say, between the tiny tastes of chocolate and the runway models, I had some time on my hands -- so I got to thinking about the trade show industry, and how mobile technology is surely, and slowly, creeping into the sales process. It can be a missed opportunity. My guess was that 99% of the brides and grooms had smartphones, yet less than 10% of the booths sported a mobile QR code! For those that didn't have ...

I love Ben Affleck's first scene in the movie "Boiler Room." I always felt that the quote above perfectly relates to companies and press coverage. The ones who don’t get coverage will quickly dismiss it as useless and a waste of time and money to pursue, while the ones who regularly get coverage just smile and hope that you keep thinking that way. Over the last 12 years, I have been featured in hundreds of major newspapers, magazines, websites and blogs (everything ranging from the NY Times, USA Today and CNN to TechCrunch, Entrepreneur and so on), and ...

We work with startups everyday who are looking for guidance and advice about how to best run their businesses and tips they should know about to be successful.  We thought we would highlight this article from VentureBeat since it gives some good pointers for anyone embarking on founding their own company.